Magical Healing: Folk Healing Techniques from the Old World - Hexe Claire 2018

Healing, Past and Present
Healing and Healers

This book is about traditional cures as they were practiced by our ancestors. You may or may not have German or European ancestry, but anyone can explore and use the techniques in this book. Before we start, allow me to mention one or two things, if you would.

When it comes to forms of alternative or traditional healing, many people tend to look to Chinese, Indian, or Japanese traditions. Working with chakras, prana healing, reiki, and many other exotic modalities are very popular today. North or South American shamanic healing systems and African traditions are being further studied and investigated as well.

Viewed from the outside, the impression could arise that our region—Europe in general, or Germany in particular—had nothing of its own to contribute to the worldwide knowledge of healing. People seem to search for healing knowledge everywhere, but not right at their doorstep.

Of course, today we enjoy a worldwide exchange of ideas and knowledge, and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s not that our own cultural knowledge is always better than things learned from others; such a view would be narrow-minded and arrogant. And what is “our own culture” anyway? Especially here in Europe with all the historical migrations and the exchange of ideas and traditions through trade routes, many traditional healing practices have similarities or are found in different variations but with the same core ideas across many regions.

If our ancestors had all the possibilities of the internet and modern media, they’d have certainly used it too. But it’s also important not to overlook what we have here.

Our own traditions are often underestimated, and there are two reasons for this. First of all, people love exotic things. Things that are strange, extraordinary, and unfamiliar catch our attention more strongly than what we already know. Well, what we think we know. Whether we really know it thoroughly is another matter, but it’s familiar to us at least.

The second reason is that many traditional practitioners are quite reserved when it comes to sharing their wisdom. As a result, it often dies with them, particularly if they find no suitable person to transmit it to who can carry on their work. Although healing is something that never goes out of demand, many traditional healers have difficulties finding the right person to train.

There is an enormous difference between the loud and sometimes dazzling world of healing workshops, seminars, and coaching on the one hand, and the more quiet and secretive world of traditional folk magic healers on the other.

The latter almost never appear in the media, and they mostly work in their surrounding areas. Often one only gets to know them by word of mouth and they are not very chatty about their art.

There are good reasons for this, of course, especially here in Germany due to strict legal restrictions in matters of healing. Even reasonable healers who always recommend seeing a doctor can face difficulties.

Some time ago the story of a farmer made the rounds through the media. He sold his products at a small traditional farmer’s market and was also known by local people as someone who can cure with prayers. So, a woman plagued by headaches asked him to pray for her. The farmer did not make any promises to cure and he took no money from the woman, it was just a simple prayer. But a third person noticed this healing prayer and brought the farmer to trial for the illegal practice of medicine.

The farmer won the case, but this story makes clear why so many traditional healers only work in secret and demand absolute discretion from their clients.

Of course, the old images connected to healing are still alive. Some time ago I saw a commercial for a cold medicine in which a creature was shown, which our ancestors would have called an “on-squatter” (German: Aufhocker, a spiritual being that sits on your shoulders and causes you to feel heavily burdened and weak). The makers of the commercial put a computer-generated evil grey spirit on the shoulders of the actor to symbolically show the effect of a cold on you. Consciously or unconsciously, they were portraying an age-old image in matters of healing.

But many things have naturally changed as time has gone on. In the past, many healing spells and rituals were concerned with infectious diseases, healing wounds, and healing burns. Some of these troubles are not very common anymore, at least not in our part of the world. With major wounds and severe injuries, one goes to the doctor or the hospital. Modern medicines have taken away the terror of many infectious illnesses, and fresh foods in supermarkets give us vitamins and nutrients year-round, something our ancestors could only dream of.

The risk of injury has decreased significantly, or has changed in nature; for example, we didn’t use to have car accidents. But who chops firewood or cuts grass with a scythe anymore? Not to mention doing laundry in big tubs heated over a fire and all the possible accidents that can happen with that. In the past a small carelessness could cause severe harm.

