Early one high summer evening in Virginia Beach, Virginia, during the late 1960s, I spent time with a Shashone Medicine man, Rolling Thunder, and helped him set up a healing ceremony. It involved two teenage boys both with serious unhealed wounds. Along with about 50 other people, a large percentage of whom were physicians, I stood in the mostly unpaved parking lot behind the lecture hall of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, the organization built around the work of Edgar Cayce. We were gathered in a circle around a massage table and watched as a boy was brought out on a rolling gurney from an ambulance, and lain upon the table. The dressing on his leg had been taken off, and it was easy to see he had a serious wound, deep into the muscle. I had seen such wounds as a medic in the Army.

Holding the breast and extended wing of a crow, Rolling Thunder made stroking movements over the boy׳s leg, flicking the wing towards a piece of steak that lay on the ground at the head of the table at the end of each pass. Never touching, just an inch or two […]