by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the leading media are hiding
This article examines the history of the German healing movement. The decline it describes could also be observed elsewhere in the Western world, which is why it has been translated into English. Readers looking for parallels in their own countries will certainly find them.
What has become of spiritual healing in Germany? The boom of the 1990s was followed by a lamentable decline. The blame lies with too many wannabes, club mentality, bureaucratization, a disastrous change in the law, and a radically altered media landscape. A wistful swan song to German healing practices – in 11 verses.
The most controversial and maligned form of alternative medicine is also one of the most fascinating: spiritual healing – the attempt to alleviate or eliminate illness by means of something non-physical, namely the consciousnessof the practitioner. (1)
Since the second half of the 19th century, this ancient approach, which was probably already practiced by a certain Jesus Christ, has experienced extreme ups and downs, between state-persecuted charlatanism and mass media-celebrated miracle production. The bottom line is a miserable decline – with little prospect of improvement, possibly incurable.
1. The unleashing. From 1873 onwards, there was almost unlimited “freedom of movement” throughout the German Empire, even for non-medical healers. This led to a sharp increase in the number of full-time lay healers. Medical professional associations fought persistently against this uncontrolled growth – and finally prevailed:
2. The HPG depression. In February 1939, the German Reichstag passed the “Heilpraktikergesetz” (HPG, Heilpraktiker Act). After the end of the war, the Federal Republic adopted it unchanged, following the Nazi regime in its efforts to force healers into illegality. In the decades that followed, court rulings even ensured that the law was applied more strictly: according to the so-called “impression theory,” a healer is guilty of a criminal offense regardless of his intentions, his beliefs, his successes, or the harmlessness of his actions, simply because those seeking help may gain the subjective impression that he is performing a healing treatment on them.
3. The Gröning interim high. In the 1950s, Bruno Gröning’s work made spiritual healing a public fascination for a time: tens of thousands sought his help, and the press and radio exploited the phenomenon. When Grönings, embittered and worn down by a flood of lawsuits and hostility from the interest groups of recognized healing professions, died in 1959 at the age of 53, the general interest in the healing method for which he stood like no other at the time also waned.
4. The Edwards impulse. Inspired by the English healing movement around Harry Edwards, the first healing associations emerged in Germany in the 1960s: the “German Association for Spiritual Healing” (DVGH), soon followed by the “Community for Spiritual Development.” They brought together people who had previously been socially isolated and practiced in secret—but they achieved little more than socializing.
5. Esotericism. From the second half of the 1960s, a new “wave of esotericism” from other cultural circles swept over Germany’s alternative health scene—and quickly spread to the healing profession. New, exotic forms of treatment with charismatic practitioners appeared: from Filipino “logurges” to shamans from Africa, America, Central Asia, and Oceania, to qigong masters from China, proponents of reiki, prana healing, chakra therapy, and other “energetic” forms of treatment. (3) They all subscribe to the vision of a New Age full of spiritually enlightened individuals who are unleashing their immeasurable spiritual potential, which includes the promise that there is a healer in each of us just waiting to be awakened.
Previously, there were probably only a few hundred spiritual healers working in Germany, mainly Christian lay healers and prayer healers, alongside exorcists and a few exorcists. They were predominantly simple, down-to-earth people with little education from the middle and lower social classes. (4) Most of them lived in secluded rural areas and helped others primarily out of a deeply felt calling. There were hardly any full-time professionals among them: most practiced spiritual healing on the side, in the evenings and on weekends—not in proper “practices,” but in living rooms and kitchens; they earned their living elsewhere. Not commercially dependent on healing fees, they worked mainly for free, accepting donations at most. (5)
Because spiritual healing was rarely a business, it was hardly ever advertised; those seeking help found their healers mainly through word of mouth, on the recommendation of relatives and colleagues, friends and acquaintances. Under such circumstances, healers could only survive if they actually achieved something therapeutically extraordinary, unexpected from a medical point of view, in a remarkable number of cases; otherwise, their rooms remained empty. (No market is more selective than one based on word-of-mouth “insider tips” in which consumers pass on their personal experiences with certain products.) Therefore, older healers with years, often decades, of experience predominated. (Several studies agree that before the esoteric wave began, the majority of the faith healers, talk therapists, and other “magical” healers surveyed or on record were between 66 and 77 years old. (6)
Their healing abilities had almost always manifested themselves in childhood or adolescence. None of them had attended a formal “school” because there were none. Instead, the typical career of a healer began in a private, more or less intensive one-on-one relationship with an experienced, admired role model—such as a mother, grandfather, neighbor, or acquaintance—who usually supervised and guided the gifted emulator over a long period of time; Or healing abilities arose suddenly: for example, after inspirations in dreams, under the influence of a vision, addressed by an inner voice, at the height of a life-threatening illness, or after a serious accident; or they came to light through random experimentation.
