|
The Return of the Woman Healer
Elinor Gadon
Historian and author of
“The Once and Future Goddess - A Sweeping Visual Chronicle of the
Sacred Female and Her Reemergence in the Cult”
As I reflect on my evolving understanding of the role of the healer,
I remember my awe at discovering some years ago that, for the
Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, healing encompassed all dimensions
of well-being, not just the physical as in Western medicine,
but also the emotional, psychological and spiritual as well.
I've never been to Africa; my first acquaintance with the world
of the Bushman was not, alas, face-to-face, but in a book by
a specialist in trance healing, Richard Katz, Boiling Energy
(1982), in which he describes in great detail a Bushman healing
ritual.
When first encountered by anthropologists in the 1950's, the Bushmen
were hunters and gatherers who lived much as their Stone Age ancestors
had lived some 10,000 years ago. They had had virtually no contact
with Europeans or even with their neighbors the Bantu, who were
pastoralists. The Bushmen lived in a collective, in bands of 35
to 50. They hunted and gathered together, and together they followed
their semi-nomadic seasonal rounds. An egalitarian culture, they
had no leaders per se, only some wise elders. Those who felt called
became healers; these were mostly men, although there was no gender
discrimination. Women were believed to have a sacred power within
their own bodies during their menstruating, child-bearing years,
so strong that it would interfere with !num, the cosmic force healers called upon to come into their bodies and act as healing
agent.
Fifty percent of all Bushmen adults became healers. What seemed
most significant to me was that whenever anyone in their small
community felt unwell, be it a physical, mental, emotional or psychological
unease, they held an all night healing ritual to which everyone
came—men, women and children, even infants. The women clapped
and sang, the men danced and healed. The healers would go into
trance and call into their bodies the healing force of Mum which,
as they told Katz, "boiled up" within them, hence the
title of his book. This force was often very painful to the healers,
and so powerful that it was considered dangerous for them.
Another important insight for me was prompted by the fact that
in her/his entire life, no Bushman was ever out of hearing range
of other members of their clan—for example, to call upon
for help. As I pondered on this I was also dealing with my own
healing over the death of my son Bill, who took his life at age
twenty-five. I could understand his despair and torment, and accept
his decision, but continued to grieve for my loss. I have come
to feel that Bill died of the failure of our family and the failure
of our culture. In his spiritual crisis he was in desperate need
of some healing. Alone in south Texas, far from family and friends,
he had no caring community to call upon.
When Katz asks in his epilogue why is it that the more resources
we put into training community mental health specialists, the less
able we are to heal - a bell tolled for me. What is the understanding
of healing in our culture? Who are the healers? I am reminded of
another of Katz's provocative questions. In an address to the Harvard
Medical School faculty, he asked, "Can doctors be trained
to heal?" The Western medical science approach is to treat
the body as fragmented parts and systems, not to look at it as
a whole. Traditional healing acknowledged the inter-relationship
between body, mind and spirit as well as the impact of forces-human,
environmental and cosmic-outside of the body. In the traditional
world view of prehistoric and primal peoples, like that of the
Kalahari Bushman, healing is concerned with well-being, the individual's
well-being as well as that of the larger community of which she/he
is a vital part. Healers were the shamans, midwives, herbalists,
oracles, and wise elders working for both the individual and collective
good, specialists whose skills and functions often overlapped.
As ritualists, their work was part of a sacred whole in which all
of life was interconnected.
What special role do women healers play? Are women by their nature,
either biological or "gender-constructed", especially
gifted as healers?
In ancient times and the Middle Ages they were the wise women
whose special knowledge was handed on from mother to daughter,
generation to generation. But by early modem times their power
became suspect, particularly to the Christian Church which then
for the next three hundred years waged a holocaust against them
through the Inquisition. Women healers were persecuted by Catholics
and Protestants alike and burned as witches and heretics said to
be in league with the devil. Those who survived were the targets
of a patriarchal medical establishment which denigrated women healers'
ways as anathema to the rigors of the scientific revolution. Women
healers were condemned as ignorant and superstitious.
