Throughout this book, the phrase “ritual healing” has been used to refer collectively to options for seeking divine intervention to relieve physical ailments. People visited sacred sites, often associated with water, in the expectation of a dream or vision that would heal them. Others affixed amulets with powerful texts and images on their body to heal infirmities or to ward off diseases. In many situations, there would have been ceremonies or rituals that accompanied these forms of healing, such as preliminary sacrifices at local healing shrines or prayers recited when an amulet was first put on. In other cases, the process associated with these cures was informal, personal, and supplemented by no special rites. In this chapter, we turn to the words and actions believed to bring about a cure without the need for an inscribed amulet or a sacred site. In other words, the ceremonies themselves were the cures.

Some of the rituals discussed in this chapter may have been conducted by the individual in need of healing him- or herself, but more frequently we can imagine that the words and actions were performed by another. Although these rituals required someone to perform them, the identity of that person was somewhat irrelevant as long as they possessed the necessary knowledge and skills. This is in contrast to Chapter 6, which also considers people as agents of healing, but whose healers were understood to possess some sort of special quality that enabled them to work miracles. Among the healers of Chapter 5, two broad categories can be identified. The first are ritual practitioners who performed healing rites within Jewish and Christian communities. Typically, these individuals held some sort of an official role that gave them the requisite knowledge and authority. The second category of ritual practitioners are those whom we can call freelancers. While some of these freelancers may have held positions within the hierarchy of cults or religious communities, the healing rituals that they performed were not officially sanctioned. These practitioners used their specialized knowledge to work with clients in need of healing and were likely paid for their services. These two broad categories of practitioners relate to the context in which each worked and can be mapped onto the responses to their cures found among elite authors.