Homer was a retired engineer who suffered from metastatic prostate cancer. He had come for treatment to Lewis Mehl-Madrona, a physician in Berkeley, California, with Stanford medical credentials. Homer was willing to try anything that might work, and Mehl-Madrona, who is part Cherokee Indian, had already been using hypnosis as a form of alternative healing. Then, with Homer's interest and consent, he decided to try something more: he introduced Homer to an Arikara-Hidatsa medicine woman, named Marilyn Youngbird, from Santa Cruz. The three of them, along with Homer's daughter, performed a Lakota Sioux sweat lodge ceremony, with Youngbird leading and Mehl-Madrona acting as fire keeper. But if the ceremony echoed the Lakota, it was also decisively modified. The lodge included a Navajo song, and Homer himself, the reason for the ceremony, was not Native American at all. According to Mehl-Madrona's written account, the Stanford-educated physician there beheld a vision of White Buffalo Calf Woman, the sacred figure who had given the Lakota people the gift of their sacred pipe and the seven ceremonies-including the sweat lodge ceremony-that accompanied it. But spliced into the traditional sacred world of the Lakota, in Mehl-Madrona's vision, were elements that allusively suggested the different world of Western science.

Mehl-Madrona wrote that he saw White Buffalo Calf Woman's acceptance of Homer and compassion for the patient. And then he added: "I watched as she entered his skull and began to rearrange the electrical patterns of his brain. She allowed me to see how she perceived his brain waves-to her they were colorful patterns of electromagnetic energy. She straightened and adjusted the waves as a weaver might untangle strands of yarn on a loom. His fear dissipated; it had been removed and realigned. 'I'm teaching him to love himself,' White Buffalo Calf Woman told me… . In a state of heightened awareness, I was given to understand how electromagnetic patterns create all the forms of the body."¹ Homer got well, recounted Mehl-Madrona. In the ritual that he was convinced had healed his patient-and in the account Mehl-Madrona gave of it-different traditions and outlooks had come together to create an alternative inner world for catalyzing change in a disease condition. In both the ritual and the account, the combining of Indian cultures-Cherokee, Arikara, Hidatsa, Navajo, Lakota-seemed an encoded sign, a piece of cultural shorthand, for a more remarkable combination. Here was a Stanford MD tending a fire for an Indian medicine woman, and here was a vision of a traditional Lakota sacred figure teaching about brain waves and electromagnetic energy patterns. The account of Homer's healing signaled not only alternative medicine succeeding where rationalist and unreconstructed Western doctors could not tread. It also told of a particular model for healing that subsumed diverse cultural practices under its aegis and casually, almost off-handedly, organized them. The organization was imparted by the shape of the ritual. It was also imparted by the complex message the ritual conveyed, with its evocations of the traditional numinous figure cutting through and decisively changing a disease situation; of the Western scientific concept of electromagnetism; of the evanescent spiritual power called "love"; and of the female and domestic skills of the weaver woman. Blended securely into one another, these individual aspects of Mehl-Madrona's vision exemplify what many in the alternative healing world have come to call energy medicine.

In a classic essay on yet another Native American culture-the Cochiti, a Pueblo people of the Southwest-J. Robin Fox many years ago offered a definitive anthropological assessment of then-recent thinking regarding disease and cure. "The sociocultural system of which the individual is a member provides the stresses that cause the illness; the medium of expression of the illness; a theory of disease (spirit possession. soul loss, witchcraft, or attack of gods, ghosts, or germs); the basis for mobilization of help for the patient; a cure; and, in varying degrees, insurance that the cure will be permanent, that is, that there will be no relapse."² A culture, he was declaring, invents the disease and gives the cure. And although his statement was couched in terms of mostly tribal cultures like the Cochiti, Fox had managed to suggest the far-reaching implications of his axiom by (almost as an afterthought) incorporating "germs" into his list of culturally constructed causes of disease. As for the Cochiti, he was saying, so for late moderns. More than several decades later, under the umbrella of meaning created by contemporary mainstream American culture and the scientific outlook of the West in general, scientific researchers and physicians name, explain, and supply the means to cure illness. They do so with presumed confidence that conventional wisdom will support their interpretation-indeed, that most will consider their cultural work not an interpretation at all but the way things fundamentally are; in other words, the truth.

For much of the twentieth century, that assurance went mostly unchallenged, and doctors functioned at the core of a common culture that acknowledged and supported their efforts. As the century began to wind down, however, some aspects of conventional medical authority were showing signs of erosion. Mehl-Madrona's nighttime ritual for his patient is dramatic and a far cry from the sterile accoutrements of a modern hospital. But it is also no longer singular. Major medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine have noted, with varying responses, the growth of alternative medicine.³ Meanwhile, the Office of Alternative Medicine, begun at the behest of Congress in 1991 at the National Institutes of Health, has already seen its budget tripled and its status changed. As the independent National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, it now possesses an autonomous budget authority that it did not have before. Further estimates of the number of Americans who use alternative medicine and do not tell their orthodox physicians that they do so, run high.

