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Beltane 2006
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Greetings!
This is Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen's newsletter. You're receiving it because you or someone using your email address signed up at my website, www.celticshamanism.com. Please let us know if you wish to unsubscribe and notify us of any change to your address. Please also make sure that your email server and spam filter will accept email from tuath@btopenworld.com as that's where this mailing will normally come from.
I hope you're all enjoying the spring and for those of you in the UK — yes that big yellow orb in the sky is the Sun! Yay! (We've had a wet, cloudy winter here in the Borders.)
Sorry this newsletter has been infrequent. I especially thank those of you who've signed up to my email list and not received anything yet for your patience. I've not been feeling exactly spiffing during this pregnancy so my thinking has been ahead of my ability to maintain the vertical and write things down.
You'll probably get a couple of newsletters in rapid succession and then a hiatus from mid-June, my due date. Having never had two small children before, (I've never even been around two small children before — I am the only child of two only children!) I'm not sure what my writing output will be like afterwards. However, I'll definitely try to make sure that you get more than two newsletters this year!
The newsletter is now divided up into a few sections. First, below, is News and Events, which covers what's been going on generally and any upcoming teaching. (This time, reflections on being featured in the BBC Scotland program Among the Believers, and an upcoming course for Edinburgh University inspired by the Harry Potter books, among a few other things.)
Next is a section entitled Good Works with information on websites and charitable organisations that can help us make a real difference in the world. I firmly believe it's not enough to just pray about the world's problems if we have any ability to do more. But since many of us are on a tight budget, I'll try to focus on ways to make the most impact with the least funds. For example, one website listed below lets you contribute to various causes with just a mouse click.
Then there's a section entitled Websites and Discussion. Here I'll put selected websites and online discussions that I've come across that may be of interest. This time I pick out one strand on a site called Barbelith that has a stimulating discussion on what ritual magicians think of the state of the world, and what, if anything, we are doing or should be doing to contribute to positive change and prepare ourselves.
Finally, there's the article. Entitled The Pentagram and the Power of the Mind, it discusses the 'placebo effect' in medical tests and the symbolism of the five-pointed star.
Enjoy!
Le Beannachdan,
With Blessings,
Geo
News and Events
I'm obviously not doing a whole lot of teaching over the next few months, but I'm planning a fun class for this time next year at Edinburgh University Open Studies: The Magic of Harry Potter. In it, we'll be exploring spiritual, social and literary themes in the books, and using this as a springboard to look at questions of good and evil, magic, reality, theology, education, and much more besides in the wider world.
March and April seemed to be my months for TV related events. Some of you may remember that I've worked in film and television in another life. A few years ago, I wrote the story for the Star Trek: Voyager episode titled Sacred Ground. In it, Commander Janeway goes through an initiatory ordeal to save one of her crew. (As you can see, even my 'other life' ventures have tended to have spiritual overtones. I see everything I do as part of the same process of bringing inspiration from Spirit into physical manifestation.) Anyway, my episode aired on April 4th on Channel 5 in Britain.
Making it was a fun process. Driving through the Paramount gates as an employee was great. I also heard that Kate Mulgrew, who plays Janeway, was particularly keen to have a serious ordeal where she got to be naked and painted up, since Patrick Stewart had got to be hung from the ceiling naked during one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Unfortunately I didn't get a shot at writing the screenplay due to production time constraints, but Lisa Klink did a good job with it. There are some moments I really love. And it was Duncan Patrick McNeill's first directing gig, which was nice as he and I both, according to the mythopoetic histories, descend from Niall of the Nine Hostages (that's where the McNeill name comes from).
In March I was featured in the BBC Scotland program Among the Believers (prod. by Benetta Adamson). In the series of three programs, journalist Andrew Slorance interviewed people of various faiths at different stages of life, and participated in various spiritual practices and rituals.
I really enjoyed being in the show and worked with Andrew quite extensively, focussing on helping him cultivate a deeper experience of the Sacred. This is a big part of the work I do with people in person and by phone and internet as an anama chara or 'soul friend.'
The anama chara of Irish and Scottish tradition can be seen as a kind of spiritual mentor or holistic life coach, a guide who helped you find a deep connection with spirit and a passionate and effective engagement with life.
