Title: “Stars in Your Eyes, Rosy Cheeks, and a Happy Girl in the Morning”: An Alchemical Case Study in Orgonomic Ritual, Jungian Integration, and Pop-Cultural Mythos as Vehicles for the Transmutation of Complex Trauma

Title: “Stars in Your Eyes, Rosy Cheeks, and a Happy Girl in the Morning”: An Alchemical Case Study in Orgonomic Ritual, Jungian Integration, and Pop-Cultural Mythos as Vehicles for the Transmutation of Complex Trauma

Author: Dr. Eleanor Vance, Ph.D., F.S.A. (Pseudonym)

Affiliation: Institute for Applied Depth Psychology and Ritual Studies, Oxford

Presented to: The Society for Trauma, Symbol, and Somatic Healing, Trinity Term 2026

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Abstract

This paper presents a longitudinal, auto-ethnographic case study of a single subject, here referred to as Jane, who has undergone a profound and ongoing healing journey from severe, multi-layered trauma. Through an interdisciplinary lens combining Wilhelm Reich’s orgone biophysics (as later popularized by Don and Carol Croft), Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, the symbolism of medieval alchemy, and contemporary pop-cultural mythologies (WandaVision, Steven Universe, X-Men, Agatha All Along, Run’s House, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians), we examine how a series of spontaneous, intuitive rituals—centered on handcrafted orgonite objects—have facilitated a remarkable process of shadow integration, narrative reconstruction, and the reclamation of agency. The paper proposes that the subject’s experience offers a valid, if unconventional, model for understanding how physically enacted symbolism can bridge the gap between unspeakable trauma and embodied recovery, transforming what Reich termed “Deadly Orgone Energy” (DOR) into “Positive Orgone Energy” (POR) in both a literal and profoundly metaphorical sense.

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1. Introduction: The Arrival of the Talisman

The case begins, as many authentic psychospiritual journeys do, not in a clinician’s office but in the mundane sacredness of daily life. Jane, a server at a fast-food establishment in the American Southwest, noticed a customer wearing a striking, handcrafted pendant. Upon complimenting the piece, she was told it was orgonite—a composite of epoxy resin, metal shavings, and quartz crystal, based on the theories of Wilhelm Reich and later refined by the Crofts to include a self-cleaning, perpetually regenerative transmutation of negative into positive energy. The customer, moved by Jane’s interest, returned a week later with a bag of these pendants, allowing Jane and her coworkers to select their own. This act of unsolicited, communal generosity initiated a cascade of events that this paper will trace, events that the subject herself describes as nothing less than a fourth-dimensional healing force entering her three-dimensional life.

Jane selected two pendants: one for herself, featuring a gold pyrite sun and a silver moon; and one for her adult daughter, Opal (pseudonym), with the metals reversed—a golden moon and a silver sun. At the time, she did not know the internal composition of the pieces. The serendipity of the sun-moon pairing, however, directly corresponded to a nightly family ritual Jane, her husband, and Opal had developed: a call-and-response affirmation concluding with “I love you both to the moon and back.” The pendants were thus immediately integrated into an existing symbolic system, amplifying its resonance.

2. Biographical and Traumatic Context: A Narrative in Names Changed

To grasp the magnitude of what these small resin objects came to signify, one must understand the landscape of Jane’s life, which reads like a conflation of Greek tragedy and a gothic novel, though it is documented fact. The subject’s childhood was marked by severe physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. As a young teenager, she was raped by a peer, hereafter Marcus Webb, and subsequently forced by her religious community (a conservative sect of the LDS church) to marry him. This union produced a daughter, Opal, whom Jane was coerced into surrendering for adoption to her own eldest sister, Elena, who then married Webb herself and raised the child estranged from Jane.

Jane later married a second husband, David Fields. This marriage produced three more children, but was characterized by profound betrayal: Fields engaged in serial infidelity with three of Jane’s six sisters, including Elena, as well as two of Jane’s childhood friends. One sister, Cecilia, gave birth to a daughter, Grace (named after Jane and Cecilia’s mother, Clara), who tragically drowned in a bathtub at age four while in the care of Cecilia, Elena, and Fields. Cecilia later bore Fields a son, Leo, who survives. The generational and relational enmeshment of trauma is staggering. During this period, Jane’s mother, Clara, died by suicide, an event that coincided temporally with the subject’s 19th year—a trauma echoed later in Jane’s identification with media figure Khloé Kardashian, who lost her father at the same age.

