Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (354 page)

genuine hair-restorer. Prayers to Asclepios and Apollo cannot be sold as cosmetic miracle workers by the most talkative Figaros in the world.)

In the great sanctuaries of Thebes, the Egyptian city of the Dead, the god of healing, Amphiraos, was worshipped - in the temple of Ptah at Memphis votive stones were found on which cured patients extolled their gods. Frequently feet, legs and hands were perpetuated in stone to make their gratitude permanent. 376 stone ears were carved next to the image of the Ptah at Memphis [26]. A polycliaic for otology (ear therapy) must have been working overtime on miracles there.

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Group experience is common to all these classical places of healing. I see in them predecessors of the psychodrama practised today in the sense in which Dr. Samuel Wamer [27] describes group therapy: Group therapy is often especially helpful, for it is easier to recognize something mutually, and during the reciprocal relationship one hand washes the other so to speak. ... This therapy is not only an intellectual experience; it also embraces the emotional life, for personality is formed by emotional experiences which are caused by the reaction of the glands and other subsidiary corporeal symptoms.

In order to achieve a basic change of personality the therapy must make contact with these intensive, repeated and continuing emotional experiences, so that the emotional spheres of the personality are affected again and undergo a tran-formation.

This kind of group experience with a deliberate goal could be sensed at all the places of pilgrimage I visited. The longing for a miracle - as a common emotional experience - released among complete strangers reciprocal relationships which extinguished any inhibitions, even against crying and lamenting aloud. People who were normally rather introverted underwent a change of personality.

They surrendered themselves completely to the general feeling. Here, at the goal of their hopes, among the mass of anonymous sufferers a change in their attitude to their illness took place. It was now or never! At places of pilgrimage ecstatic emotions are the humus on which the apparently incredible can materialize.

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In this connection I should mention briefly 'animal magnetism' which was practised by the doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). Mesmer looked his patients fixedly in the eyes and then by laying on of hands used the powers radiating from people for suggestive cures. The Catholic Church has canonized thirty-five chirotetes (layers on of hands). The English surgeon James Braid (1795-1860) realized that there was no occult hocus-pocus about successful healing by this method. He christened it hypnosis (Greek, sleep). Mesmerism became a European scourge, because people who did not possess healing magnetic powers also did a roaring trade in it.

We can read in a report [28] published in 1784 the extent to which mass suggestion and mass hypnosis could effect 'miraculous cures':

The Marquis of PuisSgur had turned his chateau near Sois-sons into a 'magnetic sanatorium'. A fanatic