TooStoned wrote:Fixx: the "we all" refers back the "rude" debunkers that MaryKosmetics indicts with her pathetically transparent affectation of a martyr: " Nobody even had the simple politeness of declining the offer, much less asking or (gasp!) trying it"
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for those with experience of traditional, or folk, medicineways, there would be perceived nothing of the martyr in Maryk's remark
traditional practices and customs provide for courtesy on all sides, and insist upon strict adherence to that courtesy
some folk and traditional medicine practices require the healer to offer help in the face of need; other traditions require the opposite: he or she must wait to be asked
if an offer is made then the proper response is either acceptance or a polite decline, with thanks
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeIV/Powwow.htm
from a scholarly article on powwow, or brauche, the folk medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans (Dutch):
Rhoads’s mother, a renowned “practicer of the magic art,” as the article describes her, in Rockland township, taught her son how to pow-wow. Hundreds of people in eastern Berks County would visit her for relief from all sorts of diseases. According to Rhoads, the mode of transmission was from mother to son. Only one son could learn the art [18]. He said he never charges: “People are expected to give as much as they can afford or what they feel they owe me…I could make lots of money by putting some of my articles on the market, but I don’t believe the gift was given to man to use as a means to make money, and consequently I will never do it.” He also believed he would probably lose his “power” if he used it to make money. The payment he did receive for “medical services” was insufficient to support his family and he worked as a laborer much of the time.
Rhoads also stated that he was called away at all hours of the night to distant places and that he always dropped what he was doing and went. He believed that if he refused to go, he would probably lose his power. Rhoads would refuse to powwow for anyone whom he knew had ridiculed the practice in the past and claimed that no amount of money could cause him to alter this policy.
Maryk and Dragon asked for no money as part of their offer to make a try at distance healing, and so have satisfied one of the primary requisites for practice of a traditional or folk medicine
a polite decline would have, in fact, been the correct response from anyone who did not wish to accept the offer
ignorance of traditional ways often leads the "sophisticated" uncouth, thinking to embarass others, to instead embarass themselves; happily, we can all learn and, if we desire, grow somewhat wiser as we grow older
Everything in nature has a power in it.
-Thomas Banyacya