Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Adyarium and Occultum

There is medicinal, organic, bio, theoretical, inorganic, astro, green, surface, polymer, petro, analytical, nuclear, computational, photo, organometallic, physical and a lot more chemistry.

There is a another research area: Occult Chemistry. You don't hear much about it nowadays.

A lot of the ludicrous research in this area was done by Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Wood (AKA Annie Besant). The work that was done between 1895 and 1933 is described in the book: Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds.

Besant and Leadbeater were important figures in the theosophical society. Besant was a pupil of the notorious Helena Petrovna Hahn (AKA H.P. Blavatsky).

Both Besant and Leadbeater were clairvoyants, and used this gift to examine atoms and molecules. They made drawings of structures of the elements and their compounds.When they were looking at air with their second sight they discovered a new element with an atomic weight of 3 and they called it Occultum. Later they discovered yet another element, Adyarium, with atomic weight 2 (and they knew that is was not deuterium but a real new element.)

Leadbeater and Besant are often called charlatans, but they were not. Their idiocy was sincere.
It would be great if they performed some synthesis.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Best "chemistry" blog, no typical grad student blog bs, love the history, keep it up

Chemgeek said...

I'm not sure if it is clairvoyance, but yelling at a reaction to get it to work seems to have an effect. If nothing else, yelling at an inanimate object is a nice way to blow off some steam.