The healing magic of the olden days was often about those crisis situations: to stanch blood, to cool burns immediately, to relieve pain, and to help wounds to heal without scarring. In those days one could not call 911, a doctor was seldom available in the vicinity, and even if one was, his treatments often were unaffordable for ordinary people.

And of course, the standard of knowledge has increased. Our ancestors were not as simple as many people think, but many things were simply not known to them. For example, it makes a huge difference if you know about viruses and bacteria or not. But it’s a strange coincidence that old drawings of demons of illnesses look quite similar to what is found under a microscope.¹ Today we still have sayings about beings causing an illness like having a frog in the throat or the German word for gout, Zipperlein; “Zipper” was an old word for dwarf.

Modern medicine has relieved us of many burdens. But are we truly happier or healthier? Not necessarily. This is because every era has its own challenges.

In the old days infections and the lack of surgical help were major problems. Today we have stress-related illnesses, allergies, skin problems, and cardiovascular diseases. And of course, we often tend to think how good things were in the good old days. This is often more a question of faith.

Take for example the famous glacier mummy called Ötzi, who lived about 5,200 years ago. It turns out even he had cardiovascular diseases and arteriosclerosis, something we think of today as a modern disease related to relative affluence. We can be sure Ötzi ate no fast food, but lived a healthy life. You see: we don’t become perfect or indestructible just by following a “healthy lifestyle” (whatever that means at the given moment).

Because what is “healthy”? If you look back in history, so many things have been considered to be healthy without a doubt; one day, when we’re history, people may smile about our ideas of healthy living.

In old cookbooks sugar is often praised as the best and purest form of energy, and therefore very healthy. Some experts recommended eating only steamed meals while others insisted on raw foods. Many spices—today favored because of their phytonutrients—were frowned upon because they would overexcite the body and harm it. Times are changing and, with them, our views on many topics.

Today some health trends are reminiscent of the sale of indulgences in the past, as new and exotic miracle plants, superfoods, diets, or exercises promise a healthy (eternal?) life. Healthy living is for many people a new kind of religion, with its angels (raw food, vegan, green smoothies, and similar buzzwords being fashionable right now, but always subject to rapid change), its demons (like sugar and fat), and with aspiration of salvation (if you are good) from the evils of, for example, aging or being the “wrong size.” But of course, other things are also important when we look at the wide fields of health today. In German we call treatments Behandlung. The word hand appears inside the word, which refers to the body part just like in English, implying that patients will be touched by a doctor, who, aside from examining what’s going on, also gets a hands-on feeling for the constitution of a person. Today most Behandlungen don’t deserve the name. There’s a lot of hecticness in most doctor’s practices and sometimes there’s not even time for a handshake between patient and doctor. Many doctors spend more time with administrative tasks than with their patients.

Over-motivated or badly performed fitness exercises do harm to joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, but often in such a subtle way that one doesn’t realize and instead pays the price for it ten or twenty years later. Physiotherapy practices are full of people who overdid their sports. All those hurting jogging knees, yoga hips, or tennis arms didn’t come from nothing, they were gained through hard work.

Taking certain vitamins and dietary supplements can sometimes harm more than help, and the border between “I just care about what foods I put into my body” and an eating disorder can be quite thin.

One does not need to be an expert to see that we live in a time of superlatives for everyone. It seems everyone is expected to be perfect and flawless. It’s important to deal with that consciously, for no one lives in a vacuum. Every day we all see retouched pictures of perfect-looking humans—a nonverbal demand to reach the same status, but of course without the favors that Photoshop grants.

Illnesses today are often experienced as personal failure: something one is guilty of or could have prevented if one was “better,” “trying harder,” and so on.

There’s a lot of pressure on today’s sick person, and modern mystics often don’t serve as shining examples in that matter, either, for example: if they babble about karmic debts or other kinds of failings immediately. As if the illness weren’t bad enough on its own!

A little humor is also never out of place when it comes to this topic. A while ago I overdid it with jogging (you see, I also had to learn the hard way). After this my knee went on strike. I could only walk very slowly when out on the street—that is if I made it down the stairs first! Seniors would zoom past me with their wheeled walkers, and this is no joke. I was as slow as a snail.