As an anama chara I teach people to enter a joyful state of spiritual awareness, in which they can experience happiness without clinging, and loss without despair. In this state, problems that they haven't been able to intellectually or emotionally resolve can be spiritually dissolved. They can then clarify and achieve the goals of their highest, divine, self and be of service to others.
I work with people in many different ways as companions on their spiritual journey, using techniques of meditation, guided shamanic journeying, prayer, ritual, magick, visualisation and Gestalt and transpersonal psychology.
I was really glad that Andrew found the individual work with me illuminating and helpful, although he did find ritual participation with a bunch of people wearing encennachs (bird winged headdresses) a little odd!
He's been on a spiritual quest for some time, and was, I felt, an informed, open-minded and fair journalist. All the people who worked on the program were great, and did a very good job of editing a huge mass of footage into a fair and illuminating discussion of a number of faith traditions.
As the Celtic shamanic component I was a bit worried about how the program would reflect on the bigger Animist and Pagan community as well as myself, but it was needless. Even the other mums at the toddler groups didn't find anything to concern them. Some of them did pick up a moment in the show where Téa came up and asked for a boob, and I loudly suggested milk as an alternative. I'll wear an encennach, but I won't get my tits out on telly, even for the BBC.
I'd seen the program before airing and was very happy with the edit, but I hadn't thought about what the 60-second promotional spots would look like. I provided the most unusual visuals and sound bites in the show, so it was mostly I and members of my Druid choir, all costumed, and ended with Andrew asking me, "So, you saw an angel and it spoke to you?" I responded, "Yes." And then there's a long beat of me smiling and nodding in a matter of fact way. The end.
I'm far from embarrassed that I see angels, but I turned purple when I saw that. It was a perfectly reasonable promotion for the show, and I certainly didn't object to it, but my statement sort of hits you in the face taken out of context! :-)
There was also a funny moment at a friend's house shortly after the show aired. She said, with slightly wide eyes, that she'd seen the program, and had told her husband that we were in toddler groups together.
At this point, my daughter Téa was looking in a corner and having an animated discussion. My friend was wondering who she was talking to. I said, "Someone we can't see. Someone even I can't see, and that's saying something!" She nearly fell off the sofa laughing.
Being mum of a two year old with another on the way has changed how I feel about media attention. Somehow, when it's just you, it's your own choice and will only effect you. But you don't want your children to suffer because their playmates think they're in the Addams family. (Though I suppose this could turn out to be a source of interest rather than horror — we'll have to see how it goes! :-)
Valentine's Day brought a wondrous performance by a group called Zipang to Edinburgh. Zipang is a Sumerian word meaning spiritual or inspired breath. They tell Mesopotamian tales accompanied by Tara, a Kurdish harpist and singer. Tara also had everyone joining in ancient chants to Inanna, and performed an incredible hymn to an ancient city for the first time in around 4,000 years.
I chatted with the group during the interval and was particularly interested to find that Tara was basing some of her arrangements on traditional Kurdish music. The way she arranged the Inanna chant, with her singing over a 'baseline' chant of Inanna's name, had a very similar flavour to the musical arrangement I received to accompany one of the Sumerian chants I've been working with. (A chant where Inanna receives the gifts of civilisation.)
I was told I'd 'get' the chant when I went on a pilgrimage to Turkey, back in 1998. The music came when I was meditating in total darkness about 7 stories down in Kaymakli, an amazing underground city of unknown age there. The connection with native music from the region was an interesting synchronicity.
Zipang work with scholars on their translations and it was an incredible evening. I encourage you to see them if they come to your area. Their website is http://www.zipang.org.uk.
I've just found out that one of my PhD supervisors, Ronald Black, has mentioned my thesis on Celtic shamanism in his recent book. It is The Gaelic Otherworld: John Gregson Campbell's Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and the Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands (Birlinn) 2005. See www.birlinn.co.uk. Ronald is an amazing fount of information on Gaelic tradition.
There have been nibbles from academic publishers about possibly putting out my thesis, but I'm thinking of doing it myself through an online Print-On-Demand company and/or as an E-Book to expedite matters and ensure that it is both accessible and affordable. The point, after all, is to get the information out there to people, and small academic presses tend to charge a lot for their books, because the audience is limited. I will let you all know what I decide to do.