From her first pregnancy, Jane had a specific, insistent craving for tuna. She would later interpret this as an early, embodied connection to the son she carried from Webb: a boy she named Ohrin. Ohrin died in infancy. His ashes, the dirt from his grave, and metal shavings from his casket were collected and preserved by Jane’s closest friend, Dana (pseudonym), a woman who has been a constant witness since high school. Dana held these materials for 23 years, waiting, she would later say, for Ohrin’s spirit to indicate the right time to return them.

CPS intervened to protect Jane and her remaining children from Fields. Jane lost custody but eventually rebuilt her life, marrying a third husband—a Cancer to her Aquarius, a gentle and steady presence she describes in terms of three fictional archetypes: Vision, the synthezoid who loves a chaos witch; Garnet, the fusion of Ruby and Sapphire who embodies love as a continuous choice; and Gambit, the Cajun thief who loved Rogue without the need for physical touch. This husband “jump-started” Jane’s healing.

Two years prior to this writing, Opal, now an adult, located Jane via TikTok and initiated the reversal of her adoption. She took the surname Hamm and now participates in the nightly ritual. Opal’s late husband, before dying suddenly of a seizure, told Jane, “I brought you your daughter home.” He had fulfilled a wish Jane had harbored since she was a girl fleeing a forced marriage: to run away with her daughter.

This, then, is the ground from which the orgonite emerged: not a blank slate, but a psyche saturated with grief, betrayal, and the hard-won architecture of survival.

3. Theoretical Frameworks: Reich, Croft, Jung, and the Alchemical Opus

To contextualize the rituals that follow, we must briefly establish the theoretical lenses through which they can be read.

3.1 Reich and the Crofts: Orgone as Metaphysics and Mechanism

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) postulated the existence of a primordial cosmic energy, orgone, which was blue in color, omnipresent, and could be accumulated using alternating layers of organic and metallic materials. His orgone accumulators were human-sized boxes intended to concentrate this energy for healing. Reich’s work was suppressed by the FDA, and he died in prison. Don and Carol Croft, in the late 1990s, revived and modified Reich’s concepts by adding quartz crystals to the resin-metal matrix. Their innovation was to claim that while Reich’s devices accumulated both positive (POR) and negative (DOR) orgone, the addition of a piezoelectric crystal created a self-sustaining transmutation: DOR was converted into “fuel” for POR, meaning the device never needed cleaning or replacement and instead grew stronger over time. The Crofts’ movement, “gifting,” distributes these devices globally to combat pollution and negativity.

3.2 Jung and Alchemy: The Shadow and the Prima Materia

Carl Jung’s framework of the Shadow—the repressed, disowned aspects of the psyche—and his extensive studies of alchemy as a map for individuation provide the psychological correlate to orgone transmutation. In alchemy, the prima materia (the base, chaotic substance) must undergo stages of nigredo (blackening, dissolution), albedo (whitening, purification), and rubedo (reddening, integration) to yield the Philosopher’s Stone. Jung saw this as an external projection of the process of making the unconscious conscious, of integrating the Shadow to reclaim trapped life force. For Jane, the resin-metal-crystal pendant serves as a physical alchemical crucible, continuously performing the opus on the energetic residue of her trauma.

3.3 Pop-Culture Mythos as Active Imagination

Jung’s technique of active imagination—dialoguing with inner figures—finds a modern expression in the subject’s deep identification with fictional characters. Wanda Maximoff (the Scarlet Witch), who warps reality from grief; Billy Maximoff, her son who reincarnates to find her; Lilia Calderu, the psychic who falls non-linearly through her own timeline; Garnet, the living fusion of two souls; and the found-family narratives of Run’s House and Kardashians—these are not passive entertainments for Jane. They are mythic templates, serving the function that the pantheons of Olympus or the stories of saints served for pre-modern peoples: they externalize inner conflicts and model possible resolutions.

