Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Obsessed with Reality
and epilepsy. The demand for his services became so great that he
had no time for anything else. He was forced to become a healer,
he complained. His method was to cast out the demons responsible
for disease. All diseases, he asserted, were caused by evil
spirits, many of whom he recognized and called by name. A
contemporary chronicler, cited by Mackay, noted that
he boasted of being much better acquainted with the intrigues
of demons than he was with the affairs of men ... So great
was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the
light which they did not see - the deaf imagined that they
heard - the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic
that they had recovered the use of their limbs. An idea of
health made the sick forget for awhile their maladies; and
imagination, which was not less active in those merely drawn
by curiosity than in the sick, gave a false view to the one class,
from the desire of seeing, as it operated a false cure on the
other from the strong desire of being healed.
There are countless reports in the world literature of exploration
and anthropology not only of sicknesses being cured by faith in the
healer, but also of people wasting away and dying when cursed by
a sorcerer. A more or less typical example is told by Alvar Nunez
Cabeza de Vaca, who with a few companions and under conditions
of terrible privation wandered on land and sea, from Florida
to Texas to Mexico in 1528-36. The many different communities
of Native Americans he met longed to believe in the supernatural
healing powers of the strange light-skinned, black-bearded foreigners
and their black-skinned companion from Morocco, Estebanico.
Eventually whole villages came out to meet them,
depositing all their wealth at the feet of the Spaniards and humbly
imploring cures. It began modestly enough:
[T]hey tried to make us into medicine men, without examining
us or asking for credentials, for they cure illnesses by
blowing on the sick person . . . and they ordered us to do the
same and be of some use . . . The way in which we cured was
by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on
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