Call of the Magician with Colin Campbell - Monday 28 November 2011 - 7.00 PM to 8.30 PM

A sangoma is a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination and counselling in traditional Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi) societies of Southern Africa. They perform a holistic and symbolic form of healing, embedded in the beliefs of their culture that ancestors in the afterlife guide and protect the living. Sangomas are called to heal, and through them ancestors from the spirit world can give instruction and advice to heal illness, social disharmony and spiritual difficulties.

Both men and women can be called by the ancestors. However, a consequence of refusing the calling is usually on-going physical or mental illness. Over the last twenty years increasing numbers of people of western cultural origin are seeking solutions to chronic illness through alternative means. One of which is initiation into the spirit medium traditions of Southern Africa. Some people are finding that symptoms, for which they had fruitlessly sought solutions in western treatment modalities, closely resemble ‘the illness of calling’. The physiological and psycho spiritual symptoms associated with this condition are understood in these cultures to be treatable only through the rigorous initiations and treatments associated with becoming a spirit medium.

Is the only answer to "the Illness of calling" to be initiated as a spirit medium or shaman? What are the implications of this process for the initiate? Is the cultural background of the prospective initiate important? How is the "illness of calling" differentiated from
psycho-pathology? Join Colin Campbell for a talk exploring some of the most important and controversial questions relating to the subject of psycho-spiritual pathology, mediumship and initiation.

Colin Campbell grew up in rural south-eastern Botswana, the son of a renowned anthropologist and a creative healing mother. In his childhood travels with his father he slept under stars, learned from traditional San people, awoke beside lion paw prints, and regularly released cobras out of his personal space. Today Colin is a practitioner of traditional African medicine, and his work bridges major world cities with ancestral homelands.