Paul Kammerer's Law Of Series: the key that unlocks a thousand doors...  

By John Townley, September 2019. 

Part One: Preface to a Volcano

Pivotal times breed mind-bending change, paradigm shifts, distruptive technologies and seminal ideas that can take generations to truly understand, take hold, and accept. They are mini-Renaissances awhirl with new music, art, spiritual fervor, social revolution, and scientific discovery that stretch the bounds of all previous imagination. The 1960s-70s were such a time, and we remember its heroes (and martyrs, "Abraham, Martin, and John") as the beacons that we still try to understand and emulate. Fifty years later, much of the world is still struggling just to grasp (much less accept) the ideas of universal rights, whole-world ecology, universal interconnectivity, and the cyberworld that were imagined and brought into being then.

Not surprisingly, that's not the only time that has happened...little islands of such world-changing activity sprout up regularly across history, like Hawaii's volcanic island mounts appearing in a string across the sea of time. And, like the Hawaiian chain, they're not accidental, unrelated eruptions, but tied together from below, sharing the same forces and concerns that repeatedly surface and rebuild the foundations of the lives of generations to come, one island at a time.

Historical hot spots are like periodic volcanic eruptions, forming chains linked from below and within.

Recently, these cultural eruptions seemed to have spaced themselves about sixty years apart (a synodic Jupiter-Saturn conjunction cycle to astrologers), with revolutionary, "interesting times": just after the turn of the 20th century, the 1840s-50s, and back to the time of the American and French Revolutions. A pattern worth researching further, in another article.

But what is of note is that the ideas of one eruption may (and do) turn out to have similar themes to the ones before and after, which would be reasonable if they spring from the same deep well of energy and structure. And in one period the work of certain individuals literally "ahead of their time" may be almost conpletely lost or ignored and not finally become recognized until the next eruption, long after their deaths or in some cases martyrdoms. An extreme way-back example is Christianity itself, which arose at the peak of Roman Empire-building revolutionizing everything, and it was either ignored or repressed until being rather suddenly and broadly recognized several generations later.

As a participator and innovator in the 1960s-70s eruption in music and later astrology,  I first imagined the broad interest in areas as disparate as social equality, psychic research, astrology, mysterious phenomena, drugs, holism, and new spiritual thinking were all something our brand-new baby-boomer generation made up. That was until Arthur Koestler's Roots of Coincidence (1971) revealed the very same things were all the rage in early 1900s Vienna, in a mini-Renaiisance that was cut short by World War I and the rise of facism and communism that followed. We know (in retrospect) what that unique revolution brought us: relativity and quantum theory, modern psychology, socialism (the non-communist kind), along with the distruptive technoligies of the automobile, the airplane, and radio. And so many of its movers and shakers (Einstein, Freud, Mahler, Shoenberg, revolutionary architects and artists like Loos and Klimt, even would-be artist Adolf Hitler) were all vying for attention on the streets of Vienna, whose all-comers-welcome government made it the cultural capital of Europe. From outer technology to the inner journey, that was the happening place to be. It was the center of all that was new in the rest of Europe. From cubism, to silent film, to worldwide thinking, it was the birthplace of modernism. It was a precursor of my own 1960s Greenwich Village.

   

Early 20th cenutry Vienna was an echo of cultural revolutions in 1770s, 1840s, and the 1960s yet to come.

It was exciting to discover that -- known history in unknown Vienna. What was more exciting was the part about the man ahead of his time, whose ideas barely resurfaced in my time, and only now are partly being recognized as prescient beyond his generation, and ours. That man was Paul Kammerer. The son of a well-to-do Jewish family, he aspired to become a musician and disciple of composer Gustav Mahler. But instead he found his outdoors naturalist talents led him into biology, when he was recruited by the Vivarium, the first-ever experimental biology institute, where the latest theories of evolution were being tested in the laboratory. There he became known for his breeding experiments with salamanders, sea squirts, frogs, and other amphibians which seemed to demonstrate that new characteristics acquired by the animals could be passed on to their progeny. This was controversial worldwide, as it contradicted the popular neo-Darwinian theory that developments were genetically random and could not be acquired or passed on -- an opinion that became standard for the entire 20th century and is only now just being re-called into question. But when the proof of Kammerer's experiments were shown to his peers, they grudgingly had to admit his results, while unable to explain them. Theoretically, they seemed more similar to the increasingly out-of-favor approach to evolution of Lamarck rather than Darwin, though Kammerer never made such a claim.

This now might seem like a tempest in the teapot of early biology, but it was blown up into repercussions of massive social importance for the time, grabbing headlines around the world. That was because, in the fierce political war of ideas between socialism/communism and extreme capitalism/totalitarianism, this was wonderful fodder for the socialist side. The idea of passing on learned experience to your kids promised a world of betterment-by-design, in which modern ideas of education and behavior could actually be built-in to an improvable human race. It was the complete opposite of of the capitalist/fascist rule-of-the-strongest whose social engineering fantasies involved simply killing off those with traits you disliked, while breeding more of those you preferred. Kammerer, although personally favoring progressive causes, wasn't ready to make sweeping, unprofessional conclusions from simple amphibian experiments, but the press that covered his lectures throughout Europe and America had no problem doing so, labelling him as squarely in the socialist camp.

The Vivarium was the laboratory, known as "The Sorcerers' Institute", where Kammerer made his magic.

This may have ultimately spelled his demise, after World War I resulted in the loss of all but one of his experimental specimens (a midwife toad).  Sometime in late 1925 or early 1926, someone tampered with that one remaining specimen, to make it look like fraud. It was clearly intentional and likely a setup to discredit Kammerer's work, but it did cause a scandal, even among foes who had previously seen and admitted to the original, untampered experiment. But by this time, the University of Vienna was being saturated with Nazi administrators and sympathizers who were systematically expelling all Jewish professors and staff, and Kammerer may have been their hardest nut to crack. That's because despite the scandal, the Moscow Academy had decided to generously fund him to set up his own, elaborate laboratory in Moscow, and by September of 1926 they were packing all of his expensive new equipment for shipping to Moscow, for a well-staffed and well-stocked project to prove inherited characteristics. He was about to become an even greater (and unreachable) thorn in the side of the Austrian Nazi Party, officially formed that year.

         

Mountain above Puchsberg, where body was found, memorial bust at hotel where he spent his last night.

Then, just a few days before his final trip from Vienna to Moscow for his new career, Paul Kammerer was found shot dead on a mountainside near Vienna. There were five typed-only suicide notes delivered to various friends and relatives (including the Mosow Academy), and his body was propped up against a rack, holding a pistol in his right hand, but shot in the left temple. Despite the clearly-suspicious circumstances, it was declared a suicide and no further investigation was done. Was it really a suicide, or was he lured there and then shot, a setup by powerful enemies? Just thirteen years later, another scientist (Otto Rahn) that ran afoul of the Nazis was similarly found dead (and frozen) on a mountainside, which was also declared suicide. Only Moscow would later complain, with the the 1928 production of the film Salamandra, produced by Soviet education minister Anatoly Lunacharsky, which clearly pointed the finger at a facist plot -- and was immediately banned in Germany...

In the volcano of the 1960s-'70s, Koestler's biography The Case of the Midwife Toad alone revived Kammerer's career and questioned the events surrounding it, to little notice. But later, with the discovery of epigenetics at the dawn of the 21st century (showing that certain acquired characteristics can indeed be inherited) , Kammerer's biology has found a new lease on life. From a disgraced Lamarckian, he has become "the father of epigenetics".

                  

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