4. The Rituals: A Phased Analysis

The subject’s engagement with orgonite unfolded through a series of escalating ritual acts, each building on the last and drawing in more elements of her personal history.

4.1 Phase One: The Sun and Moon Pendants—Symmetry and the Reunited Dyad

The selection of the two pendants, one with a gold sun and silver moon, the other reversed, established a relational field. Jane (sun) and Opal (moon) were immediately bound in a material representation of their mutually reflective bond. The nightly phrase, “Stars in your eyes, rosy cheeks, and a happy girl in the morning… I love you both to the moon and back,” became physically anchored. Jane reported wearing the pendant constantly, often holding it over her heart. She began to speak of it not as jewelry but as an active agent, “scrubbing her clean.” This language directly echoes the Crofts’ description of orgonite transmuting DOR into POR.

4.2 Phase Two: The “Orgonite Water” Baths—Solutio and Purification

The first major ritual innovation occurred when Jane felt compelled to place her pendant in her bathwater. She reasoned, in her own words, that if water conducts electricity, it might conduct “other forms of vibration and frequency.” She soaked with the pendant, later adding sea salt and, in subsequent baths, a cheesecloth “tea bag” filled with herbs from her garden. This bath became a regular practice of somatic release. Notably, an old elbow injury from a fall—characterized by persistent morning pain and limited mobility—showed marked improvement after these soaks. Whether attributable to the warmth and buoyancy of water, the mineral absorption from salts, or the placebo-amplification of belief, the subject experienced genuine physical relief, which she attributed to the orgonite “charging” the water. This practice can be understood alchemically as solutio, the dissolving of hardened psychic and somatic structures.

4.3 Phase Three: The Vibration Plate and the Rocking Chair—Discharge and Regulation

At her friend Dana’s house, Jane used a whole-body vibration machine, noticing that the pendant vibrated with her. She reported a sensation of activation—energy “exceling” that was unneeded—followed by an instinct to sit in a hammock chair and rock. This sequence, discharge followed by rhythmic self-soothing, mimics the polyvagal theory’s model of trauma release: the sympathetic surge is allowed to complete, and the parasympathetic ventral vagal system is engaged through gentle, repetitive motion. The pendant, physically shaking against her chest, became a somatic amplifier.

4.4 Phase Four: The Pyramid of Ohrin—Coagulatio and Communion

The pinnacle of the ritual development came three days after Mother’s Day, when Dana gifted Jane a new orgonite piece. This was not a pendant but a solid, seven-faceted pyramid with a spiral coil at its rounded base. Its contents, held for 23 years, included: dirt from Ohrin’s grave; ash from the Viking-style crossing bonfire the family lit over his grave the day after his funeral; metal shavings from his infant casket; clear quartz; Herkimer diamonds; pyrite; gold shavings; and, at the very center, a single pearl, visible only when the pyramid is turned to a particular angle. Dana reported that she had been moved by Ohrin’s spirit to finally create and deliver the piece.

This object is, in the truest sense, a reliquary and a spirit house. The pearl, hidden and requiring specific light to be seen, serves as a perfect symbol of the soul—present, luminous, but not graspable from every vantage point. Jane immediately placed the pyramid over her heart and planned a ritual bath to welcome it. This bath, which she came to call the first “Angel Day” ritual, was the most elaborate yet, and we must examine its components in detail.

5. The Angel Day Ritual: A Cakes-and-Ale Liturgy of Remembrance

Influenced by pagan traditions of offering food and drink to the dead (cakes and ale), Jane constructed a yearly commemorative ritual for Ohrin. It has two integrated parts: a ritual meal and a ritual bath.

