Correspondence

I Read Daniel J. HOY's article on ‘Numinous experiences: frequent or rare?’ in the Journal of January, 1983, with great interest. It has bearing on my research with the Xhosa traditional healers operating in some parts of South Africa. In terms of my observations and experiences his comments on the use and rôle of rituals should be qualified. It seems to me that there can be a basic difference between rituals in Western society and rituals in African society.

He quotes Harding who writes about the ‘claiming’ and ‘subduing’ of numinous experiences in ‘established religions’. He then continues, ‘It can be controlled through rituals … The rituals in religion perform the task of holding numinous experiences in check.’ In such instances numinous feelings will be infrequent and rare experiences. I endorse these observations to some extent and ask myself whether Western man has become afraid of the numinous in everyday life, and that it should only be experienced in the safety of an analytic relationship. This appears to be the case with Jung's approach towards therapy where the activation of archetypes is sought which in turn promote numinous dreams and experiences.

My experience with the rural African people is that it is very much part of the daily living. In addition, the ritual therapeutic procedures of the healers aim at stimulating numinous experiences by their dances, ceremonies and sacrifices. These lead to introversion of libido and getting in touch with their ‘ancestors’, i.e., the images of the unconscious. I found it very moving that pre-literate people were intuitively practising what Jung had come to see as the aim of therapy, i.e., the constant release of numinous experiences.

The healing rituals have to be performed with meticulous attention to detail, but this does not detract from their effectiveness; they manage to combine the image and the affect of the archetype. The rituals are geared to the psychological state of the individual patient—he must be suffi