Roles of the Healer

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Who are they?

Over the centuries the qualifications for being a faith healer have been as bizarre and as arbitrary as they can be. It was once believed that husbands and wives with the same surname before marriage had healing powers. Another prime candidate for healing power was a baby born with a membrane over its head.

Just as the Catholic church will limit the practice of forma! exorcism to well-chosen and judicious priests with the express permission of a bishop, the ability to heal in particularly gifted individuals will grudgingly be accepted by the church. The gift of healing is like many other gifts-some people will have a natural aptitude for it that marks them out.

Having been the recipient of healing, you may want to investigate the possibility of being a healer yourself. There are a few useful addresses at the back of the book. The distribution of the healing ability does not seem to favour one class over another.

As with anything, practice will enhance ability, but ultimately how successful one is will be dependent on one's natural ability. Mystics, faith healers and gurus, like great painters and musicians, have to go through a long and disciplined developmental stage, as a sense of the spiritual is not enough to sustain them.

A large number of healers begin as one-time patients of healers, and to their astonishment they are told that they themselves have the healing ability. St Paul makes it clear that only some are given the ability to heal (1 Corinthians 12:9). Yet in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says: 'Everything is possible for anyone who has faith'(Mark 9:32b).

Any would-be healer has to resolve the moral dilemma that he or she may be hurting people by giving them false hopes. This probably explains why healers have to enter the field with strong personal convictions and the tentative first steps of Arigo and the Stroker. One can have an innate capacity to 'feel' illness and diagnose it through one's hands. What is reassuring is that if someone does have the gift of healing it will not be long before it is recognized. Sometimes it may be intuitively felt by others that you have the healing gift.

If one only stops to consider it, everyone has met individuals whose physical presence was commanding in some inexpressible manner, either by sheer physicality or force of intellect. Some may even have felt a corresponding feeling that they would, if asked, bend to the will of that person, whatever they were to ask. Yet if asked to articulate precisely why this was the case, most people would be unable to do so.

Everyone can recognise the 'aura' another person, perhaps even a stranger, is giving off without a word of communication between them. Some people can leave you feeling weary while others can leave you feeling inspired and revivified. It is a short leap from this to imagine the presence and ambience of the healer.

Even the most imperceptive can recognize a baleful or beautiful aura on a wordless, pre-verbal level. It is interesting that when we attempt to discuss this phenomenon, we are drawn inevitably into using a vocabulary that centres on the idea of energy and energy fields, words such as 'electric' and 'vibrations' being the most obvious examples. Perhaps this is a clue to what passes between the healer and recipient during a session, the healer projecting some positive high-intensity energy into the recipient.

The universality of healing suggests its deep resonance, and significance to us. As we have seen, faith healing's resonance is multicultural and transconlinental. It has been present in some form in the Graeco-Roman world, the Indie culture of the East, on the African continent, in the Americas, and in the former Soviet Union. In advanced late capitalist post-modern urbane western society, particularly in America, where fundamentalist religion is very popular, huge crowds attend faith healing meetings.

When we study the archetypal faith healers (figures who follow the career pattern, well established in healing, of the tentative beginning followed by rise to notoriety followed by establishment clampdown) what is perplexing and ultimately uplifting about them is their endearing guilelessness. The really successful healers tend to be unassuming souls and not even markedly religious people.

At the outset we have to distinguish here between the avaricious televangelist breed of healer and the more dignified figures of healing. This is a thorny distinction, but one we have to confront. The reason it is so thorny is that both types of healer can use the same methodology to achieve their ends. What may be, and what we will examine here, is that the methodology in question has a potency that the healers are unaware of themselves. Its power exists, and one can use it to good or acquisitive ends.

If we examine the classic figures of healing-the Stroker, Quimby and Arigo, for example-instead of the cynical manipulator or the charlatan, we meet the idiot savant. A prime example of this would be Valentine Greatrakes, timorously beginning his healing in fear of looking a fool to the populace and most of all his own wife.

His powers had so much of 'the extraordinariness' about them, he wrote, that T thought fit to conceal [them] for some time'. Jose de Freitas (Arigo) is another example of the idiot savant, displaying amazing abilities yet comically falling into a dead faint after witnessing them played back to him on film.

These men were not imbeciles, rather their beginnings were often clownish and instinctual rather than rationally considered. It should be said that most healers enter the practice through strong personal conviction. These people are far from being fools, and, indeed, a person would have to be a fool to hold a mass healing in the way that Mesmer or Jacob did without some special healing gift.

Often the end of the career of the healer has a resemblance to that other clownish figure, the King for a Day, as many healers also find-usually after a sustained attack on their confidence by the medical establishment-that their powers wane or completely disappear. Mesmer and Greatrakes are prime examples of this. Yet it goes without saying that if their abilities disappear, we must accept that there must have been something there in the first place.

Unexceptional in all other regards, these men confound any charge of charlatanism that may be brought against them in their very simplicity. Of course, the cynic could say that this is feigned simplicity. If one does subscribe to this view, then one has to ask to what end would a healer conduct such a masquerade? Healers run huge risks.

Nine white witches were executed at Husband's Bos worth in the Midlands for failing to effect a cure against epilepsy. Today, if they become big enough to rock the boat of orthodox medicine they can still be imprisoned. In 1981, a German healer called Joseph Miiller was imprisoned for two years in West Germany. He was found guilty of 'contravention of the laws governing medical practice'.

Neither can we see healing as the gulling of one class by another. Faith healers and the people that heal come from any and every class. We have aristocratic faith healers, such as the Earl of Sandwich and Prince Alexander von Hohenlohe. Then there are the peasant healers, such as the Cheshire woman Bridget Bostock and Arigo. Nobody is compelled to believe in the faith healer, yet millions of people use their services.

The German philosopher Schopenhauer writes that 'Belief is like love; and as any attempt to compel love produces hate, so it is the attempt to compel belief that first produces real unbelief.' (Essays and Aphorisms). In the face of this we must ask why faith healing persists and continues to fascinate a cynical public.

The intellectual accessibility of the ideas, which would attempt to explain healing to the man on the street, is another factor that could account for the popularity of healing, and this contrasts sharply with the Latinate and obscure language of the doctor.

The notion that good health can be seen as the balancing of energies within the body is eminently plausible to the layman, who probably knows that his pancreas and liver perform actions akin to this in their regulatory function. The complexities of biochemical changes within the body and physiology may be off-putting, but the healer's art is graspable. Aiding this is the healer's primary wish to communicate with the patient in a meaningful manner, a revolutionary sentiment yet to storm the medical profession.

Perhaps there are socio-biological reasons for the magnetism of the healer. There is a deep-seated need in human beings to want to submit themselves to a dominant member of the group in which they live, inherited from our monkey and ape ancestors. This must in some part explain the attraction of the healer and the witch doctor. The healer provides answers and confidence in an uncertain world. The witch doctor is a particularly salient example as he is often second only to the tribal chief in his society.

Yet more than this, the figure of the healer will occupy a number of deeply resonant roles that play to our inner psyche. We cannot view the healer as merely a kind of glorified doctor with some added mysticism thrown in for good luck. It would also be inappropriate to associate the role of a doctor with the role of the healer, as the healer's role embraces much more than the doctor's. Whereas in the West the roles of doctor and counsellor are divorced, the healer acts as both these figures and more.