26
The Body Electric
gold mine for charlatans. When bona fide, it seems to be an escalation of
the placebo effect, which produces improvement in roughly one third of
subjects who think they're being treated but are actually being given
dummy pills in tests of new drugs. Faith healing requires even more
confidence from the patient, so the disbeliever probably can prevent a
cure and settle for the poor satisfaction of "I told you so." If even a few
of these oft-attested cases are genuine, however, the healed one suddenly
finds faith turned into certainty as the withered arm aches with unac-
customed sensation, like a starved animal waking from hibernation.
Magical healing shifts the emphasis from the patient's faith to the
doctor's trained will and occult learning. The legend of Teta, an Egyp-
tian magician from the time of Khufu (Cheops), builder of the Great
Pyramid, can serve as an example. At the age of 110, Teta was sum-
moned into the royal presence to demonstrate his ability to rejoin a
severed head to its body, restoring life. Khufu ordered a prisoner be-
headed, but Teta discreetly suggested that he would like to confine him-
self to laboratory animals for the moment. So a goose was decapitated.
Its body was laid at one end of the hall, its head at the other. Teta
repeatedly pronounced his words of power, and each time, the head and
body twitched a little closer to each other, until finally the two sides of
the cut met. They quickly fused, and the bird stood up and began cack-
ling. Some consider the legendary miracles of Jesus part of the same
ancient tradition, learned during Christ's precocious childhood in Egypt.
Whether or not we believe in the literal truth of these particular ac-
counts, over the years so many otherwise reliable witnesses have testified
to healing "miracles" that it seems presumptuous to dismiss them all as
fabrications. Based on the material presented in this book, I suggest
Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" until we understand heal-
ing better. Shamans apparently once served at least some of their pa-
tients well, and still do where they survive on the fringes of the
industrial world. Magical medicine suggests that our search for the heal-
ing power isn't so much an exploration as an act of remembering some-
thing that was once intuitively ours, a form of recall in which the
knowledge is passed on or awakened by initiation and apprenticeship to
the man or woman of power.
Sometimes, however, the secret needn't be revealed to be used. Many
psychic healers have been studied, especially in the Soviet Union, whose
gift is unconscious, unsought, and usually discovered by accident. One
who demonstrated his talents in the West was Oskar Estebany. A Hun-
garian Army colonel in the mid-1930s. Estebany notices that horses he
groomed
got their wind back and recovered from illnesses faster than