“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:10.) Even in primitive societies, witch doctors and other natural therapists have understood that the point of power is in the present, and they have utilized natural hypnosis as a method of helping other individuals to concentrate their own energy. All of the gestures, dances, and other procedures are shock treatments, startling the subject out of habitual reactions so that he or she is forced to focus upon the present moment. The resulting disorientation simply shakes current beliefs and dislodges set frameworks. The hypnotist, or witch doctor, or therapist, then immediately inserts the beliefs he thinks the subject needs.

Quite without the context of formal hypnosis, however, the same issues apply. With the greatest understanding and compassion, let me mention that Western medicine is in its way one of the most uncivilized hypnotic devices. The most educated Western doctors will look with utter dismay and horror at the thought of a chicken being sacrificed in a primitive witch doctor’s hut, and yet will consider it quite scientific and inevitable that a woman sacrifice two breasts to cancer. The doctors will simply see no other way out, and unfortunately neither will the patient.

In your time, medical men, again with great superiority, look at primitive cultures and harshly judge the villagers they think are held in the sway of witch doctors or voodooism; and yet through advertisement and organization, your doctors impress upon each individual in your culture that you must have a physical examination every six months or you will get cancer; that you must have medical insurance because you will become ill.

[...] In some other civilizations, and particularly in the past as you think of it, witch doctors operated within a context of nature accepted by all. The witch doctor, while initiating natural forces on behalf of his patient, who seemed momentarily unable to do so, was then returning the patient to the source of himself and reviving his own buried sense of power. [...]

The voodoo and the healer, the witch doctor and the priest, are all held in honor, yet are also looked upon with a certain terror because of the power and knowledge involved. [...]

“Witches” were not considered insane, for example, or deranged, for their psychological beliefs fit in only too well with those of the general populace. [...]

[...] You became known as a witch doctor, only that was not the term then. [...]

[...] The priestess, the mother, the young witch, the wife, and the old wise woman — these general types are archetypes, simply because they are “root elements” representing, symbolically, the various kinds of so-called female qualities and the various kinds of female lives that have been lived by males.

[...] Man’s pursuit of the good, to some extent now, fathered the Inquisition and the Salem witch hunts. [...]

[...] Also, Joan of Arc has figured rather prominently in her life; in school for instance she was called Joan of Arc, witch, etc.)

[...] He has gone ahead despite, in this case, your negative interpretation, and seen himself under certain conditions traveling in a trailer, writing, granted, but in front of strangers in a bathing suit or shorts, and he does not want to look like a bony witch. [...]

The old witch doctors operated within the surroundings of nature, utilizing its great healing ability, directing its practical and symbolic qualities in a creative fashion.

It’s interesting to note, also, that in medieval Europe larger amounts of those extracts were used as hallucinogens by witches and the members of various other cults.

[...] Then she really blushed and told us that she’d always been terrified of fire, and that her nickname in high school had been Joan of Arc or The Witch.