Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol60no202
Stories of Miraculous Healing: Thirty Years Later
Ljiljana Pešikan-Ljuštanović
; Filozofski fakultet, Novi Sad
Lidija Delić
; Institut za književnost i umetnost, Beograd
Abstract
This article is based on a comparison between legends about miraculous healing frequently published in the late 1980s in magazines and daily press and in advertising texts that are published today on the Internet in the form of almost formulaic information about new life-saving medicines for certain widespread diseases. These narratives are linked to tradition, primarily by their insistence on the truthfulness in both groups of texts, and on the role and basic qualities of healers, medicines, sources of healing power, testimonies and experiences of patients, elements of the miraculous and numinous. It is shown that less effort is put into achieving convincing veracity in contemporary texts, perhaps because their authors, unlike those from the late 1980s, are completely anonymous, and the websites where they publish are often temporarily available. Happiness is offered to all who invest a small sum of money and buy the miraculous medicine. The healer becomes the central figure of these narratives, they often combine the role of someone who was injured or ill with the role of the one who heals. In addition, names of famous physicians function as indirect proof of the truth: the medicine was “found” by someone who “everyone knows about”, who undoubtedly exists. Healers can also be students embodying the renewing life potential of youth, and patients who have inherited the medicine from their ancestors or received them from a patron saint. The attitude towards science in these narratives remains ambivalent. “Good” medical science opposes the evil “pharmaceutical mafia” and corrupted “official” medicine, which, for the sake of profit, consciously hides and suppresses cheap, effective, miracle medicines. Overall, what both types of narratives (those from the late 1980s, early 1990s and those from 2022 and 2023) have in common is an essential reliance on the human fear of death (Terror Management Theory) and on the deep need to, at least temporarily, miraculously overcome this fear at the price of (paid) self-deception.
Keywords
stories of miraculous healing, life stories, healer, medicine, sick/healed, fear of death
Hrčak ID:
311663
URI
Publication date:
19.12.2023.
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