Mystery and Mastery

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This also ties in with another important element in the psychology of faith healing, which is the weighty factor of mystery. Every general practitioner has a catalogue of twenty or so drugs that can be administered and are well known to both practitioner and patient.

This tends to kill off any sense of awe or romance in the healing process. When one is attended by a healer one feels that one is taking part in an ancient mystical rite that taps into a past of folklore, of witchery bequeathed to us from remote generations past or (and perhaps more importantly) our imagined romanticized perceptions of it gleaned from television and books. This element of mystery also manages to coexist cheerfully with the intellectual accessibility of the ideas that lie behind healing.

Not only is there the mystery of the healer to consider, but the very mystery of the rituals they perform. The allure of the church is based on the glamour of mystical rituals that, to be successful, require a kind of blind acquiescence from the follower. Once this is questioned, the entire edifice must collapse.

This is analogous to the work of the faith healer, who also relies on a speechless complicity in his or her strange practices. If this is not there, the healer's work is all the more harder.

He or she is also the counsellor-the witch doctor. Healers offer sustenance where there has only been a counsel of despair from a doctor.

This may not sound too grandiose a claim for healing, but one can easily imagine the effect of having someone tell you that your cancer is at least treatable, if not curable, when a few sleepless days before a synthetically sympathetic doctor has regaled you with the cheery news that there is no hope for you and you may as well submit placidly like a drugged factory animal to your unlovely fate.

Hope itself has a curative power that cannot be overlooked, as it lessens one's symptoms and enlarges the pain threshold. Healers can be both Jesus himself and the slightly frightening figure that links us to the pagan past. Just as symbolism can work only if it bypasses the conscious mind and goes to the unconscious, the power of faith healing is all the stronger if the recipient is only dimly aware of what the healer represents.