Healers

 

The photo above came from the History and People of the Appalachian Mountains Facebook page. The accompanying caption says "Post said Granny Healing Women Of Appalachia."

I think more about the grannies and healing women and men as I get older and as the doctors try to convince me to take more medications. I wish that I had someone to turn to who I could trust and who knew how to use the old-fashioned remedies.

Central Appalachia was known for its healing women and men. Sidney Saylor Farr's great book More Than Moonshine has a chapter given over to healing, remedies, superstitions, and calendars.  Anndrena Belcher, one of our great storytellers, used to tell a tale about an old granny lady who lived back in the hills and how she helped a girl discover her path in life. I have lately been looking at a reprint of  Ossman and Steel's Classic Household Guide To Appalachian Folk Healing that takes in many of the old healing remedies and practices used among the Pennsylvania Dutch and German "powwowers." These people were present in rural Pennsylvania and in the state's anthracite mining districts and had quite an impact on coalfield cultures. Karol Weaver's book Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880-2000 tells us quite a bit about them. I believe that Ms. Weaver has also done some work on the historic role of healers in Saint Domingue and the role they had in the Haitian revolution and helping to free Haiti from French colonialism. The "powwowers" and "passers" of Pennsylvania used, and perhaps still do use, prayers and incantations, amulets, objects, medical techniques, and healing rituals, and it has been said that some of these means of healing were given to them by friendly indigenous people centuries ago or through visionary encounters with indigenous people. Certain "powwowers" and "passers" have cured people far away from them. They perform their works of healing at no cost to those being aided. Their practical connections to certain religious-cultural communities is fascinating.

Image taken from the Mennonite Heritage Center website.

I'm certain that different racial, ethnic and national groups all have their unique means of protecting people from misfortunes, healing practices and types of healers. A recent article in The New York Times covered the new generation of curanderas who are anchors in their communities. Working roots has never gone away, but it seems to be having a resurgence. "Bone crunching" as a practical form of preventing and healing all kinds of ailments was widely practiced in Northern Italian immigrant communities where people worked in the mines or factories and construction. I have not read it yet, but Jake Richards' book Backwoods Witchcraft  seems to bring some of the traditional ways of healing and protection in Central Appalachia back into focus. The list goes on, and its a very long list.

I have had at least three experiences with the old healers, wise women, and healings. A strega nona---an old wise Italian woman who was a friend of my grandmother's in Hazleton, Pennsylvania---predicted my life's path for my grandmother in the back room of her candy store when I was a child. The old woman listened as I talked, walked around me, and felt my head. Her prediction was quite accurate. She, or another strega nona, gave my mother a tragic prediction for her life just a short time before my mother died.

When I lived in West Virginia I had a neighbor who practiced some of the old forms of prevention and healing. I had a job interview over in Baltimore for a job that I needed, but I felt a bad head cold coming on the day before the interview. It was a bad cold coming on. My neighbor came over and did a kind of interview with me and determined that I had a "bear cold" coming on, and she mixed up a powder that I took and I was fine and clearheaded forty-five minutes later (and I got the job).

I once ended up in the emergency room in West Virginia with a bad case of poison ivy. A young intern scoffed at me and argued when I said that if I could make it home I had frozen cubes of jewelweed in my freezer that I could use as a cure. An old doctor overheard our conversation and interrupted to tell the intern that I knew what I was talking about, he didn't, and the old remedies worked as well or better than the meds the intern wanted me to take would. I knew of jewelweed through some who practiced home healing and I kept jewelweed cubes in the freezer. It did cure me as I lightly applied the cubes to the poison ivy rash. The use of jewelweed comes to use from Native Americans.

One problem here is that the old ways of preventing and curing maladies have been undermined not so much by medical science, which may or may not validate the old ways, but by the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance companies and by medical professionals who seem to be men with vested material interests in determining who controls access to health and well-being. These nay-sayers have grown in number and in power as healthcare has become more of a business and has developed into an industry run for profit by a relatively small number of wealthy people who seem to be among the ethically challenged.

We pay for health insurance, not care, and some of that money goes into blocking national health care, convincing us that we need this system and the men running it, and into developing drugs and kinds of care that don't really cure us so much as they do build dependency on medications and on a system that doesn't center care for us.

I get aggravated when I hear researchers, doctors and spokespeople from the pharmaceutical companies on the radio exclaiming about how they're discovering that certain medications sometimes have unpredictable effects when given to women and men or Blacks and whites because the standard subjects for research for so long have been white males. People are different for many reasons and everyone is entitled to care. The too-slow-in-coming acknowledgement that doctors and insurance companies have dealt with pain experienced by Black patients differently than they have with white patients tells us what many of us have always suspected or known and justifies the bitterness about how healthcare is managed. The fact that Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States should bring people out in the streets in protest. Only recently have sweat lodge ceremonies begun to get some (grudging) respect by nonnative medical providers, addiction treatment providers, law enforcement and some in the prison system. It's clear that some folks would be better off getting needed care from healing practitioners who share their contexts and cultures. Dr. Mutulu Shakur came to an understanding of this well before many others did, and I'm grateful for his compassionate healing work. He was kind enough to send me a CD at one point and I made sure that it made it into a youth prison.

Dr. Mutulu Shakur, November 1987. (Jim Hughes/NY Daily News

 via Getty Images and Pitchfork.)

