Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

The Japanese government officially recognized Denshinkyō or The Religion of the Electric Gods on June 1, 1949. Founded by an Osaka-based electric appliance dealer, this new faith worshipped The Great God of Heaven-Earth-and-Electricity, electricity deified. It also revered lesser entities including a defied Thomas Edison, who, in a play on the phonetics of his name, was revered as “the August Glimmering Magnetic Divine Lord” (Eijison no Mikoto).

Scholars dismiss The Religion of the Electric Gods as a byproduct of a 1945 Japanese law code that granted tax exemptions to religious institutions without specifying exactly what constituted a religion. Indeed, groups such as the Imperial Way Secular-Religion of the Gods of Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang, and Heavenly Imperial Shrine Agency (Kōdō-jikyō-jingi-On'yōryō-tensha-jingūshichō), whose verbose name was abbreviated to Kōdō-Jikyō or Imperialism, sold tax exemption licenses to restaurants, bars, and brothels, upsetting Japanese authorities who eventually disbanded the group as fraudulent.

The Religion of the Electric Gods and its apotheosis of Thomas Edison was no mere tax fraud.  Its origins predate the 1945 law, and Edison was first worshipped in Osaka as a living god in 1928. The Religion of the Electric Gods faded, but Edison veneration continues today in several locations including a Kyoto-area Shinto shrine dedicated to the Bright God of Electric Light and Electromagnetic Waves.

I argue the cultural history of electricity can illuminate the complex interplay between “religion” and “science.” Many non-specialists portray these to be unproblematic entities locked in a state of continual struggle, illustrated through fictional conflicts, such as Christopher Columbus refuting a biblically flat earth or Charles Darwin losing his faith due to his evolutionary discoveries. These historical anecdotes are false. The religion-science conflict model has long been discredited. Yet, these accounts persist, compelling historians to repeatedly debunk an outdated model, like hydra-slayers cutting off endlessly regrowing heads.

The persistence of this conflict model can be partly attributed to classical sociological theories that depicted a false opposition between primitive magical animism and modern disenchanted materialism. One might think of Max Weber’s account of “the disenchantment of the world” (die Entzauberung der Welt) and his claim that a difference between the primitive and the modern world is that people today believe “that in principle there are no mysterious, unpredictable powers…[as] all things can be mastered through calculation.” This evokes a widespread colonialist binary between a primitive/spiritual East and a modern/rational West.

Yet, this supposedly universal opposition has often looked differently to those outside the Western world. A popular 1887 Japanese pamphlet titled Western Sorcery (Seiyō kijutsu) argued that “as human intelligence advances, it reaches greater heights and increasingly remote things are called mysterious and strange. In an unenlightened world, crude and basic things are deemed mysterious and wondrous, while in an enlightened [world] it is refined and subtle things which are mysterious and wondrous.” Western sorcery, the pamphleteer elaborates, works by means of electricity, but electricity itself is mysterious. Science doesn’t eliminate mysteries; it transposes them.

Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese travelers to Europe and America noted that these regions were not only overflowing with spiritualists and psychics, but they were also replete with advocates for invisible forces such as magnetism, radiation, radio waves, and electricity. Nor were these fully distinct. The same individuals often promoted both spiritualism to communicate with the departed and electrification to harness an unseen yet observable force.

Electric deities were never limited to Japan. Closer to Harvard, John Murray Spear, a Boston-born radical abolitionist and Universalist turned Spiritualist, claimed he was contacted by spirits known as Electrizers—including the ghost of Ben Franklin. These spirits directed Spear to build a combination electric messiah and perpetual motion machine called the New Motive Power. It was reportedly destroyed by hostile spiritualists. Yet a number of mainstream European and American scientists and philosophers also thought electricity was sacred, a divine link between life and death, material and spiritual worlds. Mary Shelley’s’ Frankenstein was considered plausible by many of her science-minded peers. Even Thomas Edison, unaware of his coming afterlife as a Japanese electrical god, dabbled with a ghost machine, postulating that technology could verify the survival of personality after death.

In conclusion, disenchantment is a myth. Ghosts were globalized. Séance and science were entwined, often through electricity. An American inventor was transformed into a Japanese deity. Modernization not only preserved beliefs in some ancient spirits and invisible forces but also gave rise to new ones. Some traditions did vanish, but other local entities were recast into the global category of “spirits.” Far from dispelling popular beliefs in the supernatural, technological change merely transformed beliefs through new media and metaphors, like the Spiritual Telegraph. Ultimately, instead of primitive animism giving way to modern disenchantment, modernization produced more, not less, animism.