Traditional healers proceeded largely intuitively: their hands found the places where they needed to be laid as if by themselves. They did not actually diagnose; they somehow “felt” where “something was wrong.” They said little about what they did. He lacked the vocabulary. When asked to explain how and why he could heal, he did not offer any sophisticated theories. He drew his strength and confidence from God—traditional healers in our culture were all deeply religious, practicing Christians—whose inscrutable counsel had called him to this vocation.
But this type of healer is now dying out. Since the 1960s, the number of full-time and part-time spiritual healers in Germany has swelled to well over 10,000 – and if you include those who have at least completed basic training, such as one of the first two levels of Reiki, the figure rises to several hundred thousand. However, well over ninety percent of these healers now represent a radically different type of therapist in an increasingly commercialized market. Among them are an above-average number of people in midlife crisis, who have been laid off or left their previous jobs and broken relationships—unfulfilled, lonely, and frustrated individuals shaken by self-doubt and existential crises, seeking new stability, direction, and income.
They discovered their calling in encounters with “clairvoyants,” mediums, astrologers, “spiritual wisdom teachers,” Bhagwans, or other respected authorities in the esoteric scene, in courses and workshops, at trade fair stands, in literary studies, on extended self-discovery trips to the sweetly incense-filled temples of the big city jungle, or to ashrams and other exotic retreats in the Third World. Traditional healers were born with their abilities – esoteric healers learn them, much like the art of interpreting horoscopes or tarot cards. (Reiki, pranic healing, and neo-shamanism have proven to be the three biggest nails in the coffin of traditional healing.) Traditional healers let their deeds speak for themselves, while esoteric healers—with vague zodiac signs and ascendants in the Great Nebula—try to conceal the ineffectiveness of their therapeutic practices behind spiritualistic jargon and pseudo-physical gibberish about quantum, scalar waves, vacuum fields, and zero-point energy.
6. Schoolification. Inspired by the promise that “anyone can heal,” the first training institutions emerge and begin to produce thousands upon thousands of a new type of spiritual healer within a few weeks or months for course fees of up to five figures: those trained according to textbooks instead of natural talent. (7)
6. Breakthrough to mass appeal. In the 1990s, large-scale events such as the Basel “World Congresses for Spiritual Healing,” esoteric fairs in almost every major city, and best-selling books ensured that spiritual healing gained public attention beyond the “scene” as it had not since Gröning’s time. (My Big Book of Spiritual Healing alone sold around 100,000 copies.) Once again, and this time even more eagerly, the mass media – especially the tabloid press and the new private broadcasters – picked up on the phenomenon, presenting sensational treatments and supposed “miracle healers” and giving new hope to those who were resistant to conventional medicine. This boosts print runs and ratings – and has a mass effect: according to a representative survey conducted in 1992, 65 percent of all West Germans over the age of 16 would consult a healer if they became seriously ill and doctors were unable to help them.
7. Attempt at organization. Impressed by well-documented treatment successes, high-quality studies, and outstanding healers, I founded the “Dachverband Geistiges Heilen” (DGH, Umbrella Organization for Spiritual Healing) in 1993. (8) I led it for five years with the aim of bringing together scattered forces for more effective public education about the potential of this healing method and its integration into the healthcare system. Until then, several dozen associations had been working alongside and against each other rather than with each other—in other words, counterproductively, according to the motto, “Why be stronger together when we’re doing fine on our own?”
By 1997, I had managed to get 23 associations on board; together, they represented around 50,000 members at times. However, what increasingly demotivated me was, on the one hand, the hopeless overload of voluntary work: From the outset, this project essentially consisted of others watching me work and allowing me to give them well-titled official positions from which they could intrigue and obstruct board meetings. On the other hand, and above all, I was disillusioned by the main motive that actually led most healers to join my organization: to get paying customers. They appreciated most of all the telephone “information service” provided by my DGH and my extensive directory of healers called “Auswege” (Ways Out) – both of which funneled needy clients their way.
