28
The Body Electric
laugh therapy of ankylosing spondylitis, a crippling disease in which
the spinal discs and ligaments solidify like bone, and by some similar
successes by users of visualization techniques to focus the mind against
cancer.
Unfortunately, no approach is a sure thing. In our ignorance, the
common denominator of all healing—even the chemical cures we profess
to understand—remains its mysteriousness. Its unpredictability has be-
deviled doctors throughout history. Physicians can offer no reason why
one patient will respond to a tiny dose of a medicine that has no effect
on another patient in ten times the amount, or why some cancers go into
remission while others grow relentlessly unto death.
By whatever means, if the energy is successfully focused, it results in
a marvelous transformation. What seemed like an inexorable decline
suddenly reverses itself. Healing can almost be defined as a miracle. In-
stant regrowth of damaged parts and invincibility against disease are
commonplaces of the divine world. They continually appear even in
myths that have nothing to do with the theme of healing itself. Dead
Vikings went to a realm where they could savor the joys of killing all
day long, knowing their wounds would heal in time for the next day's
mayhem. Prometheus' endlessly regrowing liver was only a clever torture
arranged by Zeus so that the eagle sent as punishment for the god's
delivery of fire to mankind could feast on his most vital organ forever—
although the tale also suggests that the prehistoric Greeks knew some-
thing of the liver's ability to enlarge in compensation for damage to it.
The Hydra was adept at these offhand wonders, too. This was the
monster Hercules had to kill as his second chore for King Eurystheus.
The beast had somewhere between seven and a hundred heads, and each
time Hercules cut one off, two new ones sprouted in its place—until the
hero got the idea of having his nephew Iolaus cauterize each neck as soon
as the head hit the ground.
In the eighteenth century the Hydra's name was given to a tiny
aquatic animal having seven to twelve "heads," or tentacles, on a hol-
low, stalklike body, because this creature can regenerate. The mythic
Hydra remains a symbol of that ability, possessed to some degree by
most animals, including us.
Generation, life's normal transformation from seed to adult, would
seem as unearthly as regeneration if it were not so commonplace. We see
the same kinds of changes in each. The Greek hero Cadmus grows an
army by sowing the teeth of a dragon he has killed. The primeval ser-
pent
makes
love
to the
World
Egg,
which hatches all the creatures of
the earth. God makes Adam from Eve's rib, or vice versa in the later
version. The Word of God commands life to unfold. The genetic
words