Despite this continuing oppression, women were still practicing
as midwives and herbalists in the rural areas of the United States
and Europe until the major demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth
century. In Latin America the curandera has continued to function
as midwife, herbalist, hands-on healer and shaman in the face of
more than four-hundred years of oppression from the Catholic Church.
According to Vicki Noble, "...each woman is an instrument
of the healing forces that have always existed, even in our time,
and each 'instrument' can be opened and made effective through
the use of certain practices and techniques." In her classes,
she teaches both individual methods of healing such as yoga, chanting,
meditation, and visualization and group experiences of ritual and
hands-on healing.
French philosopher Julia Kristeva claims that women have privileged
access to the cosmos through the connection of their menstrual
cycle with the rhythms of the moon. Poet-theorist Judy Grahn enlarges
this concept to embrace the notion that menstruation created culture—in
effect, the conscious world. Through awareness of this peculiarly
human menstrual/lunar relationship, which our women ancestors first
observed and then ritualized, the human mind was created. Her radical
thesis is based on her concept of metaforms, embodied ideas that
exist as a combination of mind, body and spirit. "Metaforms
display idea-feelings overtly, passionately, connectedly."'
How are we to understand the relationship of these provocative
notions of female power to the emerging role of the woman as healer
in our late-twentieth century culture?
The Bushman's belief in the field of energy embodied in the menstruating
woman as a power not unlike the god-given healing !num suggests
one possible link. Another is a woman's anatomy, which leaves her
body through the vulva open to the energies of the earth. I recall
a woman who came to one of my workshops who, after viewing images
of the sacred female, sat bare-assed all night long on the naked
earth to get in touch with the healing energies of the goddess.
Yet another biological factor and socializing force is a woman's
capacity to nurture a child, both within her own body during the
nine months of pregnancy, and after, from the milk of her breasts.
In our evolving contemporary culture, some women have perhaps
been more open than their male peers to the paradigmatic changes
that are taking place in our views of ourselves, life styles and
institutional relationships. Today women are again active as healers.
The reclaiming of her many-faceted role as legitimate is part of
a growing shift in values through which diverse cultural strands
are coalescing. Their common link is the disillusionment with the
systems of a society increasingly viewed as dysfunctional, no longer
serving its citizen's essential needs. Included among these dysfunctional
systems is Western medicine, with its increasing depersonalization
and alienation, the byproducts of medical technology, as well as
run-away costs threatening even the limited viability of our health
care system as it now exists.
Among present day women healers, those most popularly known are
the midwives. With a desire to treat pregnancy and childbirth as
a natural process, not a medical problem, many women have turned
to midwives whose presence has resacralized birthing
Emerging in recognition are woman herbalists, once again providing
the life enhancing ointments and medications made from organic
rather than synthetic substances, advising their clients on more
wholesome health habits.
With the trend to a more holistic view of health care, fostering
wellness and prevention rather than the curing of illness, people
are looking more to a variety of non-traditional medicines and
health strategies. These include "hands on" healers.
As hands-on healers, women use the power of their own bodies to
access vital energy that will restore balance to those who seek
their help. Health problems are often the physical result of imbalances
in this system. Through touch, the healer identifies those areas
lacking energy and those blocked by excessive energy. These areas
are then filled or cleared by the healer. This can then allow one's
own healing energy to work effectively.
Female shamans have been active since the late Paleolithic as
spiritual leaders. This tradition has never died out in Central
Asia or Korea. Today as we reclaim the role of the shaman in our
post modem Western culture, we are enlarging our understanding
of our relationship to the universe, acknowledging unseen forces,
a world beyond our material ken. The shaman's ability to activate
these forces for healing is awesome to the uninitiated. She is
drawing on the body's natural power to renew, a power that all
of us could access if only we believed.
While we cannot return to a preindustrial age where most people
lived simple lives in rural, tightly-knit communities, we can work
to create new communities where the age-old values that the women
healers teach prevail. They, like the prophets of old, are prescient,
leading the way.
|