At the beginning of 1998, I withdrew from my DGH. Even spiritual children sometimes turn out so badly that you finally give them up for adoption with a sigh of relief.
8. Supreme court opens the floodgates. In March 2004, the Federal Constitutional Court freed spiritual healers from the obligation to take a naturopathic practitioner exam at the relevant health department – effectively restoring the “freedom of the press” of the German Reich, with comparable consequences.
9. Flood of healers. Freed from the fear of official harassment and prosecution, more and more self-appointed healers dare to make healing their profession and advertise aggressively instead of having to hide. The booming Internet opens up a new, wide-reaching means of cheap self-promotion for them. As long as Germany’s spiritual healers had one foot in prison, only the most talented dared to practice, relying on word of mouth and constantly threatened by informers and envious competitors. But now, glossy brochures, professionally designed advertisements, and search engine-optimized websites count for more than natural talent.
Training courses and certificates from healing schools are conducive to attracting customers, as are various promotional services offered by associations, above all the DGH, which now focuses primarily on attracting and retaining paying individual members. As it shrinks to a mere three member associations, it is degenerating into a client acquisition agency, title mill (“Recognized Healer”) and certificate printing shop. Instead of curbing the proliferation of the healing scene, the umbrella organization is further exacerbating it – thereby becoming part of the problem it was supposed to solve.
Within a few years, the number of German spiritual healers multiplies to an estimated 15,000. The enormous increase in quantity is accompanied by a dramatic decline in quality: Increasingly, sincere amateurs predominate: inexperienced, moderately talented, self-overestimating wannabes who try to compensate for their lack of therapeutic skills with vague esotericism, dubious titles, and diplomas. They are masters of the art of making the invisible invisible – especially the effect. Confronting them with criticism is like trying to nail pudding to the wall. It doesn’t matter: being supposedly “certified” goes down well with people seeking help, especially with a certificate in a gold frame on the wall of their practice. Equipped in this way, some providers of unverifiable “energy transfers” consider fee rates appropriate that would not cause even lawyers and tax advisors to blush with shame.
10. The beginning of the decline. From the turn of the millennium, public interest begins to wane noticeably, visitor numbers at trade conferences and fairs drop as abruptly as the circulation of non-fiction books and scene magazines; the topic shows signs of media fatigue, as seen with AIDS, forest dieback, and the ozone hole. The same fate befell other “psi” sensations of earlier days, from flying saucers to psychokinetically bent spoons and bloody “psychosurgical” interventions to reincarnation memories, haunted houses, giant geometric patterns in ripe cornfields, and contact with the afterlife via tape recordings. Does anyone still care about any of that today?
Disillusionment is spreading among those seeking help: countless chronically ill people have had frustrating experiences with the new type of so-called “healers” – and word is getting around. The explosive increase in competition is leaving more and more healers with empty practices; the advertising effect of acquired licenses, diplomas, and titles is waning because too many competitors have also obtained them and are using them to attract customers. Healing schools complain of a rapid decline in prices, forced by the laws of the free market economy due to an oversupply of competitors. Reiki “initiations,” for example, which in the 1970s and 1980s cost the equivalent of over ten thousand euros, can now be bought for a hundred.
Dramatic changes in the media landscape are also playing a role. Well into the 1990s, healers regularly found journalists with open ears; they appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines, on TV shows, and talk shows. Web professionals designed websites for them that were easy for people seeking help to find. This is gradually coming to an end. An enormous consolidation process is leaving fewer and fewer media outlets; which are cutting costs by obtaining most of their material from large news agencies on a subscription basis – and for these agencies, the motto is “Follow the science” or whatever they think that means. Their editors prefer to copy from the mainstream encyclopedia Wikipedia (9) and system-compliant “fact checkers” rather than doing their own research. Search engines, led by Google, are becoming censorship tools: They ban alternative medicine to the back pages of search results, where hardly anyone can find it. Globally active PR agency monsters such as Publicis, whose billions in revenue are largely contributed by the pharmaceutical industry and its affiliated foundations, are doing everything in their power to ruin the reputation of anyone who stands out with statements, offers, and appearances that deviate from conventional medicine. (Projects such as “Newsguard” (10), “Web of Trust” (11) and the online smear machine “Psiram” (12) presumably draw from these poisoned sources of funding.) Artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, which eliminate the need for time-consuming Internet surfing by obtaining, compressing, and preparing information at lightning speed in a way that is accessible to laypeople, have recently begun to exacerbate the trend: they only “digest” what they are fed—from so-called “reliable” sources. Media that take spiritual healing seriously are certainly not to be found in this pre-selected data pool.