What does such a scenario do for a model of illness and cure? How does it impinge on the veracity claims of any one mode of healing, however culturally ensconced it may have been-and to a considerable extent may still be? What are the cultural forces that affect a fin de siècle world of the diseased and discontented, in which the old order finds itself under pressure, with its authority subtly-and perhaps not so subtly-eroding? And what specific cultural forms and practices count as the energy medicine that, I suggest, has emerged as leading challenger to the orthodox medical model?

One way to begin to answer these questions is to turn to cultural and critical studies and, especially, to their portrayals of what have been described as modern and postmodern ways of thinking and acting. Indeed, it was as early as the 1960s, according to historian of religions Robert J. Ellwood, that "American religion, rather dramatically and on a large scale, made the wrenching transit from modern to postmodern modes of spiritual existence."⁴ In this reading, modernism is understood to be characterized by the prominence of metanarratives; that is, large and encompassing stories, or master stories, if you will. These master stories are seen as carrying power to frame and organize reality and to suggest major ways of being and acting-in other words, major cultural practices-related to their basic ideas. What is the content of these comprehensive narratives? The master stories emphasize increasing human freedom through scientific progress. They celebrate a unity of knowledge that can be rationally abstracted from experience and technologically implemented. Within them, the vision of the unity of all knowledge becomes, in philosophical terms, universalism; and, therefore, these master stories render universalism a key value. Moreover, because universalism is a key value, the political life worth living, even with the rhetoric of human freedom predominating, is conceived to unfold within a body politic that is tight, dense, and singular-in other words, united. So political states are understood as large and unitary, requiring the strong buttress of military might to keep them that way. In seeming echo, for the body individual within the body politic the metanarratives echo psychologies of the self that promote the single, unified ego, bent on pursuing the social roles and tasks that the individual self organizes, orchestrates, and dominates with its own master story. Meanwhile, educational theory and practice are likewise predicated on a universal ideal for public learning-one that, when applied in medical realms, leads in distinct and identifiably unifying directions. Against this backdrop, then, conventional American health care practices can be seen to replicate universalizing, rationalistic, and scientific-technological themes.⁵

By contrast, for the postmodern world, metanarratives, or master stories, are suspect; and-as Ellwood argues in summary of cultural analysts such as Jean-François Lyotard- incredulity dominates. Postmodern thinking chisels away at ideas about a unified self and a unified world. Theories of chaos as representative of the basic nature of all things preclude convictions about a consistent logical structure for all knowledge; thus, ideas about "objective" knowledge become alien and unsustainable. Progress is suspect. Faith in the saving power of an overarching technology yields to concerns about nature-a nature that is perceived, especially, as local or situated in a place. Further, the interconnections between aspects of nature in a given place point to their existence within structures of balance, and "ecology," therefore, becomes a watchword. The new ecological localism pervades the political enterprise, too. Here unitive social ideals dissolve before a pluralizing order that is specific and local, that dwells comfortably with fragmentation and accepts a diminished sense of common identity and goals. Skepticism and relativity-that is, the relatedness of all forms in an extended ecological model-become convincing habits of thought. Finally, and most significant here, postmodern thinking is said to have implications for medicine. In a postmodern setting, understandings of disease and cure are correspondingly fragmented. No one diagnosis can culturally prevail; no one healing method can be arbiter for all others.⁶

So far postmodern theory. If, for the sake of argument, we accept the analysis that our times-even more trenchantly than the 1960s-show signs of a significant move away from modernism and toward postmodernism, at first glance we have at hand an historical way to explain the rise and prevalence of alternative healing practices in the contemporary United States. In other words, alternative medicine becomes a spin-off of postmodernism, as Ellwood's analysis of postmodern thought summarizes-a repetition on one cultural register of the postmodern mentality. But the analysis, with its identification of a postmodern suspicion of metanarratives or master stories, contains no way to identify or engage what I argue here is an emerging master story grounding a series of seemingly disparate health-care practices in the nation today. In short, whatever the postmodern condition may mean on some other cultural registers and whatever the cultural pluralism of the present-day United States, a large part of the alternative healing work of the times is carried forward under the banner of a more or less common vision. This common vision, in fact, resonates in one way with the older modernist model. And this vision-with its postmodern instincts and yet quasi-modernist unities-is what many have come to call energy medicine.

