healing
having been cleansed with water and rubbed with medicines, witnesses
the killing of a third dove and the application of its blood onto his/her
body. Before this third dove is thrown away, the patient stands on its body
while an incantation is invoked.
Another means of healing is accomplished by dance and innate heal-
ing power among the Kung of the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa.
Here the innate, latent healing power (num) must be cultivated by an
individual, which often occurs within a dance context, giving birth to an
altered state of consciousness (kia) that is a painful and frightening expe-
rience described as a death. The context for the work of the healer is the
dance where the healer grinds up plants and places them into a turtle
shell along with a hot coal that he waves over the patient. The healer may
also place his hands on the patient in order to pull the sickness out.
The Navaho of the American southwest use rituals to restore the har-
mony lost by a sick person through what is called chantway. Although
healing is considered the restoration of harmony within a sick person, the
cause of illness must be determined by means of divination before the
most appropriate chantway can be discerned. The Navaho believe that
illness is caused when sorcerers shoot arrows, which are impure and pol-
luting, into a victim’s flesh. The polluting arrows can be removed by
sweating as part of a larger ritual that can also include fasting and sexual
abstinence. It is presupposed that the gods will only heal a patient when
a patient is clean, pure, and holy. Therefore, for the Navaho, healing
involves the expulsion of dirt and the creation of purity and harmony.
There is a twofold division of chantways: holyway and evilway. The
fundamental distinction between these two types of chantways is that the
holyway seeks to attract goodness and holiness, whereas the evilway tries
to exorcise evil. Because the spiritual Holy People dislike impurity, the
holyway procedure includes the purification of the patient’s dwelling
(hogan) by singers and purification of the patient by means of sweating
and emetic rituals, such as induced vomiting. With preliminary aspects
completed, the priest-singer chants hymns, prayers, and excerpts from
Navaho mythology with the intention of visualizing certain deities or
gradually identifying himself with a deity by describing it in detail and
invoking the deity. Offerings of tobacco, cornmeal, and prayer sticks are
made. More elaborate ceremonies involve sand paintings that depict a
Navaho deity or mythical event. In the ceremony the patient sits on the
figures obliterating them and the figures in the painting are transferred to
the sick person.
Further reading: Gill (1981, 1982); Kinsley (1996); Sullivan (1989); Turner
(1968)