Awaken the Power Within by Albert Amao

Author:Albert Amao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Religion and Placebo Healing

The placebo effect is the good news of our time.

It says, “You have been cured by nothing but yourself.”

—LOLETTE KUBY1

IN THE PAST, healing without medicine, in the Occidental world, was restricted to the Church priesthood. Any type of healing without medicine outside the scope of the Catholic Church and conventional medicine of the time was considered sorcery or witchcraft. The unspoken instruction was that the clergy and ecclesiastical institutions were entitled to perform “healings,” which supposedly was a mandate coming from Jesus, who said to spread the Gospel around the world and who cured people gratis. This tradition continued until the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. At that time, two Catholic priests, Father Johann Joseph Gassner (1727–1779) and Father Maximilian Hell (1720–1792), using different approaches performed cures outside the religious aura of the church.

Father Gassner, one of the famous exorcists of the eighteenth century, used exorcism as a means to restore people’s health. The underlying idea was that sickness was the result of invasion by negative forces or possession by devils. He exorcised, with great success, patients in the presence of Catholic and Protestant church authorities, physicians, noblemen of all ranks, members of the bourgeoisie, and skeptics as well as believers. His every word and gesture and those of his patients were recorded by a notary public, and the official records were signed by the distinguished eyewitnesses.2 Father Gassner had great success curing patients by “driving out demons” from sick individuals. The interesting thing is, when he was unable to cure people by this method, he used to send them to see a medical doctor. In that manner, he avoided criticism from both the Church and the medical community.

At the same time, Hungarian astronomer and priest Maximilian Hell was also successfully healing people suffering from various ailments by using iron magnets (magnet therapy). Hell was the one who introduced his friend Franz Anton Mesmer to magnet therapy and encouraged the young medical doctor (Mesmer) to use magnets in his medical practices. In my book Healing Without Medicine: From Pioneers to Modern Practice, I describe Mesmer’s progression from his theory of “mineral magnetism,” to “animal magnetism,” and finally to “personal magnetism.”

Like medieval physician Paracelsus, Mesmer believed in the existence of a universal life force composed of fluid energy. This energy flowing from the stars, concentrated in magnets, was called “mineral magnetism” and, concentrated in living creatures, was known as “animal magnetism.” Furthermore, Mesmer believed that bodily fluids possessed polarity and that misalignment of these negatively and positively charged poles could result in illness. Thus, the application of magnets was done to realign the fluid energy in the body.

Mesmer eventually discontinued the use of iron magnets entirely to embrace the idea of “personal magnetism,” which is the belief that the physician himself was a magnet and able to channel the invisible “magnetic fluid” that pervades the universe into the body of the sick person, bringing the patient into the balance necessary for a cure. By the year 1775, Mesmer was having great success curing people from all walks of life.

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