The Way of Colorpuncture — Peter Mandel ⋅ Plume

Founded by Peter Mandel, Colorpuncture is a naturopathy that combines color therapy and acupuncture. According to the research of Dr Fritz-Alber Popp, the cell of living beings emits light that is so weak that is similar to “looking at a candle fire from 25km away.” Dr Popp calls it biophoton, it carries messages related to all kinds of body process to communicate with other cells. Peter Mandel utilizes various light colors to transmit corresponding messages to the body through acupoints and reflex zones. book cover of Colour Me Healing Just how Mandel came up with these methods, anyway? You may have heard that he bumped his head in his childhood and activated some kind of talent, but it is actually far more complicated. According to the description of the book Colour Me Healing, a new pharmacy in the town went through interior decoration, the brand new shelves appealed little Peter, 5.5 years old at that time, and his pals. They climbed up the shelves for fun, until a big noise drew the attention of the adults. His play mates were fine, but little Peter was buried under the shelf, and after they sent him to the hospital it was found his skull cracked with a nail inserted to the brain, one of his eye almost fell out. After the emergency operation, the doctor suggested Mandel’s mother to take him home, for there was not much time left. However, Mandel’s mother didn’t give up, a doctor and his father also a doctor, offered their help to take care of Peter day and night by his bedside. It is said the young doctor went out of the door for other patient and lost his life in a fatal car accident, on the other hand Peter Mandel recovered from coma, Peter has been wondering if these two incidents are correlated. Since then, Peter often got to see flower fairies and gnomes, he would excitedly run to his mother and tell her, but maybe she felt embarrassed in front of other people, his mother just said: “Ignore the kid, he is giberring again.” As a result, Peter stopped the “gibberish” in around 7 or 8 years old, this is when the headache and repeating dream began. There were gray fog and continuous noise of knocking, greatly affected his ability to focus and in turn affected his schoolwork. Mandel wasn’t happy to work in the foundry factory that his mother introduced him to work, he decided to join the army. The night before he enlisted, he talked with Hans who found him lying in the blood when Mandel was young, it was Hans who hold injured Mandel while the blood kept dripping down from his head. Only until this moment did he realize the source of that knocking is the sound of his blood dripping to the ground. More than that, Mandel often bumped his head since he was young for all kinds of cause as frequent as other kids would stumble or have bleeding nose. Recalled it at later days, Mandel believes this is the cost that he refused to hear his inner voice and refused to accept his talent. In the army, Mandel still couldn’t find his directions, he and his army mates often went out of the barrack for drinking and having fun without taking the leave, he almost got dishonorably discharged, and he had a car accident that he drove himself to a tree on the road—another bump to the head that caused the concussion. Lying on the bed in the hospital, Mandel was determined to become a military medic. He took related trainings, stopped to booze and get drunk, using his talent in visual memory to read lots of books. After being discharged, he went to the massage school at Heidelberg University while doing a part-time job. Right after the graduation, he was employed by a new physiotherapy clinic and got promoted very soon as his excellent skills received excellent feedback from the clients. A few years later, he already opened his own physiotherapy clinic. Due to the history of his headache, Mandel can empathize the pain of his clients. At that time, a famous masseur in Germany had already introduced acupuncture massage, with the experience accumulated from the cases, Mandel noticed some sort of pain can be immediately relived by pressing a seemingly unrelated point, he didn’t realize why at that time (this reminds me Yuan Shi Dian of doctor Chang, Chao-han). The answer to his doubt did not come from a book or someone’s research, but rather like a sudden flash in his mind while driving home from the clinic, his very own system just formed. He pulled over his car, walked in the nearest bar and ordered a cup of beer, then he spent 20 minutes to organise his thoughts, including the steps of massaging some points to deal with the discomforts of the spinal and shoulders, migraine and sciatica. It really works in practice! The experience was very inspiring, yet it also deepened his feeling of dissatisfaction, because his headache still happened every once for a while, and there was not much he can do as a physiotherapist. As a result, he planned to become a heilpraktiker, so he commuted between his clinic in Heidelberg and the naturopathy school in Hanover. He and his classmates shared their various expertise: herbal medicine, massage skills, ear acupuncture, chiropractic, expiration and inspiration. Among them doctor Anton Markgraf is the expert of iridology, he had a huge impact to Mandel. After practices and practices, Mandel successfully learned not only in Markgraf’s Visual Diagnosis method of iridology, but also in a holistic way. For example, when he looked at somebody’s face, the hope, fear, success, failure would be reflected somewhere on the subject’s face, and in turn Mandel would lead the person to the root of the pain. Since he can literally ‘look into’ the others, next thing Mandel needed to do is to look into himself.

