In Ecuador, hundreds of traditional healers offer spiritual cleansing. But these purifications are not intended for people with sensitive skin: they can in particular lead to burning sensations.
In the back room of a small shop in Quito, Ecuador, a short, elderly Ecuadorian woman rubbed a bundle of nettles all over my naked body. While muttering in Spanish, her hands made rapid rubbing motions from head to toe. Within seconds, my body vibrated with a pungent, burning sensation. Warts appeared in red bands.
“Your energy is blocked. We need to open your energy lines,” she said. As she rubbed my now irritated skin once more, I couldn’t help but wince at the pain.
Emma Lagla is one of Ecuador’s limpiadores (cleaners). For centuries, these traditional healers have used what they consider magical and sacred plants of the Ecuadorian landscape to treat various illnesses, the feeling of bad luck or a defiled aura.
I was coming for spiritual cleansing, a process that involves vigorous rubbing with traditional herbs to remove bad energies. Judging by the burning sensation and the stings on my body, I needed it.
In all the markets of the city center of the Ecuadorian capital, the curanderos (traditional healers) offer their remedies on stalls filled with plants such as roses, appreciated for their spiritual value, lemongrass, which can be mixed with horchata to reduce inflammations, and guayusa, an Andean holly-like shrub used by native tribes as a stimulant.
Besides the fragrant oils that sellers swear will arouse desire in your lover, other plants from the Andean highlands can be found on the shelves, such as rue (herb of grace), used to facilitate menstrual cycles, and ishpingo, an Ecuadorian spice with antifungal properties, which can be made into a tea to treat stomach ailments.
The brick-and-mortar shops run by curanderos along the side streets, which offer not only herbal products but also treatments, are also popular. (The limpiadores are a particular type of curanderos who carry out purification treatments).
“These ladies here are waiting for patients to clear their bad spirits, bad energy and stress,” Marcos Peralvo, my Quito tour guide, told me of the other people waiting in the shop when I entered. “It’s a kind of ancient magic-like medicine, but it’s not natural medicine. You come here for treatments that doctors are not able to cure, like cleansing auras and cleansing spirits from the body. They use these herbs, and these herbs will absorb bad energies from people. That’s our belief.”
While adults seek to be “cleansed”, the majority of patients are babies whose anxious mothers seek to protect the “pure auras” of their offspring.
Fortunately, nettle is not used on babies. Instead, I saw a woman hold her baby as Lagla patted him with a gentle bouquet of herbs including mint and marco (ambrosia arborecens), an anti-rheumatic herb commonly used to treat bronchial problems and respiratory. After fidgeting, the baby calmed down when Lagla placed a necklace of hard green berries around his neck to protect him. She then stroked the baby with a handful of rose petals soaked in rose oil to soothe her skin and infuse her with good energy. The baby falls asleep quietly in his mother’s arms.
“Now she is going to give the mother some herbs to make a tea. The mother has to drink it because she is still breastfeeding her child. She has to drink this tea several times a day,” Peralvo explains.
Limpiadores can provide other services like herbalism and massage, Peralvo said. Others claim to take care of other issues, such as dealing with a cheating husband, finding lost items, or even “processing” textbooks to help students pass exams. Some claim the title of llamadors (callers), who can recall a departed soul into an individual’s body.
During a thorough cleansing, the healer performs a limpia, an Andean cleansing procedure born out of the belief that Mother Nature is the cure for all ills. Limpia may consist of rubbing an egg and a dead black guinea pig on the patient’s body to assess their state of health. Next come herbs and nettle, known in the Andes for its purifying powers.
Not being sick, I did not need the complete black guinea pig or egg treatment – on the contrary, my purification was simpler and faster than a complete limpia. It was more like a spiritual massage, a quick scrub to remove bad energy. With my body still on fire from the nettles, Lagla gathered her rose petals soaked in rose oil to anoint my skin.
“It will soothe your skin and your mind. You had stress and low energy,” she explained.
Beliefs in these traditions run deep in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, but are losing ground in the country’s metropolitan areas. But not completely – in some hospitals, doctors allow limpiadores to “clean up” patients while they administer their own treatments. There is evidence that your brain can convince your body that a treatment is working, so much so that in some cases a placebo can work just as well as modern medicine, at least when it comes to conditions like pain. .
Ecuadorians like Peralvo, who grew up in the rural highlands north of Quito, need little convincing. He believes in the healing properties of herbs, he says, and he has used them himself: once, after a loud parade scared his two-year-old daughter, she fell ill and couldn’t stop crying. His wife at the time did not believe in folk remedies, but he convinced her to let him take the baby to a healer.
“After cleaning her, the healer told me she would sleep for at least three hours. My baby never naps during the day, but she did. She fell asleep and when she s woke up, she wanted to go to her room and walked there on her own,” Peralvo said.
“You have to believe in this stuff for it to work, but some people in the cities don’t believe it,” he adds.
As I left the little shop in Old Town Quito, the welts on my skin were still burning, but I felt oddly relaxed. The tension of traveling for ten days seemed to have dissipated. In the morning, I felt lighter in my soul and full of energy. Maybe I just wanted to believe in the purifying power of limpia – but even though the ritual was just a placebo, I had learned that it could do a lot for healing.