Historical Esoterism & The Revigator: Irradiate Yourself!

It is not an uncommon idea that water has healing powers. In fact people dying of thirst can extend their life expectancy dramatically by consuming water. Everyone knows that water from the spring in Lourdes has healing powers and even the water in Bath, England or Bad Gastein, Germany has a rejuvenating effect. “Levitating” water is another modern concept for fixing all the nasty diseases our unhealthy lifestyle brought into this world. Weren’t those stone age men some lucky bastards?

In 1912 R.W. Thomas invented the “Revigator”. This is a ceramic water dispenser who is lined with uranium ore on the inside. This radioactive substance emits radon gas as a decay product. Because radon is also found in the water in certain natural springs.

The idea is simple: Put water in the jar overnight and drink as much radioactive water as you need the next day. All the evil in your body gets killed by radiation and you get younger every day. Easy.

But let’s hear from the “Revigator Water Jar Company” – Revigator Building, Sutter at Taylor Street, San Francisco – themselves:

“Restoring of Water’s Lost Element: The newest miracle of modern science of vital interest to everyone because:

1) The most important thing in life is health. We cannot continue to live healthfully unless we live with some respect to the laws of Nature. Life is but cellular building – and cellular elimination. This lost element of water is radio-activity, which both creates vellular energy and removes cellular poisons.
2) Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, the great English physician says “Most diseases are directly traceable to bad drainage in the body” – to the accumulation of clogging waste matter of poisons at vital organs.
3) For centuries, the world has recognized the value of health springs and medical officers now attribute the value of many of the famous health springs to the natural radio-activity of their waters. This radio-activity is one of Nature’s ways of dissolving and eliminating these health-destroying poisons and building healthy cells and tissues.
4) It is now possible for everyone, sick and well, to have, perpetually and at reasonable cost, the splendid benefits of a genuine radio-active health spring right in the home through this invention – the REVIGATOR water jar.

The water treated such was supposed to relieve arthritis, flatulence and senility – and anything else you could have come up with .The Revigator was a huge success and hundreds of thousands were sold for about $ 30, which was a lot of money in the Twenties. (Ca. $ 400 in modern dollars)

It was not before the thirties – Marie Curie died 1935 from “aplastic anemia” contracted from her long-term exposure to radium – that the business went down the drain for the Revigator Company. Michael Epstein, an analytical chemist from Mount St. Mary’s Universitiy proved that the surviving revigators still produce quite an impressive amount of radiation here. In addition to this they still heavily poison the water with arsenic and lead.

Find the brochure mentioned above – 24 pages that will finally convince you – as a PDF at the homepage of Theodore Gray, Director of User Interface Technology at Wolfram Research. (Once there you could check out this beautiful periodic table, too) And then you could read this article about “levitating” water: Does it remind you of something?

Sophie, Willoughby's "Girl in Blue"

Over 20,000 people live in Willoughby, Lake County, Ohio nowadays. It’s located at the Lake Erie, near to Canada. (Link). It was founded 1789 by brave David Abbott and baptized “Willoughby” in honor of Doc Willoughby Jr. The Willoughbians hoped to attract the interest of their namesake who was a U.S. Representative from New York. He couldn’t care less.

Well – that was almost the most interesting thing that happened here for the last 200 years – except one story…

On Christmas eve 1933 a young girl arrived very early in the morning. She stayed at Mrs. Judd’s boarding house on Second Street. After a short sleep she dressed in her navy blue skirt, a white blouse and a scarf and left Mrs. Judd headed for the nearby church. At least that’s what she said.

In fact she went into the woods until she reached the railroad tracks and when the next train came by dropped her suitcase and sprinted to jump before it.
She did not reach the train in time. Instead the train knocked her dead, so her body showed no wounds when local authorities found her.

No relatives showed up and her body was brought to the local funeral home. Its owner, James McMahon decided to give the unknown girl a proper funeral. A fund was established for the headstone and the people of Willoughby gathered the money for it in the midst of the Great Depression. 3000 local residents went to her funeral.

For sixty years her identity remained a mystery. In 1993 it was revealed that the “Girl in Blue” was Josephine Klimczak and her belongings were identified by her brother. Lake County records have not changed the death certificate. She is listed as “The Girl in Blue.”

Links: Read the story in Cathi Weber’s “Haunted Willoughby” online here or buy it on Amazon here.

The brave, goodhearted people of Willoughby have their own App nowadays! Check it out here.

Coca Cola did NOT invent the modern Santa Claus!

How many people told you this year that Santa Claus is only an invention by the greedy, evil Coca Cola company? I’m under the impression that this urban legend is getting more popular each year and I’m really tired to hear it. Especially since this myth is used by Christian fundementalists to transport some of their infantile belief systems.

Let’s not dive too deep in the historical root of the Saint Nicholas of Myra. Though this could be amusing: Did you know that he was banned from the Council of Nicea beause of a brawl in a “bar” the night before? But because of some impressive miracles (..with the majority of those occurring centuries after his death…) he is an important saint in the Orthodox and Catholic church.

Like any given religious myth modern Santa developed over a long period of time incorporating many different elements. The Christian missionaries took rites and superstitions they found in heathen countries and integrated them into the “modern” Christian religion all around the world.

Very short version: In Germany and the Netherlands the missionaries took Wotan or Odin – who rode on a horse in the sky once in winter – and mixed him with the generous Nicholas from Turkey.

This version was transported to the United States through the famous poem “Twas the Night before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore in 1822. American illustrator Thomas Nast – from Bavaria! – changed the little elf into the rather well fed grandpa we know today about fifty years later. In 1927 the modern Santa was complete.

The “New York Times” reported in this year: “A standardized Santa Claus appears to New York children. Height, weight, stature are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the hood and the white whiskers. The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also inevitable parts of the requisite make-up.”

There was even a company marketing its softdrink with an exhausted Santa. “White Rock’s Mineral Water” used the old man to market its Ginger Ale lemonade three years before Haddon Sundbloom invented the ‘Coca Cola Santa Claus’.
Case closed. Links: Snopes, White Rock Beverages, Twas the Night, Santa’s Website