ABSTRACT
From the beginnings of recorded history, electricity and magnetism have been associated with religious and spiritual images and ideas, such as all-pervading invisible forces, divine judgment, and the soul and its relationship to the divine. The thunderbolts of Zeus were cast down upon offenders; the lodestone, as well as amber and other electrics, were perceived as possessing a kind of soul or spirit capable of acting invisibly at a distance. For William Gilbert (1544-1603), who was the first clearly to demonstrate by scientific experiment the differences between electricity and magnetism, the earth’s magnetic field was its “soul.” Gilbert, as well as other early natural philosophers of the time, believed that magnetism was an analogy of God’s love, the amor Dei that linked God with the human soul.
