The Spiritist view of cures and healing in Judeo-Christian tradition

The imposition of hands frequently used by Jesus, although there are no reports of healing (moving hands), and the obsessions
that were dealt almost entirely with dialogue established
with the Spirits that Jesus dealt with authority

 (Part 2)*

  The healings of apostles and gifts in the Christian community

The book of Acts of Apostles contains the majority of the narratives of cures performed by them. Unlike Jesus, the apostles were common men, who would many times disbelief in Jesus. While Jesus had sent then in his name, it can be seen that while the Master was alive sometimes they could not perform their task, such as the previous epileptic boy. 

Such was the centrality of Jesus that the priests of temple bet in the end of the Christian movement with the sacrifice of the Master. Everybody knows the episode following the arrest of Jesus, where Peter initially cuts the ear of Malchus and then denies Jesus three times, as the Master himself had prophesied. 

Contrary to what they expected, these men continued Christians, have taken to themselves the task of evangelisation of the world, converted others and showed themselves capable of healing and speaking in unknown languages, often interpreted in evangelical language as "gifts of the spirit." (Acts 2:38, Acts 10:45, I Cor 12:27-30). 

Almost all apostles were martyred, most of them by Rome, given the cultural threat or perhaps the astonishing that Christianity began to represent before the values of Roman civilization, in addition to the variables of political leaders.

Peter (Acts 3:1-10) cure a cripple that alms at the door of the Temple of Jerusalem with a look and a touch, pronouncing words that would become famous: "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." 

Ananias prays and imposes his hands on the head of Saul, the persecutor of Christians, at the request of Jesus that appears to him. The Jewish-Roman recovers his vision. (Acts 9:12-18) 

Sent to Rome to be judged, Paul cures Publius’s father (Acts 28:7-9) on the island of Malta, imposing his hands on the father and praying. He suffered from dysentery and fever. After the success of the apostle of the Gentiles, the sick people of the island would look for him to be treated. 

Another phenomenon associated with imposition of hands in early Christian communities is the induction of gifts of the Spirit (the “gift of tongues” and “prophecy”, among others), which Spiritism understands as a reference to mediumship. 

In the book of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:14-17), Peter and John imposed their hands on the Samaritans and they "receive the Holy Spirit." Also, Paul (Acts 19:6) imposes hands on the Christians of Ephesus and they "receive the Holy Spirit, prophesy and speak foreign languages." 

It is still obscure to me the path of the practice of imposition of hands among Christians of centuries to come. With the advent of the mass, the practice seems to become increasingly symbolic, being the healing more and more reserved for reports of the lives of saints and popes, and interestingly, the Christian kings. The Council of Trent consecrate the imposition of hands as an act of ordering and, more recently, the Neo Pentecostalism in the evangelical and charismatic Catholic renewal the use of imposition of hands with the goal of healing. 

The touch of hands of Christian kings 

Frazer (1982) had already proposed an evolutionary association between the wizard and the king (to the kings of antiquity it was attributed the powers of a wizard). Michaelus (1983, p. 70) states that Roman emperors Vespasian (69-79 AD) and Hadrian (117-138 AD) practiced the imposition of hands with curative purposes. 

The books of hypnosis practice cite the practice of French kings to touch the subjects to heal them from Clovis (496 AD), which was the first monarch to become a Christian. 

Gomes (2007) finds this information in the books of History of Medicine and also affirms that there was a fight between French and English on the origin of this real power. The British maintains that the practice would come from Edward I (1272-1307), which has records of treatment of patients with scrofula, lymph node tuberculosis, also known as "King's Evil" (which add up to 523 people!). 

The king of France better known for his healing touch was, however, Charles V (1364-1380), and the practice has spread to Louis XVI (who had touched 2,400 patients at his coronation in 1775) and Charles X (which touched 121 patients in 1824, according to Gomes). 

Oliveira (2006) describes on basis in the work of Marc Bloch (The thaumaturge Kings) the association between the legend of Santa Bottle and the regal power to cure. Charles V was called very Christian, and attributed his power of healing to God, that would have granted him in the time of his coronation because the Holy oil bottle anointed him. This oil would have been given by "the heavens" to France. 

The kings built a real theatre, with the presence of representatives of church, which had as a high point the sentence, announced by the priest: "The king touches you, God heals you”. Formal ceremony in England and France used to write down the names of people who would be touched by kings. 

