Spiritual Healing Tradition

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History

Whence came faith healing? The practice has been prevalent in virtually all cultures and religious customs through the ages. Primitive peoples required a shaman, or medicine man, to cure their ills. The Ancient Greeks and Romans erected temples to Asclepius, the god of medicine. In the Judaic scriptures paranormal cures such as the answer to Abraham's prayer against barrenness and those of leprosy by Elisha and Moses are much in evidence.

Unorthodox healing-that is, the cure or assuagement of bodily or mental ills by supplication or religious rituals, which may either augment or replace medical care-includes fringe medicine, faith healing, spiritual healing and miracle cures. Along with this diversity of schools, there is a correspondent diversity of opinions expressed about it.

To its detractors it is merely superstition and quackery, practised by metaphysical 'wide boys' out for a fast buck. To its adherents it is an alternative perspective on the way we think of illness, the basic truth of which has yet to be accepted or assimilated into medical practice. Faith healing can also boast a rich and fascinating history, one replete with spirit and humour.

It would be a mean soul that could not laugh at the enterprising Edinburgh quack James Graham, selling his celestial bed in a valiant attempt to emulate the great Cagliostro, a charlatan who practised alchemy and mysticism as the means to realize cures at the time of Louis XVI. Graham sold beds that he professed could provide painless childbirth, along with chairs that alleviated rheumatism, and for the noblemen that could pay for it, he could provide the elixir of life.

Then there is the sheer romanticism and lust for life of a figure like Grigori Rasputin, leaving his wife and children to roam rural Russia as a faith healer after a strange religious revelation.

The revival of interest in faith healing is no doubt due in some part to the New Age movement. This theorizes that humankind is entering the Age of Aquarius and that we are due for a worldwide spiritual renewal. Part of the agenda of New Ageism is a preoccupation with complementary medicine, green issues, and interest in occultist and spiritualist practices.

What is important to remember, however, is that this resurgence of interest in complementary therapy is nothing new-it occurs at regular intervals, a healthy antidote to the almost totalitarian stranglehold that the established medical world has on the way we perceive the concept of health and therapy. It will be no shock to learn that pre-Civil War America was just as infatuated with complementary medicine, albeit in a slightly different incarnation, as modern America is today. Perhaps the last British wave of this occurred in Georgian England, among fashionable society. No doubt New Ageism will not be the last of these flirtations with underground medicine.