NORTH AMERICA

Ojibwe/Anishinaabe: Mashkikiiwinini (medicine man), Mashkikiiwininiikwe (medicine woman)
In the Anishinaabe tradition, these healers are not merely herbalists—they are intermediaries between human beings and the plant spirits, animals, ancestors, and elemental forces. The word mashkiki means “medicine,” which itself derives from mashkawizi, meaning “s/he is strong.” A medicine person is therefore someone who channels strength—physical, spiritual, and emotional—to restore balance. They carry bundles of sacred objects, sing healing songs called nagamowin, and may work with the windigo and the manitou in subtle negotiations of power.

Lakota: Wicasa Wakan (“Holy Man”), Pejuta Wacasa (“Medicine Man”)
The Wicasa Wakan are spiritual leaders entrusted with conducting sacred ceremonies such as the Sun Dance and the Vision Quest. They are keepers of the pipe and walkers of the sacred hoop, mediators of the Wakan Tanka—the Great Mystery. Meanwhile, the Pejuta Wacasa work more specifically with physical healing, using pejuta (plant medicines) and dreams for diagnosis. Often, the two roles overlap, because no true healing is merely physical; spirit and body dance in constant interplay.

Huichol/Wixárika: Mara'akame
A Mara'akame is not chosen. They are called, often through visions or illness, and trained through years of pilgrimage and ritual, especially to sacred sites like Wirikuta. They ingest hikuri (peyote) to journey into the mythic realms, seeking the guidance of Kauyumari (the Blue Deer) and other deities. Their songs are offerings to the gods and tools of transformation. They heal not only individuals, but the thread between worlds that sickness tries to sever.

Inuit: Angakok (also spelled Angakkuq)
The Angakok is a dream-walker, a negotiator with the Sea Woman and the spirits beneath the ice. Often initiated through illness or near-death, they enter trance to retrieve lost souls or make offerings to appease offended spirits. Their tools include the qulliq (oil lamp), chants, and the drum, whose heartbeat resounds like the pulse of the land itself. They are not priests but voyagers into the mythic geography of Arctic cosmology.

Diné (Navajo): Hatałii (“singer,” ceremonial healer)
In Diné tradition, the hatałii is less a “medicine man” than a master of cosmic choreography, using chantway ceremonies to restore hózhó—beauty, balance, and right relation between person, community, and Holy People. They memorize vast repertoires of songs, prayers, and sandpainting designs, each sequence calibrated to a specific problem, from ghost sickness to lightning‑struck souls. A hatałii diagnoses not just with observation but with stories, dreams, and divination, discerning which narrative the patient’s life has slipped out of and which ceremony can re‑thread it. During ritual, they sing through the night, paint the ground with colored sands, and guide the patient across symbolic landscapes, so that healing becomes a journey back into the correct myth.

Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy): False Face Society Healer
False Face Society healers work with carved wooden masks whose powerful, asymmetrical faces house living spirit presences; these beings are invited, not owned. Called upon for headaches, chronic pain, and spiritual affliction, the healers perform ceremonies that involve ritual tobacco, blowing, and sweeping to drive away the “disease” entities that cling to a person’s life‑force. The masks are fed with corn mush and tobacco and kept in special places, honoring their autonomy as allies rather than mere tools. To enter the Society is to accept lifelong obligations to the masks and their spirits, and to the ongoing task of keeping the longhouse people in right relation with the unseen powers inhabiting forest, wind, and fire.

Coast Salish (Pacific Northwest): Longhouse Spirit‑dance Healer
Among Coast Salish peoples, certain healers are called and trained through winter spirit‑dance traditions, where song, drum, and masked dance invite powerful helping spirits into the longhouse. These healers may work by extracting intrusive objects or energies from the patient’s body, sometimes using eagle‑bone whistles, rattles, or cedar boughs to shake loose what does not belong. Illness is understood as a broken relationship—perhaps with a guardian spirit neglected, or a taboo unintentionally crossed—so the healer’s job is to renegotiate those bonds. Their winter ceremonies are not private clinic visits so much as communal dramas where the whole village witnesses, sings for, and helps stabilize the returning soul.

