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The Romeo Error – Lyall Watson

The island of Luzon is the largest and most densely populated in the Philippine archipelago, famous for its fertile valleys where rice, tobacco and sugar-cane flourish, but now it has become important for another product. One hundred kilometres north of Manila and fifteen degrees from the equator, is a small agricultural area that has produced a new and incredible crop of healers. Strangely, there is a connection between this outpost and Ze Arigo's state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In these two places there are flourishing chapters of the Spiritist Society started in 1857 by the French mystic Leon Denizarth Hippolyte Rivail, better known under his pen-name of Allan Kardec.

Kardec believed that salvation was not possible without charity. He taught that the greatest gift it was possible to bestow in charity was health, and that this could only be passed on by co-operation with spirits that lived in an invisible world where health was organized and controlled. In Brazil there are about four million Spiritists and several huge hospitals where emphasis is placed on the treatment of psychological disorders, but in the comparatively small community in the Philippines, they treat any kind of physical complaint.

Most of the Luzon healers belong to the Union Espiritista Cristiana de Filipinas, a loosely co-ordinated group of little country churches, where the talent of many has been released following personal contact with each other. Their training involves only prayer, humility and a familiarity with those parts of the Christian Bible in which healing is mentioned-they place particular importance on Psalm 119. Few of the healers have any schooling and none of them know much about medicine, or understand what they do, or how; but all of the thirty or more now practising perform major surgical operations with their bare hands.

During a visit to the Philippines, I saw many hundreds of operations performed by sixteen different healers. Each has a slightly different technique, but this operation is typical, and is taken from a recording I made at the time:

"The patient is a middle-aged woman, barefoot and dressed in a faded floral skirt and white cotton shirt. I am told she has a persistent pain in the stomach. She lies down on the wooden table which I have just examined minutely. There is no possibility of anything being concealed on or under it. The healer's assistants roll up her shirt and tuck it into her brassiere.

I watch like a hawk. Nothing suspicious. Her skirt is unbuttoned and pulled slightly away and a towel is placed over the garment to keep it dry. I am allowed to examine the towel and find it innocent, if none too clean. She lies still with her arms beneath her head, frightened perhaps but totally trusting. The healer comes in. He is dressed in cotton trousers and a lightweight, short-sleeve shirt. He grins disarmingly and turns slowly like a fashion model to show me that there is nothing up his sleeves.

He places both his bare hands lightly on the woman's stomach and just holds them there while he closes his eyes. He is standing on her right side and lifts his left hand to put it on her forehead, keeping his right resting over her navel. He says something in the local dialect of Ilocano. I am told it is a prayer. Everything is now very quiet. The healer begins. He takes a piece of cotton-wool from a roll which I have myself provided, dips it in a pink plastic bowl which I filled five minutes ago from the tap, and swabs over her abdomen, rubbing quite hard, three, four times.

Now he starts a kneading motion, pushing the tips of all ten fingers into her skin so that water from the cotton collects there and runs down her side on to the table. The healer grips a fold of flesh between the thumbs and fingers of both hands and raises it slightly, then pushes down more firmly than before. He is now working just to the right of her navel and suddenly there is red colour. It could be blood. At first it is watery, mixing with the moisture on her skin, but now it darkens and gurgles quite strongly up between his fingers. I can see no wound. Slowly he pulls his hands about ten centimetres apart and I can see what looks like connective tissue, thin, almost transparent, obviously elastic, red and bloody. There is a lot more red liquid now and it is starting to stain the towel. I am about one metre from the woman on her left side and I lean closer still. The healer kneads her abdomen a little more, the fingers of his left hand seem now to penetrate into the flesh up to the second joint and they are covered in red. He pulls his hands apart again and gestures to me with his eyebrows to look at the tissue more closely. The cotton wool has now been completely replaced by what looks like flesh. I put out my free left hand and touch it. It is warm and wet and coagulation is starting to form little liver-like chunks on the surface. I wipe some off with my fingers and it feels sticky. I smell it. I am certain it is blood. I can see deeper into the mess now. The healer is pushing into her abdomen and a lot of blood has collected into two pools in the hollow he has made. As his fingers move like someone scrabbling a hole in wet sand, I catch glimpses of white brighter mesentery down below.

I can see a fan of capillaries attached to what looks like a part of the small intestine. My face is just a hand's breadth from the surface. He is pressing down very hard. Now he splays his right hand and between the first and second fingers a large round lump begins to grow. It rises as I watch. I can hardly believe it.

In seconds it has grown to the size of a tennis ball, not quite spherical, and still attached down below. An assistant reaches over from the right and grips the ball with a pair of forceps. It is soft and elastic and comparatively bloodless. He pulls at it and it lifts a little way clear of the surface. The healer says something to him. Someone hands over a large pair of scissors and the assistant begins to snip away at the base of the ball. It seems to be connected now only by a band of tissue, but his hand is shaking. Finally it comes clear and he lifts it off. I put out my hand for it and he drops it into my cupped palm like a serving of blancmange. It is warm and when I press it, only a little blood oozes out. It seems to be hard inside. I drop it into the pink basin and return to the action. The healer is still standing with his left hand in her body rummaging around a little, making squishy noises, looking up at the ceiling. Now he stops, pulls his hands together as though moulding something in clay. Rubs his hands one over the other, spreading the blood up to his wrists and slowly flattening out his palms. They are both right on the surface now and there is less blood around. I can no longer see any of the subcutaneous tissue.

Suddenly he stops what he is doing, lifts his hands up together, empty, and walks away to wash. The assistant on his right takes a wad of dry cotton and wipes it across her stomach, sweeping the blood away. There is no wound. He uses the towel now to dry her off completely and I rub my hand over her skin. It is hot, but there is nothing on it, not a mark of any kind. Someone speaks to her and she opens her eyes, pulls down her shirt, buttons her skirt, climbs slowly off the table and an old man helps her walk away."

Afterwards, I examined the ball of tissue again. It looked like a tumour and was smaller than it seemed to be when I first held it, although it had not been moved from the bowl at my side.

I cut it open with a knife and found the inside partly filled with a mass of fibres laced through the tissue. An American girl who was watching the operation showed me three polaroid photographs she had taken while the tumour was rising and being cut.

I have quoted at this length from my notes to try and give some idea of what the operations are like. The whole process lasts about five minutes and is very matter-of-fact. There is little or no showmanship, no music or drums or incense, nothing to divert the attention from what is going on. The operations actually happen and I have yet to catch any healer trying in any way to fake the phenomenon. Tom Valentine, a journalist from Chicago, made his own investigation like mine and concluded,

"I was convinced that the operations in that house on that morning were not wrought by sleight of hand. We were not hypnotized, and I certainly wasn't allowing myself to be suggestible. . . . Psychic surgery is not impossible, not fakery, not hypnotic suggestion, not a hoax, not a miracle and is not limited to the Philippines." He is right, but it is only on Luzon that anyone can see it a hundred times a day, every day.