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Charles Langley was told he had special powers |
Are the healing Indians a bunch of cowboys?
Charles Langley’s book tells
of his travels with a Navajo medicine man called Blue Horse, witnessing extraordinary cures, writes Maggie Clarke
AN Englishman’s journey to the ancient heart of North American Indian culture begins with a chance meeting outside a Wal-Mart superstore in Albuquerque.
Charles Langley, a former Camden resident and ex-night news editor of the London Evening Standard, stops his car outside the store to ask directions of a young man at a bus stop.
The man, Reuben, is a Navajo Indian and would-be medicine man, and Langley ends up giving him a lift to a reservation many hours’ drive away.
In a desert landscape studded with juniper bushes and cacti, Langley is introduced to a world where people believe that witchcraft can bring ruin, illness and even death, and medicine men can lift curses and heal the sick.
He feels drawn to explore this new world that was, he writes, “as utterly unknown to me, or my people, as the Americans had been to Columbus and his people”.
Langley’s account is a mixture of travel book, memoir, investigation of Navajo customs and culture, and spiritual odyssey.
He has lived among the Navajo people on their reservation in New Mexico and Arizona, taking part in rituals and healing ceremonies and, he claims, observing patients recover or improve as a result of traditional methods.
The book details Langley’s experiences as “bag carrier and chauffeur” and, later, apprentice to a medicine man called Blue Horse.
In keeping with his journalistic background, Langley is sceptical and questioning, thinking that if he observes at close quarters he will soon find out whether a medicine man’s art is all hocus pocus. But he can find no easy explanation for what he describes as Blue Horse’s spectacular feats of divination and extraordinary cures.
The two men often travel hundreds of miles – if someone needs the medicine man’s help, he has to help them.
Blue Horse is kept busy as many misfortunes – even an income tax bill – are attributed to witchcraft. A man whose expected tax rebate is withdrawn, to be replaced by a demand for additional unpaid taxes, asks if Blue Horse can get the money back.
“He needs to fill in a form and appeal,” says the practical Langley. But in a reply which presents tax disputes in a whole new light, an astonished Blue Horse says: “That won’t do any good. He’s been witched. He’d have got the money straight away if he hadn’t been.”
Among the Navajo a curse isn’t a form of words, but various taboo items and “witching” objects wrapped up in a bundle and buried close to the victim’s home, or hidden miles away. The job of a medicine man is to find the curse, destroy it and return the evil to its senders. Langley says Blue Horse has an uncanny knack of finding witch bundles.
It is in the fire that medicine men are said to see what is afflicting those they seek to help. A fire has to be placed in the centre of the house – fine when all Navajos lived in traditional hogans, wood and earth structures with earth floors. But for people living in towns, Blue Horse helpfully takes along a portable fireplace made from an oil drum.
Langley himself claims to have seen images in glowing embers – including snakes and a bear (bad signs). He is told most white people can’t see anything in the fire. But it seems Langley isn’t a bog-standard white man. Unusual ability has been spotted in him before.
He recounts how during his travels in Louisiana he met healers, called Traiteurs in Cajun French, one of whom told him: “You’re one of us. We can see it in you – you’re a healer”.
Instances of Blue Horse’s apparent healing ability include a case of a man with serious neck pain whom conventional medicine has failed to help. Blue Horse is able to find the exact area of the pain and to discover a forgotten childhood incident in which the man killed a snake. The neck ache is caused by the snake’s angry spirit, Blue Horse says.
Langley writes that although he could not measure scientifically whether real improvements in long-standing conditions had taken place, his observations, a huge volume of notes and the word of recovered patients provided evidence suggesting that medicine men can heal the sick, look into the past, foretell the future and lift curses.
“My Navajo Medicine friends were anything but loonies,” he states.
Included in Langley’s account is a description of his experience of Peyote, the sacred cactus, eaten or drunk during prayer ceremonies. The visions induced add a strange and intriguing twist.
Now a student of anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, he says the events he records really did happen. But he accepts that some readers may find them hard to believe, adding: “I certainly would not blame them for that.” |
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