Mexican American (U.S. Southwest and borderlands): Sobador / Sobadora
The sobador is a traditional body‑worker whose craft lies at the crossroads of massage, bone‑setting, and spiritual cleansing, treating conditions like empacho (intestinal blockage), twisted muscles, and dislocations. Using oils, poultices, and highly intuitive palpation, they “read” the landscape of the body with their hands, sometimes praying or reciting blessings as they work. Many also recognize spiritual factors—susto (fright‑soul loss), mal de ojo (evil eye), or envy—and may recommend limpias, candles, or visits to a curandera for complementary work. In barrios where biomedicine can be distant or mistrusted, sobadores function as accessible kin‑healers, blending anatomy, folk theology, and inherited touch‑wisdom into one practice.





SOUTH AMERICA

Spanish/Portuguese-speaking regions: Curandero / Curandera
The Curandero / Curandera is both a doctor and a mystic—often practicing syncretic rituals that blend Indigenous knowledge with Catholic imagery. They use limpias (cleansing rituals), prayer, herbal brews, and hueseros (bone-setting) techniques. They may be aided by saints, ancestral spirits, or even animals. In some regions, the curandera specializes in midwifery or emotional healing, embodying the role of a sacred aunt or earth-wise grandmother.

Aymara (Bolivia): Yatiri
The Yatiri are chosen by lightning—literally. To survive a strike or a sudden supernatural illness is to be marked by the achachilas (ancestral mountain spirits). Yatiris perform divinations with coca leaves, speak with apus (spirit-beings of the peaks), and offer mesa rituals to balance energy between the human and divine realms. Their title comes from yatiña, “to know,” but theirs is not book knowledge. It is the wisdom of thunder, wind, and sacrifice.

Waorani (Ecuador): Menye Waempo ("Jaguar Father") and Menye Baada ("Jaguar Mother")
In the language of the Waorani, healers are often associated with the jaguar—wae, the dream predator of the forest, guardian of medicinal power. These figures serve as protectors, diviners, and visionaries. They speak with plant beings, interpret dreams, and use chants imbued with the force of the rainforest. They understand how to traverse the önkopa, the spirit-paths, in order to remove spiritual arrows lodged in the soul.
Mapuche (Chile/Argentina): Machi

The Machi is usually a woman, though men may also take up the role. She is a healer, midwife, diviner, and poet of the sacred. Her main tool is the kultrun, a drum that holds the Mapuche cosmos: the four cardinal directions, the sky and the earth, the human and the spirit. She drinks sacred herbs to enter trance, where she may speak with ancestors or combat wekufes—malignant spirits. To be Machi is to carry the burden and blessing of being a bridge between the living world and the spirit wind.

Shipibo‑Conibo (Peru): Onaya (ayahuasca healer)
Among the Shipibo‑Conibo, the onaya is a plant‑spirit specialist whose apprenticeship involves years of dieta—solitary retreats with strict diets, fasting, and ingestion of “teacher plants” to learn their songs. In ceremony, they drink ayahuasca alongside patients, then navigate visionary space using icaros, medicine songs that call specific plant spirits to cleanse, realign, or protect. Illness is often perceived as dark phlegm, darts, or tangled geometric patterns lodged in the body’s luminous field; the onaya “sees” these forms, sucks them out, and replaces them with luminous designs. Their work is as much about clearing sorcery, envy, and broken promises as it is about treating physical symptoms, weaving patient and community back into a harmonious jungle cosmology.

