siderism

You’d think such a momentous finding [the discovery of ultraviolet light] would have elevated Ritter to the status of Herschel. It didn’t. First Ritter continued his habit of embedding his findings in the language of polarities and soul, the Naturphilosophie tenets of “oneness between nature and people.” And soon he got worse, routinely peppering his papers with references to such occult practices as dowsing (using a divining rod to find water underground). He imagined he’d found the general principles governing the interdependencies of inorganic nature and human phenomena and named this new branch of study siderism. He even published a periodical with that title. With virtually no subscribers, its first issue was its last.

2017, Bob Berman, Zapped: From Infrared to X-rays, the Curious History of Invisible Light, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 51