Interview: Francis Huxley Pt.3: Lourival

FH: I met a Brazilian named Lourival, an urban shaman, and he knew a tree mushroom, he took a little heart of this mushroom and put it into a cigarette and smoked it. He gave me a joint once, down in a seaside village, outside of Rio. A colonel of the police, his wife, an autistic child, me, and Lourival, a man who was possessed by the spirit of John the Baptist (you could tell that because he held his head at an angle, where it had been chopped off). He wanted very badly to come to England to cure people of tuberculosis with the help of a candle, and a charm of some kind.

SM: So what was the trip like?

FH: Powerful, very powerful.
It was very strange anyhow because this was an army colonel who headed the tank brigade just outside of Rio and he had all General Patton's tanks Including his command tank- he was very proud, he gave Lourival my friend, who was this shaman, and his English wife, and me a ride around the barracks in Rio in his Patton's tank .
Then he gave us a barbecue feast with all the soldiers doing the barbecues and then he told us hideous stories about an electric shock machine that his friend the colonel so-and-so of the Secret Interrogation used to torment his prisoners with, and the story was you keep your captive in a very unpleasant cell for a couple of days and then you bring him up and just give him some water.
And say: Would you like a biscuit?
-Oh yes, I'd like a biscuit! - Oh you would like a biscuit, would you? Bring on 'the biscuit'!
And then would come the electric machine and he'd be strapped into it and tormented...
Did they laugh! The fact that it was called "the biscuit". .. And the shaman liked 'the biscuit' so much that he begged one off this colonel there; easy enough i suppose all you'd need is a car battery or something. And then he'd inveigle his acquaintances down in his seaside village to hold hands in a circle with one of them holding one wire and the other end of the circle holding another and then turning them on and seeing them writhe and dance until they collapsed and he'd be laughing his head off.. and you know, then a month later - Hey Why dont you come to my place, and have some more fun with 'the biscuit'... he always got them because he was a highly reputed black magician as well as everything else. He ended up dying in a mental hospital.

SM: Black magic got him?

FH: He just went out of control. He couldn't stop doing it. He couldn't stop magicking. He was an extraordinary magicker. I saw him at work - stunning performances he would put on. He was like a psychic surgeon from the Philippines, but he'd do anything. He used a pair of nail scissors to poke them in the back in order to release some hex, or spoon to lever an eyeball out, or picture a pair of ordinary scissors to cut tonsils out, hammer and chisel to make a hole in the skull and knitting needle put into the hole and smeared around.

SM: I saw an amazing video taken by a fellow in NY who had had one of his lungs operated on by Dr. Fritz; a spirit embodied by a stablehand, an alcoholic stablehand, in a town in the Amazon. This guy went down there having heard about him and having failed to end the cancer with a medical operation which succeeded only in removing one lung. So he had one lung left and it was cancerous and he went down there on his last chance. The film, which he shot, starts at this compound with maybe a hundred people all in various stage of disease and illness and fear, lingering about the outside of the compound, awaiting their turn to get in.
And finally he gets inside and during the day he's operated on, the doctor in a room, about the size of this room, there must have been a dozen people either sitting or lying down or waiting and he would come in and be talking in a strange language that nobody quite understood and do these - exactly this sort of thing. Wack a screw driver into somebody's skull and wiggle it around or take a pair of gardener shears or fence cutters and cut open a half of somebody's neck and pull something out and then sew it quickly.
But these people didn't sleep, they didn't have any kind of post-operative treatment, if you can call that an operation, and they all were fine. I saw them all in the film walking around. This guy had two scars on his back- one from the NYC hospital, and one from Fritz. Though Dr Fritz's scar was much more recent, they looked the same.
I would have doubted the story, but the film clearly showed "Dr.Fritz" opening this guy's back - he was laying on a table and they had a router which is like a small circular saw , and turned it on, and zip! right up the side of his backbone with this huge spray of blood hitting the the wall right behind him. You could see each rib open and he reached in and mucked around in there and then he left it and then the assistant came over and sewed it up. (read more reports re Dr Fritz on the net)
This guy's scar looks fine. He's fine. There's no problems ever since. I don't know what to make of it. It was so bizarre. I don't understand that at all. So seeing your friend doing that didn't give you any more insight into how that thing is working? What they're doing?