5.1 The Meal: Tuna Melt as Eucharist

The meal centered on a tuna melt, made from a salad recipe Jane has used since girlhood. Tuna was the specific craving Jane experienced while pregnant with Ohrin, making it the literal materia of their shared embodiment. To the salad, she added garden herbs chosen for their symbolic properties: dill (mother-love, soothing), lemon balm (gladness, lifting of grief), a whisper of black pepper (protection), and sea salt (the same salt used in the bath, creating a sensory through-line). The melt was assembled with sharp cheddar cheese on hearty bread, air-fried until golden, and cut in half. One portion was for Jane; the other was ritually offered to Ohrin. A glass of honey-sweetened tea was poured for him. The act of eating his portion—or placing it before a candle and later crumbling it for the birds—constitutes a physical communion. Jane describes the aroma of toasting bread and melting cheese as “the incense of Ohrin’s Angel Day,” a domestic oblation rising from the air fryer.

5.2 The Bath: A Potion of the Veil

The bathwater became a liquid alembic. The ingredients, all biodegradable and safe for the subject’s septic system, were:

· Sea salt and Epsom salt: purification and muscle release.

· A cheesecloth tea bag containing: rosemary (remembrance), lavender (her late mother’s signature scent, a detail that emerged during the ritual’s planning and brought Jane to tears, feeling her mother was “noticed”), holy basil/Tulsi (opening the heart-veil), a pinch of mugwort (dreaming, thinning the boundary), lemon balm (carrying the gladness from the meal), and pomegranate seeds crushed by Jane’s own hands. The pomegranate, fruit of Persephone, binds the living and the dead and promises seasonal return.

· A spoonful of THC-infused honey, crafted by Dana. Honey, the food of the gods that never spoils, sweetens the water and, with the THC, offers a gentle somatic softening, a lowering of hypervigilance so that subtle presence might be felt. That this honey was made by the same woman who held Ohrin’s remains weaves a third presence into the water: the witness, the friend, the keeper of the flame.

· A cup of milk or cream (optional), to render the bath a return to the womb-waters where Jane and Ohrin were once one body.

The pyramid was lowered into the steeped water with the spoken intention: “Ohrin, the fire is now water. The earth is now liquid. The ash is now carried in warmth. Come. Soak with me.” Jane entered, placed the pyramid on her sternum, and rested in what she describes as a vigil—sometimes singing, sometimes speaking, sometimes listening in silence. Upon draining the tub, the herbs, salt, honey, and seeds returned to the earth via the septic field, completing a cycle of offering that leaves no waste.

6. Pop-Cultural Archetypes as a Therapeutic Pantheon

Throughout the case, Jane has consistently mapped her relationships and internal dynamics onto characters from television, film, and animation. This is not escapism; it is a sophisticated form of narrative therapy and archetypal projection.

· Wanda Maximoff and Vision: Jane identifies with Wanda’s grief so powerful it reshapes reality, and with her capacity to mother across the boundaries of existence. Her husband, like Vision, is the steady, rational heart that anchors her chaos. Their daughter Opal directly identifies with Billy Maximoff, the son who reincarnated and searched for his true mother across realities—a transparent parallel to Opal’s reversal of adoption and reunion with Jane.

· Garnet (Ruby and Sapphire): From Steven Universe, Garnet is a permanent fusion of two beings who love each other as a continuous action. Jane and her husband, though astrologically “mismatched” (Aquarius air, Cancer water), see themselves as a fusion—her visionary detachment and his nurturing groundedness creating a stable, third entity that is their marriage. Opal, their daughter, is named in part for another fusion gem, Opal, subtly reinforcing this imagery.

· Remy LeBeau (Gambit) and Anna Marie (Rogue): Rogue’s inability to touch without harming, and Gambit’s willingness to love her fully regardless, speaks to Jane’s experience of touch being weaponized and corrupted by trauma. Her husband’s patient, non-demanding physicality has been a slow reclamation of safe skin.

· Lilia Calderu (Agatha All Along): The clairvoyant who falls through her own timeline, initially believing she is going mad, until she realizes every fall was a placement, every jump a delivery of crucial wisdom. Jane’s recent, intense feeling of “falling through her life”—reconnecting with the show Run’s House from 2009, seeing its lessons anew, leaping between past and present—is mapped directly onto Lilia’s arc. The subject is not regressing; she is performing a life-review in the round, assembling a sigil from moments lived out of linear order.