In 1968, a patient who had long suffered from chronic pain took a single session and the pain was relived. He handed him a book of Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher — Worlds How is it achieved? and told him “You can read it now, but you probably won’t understand it. Just set it aside and it will call you when it’s time.” That is exactly what happened, after reading 20 pages Mandel just put it aside, 2 years later he picked it up again and every word resonated with him. Dr Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, educator and the founder of Waldorf education. He advocated that human beings should not overly develop toward materialism, merely rely on physical senses the meaning of human’s existence cannot be answered, spiritual senses must also be developed in balance so that the ‘human’ can be complete. In Steiner’s Anthroposophy, human comprises three elements of body, soul and spirit, which in turn corresponds to the metabolic system, the respiratory rhythm system and the nerve system respectively, as well as the inner activities of willing, feeling and thinking respectively. There are four levels of the body: the physical body, the ether body, the astral body and the ego, each body needs to fully develop before the body at next level can be complete. Steiner advised to “steep himself in the lofty thoughts of meditation by men already advanced and inspired by the spirit” and Mandel did it, he buried himself in the piles of books, he read ancient civilization, modern mystics, numerology, Jewish Kabbalah, the more he read and experimented the more instincts flashed, like pieces of puzzle falling to where they are supposed to be. Besides the iris diagnosis, Mandel had hoped there are other holistic approach available for diagnosis.

In 1972, Mandel went to Baden-Baden to visit a medical instrument convention. A booth displayed Kirlian camera, with the slogan: Come take a photo of your aura! Come take a photo of your soul! He bought a Kirlian camera, but the manual was in Dutch that he can’t read for the operation. However, he knew Dr Walter Kilner was convinced that the aura is somewhat correlated to physical illness. Besides he read about Kirlian as well. In the late 1890s, Semjon Kirlian and Valentina Kirlian worked in Russia’s Kazakh State University, some years after the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, the Kirlians developed a procedure they called ‘electrophotography in a high-frequnency field’ and claimed it can reveal the light emitted by living beings on the film. If this device can capture aura as claimed by the booth, then it can be used for the diagnosis. With the help of his brother with a technical background, the Kirlian camera was usable. Mandel put his right hand and took a photo, the result astonished him. There were long and bright luminescence on every finger tip except the index finger and little finger, and he was having the enteritis, which he had suspected there is something wrong with his intestines and this was shown on the photo! In Chinese meridians, large intestine begins at the tip of the index finger while the little intestine begins at the tip of the little finger. Mandel said, “Let’s see what happens if I bring my symptoms under control,” he inserted a gold acupuncture needle into LI4, took another photo after he felt better, and then all finger tips had the same strength of luminescence. A few hours later, his gut cramps and diarrhea came back, he took a third photo and it looked the same as the first one. They modified the Kirlian camera to fit both hands and both feet, because it is import in the concept of Chinese medicine that the left and the right, the upper and the lower should keep in balance. Initially Mandel thought he captured what Chinese medicine called ‘chi’ but after correlating the Kirlian photos of his patients and their symptoms for a year, he believed it is something else. Could it be the new meridians that Dr Reinhard Voll found? For example, a ‘nerve degeneration’ channel begins from the tip of index finger, running alongside the large intestine. In the end, Mandel concluded Kirlian photo shows a closed energy field, it provides clues to deal with the pains and illness, it is a whole new area that no one has ever reached before. In the end of 1974, after comparing 800 thousands of Kirlian photos and the clinical laboratory reports, he established the foundation of Energy Emission Analysis, EEA, and published a relating work in 1983. He wrote: “Through the use of the high-frequency apparatus, it was obvious that we were dealing with energy, and I therefore ascribed all cellular processes that take place within individuals as belonging to this energy. It later became evident that our presumptions were correct…Through our observations, it became evident that long before symptoms manifest, bodily changes, disease or illness are energetically existent and through our photographic technique would reveal themselves.” So, the measure of energy diagnosis became available, what about the measure of energy treatment?

A patient of Mandel, Professor Gerhard Heuss, who was an architect and color consultant, fascinated with color and its effect on human. For example, applying colors on buildings to make the living or working environment more harmonized. Heuss gave all his scripts to Mandel, Mandel also read about other color researchers including the famous Goethe. Since light is energy, so is our body, he concluded there must be a connection between the two. Just like Dr Popp proved the cellular structure is based on light, and color is light, then colored light can be used as the medium to balance the imbalance, harmonize the disharmony. Firstly, he used VitaColour treatment which was available already, a colored filter was put in front of the bulb and the patient was illuminated for over an hour. The effect was confirmed by the Kirlian photo, but it’s really too time-consuming. His experience in massage suggested him the specific points should be illuminated rather than a whole area of the body. His experimental work was about the size of a beer bottle, equipped with a flat lens but it also took 15 minutes, this way only 6 points can be illuminated in an hour. His vendor for making his Kirlian camera, VEGA, invited him for the dinner banquet, before Mandel left the house he saw a little pyramid on the desk, he didn’t think too much, just grabbed it and put it in the pocket. In the middle of the dinner talk, Mandel reached in his pocket and put the little pyramid on the table. He heard himself saying: “Mr. Grieshaber, pyramid is exactly the shape I need to illuminate the color. I need colored glass rods with pyramid tip, and a torch-like apparatus on its back with light.” He used the prototype and it only took 1 minute to get the reaction. The tool of colorpuncture we are using today was born!

【References】
¹: Allanach, J. (1997). Colour Me Healing. Colourpuncture: A New Medicine of Light. Element Books Limited.
²: Ｍandel, P. (1986). Energy Emission Analysis: New Application of Kirlian Photography for Holistic Health. Synthesis Publishing Co.
³: Steiner, R. (1904). Knowledge of the Higher World: How is it Achieved?