Kogi (Colombia, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta): Mamo
Kogi mamos are trained from childhood in near‑darkness, learning to “see with the heart” rather than the eyes, in mountain temples that function as wombs of the world. They are caretakers of Aluna, the living thought of the cosmos, and they heal by making pagamentos—offerings of cotton, shells, or thought‑prayers to rivers, peaks, and seas. When a person is ill, the mamo may diagnose which relationship has frayed—perhaps with an ancestor, a watershed, or a forgotten obligation—and prescribe both ritual and ethical repair. Their role stretches far beyond individual care; they are planetary technicians of balance, laboring so that the “younger brothers” (modern societies) do not destroy the heart of the world.

Arhuaco (Colombia): Mamo / Saga
Among the Arhuaco, mamos and sagas (women with comparable spiritual authority in some lineages) act as interpreters of dreams, signs, and the silent teachings of stones and rivers. They practice coca‑leaf divination, reading how the leaves fall on woven cloths to reveal the hidden pattern behind a sickness or conflict. Healing often involves pilgrimages to sacred sites, where offerings of thought, song, and materials re‑inscribe harmony between human beings and the four corners of their mountain universe. The Arhuaco see themselves as older siblings to the rest of humanity, and their healers’ work is to keep that siblinghood from tearing by mending ecological and spiritual wounds at their roots.

Quechua / Amazonian mestizo (Peru, Ecuador): Ayahuasquero / Vegetalista
Ayahuasqueros and vegetalistas are healers whose primary teachers are the plantas maestras—master plants like ayahuasca, tobacco, chiric sanango, or toé. Through nights of dieta and visionary ordeal, they learn each plant’s personality, song, and “signature” in the body, then apply them as tailored prescriptions. Their ceremonies may include blowing tobacco smoke (sopladas) over the patient, whistling or singing icaros into water or perfumed alcohol, and using rattles or bundled leaves (chakapa) to sweep away spiritual detritus. The vegetalista’s task is not just to remove harm but to re‑pattern the patient’s destiny, nudging them back toward a life in rhythm with forest, family, and the river of spirits that surrounds them.

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AFRICA

Yoruba (Nigeria): Babaláwo – “Father of the Mysteries”
A Babaláwo is a high priest of Ifá, the sacred divination system of the Yoruba people. Trained through long apprenticeships, they become custodians of Odu Ifá—the vast oral corpus that contains cosmological stories, moral teachings, and practical guidance. Using sacred palm nuts or cowrie shells cast upon a divining tray (opon Ifá), the Babaláwo interprets messages from Orunmila, the Orisha of wisdom. Their speech is poetry, parable, and prophecy, often accompanied by chants that are incantations of destiny. They are not merely healers—they are engineers of fate, restoring alignment between the individual and the Ayanmo, one’s divine purpose.

Zulu/Southern Africa: Sangoma – Spirit Medium and Seer
The Sangoma is a diviner, dreamer, and spirit-messenger who mediates with the ancestors (amadlozi) on behalf of the living. Their calling often begins with illness or madness. What the West might mislabel as a crisis, the Zulu recognize as a spiritual summons. They undergo an initiation called ukuthwasa, wherein they receive training in ancestral dreamwork, herbal medicine, and bone divination. Their bones (amathambo)—thrown in sacred patterns—tell stories the healer decodes. A Sangoma walks with spirits at her side and is known to sing in voices that are not entirely her own.

Southern Africa (Xhosa, Venda, Sotho, and others): Inyanga – Herbalist and Plant Alchemist
While the Sangoma speaks with spirits, the Inyanga speaks with plants. A master of muthi (medicinal substances), the Inyanga works with bark, root, resin, and river clay, understanding each plant’s voice, signature, and spiritual resonance. Though less concerned with prophecy, the Inyanga is a healer of bodies and boundaries. In times of conflict or illness, families consult both an Inyanga for physical remedies and a Sangoma for spiritual insight. In some traditions, the two paths merge, but at their essence, the Inyanga is a green-magic scientist who reads the forest like scripture.

