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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Some healers live aesthetic, saintly lives, but many raise hell at every opportunity. They get hangovers like everyone else. Their techniques are as varied as their personalities—some administer psychic injections from invisible syringes, some use spiritual x-rays, some even heal by long distance. A few limit their treatment to spiritual or magnetic massages—laying on of hands—but most accede to the wishes of the public and perform bloody operations. “Angel gives people what they want, the same as Willie,” said James Ebert, the Austin therapist who had accompanied Angel to WillieWorld. “He performs a service, like any other businessman. I doubt Angel could even tell you how he does what he does. He doesn’t have the time or the intellectual inclination to analyze it.”
Education and training inhibit faith healers. None of them have studied anatomy, nor do they have any interest in modern techniques of sterilization or anesthesiology. The material that they appear to remove from their patients’ bodies is merely the manifestation of an illness. The gunk that was removed in the operations that I saw looked like human or animal tissue, but in rural areas of the Philippines it is common for psychic surgeons to remove rusty nails, pieces of wire, or bloody palm leaves. The healers claim to be instruments of God: it is the Holy Spirit that diagnoses and cures. Almost all of them agree that the purpose of bloody operations is to help the patient have faith. “If you can heal a patient with a trick,” says Dela Cruz, “the trick becomes legitimate.”
There are about fifty practicing healers in the Philippines, and less than a dozen travel outside their country—usually under the sponsorship of groups like the Planetary Light Association or individuals like James Ebert. “People are literally throwing money at the healers,” says Ebert, who practices what he describes as holistic rejuvenation. When I visited him a few days after my experience with Angel, Ebert was making plans for Angel’s return to Austin in early June. He also has booked guided tours to the Philippines. His main business, Ebert made clear, is healing. “I do things for people, as opposed to to people, as is done by the medical establishment,” he said, an enigmatic smile creeping across his pale, slender face. The services listed in his brochure include “bodywork,” health and nutritional counseling, therapeutic massage, and spiritual healing. Ebert’s doctorate comes from the Life College of Science, a correspondence school that operates out of a warehouse in South Austin.
Ebert has yet to perform an unassisted bloody operation, but it is only a matter of time. He confided that he has been personally tapped for ordination by one of the best-known healers in the Philippines, the man reputed to have been Ferdinand Marcos’ private psychic surgeon before the rebellion. This illustrious psychic healer, whom I will call R., used to work out of Dallas until a couple of years ago, when (as R. later told a close associate) the cops raided a house and took R. away in handcuffs. He was never formally charged, but the experience was so unnerving that he hasn’t been back to this state since. R. continues to treat Texans, but only at various resort spas in Mexico.
Ebert told me of how he awoke one morning in September 1984 to an inner voice that said, “See a psychic surgeon.” In a matter of days, providence led him to Angel Domingo. In the months that followed, Ebert traveled to the holy mountains of the Philippines, where he also met R. A short time later, as Ebert was assisting R. in an operation, the healer went into a trance—“He went to the other side to consult his spirit guide, is how he explained it”—and when he returned, R. told Ebert the good news. “He invited me to return to the Philippines, to work with him, to go with him to the holy mountains, to learn how to do surgery,” Ebert said. “Unfortunately, the political climate hasn’t yet permitted me to go back.”
Though Twilight Zoners understand the marketing potential of bloody operations, many find it difficult to deal honestly with its gory particulars. They prefer to call the gunk that the healers appear to extract from their client’s bodies as “congealed energy” (zonies are big on words like “energy” and “vibrations”). Scientific tests of congealed energy are futile, they maintain, because the stuff will only dematerialize. Zonies love to bash the American Medical Association and indict Western culture for being too literal-minded, yet their driving passion is an attempt to explain the unexplainable—to reduce metaphysics, you might say, to a science. Jann Peterson’s husband, Art, an Austin chiropractor, told me that a healer’s ability to penetrate a patient’s skin without leaving a mark depends on the speed of the vibration of the electrons. “If you speed up the vibrations of the electrons in this table top,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the surface, “you could stick your hand through it.”
Zonies can explain away every doubt. The reason their number is growing exponentially, something they take as a given, is explained by the One Hundredth Monkey Theory—a monkey discovers that yams taste better washed, and by the time this piece of information has been discovered by one hundred monkeys everyone is in on it. The White Crow Theory is the zonies’ handy way of shifting the burden of proof to the nonbeliever—if you’ve never seen a white crow, how can you be sure one doesn’t exist? One of the missions of the Planetary Light Association is to raise the vibrations of the Earth in preparation for its arrival into the Age of Aquarius, which, contrary to popular opinion, is scheduled to start any day now.
Another of the association’s missions is to sell T-shirts, bumper stickers, “Be Your Light” buttons, mugs, and tapes in which a spirit named Anoah, borrowing the voice of Jann Weiss Peterson, advises the heartsick and wary. Jann, a professional medium or channel, is the only one who is in contact with Anoah. He is an old man with white hair and white robe who floats along, carrying a book titled Wisdom. Elaina, a sort of spiritual Joan Rivers who also uses Jann’s body, refers to Anoah as the Big Cheese. Elaina is always trying to get an archangel named Jeremiah to loosen up and tell a few jokes, but being unfamiliar with the ways of mortals, he finds that difficult. Jann’s more recent visitors are a group of ETs from the Octurian Federation. As Elaina explains it, the Octurian Federation can be reached by traveling to the belt of Orion, backing up a little, then hanging a left. The aliens are led by a little man with large eyes. At first, Elaina called him Whatshisface, but Anoah rebuked her for such irreverence, and now everyone calls him Joe. “He is always reminding people on earth to dig in and do it right,” Jann told me. Elaina, Joe, and the rest of the gang also appear on the Anoah tapes (for $4 each, or they can be heard live, so to speak, during a half-hour personal counseling session with Jann that costs $40).
Congealed Energy
I do not advertise it, but I too have psychic powers. I discovered this years ago in a tough beer joint on Fort Worth’s North Side, where to my astonishment I convinced four housewives who had stopped off for an afternoon cocktail that I could read nipples. “That’s right,” I said, “nipples. Laugh if you will, but it’s a God-given gift, and I’d sooner burn in hell than abuse it.” Before long, one of the housewives had produced a bare breast for my inspection. I had drunk just enough to really believe I could do it, and as I studied the ripples and ridges of the pink nipple, a voice I hardly recognized said, “You are an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman, but your husband doesn’t realize it. You alone see that by following your instincts you are discovering the true you.” I could tell from her reaction—from all their reactions—that I was on the right track. Two of the others were already unbuttoning their blouses.
I was thinking of the nipple-reading episode as I flew to Mazatlán, Mexico, to see R. Those housewives had trusted me because we were in a barroom rather than a carnival tent and because I seemingly had nothing to gain by deception. The rest was easy. People expect to see tricks at magic shows—trying to spot the deception is half the fun—but most of those who visit healers come with some sort of belief or at least hope. In a nation where as many believe in lucky numbers as believe in the theory of evolution, that shouldn’t be surprising. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask R., but again I had vowed to keep an open mind.
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