FH: I sort of have an idea of what's happening. I could follow some of his moves. He was an expert in sadism - sadomasochism - he knew just where to get people; and he was possessed from the age of six, according to one of his stories, by the spirit of the Emperor Nero who until then had spent his time in the infirmary of hell, taking in the moon with his left hand and putting out the sun with his right hand. So when he came to maturity his left hand had an anesthetic moon touch and he could just touch you and you couldn't feel anything. I mean you could feel something but you wouldn't feel an agonizing pain.

Ive known of people after one of these peculiar operations to get up and start dancing- even a woman who had been in a wheelchair since - this was in - in late 60's or 70's - she had been in a wheelchair since the war when she'd been - had her back broken in a bomb raid - and he got her out of her wheelchair actually made her walk to strains of Schubert's Ava Maria. I don't know what he'd done with her, because he took about 12 injured patients and I saw one or two in this session. But he took her out of the wheelchair and made her stand up and beckon to her . . and as she started walking, this beautiful smile came over her. .. the first time she had walked in how many years, 25 or 30 years or something. Very beautiful. And then - okay that's enough. He'd come back and take a swig of whiskey. He was always drinking.

What I also understood was that he knew how to insult people. He had the discernment of spirits. He knew, like R.D. Laing, that I met shortly afterward, I immediately made a connection because he also had this discernment, and knew how to get at the bad thing in you, by an insult, pain of some kind, a truth that was impossible to take... I saw him do this to a famous therapist's wife once... So it was partly he was dead-on; and my 'malicious' intuition was growing . I had begun to understand the uses of malice towards other people as part of the curative process - voodoo and shamanism of this kind. That is one has to be malicious enough to understand that there is something pretty bad going on in that place and you have to come to grips with it. I mean shamanism is a kind of the higher paranoia of how to get that.

And his spell was fascination.
Fascination means to bind you - to bind two things - these two contradictory things together in one moment. Partly the horror of the situation, and partly the joy of knowing that you're about to be saved- and you have to go through the horror. And the way he would play on people in order to make them all attend the moment in which he would do something.

Once, he pointed to one of the 30 people in the room smoking and drinking and he said - 'that man is going to faint, and when I do it - I'm going to take his ectoplasm, and..ah, that woman over there,... and once I've got the ectoplasm I'll be able to -it will all happen.' And so I didn't think about this very much because I was like everyone else - just fascinated looking at it. Sure enough he fainted. Then she fainted, and then Nero disappeared and in came Mesalina, who is so quick he doesn't even know what Mesalina is doing through him. He knows what Nero is doing, but he doesn't know what Mesalina is, that traitorous woman and you know- wife to Claudius- Emporer Claudius, with the ectoplasm -Well he took my ectoplasm-

Well wait, I first met him in Brighton of all places, because some people who had known him in Brazil and had come back to England, English people, invited him over because he was such a sensation. It was on the evening of this marathon with a dozen people being dealt with, one after the other, and we all were relaxing, all his friends and the gang, we were relaxing and thinking thank God that's done. Cause it was fun but thank god - he takes it out front. And suddenly a little man, a stock broker came bursting in -

"Lourival! Lourival! you must come! my brother's dying I think and it's his birthday - he's 16 or whatever it was - and he's dying - you must come!" - and fuck - nobody was up for the occasion - okay everyone in the taxi, two taxis, three taxis, as many as - we went out to this man's flat in Brighton, quite a nice building, but the flat itself - it seemed to be all grey.

They walls were grey, the light was grey, the carpeting was grey and I went into the bedroom - there wasn't anything in it except a bed. There was - I think there were three birthday cards on the mantelpiece and nothing else. There was a little bed table I think a chair or two. He had a man servant whose night off it was and there was this guy lying in bed and you couldn't tell he was alive or dead because he didn't seem to be breathing.

Lourival felt his pulse, and didn't allow anyone else to do anything - it was obvious from the smell of him- he was just about to vanish. Lourival took everyone out of the room - 'I have to consult my 350 doctors and ectoplasm...' so after his consultation he knew he was going to do a heart transplant. And so for some reason we all - as we came back - when he said this actually in the room and I'd seen this guy for the first time lying wax and in a deathlike pallor in his bed and just insensible, I thought it prudent to take a few steps backwards and interpose other people between me and Lourival, but he followed me. He said - "You, hey - come on - take your jacket off and unbutton your shirt."