Dagara (Burkina Faso/Ghana): Kontombili Healer
Though less known outside their homelands, Dagara healers serve as conduits for the Kontombili, elemental nature spirits often associated with water, fertility, and mischief. These spirits are invoked through ritual drumming, chanting, and ecstatic movement. The healer creates a sacred space called a shrine medicine wheel, constructed from the five Dagara elements: water, fire, earth, mineral, and nature. Illness is seen as a symptom of spiritual disconnection, and the Kontombili offer solutions through signs, visions, and “dream dialogues.” Dagara healers are part ritualists, part psychologists, part elemental diplomats.

Tuareg/Berber (North Africa/Sahara): Marabout
Among the Tuareg and Berber peoples, the Marabout is a spiritual leader and healer often associated with Islamic mysticism—but whose roots stretch deeper into pre-Islamic desert traditions. A Marabout may be a Sufi master, a calligrapher of sacred names, or a recluse living near oases, visited for protection talismans and spirit negotiations. Using Quranic verses and ancestral herbal lore, the Marabout works to dispel curses, calm fevers, and shield travelers from malevolent jinn. They are often buried in white-domed tombs revered as pilgrimage sites, where the wind whispers through date palms like memory in prayer.

Igbo (Nigeria): Dibia
Dibia are diviner‑healers whose title encompasses herbalists, seers, and specialists in ritual medicine; many are recognized from youth through birthmarks, dreams, or uncanny sensitivities. They consult oracles—such as afa divination—casting seeds or cowries and interpreting complex patterns to identify the spiritual root of a problem, whether witchcraft, broken taboo, or ancestral offense. Remedies may include concoctions of roots and barks, protective charms, or elaborate sacrifices meant to appease deities and restore equilibrium between visible and invisible communities. Their reputation rests as much on moral insight and social mediation as on technical skill, since a good dibia must know when a “sickness” is actually a family conflict or unspoken grief.

Akan (Ghana): Komfo (priest/medium of the abosom)
The komfo serves as a ritual specialist of the abosom, the deities linked to rivers, rocks, and other natural forces in Akan cosmology. Through possession trance in shrine houses, a komfo allows an abosom to “mount” them, speaking in altered voice and gesture to deliver oracles, diagnoses, and prescriptions. Healing can involve herbal medicines blessed at the shrine, ritual baths in sacred rivers, or offerings that repair damaged relationships between a person, their ntoro (patrilineal spirit), and the land. In this way, the komfo is at once doctor, judge, and diplomat between the human village and the formidable but ultimately life‑sustaining power of the spirits.

Central/Southern Africa (Kongo and related peoples): Nganga
The nganga is a ritual expert whose work centers on minkisi—power objects that house spirits and medicines capable of healing or, if misused, harming. By assembling herbs, earth from graves or crossroads, and symbolic materials in pots or figures, they create focused channels through which spiritual forces can be directed. Clients come for help with illness, legal disputes, infertility, protection from witchcraft, or the need to “cool” a social situation grown too hot. The nganga diagnoses via divination and trance, then prescribes both ritual and practical steps so that the afflicted person’s life may become “cool” again—settled, fertile, and in right proportion.

Ethiopian Highlands (Ethiopian Orthodox context): Däbtära
Däbtära are learned cleric‑healers, often trained as church musicians and scribes, who operate at the edges of formal Ethiopian Orthodoxy. They create amulets and protective scrolls inscribed with prayers, sacred names, and iconic images, believed to ward off demons, the evil eye, and illness. Their healing repertoire includes reciting exorcistic psalms, preparing herbal remedies, and crafting talismans worn on the body or hung in homes. Though sometimes viewed with ambivalence by official clergy, däbtära embody a popular fusion of scripture, magic, and medicine, addressing ailments that parishioners understand as both clinical and spiritual.

