Witchcraft and Reiki: Voodoo Economics and Voodoo Healing
2009; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1096/fj.09-0601ufm
ISSN1530-6860
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Green Space and Health
ResumoThe FASEB JournalVolume 23, Issue 6 p. 1617-1621 EditorialFree Access Witchcraft and Reiki: Voodoo Economics and Voodoo Healing Retraction(s) for this article Retractions and Errata Volume 23Issue 8The FASEB Journal pages: 2790-2790 First Published online: August 1, 2009 First published: 01 June 2009 https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.09-0601ufmAboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Los Caprichos, plate 43; Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, (1746–1828). Image courtesy Art Resource. James Russell Lowell (1829–1891), Professor of Belles–Lettres, Harvard; author of “Witchcraft” (1868). Image courtesy private collector. Pope Benedict XVI, nearing the end of his first pilgrimage to Africa . . . told priests and nuns of their duty to divert their fellow Angolans from malign beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery. The New York Times, 2009 (1) A trained practitioner of Reiki healing has the ability to channel pure life force–what is known as ki, chi, or prana–and gently allow the recipient to absorb this life force. . ..As a practicing witch, I use healing magick in my life all the time. Christopher Penczak, 2005 (2) Reiki is a simple, natural and safe method of spiritual healing and self–improvement that most everyone can benefit from. It has been found to be effective in helping every known illness, including cancer. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 2009 (3) It just isn't going to work, and [is] what I call a voodoo economic policy. George H. W. Bush, 1980 (4) BEWILDERED IN ANGOLA Last March, as Pope Benedict left Africa, he rebuked Angolans for cruelly persecuting their fellow citizens. “In their bewilderment they even end up condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers,” the pontiff said (5). Angola has the continent's highest percentage of Catholics, yet much of the population retains its ancient belief in the power of witches and sorcerers. Angolan voodoo practices mix fetish worship with Catholic symbols and this national “bewilderment” has been strengthened by brutal civil war and the AIDS epidemic. As a result, children and elderly folk accused of witchcraft have been burned, mauled, and mutilated for casting spells that cause family misfortunes–from dysentery to divorce, malaria to myopia. Traditional healers, accredited by the government, join with Pentecostal clerics to exorcize spells cast by under–or over–age sorcerers. “One boy was kept in a chicken coop, and parasites ate out his eye. Another was found living in a toilet pit,” the BBC reported (6). A little girl, accused of casting evil spells, had her hands burned on a red–hot stove, her clothes were torched, and she was beaten by her mother and sisters before a large crowd despite repeated pleas of innocence (7). A senior Pentecostal pastor exorcised evil spirits from a starved and terrified, nearly naked girl of eight. Her head was shaven and foul matter had been rubbed into her eyes for several days. He dismissed any possibility that the child could die from mistreatment. The pastor explained: “Why should the child die? If the child dies, it means the child is evil (6).” Evil or not, many children die in Angola and very few get to be elderly. The sad credulity of Angolans with respect to voodoo and witchcraft are matched by the country's dismal vital and economic performance. Today's life expectancy in Angola is 38.2, and although the average woman brings 6.2 children to term, at least one will die in infancy (180 infant deaths per 1,000 live births). The median age of Angolans is 18, and almost half of the population is under 15. The per capita income is $1350 (8, 9). In the United States, neither children nor the elderly have been persecuted for witchcraft since that episode in Salem (1692). Our life expectancy is 78.2. The average American woman brings an average of two children to term and neither of these is likely to die in infancy (6 infant deaths per 1,000). The median age of Americans is 37 and only 20% of the population is under 15. Last year the per capita income in the United States was $39,751. (8, 9) From these data, we might conclude that nations “bewildered” by voodoo and witchcraft are unlikely to support prosperity or a long life span. But we'd be wrong, for witchcraft is making a comeback in well–off Massachusetts (per capita income $50,735) and voodoo healing is alive and well at Harvard (perhaps the least bewildered university in the state). WITCHES OF THE WORLD UNITE The Massachusetts homepage for latter–day witches, “Witches of the World” welcomes witches, pagans, wiccans, and heathens with the good news that the Massachusetts resource pages have been visited 1,289,582 times, as of April 15, 2009 (10). And the Harvard Medical School's Health News Letter recommends a form of touch therapy favored by witches, Reiki, as “among the more