What is Medical Thaumaturgy?
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I am sharing this topic with you today, in the light of a miracle healing.
You may have read, but two nights ago, I broke my toe. Dreary eyed and sleepy after having a strong dose of Blue Lotus tincture before bed, I went to put another log of red gum on the fire and instead of placing it on the fire, I dropped it on my toe.
Red gum is… heavy. And this wood was sharp.
And apart from a lot of blood, my toe went bluish black and I could not stand or walk on it. And so I crawled my way to the bathroom, got some steri strips and in a haze, I bandaged it up and put myself back to bed.
In the morning, I woke up, still unable to walk and having to now clean up the pools of blood I left around the house.
I have never broken a bone in my life. I have always been blessed in that regard. And when I looked at my toe the next day, I knew it was broken. I have assessed that many fractures in my life, that I know a broken bone when I see one.
Soon after I shared about it, my good friend Jo’el was in my inbox.
“Yo, want me to work on that for you?”
Now, I am not one to let many people “work on me”.
I am extremely selective about who I let in to practise on me — particularly because I have my own magic. And it works.
But I know Jo’el and he is the real deal. I gladly accepted.
He called in a number of Saints and immediately I could feel my toe start to get hot and it started to throb. It was working.
I spent the day in bed sipping Gaba Oolong tea, covering my toe in Arnica cream and dosing up on blue lotus tincture (it is an incredible analgesic / anti-inflammatory and contains alkaloids — mainly nuciferine, and reportedly some apomorphine).
My toe felt about 30% better after he practised on me and that night, I had a CBD gummy and dropped out into the deepest slumber.
And in the morning, I woke up and I could walk. I could barely even feel my toe. Sure, it was still bruised and still had a deep cut through the centre of it… but I was walking, and nearly entirely pain free.
This practise of miracle healing is called Medical Thaumaturgy, and I want to speak to you about it, because it is underutilised — and still reasonably frowned upon by those who “need scientific evidence” for everything in order to validate it to be true.
And look, I have a science degree and I am a researcher. The science is important. But all of the greatest scienticists have always bowed to the mysteries of Spirit. Just look at Einstein for example, who said:
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." - Einsten
Medicine has a long history of "it works but we don't know why yet" — aspirin was in use for decades before salicylate pathways were understood, lithium for mood stabilization for over a century before anyone had a working theory of why.
Socrates (via Plato): "I know that I know nothing"
Isaac Newton, reportedly near the end of his life, quoted":
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
So, what is Medical Thaumaturgy?
“Thaumaturgy" comes from the Greek thauma (wonder) + ergon (work) — literally "wonder-working."
It's the term traditionally used for miracle-working or magical healing, especially in a religious or folk-magic context. A "thaumaturge" is a wonder-worker: someone who performs seemingly supernatural feats, often through invoked divine power, ritual, or esoteric technique rather than mechanical or purely material means.
Medical Thaumaturgy or Medical Magic is the practise of miracle work applied to the body.
There are many ways to practise this kind of miracle work and perhaps one of the most well known Medical Thaumaturge is our good friend Jesus.
The gospels are a thaumaturgic case file. The blind man at Bethsaida. The woman with the hemorrhage who touches his cloak in a crowd and is healed before he even turns around. Lazarus, four days dead, called back out of the tomb.
But the gift got franchised
The Church didn’t let that power stay singular for long. In Acts and the Pauline letters, healing becomes one of the charismata — an enumerated spiritual gift, sitting alongside prophecy and speaking in tongues, available to anyone properly initiated into the body of the church. This is the hinge the entire later history swings on. Thaumaturgy stops being the property of one man and becomes a transferable institutional capacity. It can be granted. Which means it can also be withheld.
The desert fathers ran with this. Anthony the Great, Gregory Thaumaturgus — literally nicknamed the Wonder-Worker — built the template of the ascetic healer: withdraw from your own flesh through fasting, celibacy, isolation, and somehow that withdrawal grants you authority over other people’s flesh. Deny the body, and you earn power over bodies. Suffering becomes the entry fee for the right to heal.
When the wonder-worker becomes a relic
Living wonder-workers are a problem for an institution, though. A charismatic healer can found a rival sect, preach heterodox doctrine, accumulate a following that answers to him rather than to Rome. A relic can’t do any of that. So the power gets rerouted into objects — bones, cloth, splinters of the True Cross, water from a particular well — and pilgrimage economies grow up around them. Healing becomes something you travel toward and pay tribute for, rather than something a person does to you directly. The wonder stays real. The custody of it changes hands.
The split
And then there was a fracture point. From the twelfth century on, universities in Salerno, Bologna, and Paris start reintroducing Galenic and Arabic medicine to Europe, and a formal medical profession begins competing with the Church for jurisdiction over the body. Rome’s response is twofold: absorb what it can — monasteries doubling as hospitals, monk-physicians — and draw a harder line around what it can’t. Canonized saints, sanctioned by Rome, keep their miracles. Folk healers, cunning-women, herbalists working outside that structure get recoded, gradually and then very fast, as something illicit.
This is where medical thaumaturgy splits into a licensed channel and a suppressed one. And it is not incidental that the suppressed channel becomes heavily gendered.
The witch trials as enforcement
The Malleus Maleficarum and the witch-hunt apparatus that follows it can be read as the violent conclusion of that split. Midwives, folk healers, women with plant knowledge — unlicensed thaumaturgy, criminalized precisely because it was healing power operating outside institutional control. The phenomenology is identical to what got Christ called divine: touch, cure, wonder attributed to a body. The only variable that changed was authorization. A woman doing it without a bishop’s blessing was doing witchcraft. A man doing it with one was doing God’s work.
The miracle retreats
By the Enlightenment, mechanistic physiology starts taking over the explanatory territory medicine used to share with religion. The Church doesn’t abandon thaumaturgy so much as fence it into an increasingly narrow, increasingly bureaucratized category. Lourdes builds its own medical tribunal — the Bureau des Constatations Médicales — to certify cures as medically inexplicable before the Church will call them miraculous. Canonization starts requiring the same kind of evidentiary standard. The miracle, which used to sit comfortably alongside medicine for over a millennium, now has to defend itself against medicine to be believed at all.
Where we are now
Faith healing. Charismatic laying-on-of-hands. The whole contemporary energy-healing and biofield-science milieu — this is, in a sense, an attempt to re-suture what the Enlightenment split apart. To reclaim hands-on, wonder-adjacent healing without the institutional gatekeeping that once decided whose touch counted as miracle and whose counted as heresy.
The body was never actually neutral ground. It has always been contested territory, and the wonder-work done on it has always been a question of who’s allowed to do it, and who has to burn for trying.
And this is what I teach, both within my Spinal Attunement trainings and my year long Medical Mediumship Training.
I teach about the body as a ground for miracles, not just something we inhabit and “fix” mechanistically when things go “wrong”.
The body is a vessel for the divine. And I train Healers to become miracle workers. That is where my work differs from others.
I am currently enrolling in both my 5 day Spinal Attunement Practitioner Training in Byron Bay at the gorgeous Temple Farmhouse (just four spaces remain). You can find out more / apply here.
And the the 12 Month Medical Mediumship training I run (which is more like an apprenticeship, by the way, as I teach you everything that I know…), is where I share on this topic more deeply and also invite in guest speaker Jo’el Adifon to share about the work that he does in this field as a Thaumaturge. The doors are now open for applications and early bird ends September 1st.
You can find out more / apply here.