In what follows, I locate some of the commonalities for energy medicine, point to their cultural sources, and survey some of the practical forms in which the vision is acted out. What I suggest in all of this is a surface pluralism regarding alternative practices but a deeper core of connection, connectedness that argues for the persistence of the modern within the postmodern, at least in the world of alternative healing. And what I suggest, too, is a new and more complex application of what J. Robin Fox argued in 1964. The postmodern condition of our time, even as it trails a modernist past, shapes perceptions about the stresses that create diseases, the ways diseases should be diagnosed, and the treatments that should be employed for them. It is no wonder then that, as numbers of Americans gravitate in postmodern directions, they find the old medical authorities less convincing and their health-care futures open to new, less entrenched voices, visions, and practices. And it is no wonder, too, with the still-living modernist past, that at the same time they seek the older comfort of a unified theoretical vision, however unselfconsciously grasped or held.

Forms of energy medicine that are noticeable in America today range from sophisticated to simpler modalities, from imported traditions with long and complex histories to entrepreneurial and vernacular American renditions. As this essay will argue, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) counts as energy medicine, and so does Indian Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. So, too, do other physical practices that come from Asian cultures. Native American practices and metaphysical New Age ones, nineteenth-century legacies of Euro-American provenance, practices descriptively labeled as "prayer," and any number of other combinative practices all express the metanarrative that is basic to energy medicine. I explore these forms more extensively later, linking all of them to the unifying master story that lingers in their postmodern multiplicity.

First, what is the master story, and what do the different forms of energy medicine have in common? Basic to all of them is a strategic positioning between science and spirituality. Consider, if you will, the metaphor of energy that names this series of practices. For all the postmodern suspicion of high technology among alternative practitioners, energy is an extraordinarily plastic term that encompasses science and technology-as in atomic energy or the energy emitted by a coal-fired furnace. It also, with its Janus face, looks toward religious worlds, which in many cultures evoke spirit and divinity by speaking in the language of power: the power of God or the Gods, the energy of Spirit or the divine. Nor is this strategic positioning, with its double vision, a particularly new tack for advocates of alternative medicine. Proponents of older Euro-American versions in the nineteenth century positioned themselves to include various versions of scientific opinion even as they played these out in terms of liberal and eclectic theologies, shaped by religious nonspecialists outside of the traditions and churches. For Americans in the nineteenth century, the science in question rested on theories of the ether. For our own twenty-first century version, as for most of the twentieth, the preferred science for alternative healers in the energy mode is quantum physics. Here the energy metaphor attracts advocates because it trades on simple lay explanations for complicated and highly esteemed physical theories, explanations that avoid conflicting interpretations within the field of physics and point unswervingly instead to the "light" of the new physics. This is the light that has been said to behave, since the time of Max Planck's black-box experiments in 1895, sometimes as particle and sometimes as wave.⁷

For proponents of energy medicine, as a form of healing that looks both toward science and spirit, the dual appearances of light are good news indeed. Metaphorically speaking, light, because it behaves like a particle, can be identified with what is solid-like matter; at the same time, because it also behaves like a wave, it can be seen as evanescent and insubstantial-like energy and spirit. Although I have simplified a great deal in making these equations (and, for sophisticated professionals and scientists within the alternative community, surely oversimplified) the bottom line here is that in the domain of energy medicine we come to a cultural world of poetry (the metaphorical master story) and practice (the healing modalities). We arrive in a place in which the assumption of scientific language becomes what literary critic Kenneth Burke once called a "strategy for encompassing a situation."⁸ To put this another way, from the perspective of this essay, which explores a master story and, thus, the construction of meaning through language and metaphor, truth and falsity are less appropriate terms for making historical sense of what is going on than taking notice of a self-conscious rhetoric and its instrumental gains. Looked at rhetorically, then, from within the world of energy medicine (in other words, from the point of view of its practitioners), the science that slips away into energy and spirit possesses monumental advantages over the scientific materialism that supports conventional Western medicine. This "new" science enables a unified field vision that, paradoxically, takes into account the fragmentation so often ascribed to the postmodern condition even as it decisively modifies it. For the cosmology underlying energy medicine is in the end monistic; it is unifying and universalistic. This is so even if proponents, from their own varying perspectives, argue about the accuracy of electromagnetic models compared with other models to explain how energy operates to heal.⁹ And it is so however they configure and chart the subtle energies they seek to understand. It is therefore most important here to articulate the major lines of thinking that distinguish the overall vision of energy medicine from orthodox Western medical practice.