Another problem is that not every malady can be prevented or cured by the old means. We suffer from diseases and conditions that have been brought to us by stress-filled working and living conditions, by deliberate neglect, or by the deliberate encouragement of people in power, and by the introduction of toxins into our food and into our environment. The old rural and country means of surviving and thriving are often swamped by these factors. The old healers represented pre-industrial or early-industrial worlds, but that isn't what we have today. Could they heal an Appalachia where overdose-related mortality rates for people ages 25–54 was 72 percent higher in the region than the rest of the country two years back, an Appalachia that lives under semi-colonial conditions?

We can't find many of the plants and substances that were used in the past. We lack the spiritual or religious faith that helped us believe in the cures and follow the advice of the healers. Many of the incantations, amulets and ingredients used in the old healing practices alarmed the clergy and some people of faith. In the transition from pre-industrial to industrial societies these people often asserted their control over religion and spiritualities, and over healing as well. Most, but not all, connections to the past have either been lost or are in need of repair.

Virginia Goldenseal. Image from Virginia Wildflowers.

It does not help that some people with modern New Age and "earth-based" spiritualities try to graft themselves on to healing paths that were the mainstays of pre-industrial Jewish, Muslim and Christian societies or to paths that had their origins in societies that became Jewish, Muslim and Christian. There were almost always people present in those societies who had enlarged or broader definitions of their spiritualities than the clerics and their dogmatic followers were comfortable with. Surely we can honor their legacies within the bounds that they would have found acceptable and humbly follow their paths. We cannot recreate pre-industrial or immigrant-ethnic or long-past rural contexts and subcultures, but something of their paths is still available to us.

If the old cures and healers are not always available to us, I am sure that many means of prevention are. A fundamental practice---one that I fail at---is knowing the traditional agricultural and astrological calendars and organizing basic life tasks around them. Discreetly wearing a cross or a religious medallion, carrying a rosary, having a prayer card with you, having certain icons in your house and car, certain tattoos, using holy water, and daily anointing are popular forms of seeking protection that many people take for granted. There are other means available as well. I'm sure I knew people who had Himmelsbriefs, the "Letters from Heaven," when I was child. These letters had a common text and some kinds of "hex signs" and were carried by people or posted in homes to ward off evil and disasters. Carrying the names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (or Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah) with you is said to be a worthy safeguard. The Ossman and Steel's book mentioned above gives these names as "AWNANIA, AZARIA, and MISAEL." There are particularly helpful Bible verses that can be used and daily rites that can be practiced. Chalking your door at Epiphany is a good practice. Jews, Muslims and Christians have means of warding off the evil eye, but most clergy frown on this and priests and imams will tell you that the evil eye is a superstition that comes from the devil. Still, many believers seek protection from the evil eye.

What we want to avoid in all situations is the use of cultic images, false idols, idolatry and commercializing our faith, spirituality and religion. The theologians Pablo Richard, Frei Betto, and Hugo Assmann have written quite well about this in the book The Idols of Death and the God of Life. Idolatry is destructive to human beings and nature, and it clouds or acts against "the transcendent and liberating presence of God" (Richard). We live in a "profoundly idolatrous world," and so, following Richard, "(i)dolatry is a question of politics and faith." Idolatry leads to death, God leads to life. It is God acting through human beings and saints and angels, faith, need, and creation who protects, sustains, and heals.  

Reading certain poems and singing certain hymns can also help. I read Danita Dodson and Alberto Moreno and I encourage you to read them also. The Thomas Hymnal and the Sweet Songster can be read as poetry or sung if you know the melodies. I found this helpful poetic fragment by Yehoshua November in my papers recently:

Before the Silent Prayer

some slip the hood of their prayer shawls

over their heads,

so that even among many worshipers

they are alone with God.

Primo Levi wrote about the sadness of

"a cart horse, shut between two shafts

and unable even to look sideways..."

Let me be like those pious ones

or that horse,

so that, even amidst a crowd,

no other crosses the threshold

of my dreaming.

From Wikimedia Commons

         

On a good day this blog reflects my religious-spiritual and political universalism and encourages someone in their faith and in their struggles. As I think about this post I'm challenged to think about whether we can put together the many different ways of doing traditional prevention, protection and care or not, or if we should even try. There is so much here that might bring people together who have justifiable grievances against the healthcare systems and whose traditions have sometimes intersected and gained from crossing paths. So many people are suffering and need care. But are we too far off from the shores of solidarity to provide help to one another?

I think of being in the presence of a poor woman who was grasping to hold on to her sanity and shouted her testimony and wept in an Abyssinian Baptist Church on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She had recently moved back to the Eastern Shore from a northern city that had seemed foreign to her, another way of keeping time and another way of organizing daily life. She wanted to rebuild her life, recover and find her roots once more. The AIDS crisis was slowly being acknowledged for what it was and the semi-rural Eastern Shore was encountering that, experiencing forms of gentrification, and had a painful absence of living-wage jobs all at one time. Ever-present racism and despair wore hard on people. That woman's church---and particularly the women in her church---tried healing her when no one else could or would. Didn't she and women trying to help her deserve more in the way of resources and support? Can we be open to crossing racial-ethic and sectional lines in order to heal and be healed? And doesn't this path lead through politics because we are contesting with systemic oppression in this world and with "the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens..."

Can any of these ways of protection, care and healing help you in your life and in your struggles? 

 

"There's a Higher Power"---Buddy Miller version