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ASIA

Mongolian: Böö (male), Udgan (female)
In the Mongolian steppes, where the sky is vast and the wind speaks in riddles, the Böö and Udgan act as travelers between Tenger (the Sky Spirits) and the Earth. Chosen through sickness, visions, or ancestral lineage, they are trained to enter trance with the beat of the khel khuur (mouth harp) or the shaman's drum. Their clothing is a costume of cosmic symbolism—antlers, mirrors, and iron bells that protect and transform. They fly in soul-flight to other realms, communing with ancestral spirits and elemental beings to diagnose and heal. Theirs is a path of endurance and ecstatic communion.

Korean: Mudang (female), Baksu (male)
The Mudang is a hereditary or initiated shaman, most often a woman, who serves as a mouthpiece for gods, spirits, and ghosts. She performs gut—vivid, theatrical ceremonies blending dance, song, drumming, and possession. Clad in bright hanbok garments, she summons deities with fans and knives, channeling their words through her body in ritual trance. The Mudang is often consulted for exorcisms, blessings, or ancestral appeasement. Even today, in hypermodern Seoul, Mudang ceremonies unfold in back alleys and rooftop shrines—bridging neon-lit skyscrapers and primordial myth.

Japanese: Miko, Ichiko, Reibai
The Miko is a shrine maiden, once a wild spirit-priestess and now often a ritual assistant at Shinto shrines. In ancient times, Ichiko (“shaman child”) would enter possession states to deliver oracles from the kami—the divine forces of nature. Some Reibai function as mediums in contemporary Japan, channeling spirits of the dead or sacred presences. The old Miko danced the kagura, the divine spiral, with bells and sleeves that flowed like rivers, summoning fox spirits, thunder gods, or ancestors for guidance and healing. Though the role has changed, the thread remains: a red ribbon binding woman to divinity.

Tibetan: Lhapa (male), Lhamo (female); also Pau / Paumo
The Lhapa and Lhamo are spirit-mediums of the pre-Buddhist Bon tradition, though some operate within Buddhist lineages. They are vessels for lha (gods or deities) who temporarily inhabit their bodies during ritual. The Pau / Paumo distinction also refers to mediums who work with specific deities. During trance, they may chant, dance, or wield ritual objects like phurbas (spirit daggers) and skull-cups. They diagnose illnesses, banish demons, and retrieve lost souls through what they call lha-lug—the wind-horse power that rides between dimensions. Their sacred speech is sung in thunderous syllables that crack open reality.

Hmong: Txiv Neeb – “Father of the Spirits”
The Txiv Neeb is born, not made—chosen by spirits through illness, dreams, or inherited duty. Once initiated, the healer learns to travel through spirit worlds using chant, trance, and ceremonial tools like spirit horns, altars, and paper-cut effigies. They negotiate with dab neeb, the spirit guides, to restore fractured souls, remove spiritual darts, or heal emotional wounds. The Hmong see illness as spiritual imbalance, and the Txiv Neeb is a cosmic negotiator whose work unfolds in richly layered rituals that resemble theater, opera, and mythic negotiation all at once.

Malay: Bomoh
The Bomoh is a traditional Malay healer, sometimes feared and revered in equal measure. Drawing upon a synthesis of animism, Islam, Hindu-Buddhism, and local lore, the Bomoh uses incantations (mantra), medicinal plants, spirit familiars, and divinatory rites like water bowls or betel leaves. In older days, they were jungle-scholars who learned from tiger spirits and forest ghosts. Some are white magicians, healers and protectors; others walk a darker path (pawang hitam), dealing with curses and spirit bindings. Their ritual speech, when spoken correctly, is believed to bend the fabric of causality.

Indonesian: Dukun
Across Indonesia, the Dukun is a ritual generalist—sorcerer, herbalist, exorcist, midwife, and prophet all in one. They interact with roh-roh halus, the subtle spirits, and use sacred chants, flower offerings, incense, and daggers to navigate the spirit world. Their ceremonies may involve trance-possession, mirror-gazing, or animal sacrifice. Like others of their kind, dukun often undergo spiritual trials—periods of madness, isolation, or haunting—before assuming the mantle. Some say the spirits “bite” them awake, embedding songs and formulas in their dreams.

