Touch Me, Feel Me, Heal Me!
I approached psychic surgery with an open mind. But as I watched the healer press his fingers on my stomach and produce a gray string of gristle, I vowed to expose his mystical medicine.
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No More Bad Blood
On a Sunday morning in late April, the last day that Angel was at WillieWorld, I joined the horde of true believers in condo number 10. We sat around in our robes, waiting to be called to the treatment room upstairs. We could clearly hear Angel’s voice, praying or communicating with his patients. “Does it hurt?” he asked. “Can you stand the pain?” A girl squealed, or maybe it was a high giggle. Angel started to sing “How Great Thou Art.”
I was with another friend, Tom Athey, who had become intrigued with psychic surgery ten years ago, when a healer helped a friend who had been seriously injured in a parachute jump. Tom had read numerous books on metaphysics and was comfortable with the jargon of the Twilight Zoners—terms like “chakra” and “karma” dropped smoothly from his lips. We had made appointments for two separate morning sessions, two hours apart. A woman from a group called the Planetary Light Association, which acted as a booking agent for the healer, advised us that we would need a minimum of two sessions and that recovery time of at least an hour between treatments was essential. “You’ll be receiving so much energy your body can’t take it all at once,” she said. She also warned that Angel didn’t do cosmetic work. We assured her our complaints were not cosmetic.
There were about twenty people waiting when we arrived, and more continued to filter in and out all morning. At least half were older women who looked as though they had read a lot of books by Edgar Cayce, but some were young, holistic, New Age women with wholesome faces and startled eyes. I’d seen one of them recently at Austin’s Whole Foods Market. There was a handful of men too, including a bearded, bald-headed young man in a Japanese bathrobe who was so weak that two women had to assist him to the sofa. Judging from the red blotches on his thighs, I assumed that he had undergone chemotherapy. As the patients arrived, they were directed to undress in the laundry room. One young woman who had forgotten to bring a robe was given a blanket.
A pretty, overweight woman named Jann Weiss Peterson checked our names with her master list and had us read and sign a disclaimer saying that the treatment we were to receive was religious rather than medical and that the healer—the “minister”—made no promises. Jann is the founder and spiritual commander of the Planetary Light Association. She asked us to form a circle and hold hands while she said a nondenominational prayer emphasizing peace, love, and faith.
While Jann prayed, I studied the copies of ordination documents that were tacked to the wall behind the reception table. They were from the Lumerian Light Center and Our Church of the Garden and were made out in the names of Angel Estaco Domingo and Dr. Star Johnson. Star Johnson, I learned, lived in San Antonio and acted as Angel’s surgical assistant. Upstairs, Angel was singing “Spanish Eyes.”
I don’t mind admitting that the waiting made me uneasy. It was hard to explain, but I felt like a trespasser. I had vowed to approach this experience with an open mind, but everything I saw and heard was eroding that vow. Clients in the waiting room avoided eye contact or, worse, gave such all-knowing stares that I wondered if I had remembered to put on clean underwear. They spoke in whispers, those who spoke at all, and many appeared to be meditating or praying or both. A tall silver-haired Hispanic wearing a VA hospital robe had cancer and had been to Angel a dozen times. He sat rigidly in a folding chair, his vacant eyes fixed on the fireplace as his wife and teenage daughter comforted him.
Faith wasn’t my problem—I’m a Christian, and I pray daily for miracles, some of which come about. I profess little understanding of cosmic forces, and my life is riddled with questions for which I assume there are no answers. I fully believe that faith can heal or, for that matter, move mountains. So can laughter. Former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins made a convincing case that he cured his own crippling ailment by watching Marx Brothers movies. But sitting there looking at the dreamy, innocent countenances around me, knowing that most of their wisdom came from reading tarot cards and casting the I Ching, I knew theirs was a faith I would never possess. God can do what He pleases, but I was already having serious doubts that the psalm-singing Filipino hillbilly upstairs could cure hiccups. As Angel burst into a rousing chorus of “Beer Barrel Polka,” even the hardiest of the believers and the wackiest of the zonies were compelled to smile.
Angel turned out to be a stocky little man with greasy black hair and a baggy, weathered face. He wore a flowery short-sleeved shirt with the tail out, like a Tijuana cab driver. A tall woman with brown hair (who I later learned was Star Johnson) watched closely as I deposited a ten and a twenty in the love offering box, then told me to strip to my shorts and lie down on the table. I caught a glimpse of the VA hospital robe folded away in the corner and realized that the naked body on the other table was the Hispanic veteran I had seen downstairs.
Another assistant, an elderly woman with a kindly smile, read a card I had filled out earlier and told Angel, “This brother has some kidney damage as a result of high blood pressure. Do you want me to do a scan?” Angel said yes, and she passed a small towel over my body. Then Angel held the towel to the light as though reading an x-ray and said, “Blockage.”
As his assistants rubbed my chest and stomach with an aromatic balm, Angel directed me to face the window—the light—while he prayed for my recovery. I then watched closely as he plopped a moist piece of cotton onto my belly and began to apply pressure with the fingers of his left hand. The fingers of his right hand fidgeted and probed, until one finger seemed to stab into my flesh and vanish for maybe two seconds. I didn’t see any blood—he blocked my view with the stationary hand—but the next thing I saw was a small, stringy piece of gristle which he exhibited for my brief inspection and tossed in the trash can behind the table. “See?” he said. “Blockage. No more bad blood.”
Tom Athey and I sat on a rock wall outside the condominiums after our sessions, discussing whether to blow another $30 on a second round. Tom’s experience had been more disheartening than mine, because he had expected so much. Nevertheless, we went back for a second treatment. It was more of the same. Angel said more prayers, sang more songs, and extracted more gray meat from our bodies. Neither of us saw any blood. It wasn’t even good sleight of hand. I didn’t feel energized—I felt depressed and a little stupid.
When I called Tom five days later, he told me his throat had been sore all week. “I blame it on Angel,” he said. “What a charlatan!”
“Have you changed your mind about psychic surgery?”
“No, I haven’t,” Tom said. “I still believe there are authentic psychic surgeons around.”
Mystic Masseurs
Arsenia dela Cruz, daughter of the legendary Filipino healer Eleuterio Terte, said in an interview a few years ago that 90 per cent of all psychic surgery is fake. Her father’s bloody operations were the real article, she swore—as are her own—but most healers are mere sleight-of-hand artists with nylon blood bags hidden between the palm and the thumb. Genuine psychic operations, she said, require tremendous amounts of magnetic power. Any healer who pretends to perform large numbers of operations in quick succession is therefore a proven fraud; so says the daughter of Terte, the man who in 1925 came down from the holy mountains and twenty years later, perform the civilized world’s first bloody operation.
Nearly every psychic surgeon in the Philippines claims to be related, directly or indirectly, to Terte and hence to each other. Their methods and beliefs are usually self-taught, and their jealousy and self-righteousness infamous. Though they all started life as Roman Catholics, their theologies have evolved into imprecise mixtures of Hinduism, Buddhism, voodooism, and maybe some other isms yet to be identified. Those who have visited Texas have definitely been exposed to zonieism, for example.
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