One time a woman that I didn’t even know personally told me I had huge karmic debts that were causing my knee problems. I told her with a wink, as I am wont to do, “It’s not karma, it’s cartilage!” Of course, she did not find that funny.

Never underestimate power plays when it comes to healing. If one is ill, weak, and maybe a bit confused, some people see this as an opportunity to push their egos and feel bigger than they really are.

The old magical healing systems of our region don’t deal with karmic debts or things like that. It’s more comparable to shamanic healing methods. The basic assumptions of traditional German/European healing are: here is an illness, it harms this person, so it has to be taken out and chased off so that it doesn’t come back. There is no implication of “it’s all your fault,” “you’re wrong,” or impure, stupid, insolent, lazy, ( insert your adjective here ), and a terrible hedonist on top of it all.

Of course, traditional healers also speak frankly with their patients when they eat too much, don’t exercise, or do similar things that diminish their life force. But they do this based on common sense and not to guilt-trip them or create dependencies. The basic principle is always that the illness is the evil, not the patient.

Karma and its associated concepts come from the Indian and Asian culture where they are deeply rooted in the life and spirituality of the local people. Our indigenous healing tradition has different roots and concepts.

The traditional spiritual helpers of our culture are God, Mary, Jesus, and the saints (and of course all the older gods and goddesses gleaming through them), as well as pre-Christian nature, plant spirits, and the energies of certain places, stones, trees, springs, rivers, and much more.

Later in the book we will see in detail how to adapt the old healing spells for modern times and your individual spiritual path, but this must be pointed out right from the start: it makes a huge difference whether an ill person feels like a guilt-burdened karmic sinner or like a regular human in need, who in spite of all their human deficiencies—or maybe precisely because of them—can rely on help from above.

Another point we must keep in mind when it comes to historical healing techniques is the trap of idealization. For example, one sometimes hears glorified stories about the “power-herbs of women in ancient times,” where they used toxic plants for abortions like ergot. How many women died or sustained permanent damage from using these plants is never mentioned and maybe not even thought about.

Modern alternative healers sometimes also tend to divide our healing ancestors into “good” healers and midwives and their enemies, the “bad” doctors and pharmacists. But it’s a fact that doctors also helped to preserve magical healing knowledge, as exemplified by the famous German occulist Siegfried Seligman in his 1922 classic about the magical power of the eyes (German title: Die Zauberkraft des Auges). Some doctors worked with magical and medical cures at the same time and many a pharmacist published sheets and small booklets with magical healing spells and herbal knowledge not all that long ago. The rift between traditional healers and doctors was not as deep as many assume it today. At least not always, and not everywhere.

Good healers have also always known that there are no across-the-board cures for everyone, because every person is different from others and even from themselves due to personal changes. Today advice is often given like, “You have to try this. It works!” Some people even get a little huffy when someone doesn’t take their advice. But it is not that simple. Only with knowledge, intuition, and sometimes even trial and error can one find what is needed (and this is also true for academic medicine). By now it is well known that conventional drugs also work differently for every person. Some people face many adverse side effects while others face almost nothing. Every person is different.

Would you drink coffee to prevent insomnia? Certainly not. But this was exactly what the family doctor recommended to a friend of mine. Her blood pressure was quite low and that could hinder her body from falling asleep. The coffee cure worked and proved that even the simplest assumptions—like coffee being a “pick-me-up”— are not true for everyone.

Another friend of mine had a mouth guard to stop her from grinding her teeth at night, but her problem became even worse and her entire jaw was painfully tensed up. A physical therapist later told her that sometimes the body wants to re-establish the original alignment of the teeth in sleep and will unconsciously bite even harder when asleep to get rid of the foreign object.

We see that what’s good for someone can cause problems for another person. These are two randomly selected situations, but they illustrate clearly how important it is to see every person as a unique individual and respect the natural differences between human bodies.

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1. See the works of Wlislocki in the bibliography.