I'm also pleased to say that two articles written by me have just appeared in print. One, based on a section of my PhD, entitled A Possible Celtic Iconography of Trance Possession is in the most recently printed edition of Cosmos, the journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society. (Volume 19, Number 2, December 2003) For details of the Society see their website, www.tradcos.co.uk.
The other is in the French magazine Voies Paiennes for Winter Solstice 2005. The piece is entitled L'Experience du chamanisme celtique and is a translation into French, by the editor of the magazine, of a piece on Celtic shamanism I wrote specially for them. Their website is www.voiespaiennes.org.
Finally, I recently received a mailing from a wonderful Scottish choir, Capella Nova, who perform and record everything from Hildegard of Bingen to all kinds of Gregorian chant to music associated with Saint Brigit and others to modern works and are well worth seeing and hearing. Their website is http://www.cappella-nova.com.
Good Works
In keeping with ideas from prior newsletters about how much we can do with very little, the charity, Sightsavers, at www.sightsavers.org works to prevent blindness. One cause is trachoma, a horrible disease; very contagious and transmitted partly through polluted water. It causes infection and scarring in the eyelids, they eventually turn in, the lashes damage the eyes worse so people pluck them, then of course they grow back even more abrasive and do worse damage till blindness results. A 16 pence tube of ointment cures it. 5 pounds (About nine dollars) could pay for a course of treatment for ten people suffering trachoma eye infections or protect at least six families from river blindness or pay for an artificial lens for use in cataract surgery. Sounds like a good deal to me. How better to spend five pounds?
If you want to help for free, try the Hunger Site, where you can feed the hungry with a mouse click at www.thehungersite.com. It also has links to sites to help prevent breast cancer, save rainforests, protect children's health, etc. I've made it my home page, and just click all of them each day.
Websites and Discussion
David recently came across an interesting discussion on http://www.barbelith.com entitled "Are We Doomed?" The link to the specific discussion is from the Temple section, http://www.barbelith.com/forum/6 which is well worth looking at in total. "Are We Doomed?" is at http://www.barbelith.com/topic/24444. It's a lengthy, but very well worth reading, discussion on what individual ritual magicians think is happening in the world and how they might prepare for the worst or effect change for the better.
One interesting point (that I've often made to people as well) is that there have been many worse times on earth than what any of us in the developed West are experiencing now. (Perhaps not in terms of global environmental destructive impact, but certainly in terms of personal experience.) Over a third of the European population died in the Black Death, for example.
In toddler groups mums often speak of how scared they are for their children, which is a natural emotion, yet even a century or two ago chances are all of us sitting in those groups would have had one of our children die. In real terms in the developed West, this is the safest ever time to be a child, despite any news headlines about nutters. (This is not to underestimate the number of children growing up in less than ideal or abusive circumstances, or to say we shouldn't protect children much more than we do from those who might harm them, it's just to put it in a broader historical context in terms of children's actual survival.)
Another good point made in the discussions was that magicians (amongst others) seem to have a real difficulty imagining a positive future, one that isn't Mad Max / Road Warrior. There are a few sides to this.
There is, on one level, a seductive glamour to the idea of a nice simple world where it's survival of the fittest. However, we always presume that we'll be amongst them! We imagine taking a crossbow bolt or broadsword to any murderous thugs. No parole, no second chance. However, we'd do well to realise that, however much we've camped out, grown organic vegetables, or done martial arts, the life and death reality of such a world would be much grimmer than most of us can imagine. (In short, said thugs might, in the short term, be better equipped for survival than us.)
Next, if we can't imagine a positive reality, where enough of us wise up and act from that wisdom to create ever greater levels of positive change, how is it to happen? Everything begins with the idea, the positive thought that something is possible. Why do we feel such a pull to negative imaginings and how can we change that? From a spiritual or magickal perspective it's the worst approach we can take. There's lots more fascinating discussion on this topic on the site, so I encourage you to have a look.
Now, on to what I've been reflecting on lately. The TV interview I had just done made me reflect on the age-old question of how we know what is 'real.'
