Gathers Shrestha
Kathmandu, 20 feb ( EFE).- Nepal, nestled in the mountains of the Himalayas, is still a sanctuary for thousands of healers as Mohan Rai, who practice their ancestral techniques of healing ceremonies very criticized by the Government Maoist.
A healing ceremony has a source component ritual: the shaman, between music of drums, asks the spirits which one is causing damage to your patient and reason, and then apologizes for this offering incense and fruits.
“This is a complicated vocation, and it takes discipline and respect for nature to be shaman,” explained to Efe shaman Mohan Rai, 84, he began his apprenticeship in the Office when he was only a child at the hands of his father, uncle and grandmother.
Rai leads an Institute that come from three decades ago hundreds of anthropologists and patients from all corners of the globe to learn skills and knowledge, but shamanism is at once subject and popular mistrust of the Government.
In Nepal, where health services are poor and they are mainly concentrated in urban areas, many people often resort to local shamans in his first attempt to put an end to a disease.
The other side of the coin is that his dealings with the spirits puts them in the axis of the superstitions, and often there are accusations of black magic and lynchings as the happened last week in a Nepalese village.
The victim, a 40-year-old woman called Dhegani Mahato, was hit with stones and Timbers, and later burned alive following a shaman to her out of making witchcraft with a relative political and making him ill, according to the authorities.
The shaman and nine others were arrested immediately by police, but the case has reached the national arena: the Prime Minister, Maoist Baburam Bhattarai, has appealed to the nation to not believe in shamans and healers.
According to the estimates of the shaman Rai, for whom the murderer of Mahato was a scammer and a “liar”, in Nepal there are about 700,000 healers, but only “1% of them know” the Office, really a ancestral activity that requires a learning.
“Spirits seek people whose ancestors were shamans.” Then the light enters us. “At the beginning we do not realize the power that lies within us, that makes us behave differently”, has told Efe.
“Can we are well physically but our bodies we hurt as if someone was hitting us”, underlines Rai, who maintains that veteran shamans help recognize the aforementioned spirits.
“Selected” healers just feeling well after celebrating rituals and meditate in the cemeteries, says Rai, it ensures that your Guild, unlike others, has no “fear” the ghosts.
FantasmagorÃas aside, the process to become Shaman was not without setbacks for this octogenarian healer.
Young man, has, even believed in the “faith healing”, so he enlisted in the army and then worked as a tour guide, until in 1976 he met a group of us academics interested in the curanderÃa.
Rai, a link in a chain of family which also includes the trade three of their five children “During a trip to the mountains was recognized as a shaman by shamans of a village”, explains.
Rai and his colleagues treat people possessed by nightmares, paranoia, or cases of slimming without apparent reason, using ritual techniques clamped together by decades of practice, although certainly not supported by the science.
“If people are showing contempt for nature, can be possessed by spirits–argues-.” “Patients of this type may have been possessed by the spirit of a child or someone who died an unnatural death”.
But the curanderÃa also has its limits: “with a broken leg – sure – you should go to hospital”. EFE
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