Evenki / Tungusic (Siberia): Saman (often rendered “shaman”)
In its original Tungusic context, the saman is a specialist in soul‑flight, entering trance through drumming, chanting, and sometimes dancing or self‑wounding to contact spirits. They maintain the health of individuals and the hunting fortunes of the group by negotiating with animal guardians, ancestors, and landscape beings who control game and weather. Sickness may arise when a soul strays, is stolen, or offends a spirit; the saman journeys to retrieve it or bargain for its release, sometimes dramatically enacting the struggle through song and movement. Their regalia—fur, iron, antlers, and dangling metal—creates a portable cosmos, turning the healer’s body into a moving altar where sky, earth, and underworld meet.

Hindu (India, especially Banaras and beyond): Aghori Sadhu‑Healer
Aghori sadhus are ascetics who embrace the impure—cremation grounds, skulls, ashes—as pathways to a radical non‑duality where all is Shiva. Some act as healers, performing fierce rituals, mantras, and ash‑based medicines to treat possession, chronic illness, and psychological distress that other specialists hesitate to touch. Their work often involves breaking social and inner taboos, confronting fear and disgust so that buried traumas and shadow energies can be integrated rather than merely suppressed. For those who seek them, an aghori’s medicine is not gentle; it is a fire that promises not comfort but transformation, turning poison into a path.

Tibetan cultural sphere (Himalaya): Amchi (Sowa Rigpa physician)
The amchi is a doctor of Sowa Rigpa, the Tibetan science of healing, grounded in detailed medical texts yet woven through with Buddhist cosmology and ritual. They diagnose through pulse readings, urine analysis, and extensive questioning about diet, dreams, and emotional life, mapping ailments onto the three nyes pa (wind, bile, phlegm) and the subtle channels. Treatments range from complex herbal formulas and diet changes to moxibustion, blood‑letting, and external therapies, almost always accompanied by mantra or protective diagrams. Where necessary, an amchi may recommend rituals to appease local spirits or avert astrological obstacles, acknowledging that body, karma, and environment form a single living system.

Filipino (Philippines): Albularyo
The albularyo is a village “general practitioner” of folk medicine, treating everything from fevers and sprains to bewitchment and spirit‑caused afflictions. Their toolkit includes hilot (therapeutic massage), herbal decoctions, blessed oils, and diagnostic rites like tawas, in which alum, eggs, or candle wax reveal the invisible origin of an illness. Patients often believe albularyos possess spiritual gifts that modern doctors lack, such as the ability to confront offended spirits (lamang lupa) or lift curses laid by envy. Many explicitly frame their healing as a vocation granted by God or saints, reciting prayers as they work, blending Catholic devotion with pre‑colonial spirit‑work in one continuous current.

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EUROPE

Norse/Germanic: Völva / Seiðkona / Vala
The Völva is a staff-bearer, a prophetess of ancient Norse tradition, versed in seiðr—a magical practice involving trance, fate-weaving, and soul-flight. Cloaked in blue and adorned with bone and bronze, she chants galdr (incantations), summons ancestral spirits, and glimpses the shape of time’s unfolding. Seiðr practitioners were feared and respected; their rituals often took place in liminal settings—by the sea, at burial mounds, or atop icy cliffs. Odin himself was said to learn seiðr from a goddess, and some believe the Völva is the mythic rootstock of all European witches.

Hungarian: Táltos
The Táltos is a dream-chosen shaman of pre-Christian Hungary, marked by strange birth (e.g., with extra bones or teeth) and trained in spirit-travel. They enter altered states through drumming, fasting, or trance-sleep to commune with the sky realm (Égig érő fa) and battle dragons or demonic forces in dream-battles called révülés. They are said to heal through touch, song, or by riding supernatural horses across the night sky. Though suppressed by Christianity, the Táltos survives in folk tales—weather-wizards, storm-callers, and the keepers of secret songs.