The Pentagram and the Power of the Mind
Stimulating discussions with friends and students, a program on spiritual healing, and the process of teaching an anama chara client about working with the pentagram (the five pointed star) in ritual magick have recently interwoven in an interesting way.
First, a few words about what I found to be a fair but challenging program on healing. The program was Alternative Medicine: the Evidence, Episode 2 of 3, Healing, BBC 2, 9PM, 31st January 2006, (produced by Nicola Stockley, series producer Martin Wilson, presented by Kathy Sykes). I'd encourage you to see it if you get the chance. (The other episodes were on herbalism and acupuncture.)
It was well researched, and challenging in that the research didn't yield the precise results that those of us who work as spiritual healers might have hoped for. But then, scientific experiment isn't about getting what you hoped for, but about getting results that increase understanding in real terms.
The big difficulty in metaphysical research is that some of what we're working with just isn't measurable as an energy or image by current methods. Perhaps it's not measurable at all on this level of reality.
Quantum theory proposes that there are many possible dimensions. How perceivable would a ten dimensional force or being be to a three dimensional being? Would it be invisible? Overwhelming? Might it be both or neither by turns, depending on the three dimensional observer and their state of consciousness?
The reason that I stress that what we're working with may not be measurable as an energy or image is that it may be measurable in terms of its effects in this reality. That is, it may be measurable by its effects on us in concrete ways in our lives. If working with an entity, or practice, or kind of energy, or philosophy, makes us better, kinder, more effective people in the world, then in one way, it's as 'real' as it needs to be.
That's not to say, however, that attempting to measure or quantify these forces, to understand how they may work, has no value. My dad was a scientist, so I have a great appreciation of well conducted research, and some intolerance for a lack of rigour.
The program Healing described one university study with $2,000,000 in funding that showed serious problems. They set out to prove that healers generate some kind of energetic field. This was the first problem. Instead of setting out to see what, if anything, measurably unusual, was going on in healing interactions, they quite obviously set out to prove that something was.
To do this, they used various instruments to measure gases and electromagnetic currents being released from people's skins. (I'm hoping they did some kind of comparison between people just sitting there and people trying to do healing, but this wasn't clear. There's nothing special about a person's skin producing gases and electromagnetic currents, skin just does that!)
Then they developed a computer modelling program to make a picture of the individual's energetic field based on these readings. However, their program was based in large part on the subjective impressions of Russian healers. That is, the healer said, "When I do this the aura looks like this," and they made the program depict a person's 'field' based, in part, upon that information. Not too scientific. I actually got quite annoyed with this. A well constructed study of healing, with proper measurements of what's going on, would be worth the money, but this just seemed like a real waste of resources.
On a more positive note, one NHS doctor, Michael Dixon, became annoyed at first when his patients reported effective healing of hard to treat conditions like psoriasis. He finally met the healer, began referring patients, and did an informal study over six months of patients with similar conditions. 50% of the group that saw the healer had some improvement. By contrast, only 30% of those who didn't had some improvement. So far so good.
Some of the most thought provoking information came from a University of Aberdeen study done by Dr. Jennifer Cleland. They set out to discover how much of the healing effect came from the interaction with the healer, rather than any 'subtle energy' the healer might be sending the patient.
This left them with a problem. In a medical test, they usually give some patients a drug or a treatment, and others a placebo, pills made of sugar or starch that would have no effect. How could they develop a 'placebo' of spiritual healing?
They had an actor of a similar age and appearance imitate the healer. For the purpose of the study, they wore similar clothes, were both called 'Fred,' used the same music, said and did the same things. Both men worked with chronic asthma sufferers who hadn't had much improvement with conventional treatments.
All the patients improved, and there was no statistical difference between the groups, though there was a slight tendency for the actor's patients' to improve more.
How do you explain that one? One way, of course, is to say that the actor, unbeknownst to himself, had untapped healing powers. Another is to say that we all do. Another is to say that this is a true placebo effect, a person believes that they will experience healing, so they do. But how, precisely, does that work?
At Methodist hospital in Houston, a surgeon, Dr. Bruce Moseley, did a study to try and find out how far the placebo effect could go. He took two groups of arthritis sufferers with severe knee pain. One group got an operation, the other got an incision and a 'play acted' surgery. The patient was under general anaesthesia, but the surgical team ran a video tape of the surgery on the monitors and acted in every way is if they were doing it. The team didn't even know who was getting the real surgery until they silently read it after opening a sealed envelope in the theatre.