In this context, perhaps the clearest statement of what it is that provides the ballast for energy medicine comes from scientific thinker and theoretical physicist David Bohm. His words and ideas regarding an "implicate order" are well nigh universally quoted in the world of alternative healing, and they need to be noticed for the sake of challenging a postmodern reading that misses its unifying master story. Bohm has aimed to advance a "new notion of order," one "appropriate to a universe of unbroken wholeness." "This," he writes, "is the implicate or enfolded order." Bohm's terminology is new language for an old perception common to both Western and Eastern mystics and to a series of traditional religious narratives such as the creation narrative in the biblical book of Genesis. In brief, Bohm posits a ground of being that, while not itself visible, brings things visible into existence. "In the enfolded order," observes Bohm, "space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order." Then he goes on to make a distinction that is as crucial for his theory: "These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the explicate or unfolded order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders."¹⁰

In keeping with Western religious thought, the explicate order becomes the created world as we know it. And, significantly, if we substitute "unmanifest" for "implicate" or "uncreated" and "manifest" for "explicate" or "created," we enter metaphorical religious worlds comfortably inhabited for centuries by Chinese Taoists and Indian yogis, as other Asians inclined toward mysticism. In other words, the manifestations of light and other natural substances resonate suggestively with traditional views that both Western and Eastern religious traditions have, from their different cultural stations, advanced. Thus, the other (spiritual) face of energy medicine nudges us toward the religious sources for the combinative alternative healing practices of the present.

Asian input into energy medicine is obvious, and so is its version of the unifying master story. From the early 1970s, when, after the much-publicized presidential trip to China, the political climate in Richard Nixon's America brought new rapprochement with the mainland Chinese, reports of acupuncture began to surface in the American press. Anecdotes of extended surgeries performed with stunning success and without anesthesia were reported in the media. Other reports of the skills and successes of Chinese medicine also began to gain the public ear and eye. Soon a trickle of Western students was visiting China to learn what they could about what was being called Traditional Chinese Medicine, which included not only acupuncture but also a series of diagnostic models and other healing practices that embodied the metanarratives. Schools of acupuncture that taught theories of energy transformation, as well as such practices as traditional pulse diagnosis, moxibustion, and herbology, began to credential students in the United States. These schools were aided by the change in the United States immigration law in 1965, which abolished the old European-leaning quota system of 1924 for another that distributed quotas in ways more supportive of Asian entry. Because the 1965 law favored professionals and their families, health-care specialists made up significant numbers of the new immigrants, and they proved to be articulate purveyors of the Chinese metanarrative of energy and its transformations.

Accounts of the mysterious chi or qi that pervaded the conceptual frame of Chinese medicine began to be available. Qi was something like, but not quite, a vital energy that traveled mysterious bodily pathways called meridians, and major body organs resided in pairs along the meridian pathways. When an organ malfunctioned, blood was likely involved, but so was spirit and also qi. "Chinese thought does not distinguish between matter and energy," Ted J. Kaptchuk wrote in what is perhaps the best-known popularization for Americans of Traditional Chinese Medicine. "But," he continued, "we can perhaps think of Qi as matter on the verge of becoming energy, or energy at the point of materializing." Still, traditional Chinese practitioners did not think of qi in itself; rather, working practically to treat sick people, they referred to it in functional terms.¹¹ Meanwhile, Western physician David Eisenberg, the first medical exchange student to the People's Republic of China, recounted the description of qi he received from one Chinese mentor: "Qi means that which differentiates life from death, animate from inanimate. To live is to have Qi in every part of your body. To die is to be a body without Qi. For health to be maintained, there must be a balance of Qi, neither too much nor too little."¹²

If the vitalism was not quite Western, it was an energy reading that Americans could understand. More than that, as key health-related Chinese martial arts and related disciplines spread in the United States in the wake of the American-Chinese thaw, so did experiential reports of qi. Both Taijiquan (t'ai chi) and Qigong have been predicated on empirical encounters with a qi that practitioners can feel. Experienced as a tingling sensation in hands and feet and traveling up the spine, or as feelings of heat in the t'an-tien (the region two to three inches below the navel and a central point in Chinese philosophical and medical thought) or elsewhere, for these practitioners qi brings its own intrinsic rewards. Energy "baths," feeling "charged" and focused, getting "high" on natural energy-these are a good part of why practitioners say they keep to their discipline. In so doing, once again they live out a story line that posits a unifying energy linking them to cosmic realities and also, from a social perspective, to a series of other practitioners of alternative healing forms.

