found “everything that has come out of Orgonon since Oranur... rationalized defenses
against untenable positions.”
This kind of indiscriminate criticism was no more helpful than the attitude of other
colleagues who always found Reich right no matter what he did. But responses like
Hamilton’s indicated to Reich that many were abandoning him.
Ilse Ollendorff has written of Reich’s mood that summer:
With the loneliness and frustration ... his basic optimism must have fal-
tered. Reich must often have sensed that the final outcome might be rather grim.
His health was not good; his heart was bothering him ... He had always been con-
cerned about what would happen to his remains if he should die, and he now began
to prepare in earnest for a tomb—or mausoleum—at Orgonon ... [There was] one
spot on the hill where the observatory was built, where often before he had said he
would like to be buried. He now had Tom Ross, the caretaker, begin digging out a
place for a tomb^4.Reich was not totally without consolation during the summer. At the seminar on
the DOR-buster,he met Aurora Karrer, a woman of thirty-one at the time. As a biologist
who was employed by the National Institute of Health in Washington, Karrer had long been
an admirer of Reich’s. I met her only twice briefly and spoke just a few words with her^5. She
was very attractive, dark-haired, resembling the Tahitian women in Gauguin’s paintings,
which Reich greatly admired.
An intense relationship developed. Aurora Karrer seems to have rekindled a depth
of romantic feeling Reich had not experienced for many years, an intensity heightened by
his perilous legal predicament. However, there were difficulties, the precise nature of which
I do not know save that they included Reich’s old problem of jealousy. His angry outbursts
were frequent and Karrer would sometimes leave him unpredictably^6.
In spite ofall Reich’s legal strains and personal upheavals in the post-injunction
period, his flow of scientific publications did not cease. As mentioned in Chapter 28, Reich
in 1955 changed the name ofthe Orgone Energy Bulletinto CORE(standing for cosmic
orgone engineering) to reflect his continuing work. In 1954, he published one large issue
devoted to problems of weather modification and drought, with a report on his experiences
up to the Arizona expedition; in 1955, two more issues ofCOREappeared. The first con-
tained a description of his trip to Arizona. It also included a preliminary paper by Reich on
some ofhis chemical investigations concerning DOR.
The same issue contained a summary by Chester Raphael of a small seminar on
DOR-sickness that Reich had held at Orgonon on August 26 and 27, 1953- Reich made sev-
eral important distinctions at this conference that merit a brief description.
He distinguished between Oranur sickness and DOR-sickness. “Oranur sickness”
referred to the organismic response to the experimental use of radium in an atmosphere
(Orgonon) highly charged with orgone energy. The Oranur experiment provided a way of
410 Myron SharafFury On Earth