Both groups got better. One man who'd been in crippling pain still goes out dancing, pain free, seven years on. But how was it working? Is it all about the mind, or was there some way that just making an incision triggered the body's healing process?
In another experiment, Dr, John Stoessl at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, gave patients who had Parkinson's an injection of saline while their brains were being scanned. In Parkinson's disease, the brain produces insufficient dopamine, an important brain chemical, like serotonin. The patients were told that the saline was a medicine to help their brains produce dopamine. When they were injected, that's just what their brains did, you could see it on the scan.
Interestingly one of the best results came from a man who was a painter. As a visual artist, he was naturally quite good at picturing what was going on, and later found he could mentally control Parkinson's tremors, just by focussing his mind a certain way.
Parkinson's is an interesting disease to look at because dopamine plays a central role in the disease mechanism. Dopamine is also a chemical that the brain releases in anticipation of a reward, in expectation of something positive happening. You might call it the optimist's brain chemical. So perhaps it's central to how the placebo effect works in other cases, setting other processes in motion that create a healing effect.
An anthropologist on the program, Professor Daniel Moerman, made the point that traditional healing rites maximise positive anticipation. There's confidence in the healer, community support, uplifting music, and other elements that get the patient in a heightened state. Initiatory rites, likewise, though painful, can create positive anticipation along the lines of, 'after this I'll be a man,' or 'I'll be more powerful.'
He made the point that surgery, including the sham surgery in the Houston experiment, fulfilled these criteria. Surgery is the peak intensity moment in many people's lives. They're knocked out; knives and blood are involved. They're opened up and physically changed by masked people with an aura of omnipotence in a room where only those omnipotent people and their patients are allowed.
Outside of the last 200 years or so, most people would never have survived such an experience. Some still don't, so there's real life and death risk involved. (Just like in many traditional initiatory rites. There's a famous picture of an Aboriginal initiation in the 19th century where white feathers are placed at the heads of the significant number of initiatory candidates who have expired.)
Even less dramatic 'placebos' have concrete effects. Four placebo pills generally work better than two in experiments, even though four times nothing is still nothing. Different colours of pills work better for different problems. (Who's for the red or the blue pill?)
Returning to the doctor who refers patients to a healer from the start of the program, he said that so much is really about the patient/healer relationship. He said that he is often working at his computer bringing up a patient's records when the patient comes in. They talk while he enters information, and then he'll turn around and look at the patient for the first time and go, "My God you look ill."
The first healing thing is mutual awareness. As an anama chara and shamanic healer and counsellor this has always been clear to me, (both as healer and healed) and I'm sure it's clear to those of you who have experienced a positive healing relationship.
This awareness can simply be of the "My God you look ill" variety, or the insights of psychotherapy, or meditative levels of mutual awareness held in the Divine, but some sense of companionship or fellow feeling is central to healing.
Dr. Dixon went on to say that he preferred to think of the placebo effect as the 'self-healing effect' for that is actually what it is. This self healing effect is often triggered, at least in part, by the positive expectation created by the patient/healer bond and confidence in treatment.
Whether or not there is some subtle or immeasurable energy at work, the 'self-healing effect' works, and as Dr. Sykes, the presenter, said, we'd be mad not to use it.
The Pentagram
So what does all this have to do with the pentagram? The pentagram is a five-pointed star symbol. It appears in many traditions, from Egyptian to Sumerian to Pythagorean to Wiccan to ritual magick.
To quote from Malburn (see below for all references) "The earliest evidence of the pentagram dates back to as early as 3500BC, where it was discovered in ancient Mesopotamia alongside some of the earliest forms of written language... Mesopotamian artwork would go on to associate the pentacle with royalty; the five arms of the star representing the royal authority reaching to the four corners of the world..."
This 'royal authority' was bound up with the idea of divine truth as the ordering principal of the universe or cosmos. In Sumerian this truth is called me, in Egyptian maat, in Old Irish fír, and in Indo-Iranian farr. This principle of Divine truth, right action and right identity or being extends from the sovereign to his entire kingdom.