Nor has East Asia been alone in offering means for physically based experiences of energy to Americans. As South Asian forms of yoga began to proliferate from the 1960s (again supported by the changed immigration law that brought increasing numbers of Asian spiritual teachers to the United States) Chinese qi met Indian prana, sometimes translated from the classical Sanskrit as "breath" or "wind." In hatha yoga systems, it is incorporated as pranayama, or disciplines for breathing and breath control that precede or accompany meditation and that are, likewise, considered a complement to the physical 'asanas or yogic postures. Like the cultivation of qi, the cultivation of prana brings what practitioners say are changes in energy states. Either directly in pranayama or indirectly through a sequence of 'asanas, the outcomes of yogic practice to which practitioners attest advance a master story that we have seen before. As for the Chinese systems, the rewards of yogic practice are felt to be intrinsic, and they concern the perceived transformation of energy.¹³

More than that, South Asian physical maps of the body, as presented in classic Ayurvedic (literally, "knowledge of [long] life") medicine and in spiritual literature are predicated on the familiar master narrative, telling of major centers of energy transference from inside to outside the body and vice versa. These have been called the chakras, with seven major ones usually represented but many other minor ones identified as well. The charkas gained renewed attention through the new presence of a professional class of South Asian Indians in the U.S. from the 1960s, but they had enjoyed a minority Western representation much earlier through the presence of theosophy. Picking up on South Asian literature but also on European reflections on it, as in the thought of Rudolf Steiner and others, C. W. Leadbeater, a charismatic British theosophist with an American following, published his small but visionary book The Chakras in 1927. "The chakras or force-centres are points of connection at which energy flows from one vehicle or body of a man to another," wrote Leadbeater. "Anyone who possesses a slight degree of clairvoyance may easily see them in the etheric double, where they show themselves as saucer-like depressions or vortices in its surface."¹⁴

Thus, as Ayurvedic medicine grew increasingly popular in the U.S. in the 1990s, it encountered a residual tradition in which the chakras were already real and known, and in which they had been subsumed into an esoteric culture and world. Moreover, the erstwhile life of the chakras in an earlier America was only a hint of what was abroad in the land. For Asian energy systems entered an America in which a homegrown metaphysical tradition inherited from the nineteenth century and, in its sources, much earlier, had been cultivating a master story of energy that meshed well with Asian ideas. American spiritualism and theosophy, and even New Thought and Christian Science, all fostered views of reality in which the material world was part of a monistic total world-substance that was permeated by energy and spirit. Matter was malleable to Mind-could be shaped and changed by it-because, as in Bohm's implicate and explicate order, it was a manifestation of that which was not manifest and yet possessed the ultimate key to the universe and its materialization. The news was that spirit shaped matter and resided within it, that humans could tap the energies that ran the cosmos, and that there were simple, easy methods to do so. Often expressed in terms of the ancient theory of correspondence-"as above, so below"-and ideas about macrocosm and microcosm or similar, the metaphysical systems provided a cultural residuum from which newly arrived Asian teachers could draw and to which they could connect in explaining their views to Americans.¹⁵ In short, a common and unifying metanarrative was being recognized and shared.

A popularized new physics, an Asian presence, and an American metaphysical tradition had come together. They were joined, moreover, by other cultural sources. One that became ever more prominent was a combinative Native American teaching that mixed various tribal traditions in a pan-Indian commonality. Native Americans, over the years, became skilled in the use of native plants, and their traditional pharmacopeia has been large and sophisticated, including even oral contraceptives that suppress ovulation for women.¹⁶ Indeed, according to Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, in 1975 the Pharmacopeia of the United States of America and the National Formulary together listed some 220 American Indian pharmacopeial substances.¹⁷ What distinguishes the Indian use of these substances from their Western equivalents (or, in many cases, derivatives) is a Native American conceptualization of energy that replicates, from its own perspective, the familiar master story belying postmodern fragmentation in alternative healing. Here herbs and plants are seen as carriers of a pervading and life-giving energy, transmitting vital essences that an ailing person needs. Beyond that, typically herbal remedies have been administered in ceremonial contexts or have been gathered and prayed over in such contexts. Thus, an element of meditative deliberateness and focus regarding their composition and use makes them less secular than sacred. They become but one element in a medicine person's spiritual and energetic healing repertoire.

In these energy terms, the crown of that repertoire was and is shamanistic. Native American healing ceremonies from any number of tribal traditions frequently rely, in the context of family and community support, on the intervention of a medicine person to heal a disease-ridden member. Navajo healing is probably the most well-known case in point. The lengthy ceremonial chants of the Navajo, some sixty or more even in the late 1970s, have lasted two, three, five, or nine nights, an extensive period in which the patient becomes, literally, one sung over, and the healer, a hatali or singer, uses sometimes several hundred songs. At their center are the Holy People of the Navajo, with the songs recounting how a hero from among the Dineh, or people (Navajo), left family and friends for a series of adventures among the sacred ones. Within these sung accounts, the chant hero violated different boundaries the Holy People imposed, acquired knowledge of their ceremonies, and brought the new and saving knowledge back to the Navajo family left behind. The healing "sings" of the present-day Navajo recount these sacred tales of transgression and knowledge in a ceremonial setting in which, through sand painting, song, and other ritual instruments, the patient identifies fully with the chant hero and, it is hoped, absorbs an energy that effects the cure.¹⁸

