Origins of the Ranch, Part II
The following story is from Purcell Weaver’s Preface to Edmond Szekely’s book “Man, Cosmos & Society: A Paneubiotic Synthesis” (The C.W. Daniel Company, Ashington, Rochford, Essex, England; 1936).
Mr. Weaver, a young lawyer from England traveling the South Pacific on a curative vacation, misses a boat home and finds himself in Tahiti, where he meets Edmond Szekely, who advises him on how to recover his strength and vitality through a program of rigorous diet and exercise. (Purcell Weaver is pictured in top row, right.)The results are remarkable, and feeling well again, Mr. Weaver begins a collaboration…
After two weeks of treatment I felt much better than I had for many years. I woke up fresh in the mornings and ready for mental work—which the Professor provided. On one of my weekly visits to him to report progress I found him busy dictating in French what appeared to be a chapter of a book. When the typist had left, he told me that as he was not permitted to give personal medical advice to the natives who came to him for help, although his treatment was quite gratuitous. He was preparing a practical manual of his therapy for distribution in the island. I walked home late that night with an Anglo-French dictionary in one hand and a bundle of manuscripts in the other. Next morning I started translating and I have been translating ever since. For the manual grew and grew. It arose out of the practical needs of the moment; by the time it was finished it had laid down the foundations of the new natural medicine and the new natural society of the future.
The full titles of the two expeditions directed by Edmond Szekely are the International Cosmotherapeutic Expedition 1930-40 for the Pschophysiological Investigation and Therapeutic Application of the Cosmic, Solar, Terrestrial and Human Radiations between Latitudes 45° North and 30° South and the International Ethnopsychological and Ethnosociological Expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
His practical work of healing among the natives of Tahiti represented one side of expedition’s activities. At the same time new cosmic, psychotechnical and sociological methods were applied in the field of enthnohistorical research.
[At this point in the introduction, Mr. Weaver details some of Szekely’s theories, then returns to describing the practical effects of a therapy that basically embraced whole, natural foods in a special diet, exercise, detoxification, cautious exposure to sunlight, and a study of the wisdom traditions of ancient cultures–in other words, an abundance of nature and historical common sense/intuition in all its forms.]
When I found that the therapeutic methods worked in practice I decided to abandon the study of law and take up that of the medicine which had served me well. By November I was able to return to England. I arranged with Edmond Szekely that I should spend the winter at home, arrange for the publication of his book and then set out again in the spring to spend the summer with him in California where I might learn for myself how to apply the healing forces of Nature used in cosmotherapy. To do this effectively a supply of patients was essential. We did not wish to have a repetition in America of our difficulties with the medical profession in Tahiti. The simplest plan was that I should find some volunteers in England. This was easier said than done. Not unnaturally, as California is a long way away and there was only myself and no Cosmos, Man and Society to convince people of the excellence of the treatment. December, January and most of February passed and still I had no patients.
One evening I was taken to the theatre by some friends and found myself sitting next to a young woman to whom in the intervals of the piece I confessed my difficulties. She took the matter in hand and within a fortnight had collected half a dozen people besides herself who had the faith and courage to venture to the new world—a new world not only in space, but in ideas.
Next month: On to Elsinore…and Deborah Szekely, who married the Professor at age 17, chronicles how her family first met Edmond Szekely in Tahiti, as well as her childhood adventures there.
