- Hawaiian Kuehu Treatment -
The Healing Prayer
I. The Literal Translation
1. There the people of Hilo are thatching
2. The roof is completed
3. They trim till the thatch is well-trimmed
4. They scrape the earth to a solid foundation
5. The solid foundation is made. Stroke on stroke is out the umbilical thatch
6. The house is completed, the grass is spread
7. The mats are rolled down
8. The builders are covered with their sleeping-tapes
9. They lie on their pillows, they sleep
10. They awake, arise, go forth
11. They provide the food
12. They fish
13. They eat
14. The eating is over
15. They wash their hands
16. They come forth
II. The Esoteric Sense
1. The thatching of the house is the healing of the sick man, attended by his family. Hilo is the name of the land, but also of the night of the new moon, hence the beginning of the new period, a renewal. Hilo also means to roll together, as the strands of a fish-line, and this symbolizes love of wife and family (which aids the healer), as well as the affliction which is now united with the sufferer, but which the kahuna will 'unroll'.
2. The human house, the body, is 're-thatched'. The white tapa above the patient is the sheltering roof.
3. The pain, the fever, the various evil conditions are 'trimmed away'.
4. The last task is to establish confidence of the patient in his new foothold.
5. As the umbilical thatch (over the doorway) is cut last of all, and tabu is removed and the house is reborn - so the treatment ends and the patient is reborn.
6. As cold damp earth is covered by grass, so is the uncleanness of disease covered over.
7. Mats are laid, visitors are welcome. Likewise, the blessings of life are spread out before the recovered patient; he is presentable once more to all comers.
8. (& 9, 10) The builders are the healers; their task is done, they can rest. Then they awake, rise, go forth.
11. They procure food for the ceremonial feast of the house-entering, of re-entering the house of life, of the body, of restoration to friends. All partake. The eating is over. The patient bathes to wash away all evil. He emerges as a new-born dwelling.
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The above account is furnished as by Max Freedom Long, F.H.F., and is contained in "Hawaiian Kuehu-Treatment" by Theodore Kelsey, Honolulu, 1941 (mimeo., 12pp.) We hope to supplement this, in a later issue of Round Robin, by the account from the same pamphlet of the actual procedure in healing by the Huna methods.
Here, There, and Elsewhere
(Entertaining Variorum Comments of Max Freedom Long)
§§ ... One thing stands out more and more clearly - that the day is past when Illuminists can nibble off a bit of the loaf of psychic phenomena and eat that morsel by itself. We've done that sort of thing for a century of psychic research and have failed to get anything like a full meal. We can't nibble off the topic of telepathy and say that the answer to that is a transference of thought forms, without at the time biting off the crusty problem of telepathic communications which have arrived from polar seas to tell of things which had not happened, and which did not-happen for as long as three days to come.
§§ ... The doughty behaviorists get along fairly well in so far as plausible words are concerned, when they say that all consciousness is a by-product of chemical actions. But when some invisible poltergeist starts throwing stones at a certain house, and at no other in the vicinity, and keeps it up day after day, the absurdity of chemical reaction in invisible nothingness, to produce all the evidence of a conscious entity at work ... Well, swallow the first camel and choke on the second gnat, or else don't be a behaviorist.
§§ ... There was the strange case of the Wyoming rancher who was a spiritualist of parts, and gifted with courage and imagination, if not with luck. He didn't ask his familiar spirits - he told them. They tipped the tables and were increasingly obedient. All went went swimmingly well until one day the rancher took a shovel and dug a few feet of narrow irrigation ditch to show his spirits what he wanted done. He then pushed the shovel into the sod and ordered his spirits to continue digging the ditch. He was a man of will and dogged determination. He continued hour after hour to insist that his orders be obeyed. A neighbor stopped to observe and got a curt explanation. Passing that way a little later, he was interested to see the experimenter going thru digging motions, but without the shovel. Upon closer inspection he discovered that the experimenter had become mad. And he remained mad, recognizing no one, remembering nothing, and never ceasing to go thru digging motions except when falling asleep. - That was a most complicated chemical reaction to produce the consciousness of the mad digger... or shall we leave the behaviorists and join the spiritualists?