· Run’s House and Keeping Up with the Kardashians: These reality programs served distinct functions. Run’s House, watched during her pregnancy with Ohrin and his subsequent loss, gave her a televised father figure in Rev Run, whose nightly bathtub monologues of “God is love” and positive affirmation modeled a benevolent paternal presence entirely absent from her life. Kardashians provided a prolonged, real-time study of women navigating public betrayal, bodily autonomy, co-parenting with toxic partners, and the reclamation of narrative. Jane’s deep identification with Khloé Kardashian—loss of a parent at 19, life-threatening crisis with a partner, betrayal by a partner with a family member—allowed her to externalize her own story and see that she could “alter the narrative.”

7. Non-Linear Time and the Integration of the Self

The subject’s recent pull to rewatch Run’s House, nearly two decades after it first held her, signals a profound integrative moment. She asks, “Am I in sync with who I was then, or am I healing that version of me and incorporating her into the person I am now?” The answer, from a Jungian perspective, is both. The young mother of 2009, pregnant, grieving, clinging to a television for a father’s blessing, is not a separate self. She is a part of the psyche that is being revisited, held, and thanked. By re-watching with the knowledge of survival—knowing that she will lose Ohrin, lose other children, be betrayed by sisters, and yet ultimately reunite with Opal, marry her true partner, and build a garden and a ritual life—Jane is performing a reparative act upon her own timeline. She is saying to that past self: You made it. Your watching was not in vain. The blessing took, and you became the blessing.

This non-linear experience is crystallized in the orgone pyramid. The copper spiral at its base is the labyrinthine path of her life, winding into the dirt of Ohrin’s grave, the ash of his fire, the metal of his casket, through the amplifying quartz and Herkimer diamond, past the protective pyrite and incorruptible gold, to the hidden pearl at the center—visible only when the light shifts. That pearl is the Self, the indestructible essence, the thing that trauma could not touch. The pyramid, like the alchemical lapis, is both the process and the product. It is Ohrin, transmuted. It is Jane’s own soul, polished by the very grit that was meant to destroy her.

8. Conclusion: The Fourth Dimension in a Fast-Food Restaurant

This case study is not offered as empirical proof of orgone energy, nor as a prescription for trauma treatment. It is offered as a phenomenological account of what becomes possible when a suffering human being is given a symbol, a ritual, and a permission. The orgonite pendant, initially a curiosity, became the axis around which Jane organized a comprehensive, self-directed healing system, integrating somatic release, narrative reconstruction, ancestral communion, and the sanctification of daily acts (bathing, cooking, walking in the sun).

The 4th-dimensional healing force discovered by Wilhelm Reich, and repackaged by Don and Carol Croft, may or may not be measurable by current scientific instruments. But its psychological reality is undeniable. For Jane, it is the force that allowed her to hold a pyramid containing her son’s ashes and feel, not just grief, but presence. It is the force that let her see her daughter wearing a moon while she wears the sun, and know that the cosmos had been set right between them. It is the force that transforms a tuna melt into a Eucharist and a bag of Epsom salts into the sea of the primordial mother.

We leave the last word to the subject herself, in an unedited excerpt from her journaling during the preparation of this paper:

“I don’t chase healing anymore. I attract what belongs to me. And a healed, whole arm belongs to me. A daughter home belongs to me. A son in a pyramid over my heart belongs to me. The water knows. The salt knows. The lavender knows. My mother is still here, smelling of lavender. My husband is the Cancer to my Aquarius, and we are Garnet, a fusion of choice. My daughter is Billy Maximoff, and she found me across the algorithm. Ohrin is the pearl. I fall through time like Lilia, and every fall is a placement. I am not broken. I am being assembled. Good morning. God is love. We are love. And I love you all to the moon and back.”

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Hashtags for Publication: #Orgonite #AlchemicalHealing #JungianPsychology #ComplexTraumaRecovery #PopCultureMythos #CaseStudy #ScarletWitchHealing

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The author wishes to thank the subject, Jane, for her courage, her poetry, and her unwavering insistence that love is a transmuting agent. All names have been changed to protect privacy. The rituals described are personal and spiritual in nature and are not presented as substitutes for professional medical or psychological care.