11. On the road to insignificance. Germany’s spiritual healing is in the process of degenerating into a wellness ritual of a neo-religious subculture, returning to the social margins of the esoteric community – unless it succeeds in ensuring, in a way that is comprehensible and credible to outsiders, the therapeutic quality that it has long since lost. It is spiritual healing itself that is in need of healing.
To this end, in 2005, I established the “International Clearing House for Healers” (IVH) to complement my AUSWEGE foundation. Using a rigorous selection process, it attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff in the scene and filter out the rare experts. The response to this project will show whether it is already too late.
Can “healers” heal? Recently, the honest answer has been: at best, in exceptional cases.
Notes
This article is the expanded and updated version of the section “The 10 phases of German healing” in my book Heilen “Heiler”?, 4th edition, 2011, p. 87 ff.
(1) See Harald Wiesendanger: Das Große Buch vom Geistigen Heilen – Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Gefahren (The Big Book of Spiritual Healing – Possibilities, Limits, Dangers), 4th edition, 2004; ibid.: Geistheiler – Der Ratgeber – Was Hilfesuchende wissen sollten – Ehrliche Antworten auf 51 spannende Fragen (Spiritual Healers – The Guide – What Those Seeking Help Should Know – Honest Answers to 51 Exciting Questions), 5th expanded edition, 2007.
(2) See Harald Wiesendanger: Das Große Buch vom Geistigen Heilen (The Big Book of Spiritual Healing), op. cit., p. 70 ff.
(3) For criticism of these, see Harald Wiesendanger: Das Große Buch vom Geistigen Heilen (The Big Book of Spiritual Healing), Geistheiler – Der Ratgeber(Spiritual Healers – The Guide) and Fernheilen (Remote Healing), Volume 1: Die Vielfalt der Methoden (The Diversity of Methods).
(4) For centuries, healers, faith healers, and other spiritual healers “mostly came from modest social backgrounds,” as the Stuttgart medical historian Robert Jütte explains in his Geschichte der Alternativen Medizin (History of Alternative Medicine) (Munich 1996, p. 100).
(5) According to Jütte (ibid., p. 102 f.), most healers were “forced by economic circumstances to continue practicing their learned profession”; they “merely supplemented their regular income a little with their healing activities.”
(6) See Herbert Schäfer: Der Okkulttäter, Hamburg 1959, p. 91; Ebermut Rudolph, “Zur Psychologie deutschsprachiger ‘Spruchheiler’,” in Heilen und Pflegen, Marburg 1986, pp. 147-153, there p. 147; Anita Chmielewski-Hagius, “Gesundbeten in Oberschwaben” (Praying for Health in Upper Swabia), Bodensee-Hefte 12/1993 – 1/1994, pp. 42-46, p. 42.
(7) See Harald Wiesendanger: Heilen “Heiler”?, 4th edition, 2011, pp. 40 ff.
(8) For more details, see my Großen Buch vom Geistigen Heilen, op. cit., chapter “Mein Projekt ‘Dachverband’: ein Lehrstück für die Heilerbewegung” (My project “Umbrella Organization”: a lesson for the healing movement), p. 352 ff.; in my anthology Spiritual Healing for a New Age – From “Miracle Healing” to Holistic Medicine, 2nd edition 2005, p. 221 ff.; and in my guide for people seeking help Heilen “Heiler”?, op. cit., p. 52 ff.
(9) Harald Wiesendanger: Das GesundheitsUNwesen – Wie wir es durchschauen, überleben und verwandeln (2019), pp. 364-407.
(10) Harald Wiesendanger: Das GesundheitsUNwesen – Wie wir es durchschauen, überleben und verwandeln (2019), chapter “Vergiftete Quellen” (Poisoned Sources), p. 317 ff.
(11) Harald Wiesendanger: Das GesundheitsUNwesen, op. cit.(2019), p. 358 ff.
(12) Harald Wiesendanger: Das GesundheitsUNwesen, op. cit.(2019), p. 458 ff.