promising” approaches in cardiology: Healing touch. Practitioners use their hands above or on the body, using a gentle touch, with the intent of affecting the body's energy field . . .Reiki. This centuries–old practice involves light touch over different parts of the body in an ordered sequence (11). Reading this twaddle on a spring day in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, it seemed to me that Pope Benedict could well issue a warning against “bewilderment” in Massachusetts. The Bay State is positively awash in witches, sorcerers, and Reiki fanciers. At one gateway to Cape Cod, the Plymouth Area Witches (membership 37) urge their clan to make “magickal friends” to “see spells and witches come true!” Therapeutically inclined, they claim that while their main focus is on healing and divination, they will also share spells, meditations, and “experiences (12).” At Rehoboth Massachusetts, the other entry to the Cape, “The coven grew until we no longer had room for new members (though our sabbats were always open to non–coven members.) (13)” Slightly to the North, an event took place that Pope Benedict might have good reason to abjure. On April 10th in Spencer Massachusetts, the practicing witch, Christopher Penczak, presided over a meet–and–greet book signing for his Magick of Reiki: Focused Energy for Healing, Ritual and Spiritual Development. He explains in his eager volume that Reiki also works on the energy bodies. Healing can occur on an emotional, mental, or spiritual level. Reiki differs from other forms of energy healing, because the recipient is said to be in charge of the transfer of energy. The recipient's “higher self” or “body wisdom” controls the flow, preventing any overload from too much energy. The Reiki practitioner is like a straw, the recipient sucks energy through the straw, and just like having a drink, when you've had enough, you stop drinking. The recipient cannot “choke” or overload on the healing energy (2). Mr. Penczak differs on this last point with the authorities at Harvard's Dana–Farber Institute, who assure visitors to their website that although Reiki promotes healing by “stimulating the immune system,” there are–so help me–“Possible Side Effects.” Those listed include “emotional release (laughter, crying, etc.), gastric upset, mild nausea, diarrhea, body sensations like tingling feeling, headache, etc. (3)”–not unlike those qualifications announced for psychotropic drugs in the midst of the evening news. The Harvard medical faculty seems to have a soft spot for this ancient therapy favored by witches. Writing in the authoritative The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Catherine E. Kerr and her colleagues have carefully analyzed–and praised–the animal magnetism of the Reiki practioner: He/she then sweeps his/her hands at a distance of 1–2 inches from the body and tells the patient he/she is receiving a powerful energetic touch. Even though the practitioners’ hands are kept at a distance, patients frequently describe a “flowing feeling” near where they envision the practitioner's hands to be (14). The Harvard group is not quite as bold as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which attributes to Reiki a dazzling power to act at a distance: “Practitioners with appropriate training may perform Reiki from a distance, that is, on clients who are not physically present in the office or clinic (15).” If that ain't Voodoo, I don't know what is. . . as they say. Not to worry, though. Harvard University's Pluralism Project is on the job. When Mississippi victims of Huricane Katrina needed physical and spiritual help, they turned to local witches and “pagan” rites. Grove Harris, managing director of the Pluralism Project at the time, reassured network news that magic is the “art of changing consciousness at will. . .It's not the same thing as some of the TV shows that portray a witch winking her nose and creating physical change. The way pagans can work with energy and clinical magic, in some ways it's similar to prayer,” Harris said (16). Like rabies, Reiki and witchcraft have crossed the Cape Cod Canal. There is an active Witch School in Provincetown “dedicated to supporting Magick Media in all it's [sic] forms (17). And, one can obtain Magickal Beads in West Falmouth, a stone's throw–so to speak–from the busy labs at Woods Hole (18). Where Magick thrives, there lives Reiki. In nearby Dennisport one can consult a “Kabbalistic Healer and Reiki Master” whose experience with “craniosacral, hot stone, reflexology, and aromatherapy” promises the “relief from stress and pain (19).” This sort of thing may be OK coming from a day spa, but it's troublesome to have it sound like medical advice from the Harvard Health letter or from Dana–Farber's web site (3, 11). THE DAUGHTER OF FANCY OR TERROR Witchcraft in Massachusetts today is a far tamer affair than in Angola or in old Salem: children and the elderly are not hunted, burned, or persecuted for sorcery. Magickal beliefs in the Bay State can be attributed to personal whim or fancy, while credulity in Africa remains a creature of terror. The distinction