After all this array of facts the question naturally arises : to what extent is the total practice of primitive and ancient peoples here represented? This question we shall try to answer.
In later Chaldean times there were two schools of priest doctors: ( I) those who relied on magic entirely; (2) those who taught that disease was the result of sin and that repentance was the way to cure. In time there came also to be a class of physicians who used only simple natural means. But those who used magic, charms, prayers, and incantations were still held in higher esteem and accorded greater powers. In Egypt the profession of Medicine has always been surrounded with the greatest secrecy; its practice strictly limited to the initiated ; and the mysterious and magical element preserved by forbidding the laity to practice and thus become familiar with its means.
Although many of the orthodox Buddhistic teachings of the present and more recent centuries would seem to preclude the possibility of such practices as those we have found current among other races, the sacred literature of the Hindus which reaches back several thousand years reveals a large element of magic and miracle in their early healing art. Buddhistic, Brahmin, and Jainistic monks are now forbidden to use magic arts, and efforts have been made to discredit the Atharva-veda-Samhita and exclude it from the sacred canon.
For these reasons it is of special interest as a source of knowledge of the folk medicine which grew up before the priestly religion had developed opposition to such beliefs and practices. From the Atharva-veda (6I, Vol. XLII) itself and from Winternitz (88) we gather that in earliest times the priests of the people were at the same time magicians and sorcerers as the name Magi, applied to the ancient Atharvans, would indicate. The ancient name for the Atharva-veda itself has the signification of both white and black magic and its purpose as stated by the Hindus is "to conciliate (demons), to bless (friends), and to curse (enemies)." It is made up chiefly of songs and speeches for the healing of diseases. In it we find the belief in demons as the cause of disease in many of the usual ways, the belief in incubi and succubi, and in exorcism. There are formulae for insuring long life, for purification from sin and guilt, for restoration of harmony in households and between lovers.
Winternitz (88, p. III) finds that the Atharva-veda has preserved for us, in its magic songs and rites, many ideas which are still current, and that it contains "numerous verses which in their character and often also in their content are as little different from the incantations of the Indian medicine men and the Tartar shaman as from the Merseberg charms which belong to the small remnant of the oldest German poetry."
About the same may be said of the Parsees as appears from their sacred book the Zend-Avesta. The belief in evil spirits, demons, magic, etc., and the same sort of prayers, incantations, charms, and formal ceremonies to ward off evil or to cure disease, are to be found here as in the Atharva-veda. We are told (61, pp. 219, and 229) how Angra Mainyu, a helper of Ahriman, created 99,999 diseases to afflict men and how they were defeated by the 10,000 healing plants which Ahura Mazda brought down from heaven, by Airyaman's permission, for the use of Thrita a priest of the god of life and health. Here is recorded the belief in the supernatural origin of both disease and the healing art, the intimate relation of religious and magic ceremonies, and proof of the fact that originally the two were not distinguished. Whatever the later scientific developments may have introduced in the way of treatment for disease, the sacred literature of both the Hindu and the Parsee in its original purity reveals nothing that does not have in it an element of the supernatural. The healer among healers was he who healed by the holy WORD.
To Blümner (10, p. 238-9) " the healing processes to which the priests of the Aesculapian sanctuaries resorted seem to have occupied a very doubtful position between empirical therapeutics and superstitious hocus-pocus" and are to be "especially distinguished from those of the professional physicians by the veil of secrecy and miracle which surrounds them, since they rightly understood that the love of wonders among the common people would always bring them success." Every one is familiar with the popularity of these more miraculous methods of cure in Greek times, and with the great difficulty which medical reformers experienced in their attempts at the introduction of the scientific spirit in medicine.
The Romans had no systems of treating disease but by prayers, charms, prescriptions from the Sibyline books, and a crude domestic surgery and medicine, until they learned from the Greeks. The practice of the average physician was a combination of superstition and legerdemain.
While savage and primitive peoples undoubtedly know something of surgery and the use of materia medica, baths, massage, and the like, it cannot but be evident from what we have already said that their treatment of most diseases is largely or wholly by magic and supernatural means and that even real therapeutic means were given supernatural rather than the natural significance. We may safely say that in so far as diseases have, to them, no natural cause; in so far they have no strictly natural means for their treatment. However simple and natural the explanation of their methods may appear to us, and however absurd the expected results of many of their procedures, we must recognize the fact that to them these things were miraculous and no result which was conceivable to them was theoretically impossible of achievement.
Miracles of Healing
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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
