New Age Spiritual Healing

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The resurgence of interest in healing at present must be due in some part to the New Age movement, although the kind of healing prescribed by New Agers has more in common with Jungian psychology than with healing practised down the centuries. New Age healing consists of what is termed 'healing of the memories', 'healing emotional hurts', or 'soul healing'. The main idea behind this is that what is to be healed are negative past experiences rather than the physical body.

These ideas were developed principally by Agnes Sanford and Morton Kelsey, although the influence of both Jungian and Freudian psychology hang heavily over the proceedings. The movement borrows heavily from Freud's idea of depth psychology, whereby one's childhood experiences are plundered for traumas and upset, which must then be confronted and healed. Jungian psychology is also utilized, in that New Age healing encourages you to visualize Jesus accompanying you during the traumatic event of the past.

This visualization of the past with Jesus as a companion also extends to visualizing the desired state you wish to reach in the healing process. The effect this has on the subconscious is supposedly meant to bring about what is wished for. Like Christian Science, many of its doctrines oppose and eschew Christian ideas.

Of course, there is the darker side of faith healing, or rather the abuse of faith healing. There can be no whitewash of this in any respectable assessment of the topic. The excesses of the Eddy movement are unrelated to the issue of the validity of healing. We will not elaborate on the moral bankruptcy of the Elmer Gantry breed of televangelist faith healer, not because it as insignificant but because it deflects us again from asking the real questions-the question of the validity or otherwise of healing in the war on disease.

Before we can proceed, we have to accept that there really is something to be studied, abandon our prejudices and preconceptions, and set out with an open mind, something that is harder to do than we would often care to admit.

Healers and healing past and present

We shall endeavour here to provide a brief potted history of the history and personalities of faith healing through the centuries, with an awareness that we will ultimately fail because of the huge expanse of the subject. What we do hope to provide is an entertaining jaunt through the history of healing without being too dry or scholastic.

Faith healing was the dominant form of treatment five hundred years before Christ, concurrent with the time that hygienic therapy began among the Greeks. (Hygienic therapy advocates manipulation of the environment that sufferers inhabit, to help them recover. Rest, fresh air and diet are its principal weapons against disease.) Gradually drug cures became popular, and this was integrated into the usual faith healing practices. When Christianity began to make its influence felt, these drug cures were forced out, and once again pure faith healing became predominant and maintained its ascendancy for thirteen centuries. At the time of the Renaissance, faith healing began to lose its virtual monopoly on medical therapy but still had purchase in non-medical cults.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras, the sixth century BC astronomer, mathematician and physician, considered healing to be the most elevated of pursuits and saw it as an integral part of his deliberation on ethics, mind and soul. He called the healing energy pneuma, which he theorized arose from a fire at the core of the universe, which gave human beings their animation and immortal soul. His adherents believed this pneuma could be perceptible in a lucent body and that this light was capable of curing illness. They believed that all matter is comprised of opposites that are in conflict and have to be in equilibrium in order to be in harmony.

Hippocrates

Hippocrates (460-377 BC) was born on the Greek Island of Kos into a family of priests and physicians. He was educated at a famous school in Kos and received medical training from his father and other medical practitioners. By the time he had moved to Athens he had acquired outstanding proficiency in the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease. He kept detailed accounts of mumps, epilepsy, hysteria, arthritis and tuberculosis. Hippocrates argued that all illness, both mental and physical, was caused by natural factors, such as organic injury or an imbalance of body fluids. The Greeks, beginning with Thales, had a tendency to replace magico-religious explanations for things with naturalistic explanations.

Hippocrates is held to be the father of modern medicine, although Alcmaeon and Empodocles had challenged medical practices based on superstition and magic before him. Hippocrates laid the basis of modern scientific medicine in his writings, called the Hippocratic Corpus. He also created the basis of medical ethics embodied in the Hippocratic Oath.

Hippocrates believed that the body had self-healing mechanisms, and it was the physician's duty to aid these natural processes. The cures of Hippocrates involved proper diet, rest and fresh air. Hippocrates recognized that the alleviation of some symptoms by the so-called 'laying on of hands' was accompanied by a sensation of warmth and tingling.

He described the healing energy: 'the heat that oozes out of the hand, being applied to the sick, is highly salutary'. He postulated that just as 'health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to the other'.

He postulated his own notion of the'healing energy', or pneuma, and called it the vis medicae naturae. He believed that the proper flow of the pneuma could be disrupted by malign influences, which disturbed the relationship between the individual and the cosmos.

Unlike Pythagoras, Hippocrates advanced the view that mind and body were separate. The Hippocratic system was codified by Galen in the second century AD, although Galen himself suspected that the efficacy of the healing temples that were employed in Ancient Rome relied on some form of mental manipulation.

The idea that mind and body were separate became the orthodoxy to hold sway for many centuries afterwards. A few lone voices, such as Plato's, spoke out against this idea: 'The great error of our day,' he wrote, 'is that physicians separate the soul from the body.'