Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich (1740-1817)

German author and physician, born on September 12, 1740, as Johann Heinrich Jung, was best known under his assumed name, Heinrich Stilling. He was professor of political economy, public administration, and agriculture at several German universities, a contemporary of Franz A. Mesmer, and founder of a German spiritual school of cosmology. His book Theorie der Geister-Kunde (1808; English translation by S. Jackson as Theory of Pneumatology, 1834) contains a great number of authentic narratives of apparitions and similar phenomena. Jung-Stilling also expounded the doctrine of a psychic body, based on the luminiferous ether.

According to Jung-Stilling, animal magnetism undeniably proves that we have an inward man, a soul, constituted of the divine spark, the immortal spirit, possessing reason and will, and of a luminous body that is inseparable from it. Light, electricity, magnetic forces, galvanic matter, and ether appear to be all one and the same body under different modifications, according to Jung-Stilling. This light substance, or ether, is the element that connects body and soul and the spiritual and material worlds. When the inward man—the human soul— forsakes the outward sphere, where the senses operate and merely continue the vital functions, the body falls into an entranced state, or a profound sleep, during which the soul acts more freely and powerfully. All its faculties are elevated.

The more the soul is divested of the body, the more extensive, free, and powerful is its inward sphere of operation, JungStilling said. It has, therefore, no need whatever of the body in order to live and exist. The body is rather a hindrance to it. The soul does not require the organs of sense—it can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel in a much more perfect state.

The boundless ether that fills the space of our solar system is the element in which spirits live and move, according to Jung-Stilling. The atmosphere that surrounds our earth, down to its center, and particularly the night, is the abode of fallen angels and of human souls that die in an unconverted state. Jung-Stilling discouraged communications with the spirit world as sinful and dangerous. He considered trance a diseased condition. He believed implicitly in the efficacy of prayer and claimed psychic powers himself. More than ten weeks before the event, he predicted the tragic fate of Swiss writer Johann Kaspar Lavater, who was shot by a soldier in Zürich in 1801. The first part of Jung-Stilling's autobiography (Heinrich Stillings Jugend, 1777) was published at the instigation of Goethe.

He died on April 2, 1817.

Sources:

Jung, Johann Heinrich. Heinrich Stilling. Translated by S. Jackson. 1835-36. 2nd ed. 1843. Abridged ed., edited by R. O. Moon. N.p., 1886.