between those two faces of credulity was first drawn by James Russel Lowell in an 1868 essay on the Salem witch trials of 1692: Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, manifests itself in widely different ways, according as it chances to be the daughter of fancy or terror. The one lies warm about the heart as Folk–lore, fills moonlit dells with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie. . . and makes friends with unseen powers as Good Folks; the other is a bird of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoul and commits uncleanliness with the embodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murky throng from the slums and stews of the debauched brain (20). The Trial of George Jacobs, August 5, 1692; T.H. Matteson, 1855. Image courtesy Art Resource. As in Angola today, witchcraft in Salem was a true daughter of terror. Clerics were up in arms; the very young and the very old were in constant jeopardy of life and limb for casting evil spells. Salem's Rev. Parris had held Satan and his coven responsible for strange fits suffered by his daughter and niece, and soon the town was aflame in mutual recrimination. In consequence, hundreds were accused, 19 of the alleged witches were hanged, and poor Giles Corey, age 81, was pressed to death beneath a weight of stones for failure to plead. On August 19, 1692, George Jacobs, age 71, was hanged, still pleading innocent: “Because I am falsely accused. I never did it.” He was hanged for having pinched, scratched, and bitten a neighbor, “threatening to destroy him if he did not sign the devil's book.” George's principal accuser was his own granddaughter, who accused George in order to save her own life (21). Lowell pointed out that “although some of the accused had been terrified into confessing, yet not one persevered in it but all died protesting their innocence, though an acknowledgment of guilt would have saved the lives of all.” The accused were also not, as was commonly the case, abandoned by their friends. “In all the trials of this kind,” he wrote, “there is nothing so pathetic as the picture of Jonathan Cary holding up the weary arms of his wife during her trial, and wiping away the sweat from her brow and the tears from her face (20).” Lowell tells how a poor slave–girl, Tituba, and a score of other defendants in the witchcraft trials were forced to confess to casting spells and to having “out–of–body” experiences, of sighting great balls of fire, of having visions of multitudes in white glittering robes, and the sensation of flying. Closer to fancy than terror, Tituba's confessions seem to ring a modern bell (and book and candle, perhaps?) they antedate by three centuries the “experiences” promised by the Witches of Plymouth or the Magick of Rieki (2, 12). VOODOO ECONOMICS Of that proud antebellum company of social reformers and abolitionists who had made Boston the temporary Athens of America, Lowell was perhaps the most cosmopolitan. He succeeded Longfellow as professor of modern languages at Harvard; he was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review. He later became American minister to Spain–where he discovered Goya's dark images of war–and to the Court of St. James. The poetry and criticism he wrote were good enough for contemporaries to rank him among the lions of the Saturday Club (i.e., Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Hawthorne) (22). But Lowell was also an astute social critic. He noted that many of those hanged or pressed to death were elderly, and many of the accusers were young children. In the Salem of 1692–as in Angola today–it was rare for people to reach the age of 70 or 80. Lowell described that Old Folks were regarded as curiosities, biological outliers who must have made a pact with the devil: “Unhappily there were always ugly old women; and if you crossed them in any way, or did them a wrong, . . . they could send a demon into your body, who would cause you to vomit pins, hair, pebbles, or knives (20).” In the land where witchcraft reigned, life was short. As in Angola today, life expectancy in Puritan Massachusetts was slightly over 40. In the Bay State today, in our age of stents, beta–blockers, and the ICU at the MGH, we've doubled that short span of years (23). We owe that to reason, not placebos. Lowell also traced the Salem witchcraft trials to socioeconomic causes. He attributed Salem's obsession with witches to its roots in Cromwellian doctrine and argued that earlier witchcraft trials in England were an aspect of Calvinist belief. The trials were grounded in a tradition of contractual agreements among the mercantile class. Lowell suggested that Christianity had invented the soul as an individual entity to be “saved” or “lost”–like money–and that the grosser wits of commerce came to treat the soul as a “piece of property that could be transferred by deed of gift or sale, duly signed, sealed and witnessed.” He argued that the Salem model of witchcraft was based on an unholy contract between an individual witch and the Evil One (20). The success of their joint venture was to be judged by the number of souls