It became a formal and political act and increasingly surrounded by myths and legends. If any benefit was brought to the health of participants, it certainly would be forgotten or put in doubt with the French Revolution and the French Enlightenment, enemies of the clergy and nobility, as well as everything that concerns them or maintain their prestige. 

The temporal and ecclesiastical politic appropriated the imposition of hands for healing and emptied it from its spiritual meaning, destroying it before the eyes of the new intelligence that emerged in Europe. Mesmer and his disciples had to do a new reading of it, with scientific claims on a base supposedly natural, from this practice of treatment, which won status of alternative medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Conclusions 

In possession of this information, although subject to an additional deeper search, we can already perform some analysis. 

Regarding the concept of disease, the Spiritism is at an intermediate position between the ideals of the Old Testament and contemporary scientific materialism. If, on one hand, diseases are subject to examination and treatment based on natural causes, the Spiritism advocates a spiritual component associated to them, which would work as a kind of catalyst. This component is not limited to psychological phenomena, which are magnified by the action of spirits and influences from perispirit in the body of a person. 

Spiritism does not conceive a vindictive divinity that shows its power in a proactive form falling ill the ones that do not bend to its wishes and orders, as in the Old Testament. This propose, if employed by a spiritist, is the result of confusion. It proposes a world organized in an intelligent manner, governed by universal laws that are being seized in their meaning by humans during their evolutionary path over several existences. Ignorance and acts in dissonance with these laws have resulted in suffering and pain that are signs, reactions, and not divine punishment. 

Suffering has not only spiritual causes, but also pasted causes (where reincarnation and the idea of divine justice have an important role) and current causes, the latter often forgotten by contemporary spiritists, but much discussed by Allan Kardec. 

Needless to say that it makes no sense in the Spiritist doctrine the sacrifices and ritual practices for the purpose of forgiveness of sins by God. The idea of the law of God, understood as the biblical text, will be replaced by the moral conscience of the individual in confrontation with reality, which is often felt, thought and researched by superior spirits embodied in Western and Eastern cultures. Spiritism values reason, intuition and perception as ways of construction of knowledge. 

Regarding the New Testament, from the spiritist point of view, is difficult to distinguish in the texts of the early Christians what is legend from what is fact, but it is not implausible to believe that if such treatment happened, they happened by what Kardec conventionally called mediumship healing (unlike the human magnetism or magnetic passes). The cures are almost all instant or short-term and involve chronic diseases, severe states and even mutilated symptoms of organs of the body. 

In cases of resurrections, except for the attributed to Christ himself, which may speculate, is that states at the time of Kardec used to be called catalepsy and more recently medicine prefers to call states of deep coma. 

Kardec removes from mystery of faith and direct divine action the weight of explanation of these phenomena and others, also uncommon or rare, that he, the spiritists and the magnetisers witnessed in his time. The cures and improvements would be done by the action of transmission of vital fluid and spiritual action on perispirit, mainly, and on the body, possibly, of people when they imposed their hands and perform healing passes. 

The faith of the patient seeking people that perform healing passes and mediums of healing is the trust in the possibility of spiritual intervention and action of the fluid, which proposes the harmonization of thoughts, the tranquillity of the soul and internal disposition to benefit the well being that this technique can provide. Thus, Spiritism gives a new meaning to the primitive Christian practices, stripped them of ritualism and mysticism that were understood and modified in the passing of time, proposing hypotheses explanatory of its spiritual dimension and recovering their spirituality and their role in health of the contemporary man. 

Bibliographic sources:

The Bible of Jerusalem. São Paulo: Paulinas, 1985.

GOMES, Mauro. The touch of the hands of the king. Available in http://www.pulmonar.org.br/blog/tuberculose/o-toque-das-maos-do-rei/. Accessed on 01/12 / 2007.

Kardec, Allan. The Gospel According to Spiritism. Rio de Janeiro: FEB, 1978. [Popular Edition]
The Genesis ______. Rio de Janeiro: FEB, 1973.

MICHAELUS. Spiritual Magnetism. Rio de Janeiro: FEB, 1983.

OLIVEIRA, Maria Izabel B. Morais. The miracle regal and legendary cycle in favour of strengthening the power, the circle of France Charles V (1364-1380), Journal of History and Cultural Studies, v.3, n. 1, Jan / Mar 2006.

* The first part of this article was published in the previous edition of this magazine.