Roy Willis           

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest man of the great truth which is embodied in the Christian concept of the entire surrender to the Will of God. Sit down before fact like a little child and be prepared to give up every preconceived otion. Follow humbly wherever and whatever best nature leads you or you shall learn nothing. I've only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I ahve resolved at all risks to do this.
                                                                   Aldous Huxley

Although I had read of shamanic initiations in various cultures outside my own, nothing in my training as an anthropologist quite prepared me for an unusual experience associated with the emergence of my healing gifts.

I was visiting Egypt. I was still struggling to come to terms with the after-effects of a major identity crisis chich had hit me several years earlier. In a state of severe depression, none of my outward achievements as a scholar and social scientist seemed to mean anything. More, the inner crisis had made me aware for the first time of unresolved problems and conflicts rooted in early childhood experience.

My state of mind when I reached Alexandria was quite disturbed. Then in my early fifties, I was weighed down by a heavy sense of waste and guilt. Nonetheless I decided to see as much as I could of this ancient city.

On Friday, March 18th, 1983 I took a guided tour of Alexandria. After being shown around an ancient monument called Pompey's Column I sat on a wooden stool to rest. Soon afterwards I became aware of a voice speaking in English with a fluent delivery but a curiously 'metallic' intonation. The source of this voice seemed at once immensely distant and right inside me. I began to write the words down in my notebook. They addressed my state of mind very directly: The troubles I had experienced were the result of a karmic debt, now paid, and about which I would know more later. I was told emphatically that I was guiltless and free. Then a mysterious sentence: 'After long exile, the King has come home.'

The next sensation was tactile. I felt myself immersed in healing water. I could sense the life-giving liquid over my whole body. Instantly the psychic pain I had known for so long vanished.

Then it seemed I was looking through the water (or perhaps through an atmosphere considerably thicker than our planet presently possesses) at an extraordinary sight, the meaning of which is still obscure to me. A cigar-shaped object made of some highly burnished, metal-like material and equipped with a double row of square windows or portholes, was slowly rotating on its longitudinal axis, at a fairly low elevation to my half-left. It had an apparent length of about two-and-a-half feet. Its distance from me, I somehow knew, was rather more than 2,000 yards. It was glowing from within with an amber light. I recognized that it was what UFO buffs call a 'mothership'. After perhaps a few seconds of watching this object, which I could see with a startling degree of clarity much superior to ordinary vision, I came out of what I assume was a trance state and managed to get a taxi back to my hotel. There, in the seclusion of my room, I wept without restraint. Afterwards I felt as one reborn.

A few months later, back home in Scotland, I was just settling at my desk one morning when I heard that distant-close 'metallic' voice again. It made a single, surprising statement: 'Everything is exactly as it should be.' I have not heard it since.

Five months later I discovered that I could heal while studying the work of the renowned Scottish healer, Bruce Macmanaway.

A few years later, after I had proved my healing gift to my satisfaction, I was sitting one day in the library of Edinburgh University, browsing through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Suddenly the title ALEXANDRIA caught my eye. Below it I noticed a paragraph headed 'Pompey's Column'. I discovered then that the column had been erected by the Christian patriarch Theophilus in the 4th century A.D., on the site of a cult centre called the Sarapeum which he had previously demolished.

The cult centre had been sacred to a divinity called Sarapis (or Serapis), a solar god with powers of healing and fertility famous throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Sarapis had been a composite deity combining the Egyptian divinities Osiris and Apis, the sun-bull of Memphis, with the Hellenic gods Hades, king of the underworld, and Asclepius, the founder of Hellenic medicine. The destruction of the cult centre in Alexandria in A.D. 391 'signalled the final triumph of Christianity not only in Egypt but throughout the Roman Empire'.

Speaking now as an anthropologist who has recovered a sense of his vocation, it strikes me that at a deeper level this experience conforms to a worldwide and ancient pattern in which an initiatory ordeal and spiritual healing precedes emergence of the initiate's healing powers. This pattern is described in Mircea Eliade's classic, Shamanism, and in Joan Halifax's Shaman: The Wounded Healer. My own field research in Africa bears out these authors, and my research in Scotland suggests that the same pattern is to be found in the life stories of healers in Western society and culture. Thus, among a group of 20 healers at a five-day workshop run by Bruce Macmanaway in 1986, in 19 cases (my own included) the emergence of healing powers had closely followed major life crises. These often took the form of severe illness or near-catastrophic accident. The sole exception was a young woman who had found she could heal as a child and for long assumed that everyone could do the same.

Roy Willis, PhD was Visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Uppsala, when he wrote this article. His home is in Linlithgow, Scotland.
 

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Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1992 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099
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