they had pocketed: the ultimate bottom line, we might say. The trade that was in the saddle in Salem was traffic in souls. The trade in witchcraft and Reiki today also has economic consequences. NCCAM has spent over half a billion dollars in the last four years to fund voodoo sciences such as Reiki, aromatherapy, and homeopathy–practices that the NIH itself admits may not “follow the laws of science (particularly chemistry and physics) (24).” That's money taken from the Harvard Medical School or the Dana–Farber Institute where cures have been discovered by methods that do in fact follow the laws of science, particularly chemistry and physics. It is also reassuring to learn that a recent, serious clinical trial of Reiki for fibromyalgia showed that the laws of chemistry and physics hold up: Reiki is entirely useless (25). We might conclude that it's also useless to put any further money into voodoo healing that works via the “life–force” of animal magnetism. In the prophetic words of George H.W. Bush on Reaga–nomics: “It just isn't going to work, and [is] what I call a voodoo economic policy (4).' Gerald Weissmann Editor–in–Chief doi: 10.1096/fj.09–0601ufm REFERENCES 1Bearak, B. (March 22, 2009) Pope Tells Clergy in Angola to Work Against Belief in Witchcraft. The New York Times. p. A 8 2Pneczak, C. (January 10, 2005) Using Reiki Magick. The Llewellyn Journal http://www.llewellynjoumal.com/article/751. Accessed April 2009 3Dana-Farber Institute. Cancer Information, Integrative Therapies: Reiki. http://dana-farber.org/can/integrative-therapies/html/reiki.html. Accessed April 2009 4Bush, G.H.W. (April 10, 1980) Speech at Carnegie Mellon University. NBC Nightly News (online files). http://icue.nbcunifiles.com/icue/files/icue/site/pdf/33292.pdf. Accessed April 2009 5Pullela, P. (March 21, 2009) Shunwitchcraft, pope tells Angolan Catholics. Reuters India. http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-38634620090321. Accessed April 2009 6Stickler, A. (July 13, 2005) Angola witchcraft's child victims. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4677969.stm. Accessed April 2009 7Salopek, P. (March 28, 2004) Children in Angola tortured as witches by own families Chicago Tribune.com. http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/sun-day/chi-0403280349mar28,0,2660526.story. Accessed April 2009 8U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 2009 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ao.html. Accessed April 2009 9The World Bank 2006 Annual Report 2006: Country Eligibility for Borrowing from the World Bank. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/EXTANNREP/EXTANNREP2K6/0,contentMDK:21046862~menuPK:2915976~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:2838572,00.html. Accessed April 2009 10Witches of the World 2009 Massachusetts Home Page. http://www.witchvox.com/vn/hm/usma.html. Accessed April 2009 11Harvard Medical School (October 2005) Healing Touch Therapy: Alternative thereapies relax heart patients. Harvard Health Letter. https://www.health.harvard.edu/press_releases/healing-_touch_therapy. Accessed April 2009 12Plymouth Are Witches Healing and Divination Group 2009 Welcome, Plymouth Area Witches! http://www.meetup.com/Plymouth-Area-Witches/. Accessed April 2009 13Masson, D. The Salgion Tradition: A Brief History. http://www.circleofsalgion.org/history.html. Accessed April 2009 14Kerr, C.E., Wasserman, R.H., and Moore, C.I. 2007 Cortical Dynamics As A Therapeutic Mechanism for Touch Healing. J. Altern. Complementary Med. 13, 59– 66 15National Institutes of Health, NCCAM 2008 Reiki: an Introduction. http://nccam.nih.gov/health/reiki/. Accessed April 2009 16Brown, J. (October 31, 2005) Witches Work Their Magic in Hurricane Zone: Pagan Rituals Help Some Recover from Katrina. ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1256677. Accessed April 2009 17The Witches’ Voice 2009 Group Profile: Provincetown MA aka P-Town Witch School. http://www.witchvox.com/vn/vn_detail/dt_gr.html?a=usma&id=33687. Accessed April 2009 18 The Bead Tree with JoAnn Allard. http://www.thebeadtree.com/Magical_Mixtures.htm. Accessed April 2009 19Cape Cod Body and Soul Day Spa. http://www.capecodbodyandsoul.com/who.htm. Accessed April 2009 20Lowell, J.R. 1870 “ Witchcraft” In: Literary Essays. Houghton, Mifflin, Boston; The Riverside Press.p. 331 ff 21Rosenthal, B. 1993 Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.p. 111 ff 22Weissmann, G. 1993 Commemoration and Witchcraft. In: Democracy and DNA. Hill & Wang, New York.p. 125 23Fogel, R.W. 20043 The Escape from Hunger and Death: Europe, America and the Third World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.p. 36 24National Institutes of Health, NCCAM 2003 Questions and Answers About Homeopathy. http://nccam.nih.gov/health/homeopathy/. Accessed April 2009 25Assefi, N., Bogart, A., Goldberg, J., and Buchwald, D. 2008 Reiki for the treatment of fibromyalgia: a randomized controlled trial. J. Altern. Complement Med., 14, 1115– 1122 Volume23, Issue6June 2009Pages 1617-1621 ReferencesRelatedInformation
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