On one level, the idea is that the sovereign holding his or her right role in the world empowers everyone else to fulfil their own. The king acts as axis mundi, or world axis, the ordering 'anchor' of the cosmos, the centre which must hold to maintain the sacred link between heaven and earth.
As we develop spiritually, we move to different perspectives on these things. Many earlier cultures believed that holding sovereignty over the elements was something only a king or pharaoh could do. Now we've come round to the idea that we are all capable of attaining a kind of sovereignty ourselves. We can govern the elements in our own lives, become our own axis mundi or world axis, a stable centre through which divine power can radiate to others.
In many branches of ritual magick, this begins to happen, in part, through the Lesser Pentagram ritual, one of the first rituals you learn.
You can find assorted versions of the ritual online and in many books. For example, the Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn Site has an excellent article by David Cherubim at http://thelemicgoldendawn.tripod.com/pentagram.htm.
The original Golden Dawn version is at http://altreligion.about.com/library/bl_lesser.htm.
I recently sent about twenty pages on the symbolism and elements of this deceptively simple ritual to a student, so I won't be attempting a full synopsis here!
The ritual is designed to create a kind of equilibrium, to place the balanced self in right relation to the cosmos before attempting to effect any changes on the cosmos through magick.
As the often misunderstood Aleister Crowley says, "...Equilibrium is the basis of the Work. If thou thyself hast not a sure foundation, whereon wilt thou stand to direct the forces of nature?...Establish thyself firmly in the equilibrium of forces, in the center of the Cross of the Elements, that Cross from whose center the Creative Word issued in the birth of the dawning universe...So shalt thou gradually develop the powers of thy soul, and fit thyself to command the Spirits of the elements, For wert thou to summon the Gnomes to pander to thy avarice, thou wouldst no longer command them but they wouldst command you." (p. 51 of DuQuette, quoting directly from Crowley's Liber Librae.)
He goes on to say that the unbalanced desires arising from a lack of equilibrium mean that you can only attract weak spirits who would then have power over you.
The important point for my discussion of the program on spiritual healing, above, is that on one level the pentagram, with one point upmost, represents the element of spirit or the higher mind governing the other four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
DuQuette says, "The reader may be asking at this point why a five pointed symbol is key to mastery of the four elements. The key is the quintessential fifth element. This element is responsible for both binding the elements to form a whole and keeping them separate enough so that everything doesn't dissolve in chaos.
In Western Hermeticism it's referred to as 'spirit.' In Qabala it is represented by the letter 'shin.' When this is inserted in the Tetragrammaton, IHVH, Jehovah, it becomes IHShVH, Jeheshua." (i.e., Jesus).
Many people have seen the idea of the Christ's awakened presence within the self, governing the elements, as a manifestation of the 'second coming.' The coming of the Christ energy as governor of the elements within each of us.
In this and other senses, the pentagram ritual is an assertion of the ideal cosmic order. Now — thanking you for sticking with me thus far — here's where it all comes together.
Malburn says that the pentagram was the symbol of the first Olympic games around or before 776BC. The ancient Greeks saw the symbol as the "pentalpha", drawing its name from the five ("pent" in Greek) A's (Alpha) that make up the symbol's arms) as a symbol of divinity and of perfection.
In later centuries, Pythagoras and his followers associated it with the Divine Proportion, mathematically known as phi. It was associated with Aphrodite, as the planet Venus (representative of Aphrodite, and her Roman counterpart), traces a perfect astrological pentacle every eight years.
"It was half of this Venusian cycle that would be the cornerstone of the Olympic four year tradition... As well as associating the pentacle to mathematical perfection and uncovering its strong links to the Divine Proportion (also know as the Golden Mean or Golden Section), the Pythagoreans would go on to give their own name to the symbol — Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health." (Malburn)
Here we can see that the pentagram, associated with divine perfection, with the ideal cosmic order or matrix of all things, can also be associated with health. This makes perfect sense, as divine perfection and cosmic order would naturally be seen as bringing health in harmony with the divine matrix of the perfect organism.
The 'placebo' effect and the symbolism of the pentagram both relate to the idea that the spirit or mind can govern the body. Healing is aligning the self with a cosmological ideal. The ideal that mind, higher mind or spirit can govern the physical realm. Indeed, that, when a person is in right relation with the cosmos, spirit or the higher mind very naturally governs the elements.