Clearly, Native Americans and their traditional healing ways appeal to other Americans for a variety of reasons. It is easy to suspect that the romance of otherness seems to promise access to secret and privileged paths to healing, unknown or ignored by the Western mainstream. The natural and low-technology ambience of native healing surely offers respite from a high-technology world that can be sterile and alienating for numbers of Americans, putting a human face on healing and at the same time imbuing it with an aura of sacredness missing in Western medicine. When drugs and machines fail, there are the gods, and the gods seem to dwell in natural settings and among nature people. Meanwhile, as studies of native healing rituals pervasively suggest, American Indian healing has embodied an astute awareness of the emotional dynamics that can contribute to physical disease and, through ritual, has worked to address these issues. In one example from the work of Mehl-Madrona, a medicine person, portrayed with clairvoyant powers heightened by the energy of ritual, prompted a family member to confess the incest violation of his niece that triggered her disease.¹⁹

Americans raised on the Human Potential movement of the 1960s and in the generally psychologized culture of our times are attracted to ritual events such as these. Moreover, the contemporary New Age movement, the most recent manifestation of American metaphysical religion, despite the condemnations of a number of prominent Native American academics, has borrowed unabashedly from Native American sources for its own spirituality. Heavily dominated by themes of healing, the New Age movement has made combinativeness its major motif; and its combinativeness has worked, above all, to mediate forms of energy healing. From American Indian sweat lodges to avant-garde versions of psychotherapy and backyard species of magic, New Agers have explored and broadcast a variety of energy healing modalities. In so doing, once again they have carried forward the common master story of energy medicine. Cultural interpreters may claim that New Agers are postmodern, but their unifying perspective echoes, in fact, an older cultural world.

This is not, purely and simply, to equate energy healing with the New Age. To be sure, there is copious overlap, but it would obscure the broad parameters and the inclusiveness of energy medicine in major ways to subsume it uncritically under a New Age banner. However much the New Age movement has advanced alternative themes, energy medicine predates the New Age by nearly a century and a half, and healing modalities introduced in this country in the nineteenth century continue to function at the center of the alternative tradition. Looking at these can initiate a brief review of what, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, counts as American energy medicine. It can also point, unmistakably, to the modern as distinguished from postmodern, sources of the master narrative this essay explores, showing its age and ancestry.

As clear an articulation as can be found for energy medicine comes with the early nineteenth-century introduction of homeopathy into the United States. In the decades following the German publication, in 1810, of Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of the Art of Healing, homeopathic concepts and cures were distilled for the American public. Operating on the basis of two major axioms-the law of similars (that "like" cures "like") and the law of infinitesimals (that the more dilute the substance the greater its healing potential)-homeopathy was, and still is, energy medicine par excellence. Homeopaths say that, in the higher dilutions (or "potencies"), not even a molecule of the original medicinal substance remains: homeopathic opium contains no opium; homeopathic natrum muriaticum holds no chloride of sodium. Homeopaths also tell that the substance that would provoke symptoms of a disease condition in a well person is the very substance to use to treat the same disease in one who is sick. Their "provings," they say, point to a history of positive results; but they acknowledge that homeopathic theory lags behind. Still, homeopaths talk about the "vital force" of the body, about the body's electromagnetic fields, about the electromagnetic "signature" left in an opium remedy with no "real" opium remaining in it, and about the interaction of remedy and body so that the electromagnetic field of opium brings its subtle effects to bear on the electromagnetic field of the body. In such explanations, operating almost on a "spiritual" vaccine principle, the energy of the remedy pushes the patient gently in the direction of the disease to elicit from her or him, if successful, a larger swing back away from it and toward wellness and health. In other words, an energy is seen as prompting a corresponding energy change in an ailing person. The disease began in the energy field, homeopaths say. Changing the energy field can stimulate a transformation of the disease condition.²⁰

It is not difficult to see the family resemblances here between homeopathic notions of "vital force" and Asian notions like qi and prana. And so it is not difficult to see the common master story in operation-not in the nineteenth century through historical continuities and connections, surely, but through a basic similarity in ideas about sickness, healing, and how healing can be effected. As important, in the "field" in which homeopathy operates in the early twenty-first century, Americans who embrace homeopathy have, more likely than not, heard of qi and prana. They know the master narrative implicitly.