§§ ... Your crusade for the rescue of earth-bound, complexed and other wise bewildered spirits is a most valuable and humanitarian activity. Did you know that an electrical shock machine of great power was constructed here in Los Angeles, to drive out obsessing spirits after the methods of Dr. Carl Wickland. It has not been in use because of lack of a good medium, and because no place insulated by sheet iron could be found (to avoid spoiling radio reception for miles around). But this project should be encouraged... Some fine day we may know all about this knotty business of obsessional insanity and multiple personality. Just now it has no visible silver lining; but it is within the range of a lively imagination to envision a day when obsessing propensities may be turned to good use. A number of cases are on record where the obsessing spirit was a great improvement on the one [15] displaced. Just as a matter of speculation, wouldn't it be helpful if Confucius, or Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, and Ascended Master Ballard could be invited to obsess the bodies of a few healthy but dull witted citizens who could be spared without wrecking the country. Perhaps they might evolve between them a system on which their strife entangled followers could agree.
§§ ... It is passing strange to note how many people there are who do do not believe in ghosts but would dearly love to see one. They wouldn't believe it if they saw it, but how they would love to have a look! Fie on us for a foolish and inconsistent generation! In almost no time we will be ghosts ourselves, and continue to ghost and ghost for more years than one likes to contemplate. All it takes these days is five seconds and a slight miscalculation at the intersection.
§§ ... I sometimes laugh to myself then I think of my Rotarian relative who passed over some years ago, and who was hopefully looked up by us thru the family familiar one windy seance night. Our familiar was gone some time, then came back to write angrily that he found the departed all right, but that he could not persuade him to come along to the seance and hold converse with us. He stubbornly insisted that "he didn't believe in ghosts and such foolishness", which for a bright ghost just across and inducted into the heavenly version of Rotary was unexpected to say the least - or was it? He is the second one we have found who was that Way ...§
§§ ... For a long time I have had in mind to root for the project of teaching all the "living and the dead some common language, such as Esperanto... Twenty years ago when I was living in an old house in Honolulu, something would shake my bed and awaken me every night. I tried to talk to the intruder with a little faltering German, a few words of French, and a little poor Hawaiian; I even read a message which a friend transcribed for me into Japanese and Chinese, tho probably no living Oriental would have understood me, but could get no response. Finally I called in a psychic friend, and we sat in a parked car thru a long semi-moonlit evening, watching the house. Eventually she saw a gray man with a beard and a doctor's bag arrive from nothingness and enter the house thru the locked doors. The bed shaking continued in contest form each evening, and invariably I had to admit I was worsted and turn on the light full glare. Not until I moved away was I able to resume sleeping in the dark... Four years later, in New York for a few nights, the bed shaking was resumed, and again in Laguna Beach, fully ten years later... When I go across I intend to look up the old gentleman and see if he can be made to understand the deaf-mute sign talk...
Your article on the absurdity of the cult of secrecy in our circles ... An adult keeps his secret and preserves it inviolate by the logical process of letting no one know that a secret exists -- not by carrying a banner proclaiming secret knowledge ...
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§ (It is common report that there are people on the 'other side' who do not believe that communication with our plane is possible and others who are violently opposed to it - a carry over, usually, of earth opinions. The noted sceptic Frank Podmore is said still to be unconvinced, tho now many years among the departed. Ed. note)
(Quotations in this article are from correspondence and were not designed for publication by Mr. Long).
References
- Kelsey, Theodore. Hawaiian Kuehu-Treatment: An Ancient Method of Curing the Sick, with Interpretation of a Healing Prayer, Also Notes and Technical Section. Honolulu: 1941. Print.