I’ve been talking a lot about orgone accumulators and Babalon matrices and such, but I haven’t actually described the bit about the orgone accumulator or “shooter” itself, which is what’s probably drawing a lot of people to this series of posts.  An orgone accumulator or shooter (the terms are generally interchangeable, though I suppose “shooter” is a better term instead of the box or cabinet that most people think of) is composed of a central hollow channel that pierces through alternating layers of organic and inorganic material, with the channel extending out of either side of the materials.  The shooter collects ambient energy, accelerates it through the material, and propels it through the channel.  Theories abound about how this works, but it generally operates like how magnetic propulsion or railguns work: orgone is attracted to organic materials and repulsed by inorganic materials, and as it gets pulled by one, reflected by the next, pulled by the one after that, and so on, the accumulator gathers and propels energy on down the channel.  The more layers of alternating materials there are, the more powerful the accumulator will be.  Based on some experiments Jarandhel and I had performed off the cuff to figure out a few tricks of the orgone shooter:

• The orgone shooter is essentially directionless, but appears to “work how it should”.  After some experimentation with different lengths of the central channel and using crystals to force a direction, we realized that it’s the length of the channel that extends out of one side of the material that determines the direction of the shooter.  The shooter appears to collect ambient energy through the long end of the channel and fires it through the short end.  Attaching a crystal in front of the channel, but not blocking the channel itself, appeared to have no effect.
• The channel must be hollow and unobstructed for the shooter to focus a beam of energy.  Using a hollow channel with material inside caused a staticy feeling, while using a solid channel appeared to cause a radiating cone.  Having a crystal point sticking out of one end of a tube or directly covering it didn’t work either, resulting in a similar effect, but a crystal positioned just above the channel seems to work fine even though nothing special is accomplished by doing so.  People who want to experiment with hypothetical orgone wands, take note.
• Although the official writings of Reich and orgone technology abhor the use of copper in orgone, claiming it creates toxic effects on the body and “dead orgone”, we haven’t found this to be the case at all.  In fact, one of our friends who works with death and the dead, which would normally be filled with “dead orgone”, finds the use of orgone accumulators involving copper repulsive and draining on her.

Constructing an orgone shooter in the way Jarandhel and I made them required the following:

• 000 grade steel wool
• a roll of thin corkboard
• an electronic craft box
• copper refrigerator tubing

I measured the size of the craft box, cut out many layers of corkboard and steel wool, shoved them onto the copper tubing, shoved that into the craft box, and sealed it up.  I used a dremel to drill holes large enough for the copper tubing on either end of the project box.  Approximately 24 layers each of steel wool and corkboard fit into the project box, though it’s always nicer to have more.

Jarandhel had brought up before that other occult technology exists to gather and circulate energy, among them Franz Bardon’s fluid condensers.  These are mixtures that significantly empower the nature of an object, a kind of anointing mixture that gathers and focuses an object.  I’ve seen it used in other magical tools, so why not augment this project with it, too?  Franz Bardon, in his Initiation Into Hermetics, gives the following instructions to prepare a simple fluid condenser:

Take one handful of fresh or dried chamomile flowers, place them into a pot, and pour enough cold water over them to completely cover them. Boil the chamomile flowers forapproximately 20 minutes, covered with a lid. Let this concoction cool, but do notremove the lid. Once it has cooled, filter it and pour the filtered chamomile concoction into a clean pot and reduce it by boiling it slowly to approximately 50 grams; a few drops more or less are of no consequence. During the whole process, the pot has to becovered with a lid. Once the chamomile extract has cooled, mix it with the same amount of alcohol. Should you have 50 grams of chamomile extract, mix it with 50 grams of alcohol. The alcohol will preserve the chamomile extract. Should you have nothing else available, you can use denatured alcohol. Add approximately 10 drops of the gold tincture to this mixture of chamomile extract and alcohol.

To make this, I gathered the following supplies:

• Gold leaf
• Organic chamomile teabags
• Distilled water
• Grain alcohol

I first made the gold tincture by melting the gold leaf in a heavy steel ladle over a hot flame.  My intent was to melt the gold, toss it into distilled water, collect the cooled and hardened remains, and repeat the process until there was a negligible amount of gold left to salvage from the water; every time the melted gold is quenched in the water, atoms of gold dissipate into the water, eventually forming a tincture.  However, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped, so I boiled the gold in the water in a pressure cooker for a while before making do with what I had.  (Bardon himself claims that even microscopic or atomic levels of gold increases the potency of a fluid condenser dramatically, so I’m hoping this suffices.)  While the resulting mixture looked bad and smelled even worse, it felt potent to me.  Using the resulting fluid condenser, I made another orgone shooter of the same size and number of layers, but this time dousing the layers of steel wool and corkboard with the fluid condenser, as well as drizzling some down the central metal channel and brushing some on the inside of the project box.

The orgone accumulator with the fluid condenser definitely had a sharper “jolt” to it, like it was much more active or alive, than the plain orgone accumulator.  Operationally, they’re the same (since there’s no operation to them), but the orgone shooter with the extra energy gathering substance inside definitely packs more of a punch, and it feels like there’s a constant stream of…I dunno, wind or something coming from the channel.  For my current Babalon Matrix setup, I’ll probably just keep the plain orgone accumulator off to the side as a backup or as another energy accumulator pointing towards the field, for the added kick.  It’s definitely a nifty combination of magical tech, that’s for sure, though it does smell a little funky.

Also, to clarify a few terms that I’ve been throwing around, because I probably should have done this before:

• Orgone accumulator: a device to harness, direct, and accumulate an ambient magical life force called orgone.
• Crystal grid: a set of crystals energetically linked up to form a magical field.  Although “crystal” is used in the name, these may be rocks, talismans, or other objects that can hold a magical charge.  For more information, see this post over at Dreamhart.
• Babalon Matrix: a crystal grid making use of an orgone accumulator to harness, focus, and attune using magical energy.  Alternate names include orgone crystal matrix or reiki crystal matrix (apparently, “ambient magic/life force” has lots of interachangable names).  Jarandhel’s post at Dreamhart may be helpful to discover more about the original creation of the device.  The name “Babalon Matrix” originated with Thelemite magicians, likely enough, but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing specifically Babalonian or Binah-related about the tool.  I’ve got my own name in the works, but I’m keeping it a secret for now.

UPDATE (9/29/2012): After some more experimentation, it would seem that the orgone accelerator that uses the fluid condenser isn’t actually that great.  The fluid condenser helps attract energy into the accelerator, yes, but at the expense of it shooting anything out; it has a weaker output than the normal orgone accelerator, even though it’s definitely more “alive” and can take in far more input.  Despite the energy accumulated within the accelerator, it’s not that useful; it’s possible to pull energy out from it to use in other things, like a battery, but with no more success than pulling it from the ambient surroundings.  Oh well.