Homeopathy, however, was not the only nineteenth-century arrival from abroad. There was also, as significantly, magnetic medicine. Called alternately mesmerism or animal magnetism, Franz Anton Mesmer's healing system was publicized in the United States largely through popular lecturers and visitors from abroad, with plenteous help from the newspapers of the day. The Austrian physician, who had spent much of his professional life in France, from the first taught the existence of magnetic tides that permeated everything, so that nowhere was there empty space. In this early form of the metanarrative that pervades energy medicine, the "tides," when flowing freely through an animal (i.e., human) body, were said to guarantee health; their interruption or blockage, by contrast, forewarned illness. For Mesmer, mineral magnetism could help to free the blocked energy, but he eventually came to use the animal magnetism of a human healer.²¹

"Magnetic doctors," as they were called, followed in his footsteps, in this country beginning to practice in a largely unlicensed nineteenth-century situation. From among them came the later founders of osteopathy and chiropractic, Andrew Taylor Still and D. D. Palmer, respectively. And from among them, too, came Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, whose mental healing through "Christian" science provided therapies and theoretical rationales for the patient-students who later created New Thought and Christian Science.²² In all these cases, the controlling master story appeared, shaped by the rationale and method of each healer, again and again.

Significantly, the manipulation of the bones in osteopathy and of the spine in chiropractic tilted both healing methods toward science. Yet both Still and Palmer (as, in the present, many practitioners in their tradition) considered nature the true healer and conceived their role to be one of unblocking obstructions so that nature (or, as Palmer called it, "Innate") could take over and have its way.²³ Meanwhile, the mentalistic cures advanced by New Thought and Christian Science rendered them strong examples of the American metaphysical tradition and, so, even more clearly motivated by religious concerns. Proponents of energy medicine, then as now, were straddling a line between science and spirit. In so doing, they were articulating the unitive perspective that, in narrative form, we have repeatedly seen undergirding their medicine and, from one point of view, disrupting its postmodernism. And while osteopaths especially, and even chiropractors, eventually moved in more conventional worlds, their governing metaphors of obstruction and freedom, inherited from the older magnetic medicine, became pervasive for a spiritualizing energy medicine. Energy, the mysterious life quality of heaven and earth, was blocked in the sick and had to be freed; alternative-energy healers agreed on that. Only the means by which healers did so became different.

In present-day healing, many of these ideas are alive and well. Acupuncture and the Chinese health-related "gymnast" systems of qi manipulation flourish, and so do various systems of hatha yoga. Practitioners of related disciplinary forms for example, Taoist meditation and kundalini yoga, stress, respectively, the production and direction of qi or the awakening of the kundalini energy at the base of the spine to make it available for spiritual and physical well-being. Traditional Native American healing continues to grow in the esteem of other Americans, as Mehl-Madrona's work attests. Advocates of spiritualism, theosophy, New Thought, and Christian Science still continue to teach and practice the permeability of the body before spiritual and mental forces. Professionals in osteopathy, especially in its newer outgrowths in the cranial-sacral therapies of William G. Sutherland and John Upledger, and in chiropractic, with the many innovations that characterize that modality today, practice forms of energy medicine. All do so under the aegis of a controlling master narrative about the high significance of energy and its free flow for health and well-being in physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual terms.

They are joined, however, by other modalities. By 1990, the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) had been launched as a professional organization. Its mission is "to bridge current and emerging energy-related disciplines in medical science and practice, and to create a synthesis in which a science of consciousness is supported by a new mind/body paradigm." The society sponsors annual conferences that bring conventionally credentialed health care practitioners together with a large assortment of alternative professionals, self-taught healers, academics, students, and lay persons. Two periodicals, the practice-oriented quarterly Bridges and the peer-reviewed research journal Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, are also published. In a 1998 collection of audiotapes from conference lectures and speeches, the dozen presentations ran the gamut from prayer and shamanic healing to mysticism, medical intuition, and electromagnetic research.²⁴

In a prominent example of what counts as energy medicine, physician Larry Dossey, in a series of works that announce the power of nonlocal or universal (and, for many, divine)-mind, has pointed to the capacities of old-fashioned prayer. Keenly interested in "prayer research," he has reported the results of a series of science-oriented studies (i.e., following scientific protocols for double?blind experiments and the like). These studies have been specifically constructed to document the healing effects of prayer. "'Prayer-researchers' have surfaced in medicine today," he announces. "These scientist clinicians offer us some of the most remarkable evidence that the mind may indeed be nonlocal and can act on matter in decisive ways-ways that may make the difference between life and death for the sick person."²⁵ Meanwhile, the energetics of food, already part of Chinese medicine, has been cultivated by the Japanese-inspired macrobiotic movement since the late 1960s. Here all foods are classified according to yin and yang energies, in a form of practical Taoism that finds both physical and spiritual balance (and so good health) attendant on eating "centered" and "centering" food, food with a modicum of yin and yang qualities and cooked in ways that complement the original substances. Forms of palm healing, including Therapeutic Touch and Reiki, abound, and they carry spiritualizing legacies: theosophy in the case of Therapeutic Touch, Japanese and related concepts of "universal life-force energy" in the case of Reiki. Although in practice, in these forms, there is often contact between therapist and client/patient, most practitioners agree that no physical contact is necessary and that the therapist's hand may be a few inches from the client's body, underlining their view that what is being transferred is energy. And despite recent negative publicity for Therapeutic Touch-criticism that itself has been strongly challenged-practitioners and clients alike point to ancient precedents and contemporary results for the practice.²⁷ In all these cases, a surface pluralism belies the inner connectedness of the model; a common metanarrative makes these healers friends and close relatives. The common story also challenges an easy postmodernist reading of what is going on.