Ukrainian: Molfar / Znakharka
Molfar are Carpathian mountain shamans, blending pre-Christian magic with Eastern Orthodox overlays. They heal with herbs and smoke, use whispered spells (zamovlyannya), and are famed for weather-working—conjuring storms or halting hail. Their female counterparts, Znakharka, are herbalists, midwives, and cunning women. Molfars often inherit their gift and operate in solitude, rarely seeking attention. In folk belief, they speak the language of bees, of thunder, of rivers, and possess the gift of invisibility when walking among spirits.

Polish: Szeptucha (“Whisperer”)
In the eastern reaches of Poland, especially among Orthodox communities, the Szeptucha practices healing through whispered prayers. Her name comes from szeptać, “to whisper.” Often elderly women, they combine folk Catholicism with Slavic pagan rites—reciting prayers over garlic, water, eggs, or herbs to drive out illness, curses, or spiritual attachments. The ritual is intimate, usually conducted in candlelight, with murmured incantations passed down orally for generations. She is not a witch, but a grandmother of power whose every murmur might tip the scales between sickness and salvation.

Irish (Gaelic tradition): Bean feasa (“woman of knowledge”)
The bean feasa is a rural wise‑woman whose portfolio spans herbalism, midwifery, and the subtle arts of blessing and curse‑unbinding. People come to her for remedies made of nettle, comfrey, or elder, but also for spoken charms against fairy abduction, the evil eye, or “taking” from a burial ground. She might quietly integrate rosaries and saints’ names with older invocations to land and weather, performing cures at thresholds, wells, or crossroads where worlds mingle. In a culture marked by poverty and colonization, the bean feasa has often been both feared and indispensable, carrying outlawed knowledge in memory and murmur.

Finnish / Karelian: Tietäjä (“knower”)
The tietäjä is a magically powerful figure whose authority arises not from trance‑ecstasy but from vast knowledge—of myths, incantations, and the right names of things. They heal by singing or reciting long rune‑songs that narrate the origin of an illness, then command it to return to its mythic source, reinforced by spit‑charms, touch, or breath. Their responsibilities extend beyond bodily healing to protecting crops, locating lost animals, disrupting harmful magic, and even influencing weather for the community’s benefit. Incantations may call upon Christian figures, old deities like Ukko, or the dead, revealing a layered cosmos where words—properly spoken—are themselves medicine and law.

Italian (Friuli and folk Europe): Benandante / Guaritore
In early modern Friuli, benandanti—“good walkers” born with the caul—claimed that their spirits left their bodies on Ember nights to battle witches in the fields, wielding fennel stalks against sorghum to protect the crops and community. These nocturnal struggles were understood as agrarian healing rites, ensuring fertility, healthy children, and good weather if the benandanti prevailed. Over time, inquisitors reinterpreted them as witches, but local memory preserved them as defenders of the village. In a quieter register, folk guaritori use blessings, herbal teas, and gestures to treat the malocchio (evil eye) and everyday ailments, embodying the same impulse: to stand between their people and invisible harms.

Germanic / Central European: Cunning folk / Braucherei practitioner
Cunning folk across Britain and mainland Europe—and their Pennsylvania Dutch cousins in braucherei—are lay ritual specialists who combine Christian piety, folk magic, and practical herbalism. Clients seek them for love troubles, theft, livestock illness, or strange maladies believed to stem from curses or ill‑will, and they respond with written charms, spoken prayers, and protective symbols inscribed on paper or objects. Many keep handbooks of spells and psalms, but also rely on intuitive “second sight” and a keen sense of village dynamics to locate the true source of harm. Their healing work is as much about re‑stitching social fabric—defusing feuds, redirecting envy—as about treating bodies, making them humble but enduring custodians of everyday magic.