Psychic sexuality

A hidden lineage of energy hunters. Swann traces a suppressed history from the Renaissance forward: Paracelsus and the sympathetic system, Mesmer's animal magnetism, Reichenbach's Odic force, the Victorian "psychic force" of Cox and Crookes tested on medium Daniel Dunglas Home, and Wilhelm Reich's orgone. Each researcher used a different name, partly to dodge the disgrace attached to predecessors.

The recurring giveaway. What links them, Swann claims, is sexualizing energy. Around Mesmer's communal magnetic vats in 1780s Paris, sitters experienced convulsions and involuntary orgasms. Reichenbach's sensitives reacted to "horny" males. Victorian seance-goers reported "tremulous pulsations" near the loins and confessed themselves "disturbed," a polite code word for aroused. To Swann these scattered, embarrassing reports are evidence that one real energy kept surfacing under many labels.

Science by incineration. Reich, once Freud's clinical assistant, argued that blocked sexual energy (which he named orgone) trapped in chronically tight muscles bred neurosis and disease, and he built "accumulators," box-like devices meant to collect this energy. When users reported heightened sexual potency, his fame surged and so did official alarm. In 1954 a US court banned the accumulators and ordered the word orgone scrubbed from his writings.

The overkill tell. The FDA and FBI confiscated his books and burned them in a New York incinerator in 1956. Reich, jailed for contempt of court, died behind bars in 1957. Swann reads this ferocity, far beyond what a harmless quack would warrant, as a sign that the establishment was suppressing not a fraud but a forbidden topic: human energetics itself.

Clairvoyance demystified. Swann insists clairvoyance is not a rare gift but a universal human faculty that social conditioning teaches us to distrust. He coins vibe-sensing for non-visual clairvoyance, the felt detection of invisible information without any mental picture. Sensing someone's sexual interest across a room, feeling a mood before a word is spoken, a mother feeling her distant child is hurt: all qualify.

Conditioned blindness. He argues societies "dumb down" perception by simply never teaching people to trust, recognize, and refine these innate sensors. A key quirk: people cannot perceive what they have never been told exists or shown what it should look like. Group agreement not to perceive something, he says, reliably makes large numbers of people stop perceiving it, regardless of whether it is really there.

The experiment. In 1989 Swann sat in a copper-paneled chamber at the Menninger Foundation's Voluntary Controls Program, run by biofeedback pioneers Elmer and Alyce Green. The room, insulated on glass blocks with a magnet suspended over his head, was modeled on a "copper mirror" training device described in the Theosophical Mahatma Letters. By day three he saw an orange mist, then the bones, blood vessels, and acupuncture points in his own hand, then tubes of light shooting through the floor.

Lucidity unleashed. He calls this super-charged, multilayered seeing lucidity, several kinds of clairvoyance firing at once. The catch: it would not shut off. For roughly a year it ran day and night, even in dreams, until a clairvoyant healer, Carmen de Barazza, helped him dial it down over about ten sessions.

Entangled manifestation. Borrowing from Theosophy, Swann rejects the static, oval, rainbow-cloud aura of popular art. The real energy field, he says, is an entangled manifestation: multidimensional, always in motion, and possessing actual substance, which is why sexual and emotional energies can be physically felt and not merely seen. Static two-dimensional drawings mislead people into expecting a frozen picture, so they fail to perceive the moving reality.

Layers within layers. He describes the body threaded by distinct networks (a blue neural net, a green acupuncture net, a white lymphatic net) plus rising magnetic "bands" that rotate around the body and reenter through the soles of the feet. Crucially, perception is dimensional: a prudish clairvoyant filters out sexual layers entirely, and a dull-black aura, he claims, reliably forecasts approaching death.

Two states, two vocabularies. Swann splits the sexual energy body into paraphernalia, the everyday energies quietly circulating (the reddish "crotch chakra" between genitals and anus, tiny chakras dotting erogenous zones, hair follicles acting as antennae), and regalia, the spectacular display that erupts only during arousal and vanishes afterward. Paraphernalia he can see in nearly everyone; regalia appear only when someone is "turned on."

The aroused show. His clairvoyant descriptions are flamboyant: aroused women sprout luminous fountains rising twenty feet, emit scented light-globules, and project a green "probing beam" from above the clitoris that plunges into candidate males to select one (he likens the resulting headdress of green rays to Medusa's snakes). Aroused men grow a red whirling column from the crown and an energetic extension that, in one Manhattan sighting, reached two hundred feet.

Beyond two boxes. Swann maps sexual energy onto three ancient archetypes: Mars (masculine), Venus (feminine), and Mercury, the fluid, shape-changing mix of both, symbolized by liquid mercury and the coiled, winged messenger. He claims pure Mars or pure Venus energy bodies are actually rare; most people display mixtures, temporary swaps, or composite fields that flicker between male and female signatures.

Labels that fail. From this vantage, he argues the categories heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual are crude sociological inventions that do not match what he says is energetically visible: a wide, shifting spectrum in which a man may carry the female display or a woman the male one. He even reports seeing single auras that appear to be composites of more than one person's energy field.

Melding over mechanics. Swann distinguishes "hornyness" from simple sexual release. Repetitive sex often fails to satisfy it, he observes, because the real craving is to meld and bond, an energetic information-exchange that can occur through touch and embrace without intercourse at all. He treats the energies as information-carrying, so two fields "reading" and reorganizing each other is the actual event; sex is one possible outcome, not the point.

The two brothers. His vivid case: two estranged brothers in years of psychoanalysis, told their bond was an "incestuous problem," arrived with clashing, spark-throwing energy "torques" around their chests. Once Swann named the mutual energy and they consented to embrace, their fields fused from angry red into gold-edged blue and the lifelong hostility dissolved. The lesson: what looked like pathology was an unmet need to bond.

The control thesis. Swann's boldest claim is political. Knowledge of sexual energy, he argues, is the easiest entry point into all human energetics, because almost everyone can feel it raw and uncultivated. Master it and you open the door to the harder faculties: telepathy, clairvoyance, healing, influence at a distance. That, he contends, is precisely why mainstream power structures suppress the whole field.

Why it stays hidden. Societies depend on uniform, conventional perception, he says, so they desensitize innate sensing and condemn anyone who develops it. The forewords and closing chapters tie this to power: a population that could consciously amplify the force flowing through it would be ungovernable in the old way. He cites secret Soviet "bio-energetics" programs and Chinese qigong research as proof the West chose denial while rivals quietly investigated.