Probably the most salient challenge to the easy postmodernism and the clearest example of energy medicine today, however, can be found in auric healing, a practice that takes the logic of palm healing into a form of healing predicated on the existence of further energy fields surrounding and permeating the human body and all living things. Auric healers, sometimes called psychic or spiritual healers, summarize in their theoretical and practical approaches the different worlds that come together in energy medicine. Some of the most prominent auric healers of the present, like Barbara Ann Brennan and Rosalyn Bruyere, bring together graduate training in science with strong metaphysical beliefs, a general background in alternative-healing modalities, and an openness to both Asian and Native American practice and lore. Their focus is ideas and perceptions of the human aura, that energy depicted as a circle of light around the heads of Christ, Mary, and the saints in the stylized portrayals of Western painting and statuary and understood by energy healers in electromagnetic or related terms.

Auric healing echoes, too, the formative nineteenth-century traditions that articulated the metanarrative of energy. In an important example, theosophical teaching from the nineteenth century, with material taken from South Asian and Western esoteric sources, included a doctrine of seven bodies in any human person, from the actual physical body to the highest spiritual body. Helena P. Blavatsky's "septenary constitution of man" has permeated the theosophical world and provided a model for the energy bodies that both Brennan and Bruyere regularly report seeing around the physical bodies of their clients and all humans.²⁸

In their analysis, energy strands are broken, twisted, or in other ways entangled. Chakras, which, as in the theosophical world, have become staples in the master narrative of energy healers, malfunction: they fail to turn in the direction they should; they produce too much or too little energy in ways that distort the smooth and harmonious connection between an existing person and the universal source of all energy (what corresponds to God in a traditional view). An auric healer works to bring order and proper function, always with the idea that human disease begins and ends in the human energy field, that a physical disease is, first, a spiritual one, and that an energy change, which brings spiritual transformation, can also help to heal physical disease.²⁹ The spirituality that Brennan, Bruyere, and similar healers represent in these ideas and practices is surely new and even New Age. But Brennan, Bruyere, and others are important symbols of the wider movement of energy medicine. This is especially because of the way that, like the New Age in general, they combine strands and elements from a catch-all series of sources to tell, for believers and practitioners, a master story that connects individuals to communities to cosmos. In short, the unifying narrative they repeat works to create forms of healing that resonate with their sense of the forces and factors that create disease in our time. Their metanarrative addresses, too, the lifestyles that organize our languages of diagnosis and cure and the resources that can be mobilized to effect them.

The world of meaning and order that these healers have succeeded in creating, often in the midst of catastrophic illnesses that they are asked to treat, seems, as I have argued, a far cry from any analysis of postmodernism that emphasizes its predilections for fracture and fragmentation. We can take a cue, though, from Mehl-Madrona, with whom this essay began. Reflecting on the postmodernity of the present, Mehl-Madrona asserts that "we live in a world without fixed points of view" and goes on to point to a nihilism that he sees as part of the contemporary heritage and situation. For a few, however, argues Mehl-Madrona, the "world without absolute references" becomes an occasion for clear vision. The shaman, he says, ventures to the borders of chaos and comes back with wisdom, a wisdom that can help and heal those who are stuck. Yet at the same time that the shaman traffics with something like postmodernity, Mehl-Madrona acknowledges, he or she lives in a premodern world of traditions and teachings that supply strong faith and direction.³⁰

For Americans entering the twenty-first century in a complex society, the premodern world is mostly vanished. Most energy healers do not have the shaman's tribal traditions to which to return. But, in different ways, all of them have challenged the conventional analysis of the postmodern situation. If, as Robert Ellwood says, alternative medicine is a sign of the end of modernity, it also is a signal of a new and emerging faith that still contains, in its ability to mount and maintain a common master story, some of the unity that moderns apparently saw everywhere. It is a faith that gives comfort to practitioners and their clients alike amidst the seeming chaos of intense and intensifying pluralism, and it signals, too, a pragmatic-and characteristically American-ability to find what seems to work and run with it, given the exigencies of conditions and situations.

NOTES
1. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Coyote Medicine: Lessons from Native American Healing (New York: Simon & Schuster, Fireside Book, 1997), 179.