Magical Healing: Folk Healing Techniques from the Old World - Hexe Claire 2018

Matters of Attitude
Healing and Healers

In the old days healers often worked in their immediate vicinity where everyone knew each other. Today, however, this is very different. Many people approach healers with a consumerist mentality. “I give you this money, and you make me healthy again.” This attitude causes many problems for healers.

I’ve often heard from healing practitioners that they are expected to do miracle healings in next to no time and with no contribution on the part of the patient—and at absolute bargain prices, please. Maybe this is a typical German attitude; other cultures do show much more respect for the skills of traditional healers.

Some people know the price of everything but the worth of nothing. The doctor Martina Bühring, who did a survey about Berlin’s traditional healers, mentioned two examples that illustrate this issue clearly. In the first example, a woman went to a traditional healer to talk off her shingles and paid for two scheduled sessions in advance. After the first session she was cured of this wearisome and painful illness, but what did she do? She demanded the money for the second session back.

On another occasion, an Eastern European woman went to this healer to treat her migraine. Five sessions were scheduled, but she was also cured after the first one. And what did she do? In appreciation and thankfulness, she sent the healer the money for the other four sessions that were originally planned.

Another healer in Bühring’s survey put it in a nutshell:

“Healing has much to do with the faith of a patient. Because of that, it works much faster when I treat foreigners (Poles, people from the former Yugoslavia) than Germans. Sometimes their illnesses vanish immediately.

“When it comes to Germans and especially Protestants, the healing process takes much more time. Polish people and people from other cultures believe in ’miracle healings’ and they collaborate in the healing process. Their whole kin supports them, all of them pray together. Germans don’t fight [for their health]. They go to the doctor first and often don’t want to recover strongly enough. Their motto is: Now do something for your money.” ³

If there are no associations or gatherings for them, many healers in major cities plow a lonely furrow. In the olden days, when healing was a village business, respect was a matter of course, although in some regions healers were also seen as a bit eldritch (because, as they say, the one who can work for good can also work for evil). People knew each other and, most importantly, they had faith. This does not refer to faith in any specific religion, but a faith that there exists healing and helpful forces that we can work with to get relief or healing. In other words, a faith in the helpful forces of nature and the body that can be approached to activate self-healing powers.

Today this is often very different. Many patients are curious or don’t go to a healer until everything else has failed and their situation has greatly worsened. In this state, they expect miracles from healers.

If you talk to healers, you will often hear the words “If only people would come sooner!” But many decide to go to healers only if it’s bad enough to try “something like this.” The despair that moves them doesn’t have much in common with the faith of patients in the old days. Because of that, some healers ask their patients first if they have faith; if that’s not the case, they send them away. One can’t blame them for that. Who wants to waste time and energy on people who don’t collaborate or “don’t want to recover strongly enough” as the healer cited above put it?

Another problem that must be kept in mind (especially the western mind) when it comes to the activation of self-healing powers is over-analyzation. This often happens when people want to have guarantees and logical explanations for anything that happens, because they do not have faith in things that go beyond analytical thinking.

But no one can guarantee healing, no healer and no doctor. Instead of taking what Mother Nature gives us in the form of herbs or trusting the experience of a healer and her hands, they want reasons and justifications. The analytical mind picks it apart and pigeonholes until all the magic is gone.

Many legends also refer to this propensity, so it seems to be nothing new. The hero of a story is warned to not turn around after a magical happening; he turns around nevertheless and ruins everything. Or, for example, a woman knows she should not spy on the good house spirits but does so in spite of herself, and the little people leave her house forever. There are many more examples like this, all illustrating the point that over-analyzing or too closely examining the magical and enchanting sphere will cause it to lose its power.

Healing starts not in the domain of rational thinking. Healing starts in the deeper levels, the nonverbal levels, the realm of feelings, inner images, and our bodily sensations. From shamans to travelling Romany healers and from Low German hexers to southern Germany “turning” healers (we will come to that special healing technique in detail later in the book), they all know that the initial spark for healing comes from the depth of nonverbal perceptions.

In this context it is often said that we as humans have to tap into our animal nature to get in touch with the elemental force in every one of us.

Children are often much easier to treat because they embrace the healing energies naturally and don’t over-analyze everything. Of course, children also ask: “What is this? What is it good for?” But when you explain it to them, they join in with enthusiasm.

A mother told me some time ago about her daughter, who had a cold. In addition to the prescribed medicines, she gave her daughter a pink dyed stone and told her it was a fairy stone that helps people get well. The little girl of course loved the color (and for a child it’s irrelevant if a healing stone was dyed or naturally that way). It was pink and beautiful and appealed to her from the first moment. The little lady was so happy that her self-healing powers quickly increased, and she recovered faster than with other colds before.

The illness was “turned.” The old turning healers couldn’t have done it better. (As stated before, we will cover this technique at greater length later. In German what I’m calling “turning” is expressed with the word wenden, and people who practice this are called Wender or Wenderin because they have the ability to bring an illness to the turning point—the point from which then on it gets better.)

So, what should hinder us from becoming a child again for a moment when it can help us so much? Children indulge in their feelings and see the world with open senses, without the rational mind short-circuiting the process or putting the brakes on.

Please don’t get me wrong. Rational thinking has an important role, too. You need it to make good decisions, collect the information you need, and evaluate it. But from the moment you’ve decided on your chosen path, physical perception should take the lead and our brooding mind should step back a bit. This, more than anything else, helps our self-healing powers to unfold and work for us, strong and unimpeded.

This is also the reason why many healers insist that their patients not thank them. The phrase “thank you” disturbs the self-healing powers. Traditional healers always have a fine sense for those tiny but important details. If someone says “thank you” to a healer, this indicates that the healer did all the work. But healers are impulse-givers. The rest is done by the faith and of course the immanent powers of the body of the patient. To root this deeply in the consciousness of their patients, the words “thank you” are taboo to many traditional healers.

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3. Bühring, 67