Certain kinds of magickal alignment feature in both ritual magick and the operation of the 'placebo' or self-healing effect in the medical studies discussed above.
In ritual, ritual magick and spiritual healing or prayer, the individual experiences a kind of union or sense of companionship with forces or entities perceived as 'higher' or more potent in certain areas than the individual. (The individual may, of course, experience these as facets of the self, or the self as a facet of a greater whole that is helping itself, but that's for another discussion!)
In medical treatment, the individual also experiences a kind of union with a 'higher power,' an expert, someone who knows more or can be more effective in certain areas. A really great doctor gives us a sense that we have companionship on the healing journey.
In both cases, positive expectations are 'conjured' by ritual elements. The journey to the doctor, spiritual healing practitioner or spiritual being, the magick of ritual robes or white coats, the hospital or temple visit.
Alignment with an ideal is experienced in both cases. The knee is surgically corrected (or thought to be surgically corrected) to be made into what a non-arthritic, healthy knee should be. It's definitively an idea of alignment with cosmic order.
All this shows us that there's a crystal clear correlation between some of what makes healing effective in the physical, the so-called placebo or self healing effect, and ancient ideas of magickal alignment with cosmic order, represented in the pentagram ritual.
This goes back to a principle many of you will have heard me express before. The idea that the 'objective' reality of spiritual experience is less important than the concrete effects such experiences have on us and those around us now.
'Reality' can even be beside the point on multiple levels. In the asthma test, both the real and the 'fake' healer produced an effect in people who hadn't responded well to other 'real' treatments. How boggled does your mind feel?
It actually needn't feel that boggled if we go back to basic principles, magical and medical. The mind effects the body. Stress related illnesses give loads of evidence for this, not to mention the unhealthy behaviours we often adopt under stress that impact our health. As Dr. Andrew Weil said in Spontaneous Healing, people are making their bodies obey their minds alright and it's killing them. For example, a study in the British medical journal, The Lancet, recently showed that wound healing in stressed people is slowed by up to nine days as compared with non-stressed people. (Kiecolt-Glaser, J., et al, Lancet 346, 1995, pp. 1194-1196)
There's also increasing evidence that social inequality, and the perception of helplessness in the face of such inequality, worsens our health and shortens our lives. For example, in Britain the average income increased by over a third between 1979 and 1990 but so did social inequality, the rich got richer and the poor, poorer. Death rates, mental illness, crime and other signs of distress all increased.
Dr. Richard Wilkinson at Sussex University did studies over twenty years that showed that people didn't live longest in the richest countries, but in those like Sweden, Japan and Iceland with the least spread of incomes and greatest social equality. (Clayton, p. 36, quoting Wilkinson, 1996)
Spiritual and magickal practices, whether the pentagram ritual, spiritual healing, or other rituals and prayer, create the right circumstances for health and healing on several levels. Positive expectation, alignment with perceived 'higher powers' in companionship or love and devotion, and a sense of empowerment.
Therefore, while research and proof is of interest, the greater interest is in what works for us. If we know that healing, and maintaining health, depends upon the factors above, we can get on with cultivating those factors, rather than worrying about their source. Wherever we find those factors, in a ritual, in a positive relationship with a doctor, in prayer, or all of the above, is less important than that we find them.
We also don't need to compartmentalise our experience, as all we do along these lines is part of the same process. You can see it as aligning with the best self you can be, physically and mentally, and thereby aligning with a kind of natural order, taking your place in a bigger evolutionary scheme. You can also see it as aligning with a cosmic or spiritual order as well, not instead of.
Placebos and pentagram rituals all work towards similar goals, to allow our highest, best, most positive selves to govern the elements within us.
References
Clayton, Paul, 2004, Health Defence, (Aylesbury: Accelerated Learning Systems, Ltd.)
DuQuette, Lon Milo, 2003, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, a Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, (Boston: Weiser)
Malburn, Thomas, 2005, The Eternal Knot, at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/d.malburn/EternalKnot.html, accessed 4th March 2006
Wilkinson, R.G., 1996, Unhealthy Societies, the Application of Inequality, (Routledge)
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