What could I do ? So like that after two glasses, he was sitting by the bed - there was a gentleman here in the bed and sheets and covers - he had unbuttoned his pajama jacket. He had one glass on the man's breast bone and he put the other glass on my breast bone just here. Then he started pressing. well it's a very nasty place just there on the sternum, and after a time I must say I felt this pain being more like needed to have but I also felt a dreadful faintless go through me - kind of nausea; at last I said "I can't take much more of this..." and he said "Endure fellow! Endure!"

And so I endured until my knees failed me and I went down on the floor. After just a half minute or so I began to feel better and I looked up and the man in the bed had - was now awake - he was turned sideways on his right elbow and looked at everyone and said - what are you all doing in my room?. So I don't know how he did that bit of it. And I wondered, when he took the ectoplasm out of people, you could see it grow, or at least it seemed to be growing he would make a pat on the skin, put a glass shrouded in cotton wool on top, press it for a bit, lift the cotton wool, and there - a pale colorless liquid forming into something like a white dog turd. In front of my eyes this concretion was forming - very strange indeed! I didn't want to believe what I saw, and I began to feel sick at both ends and ah...

Once he sucked ectoplasm out of a young woman's back and I asked a number of magicians how they would do it if they had to - if they had to fake it - they had no idea; and I'm sure it was a fake of some kind because this first occasion when he took ectoplasm out from under a glass and squished it into being as it were, he promised to one man that it could be sent off to some lab for testing, but to another man he said "put this down the lavatory immediately it's too poisonous." So I thought that was a little dicey to believe and I wondered very much if it was ectoplaSM or what on earth it might be if it was a trick. He said that when people fainted he took their ectoplasm.

And then all kinds of, what actually you do when people's attentions are fascinated by you - how you can convert this into direct operational activity- seemed kind of common sense, as it were.

SM: Do you think that focusing of the person's attention also has to do with the healing occuring?

FH: Well partly it's because - there's a lot of theater in it; and partly it is the horror of being victimized in this way and really puts you through it. Partly it's the fact that you've got a huge audience who are longing to see the horrors and hoping for the miracle so that you have to hope because after all, what's the point of doing this number if you didn't get cured. And so you sort of lay something on the victim and then you'll pick it off him by this sort of slightly horrific operation. So it's a very theatrical performance in which you allow the man to transfer his sense of impending doom to an actual activity; which is like doctors in Victorian times would do, if someone was acting nuts and had a bug in his brain - he would produce a bug out of the man's ear and say - well there it is you see - I mean it's quite alright to do this slight of hand and you could help somebody enormously by - taking bugs out of their heads. And that it works, as often as not, because when you lose your identification your own pain - it's out there now, you can see it. And all you have to do is to do this trick by first identifying your pain, your illness, with this activity and then out it comes and you can see suddenly you're different from the illness. And then your immune system kicks in.

SM: Well it's so hard to imagine I guess because we're pretty much brainwashed about the mechanics of illness. We basically don't believe that it's possible.

FH: Oh yeah we have the placebo effect instead. And it's kind of pathetic - I mean some of them are very interesting but the whole doctor business of using placebo magic is really pathetic. And I think you could use placebos as long you told - as long as you made it absolutely plain what reaction you might expect from this pill - this placebo - it does help a great deal. I don't know how often you've taken tranquilizers or whatever or pain-killers or opium or acid - all those things. If you have some idea of what's going to happen to you, you can work it much better than if it's all very surprising.

SM: Right, you get into quicker, you use it faster.

FH: You know how to use it. You can lend yourself to the effect and when you have it all spelled out in one of these theater actions - I've heard of Dr. Fritz; I never saw him at work.

SM: This young guy who had this lung operated told me that shortly thereafter Dr. Fritz, or the incarnation of Dr. Fritz, because apparently there have been a couple of others, died- being stung to death by a swarm of bees; he had incarnated Dr. Fritz for two years - very strange story.

FH: Just the kind of thing you'd expect. I think one has to take those things pretty seriously to understand what might be happening.

SM: Well I felt it was so strange because - okay maybe the guy has some ability to be like a charismatic healer, laying on of hands, energy passes, simulates the immune system, I don't know what, but when you see the doctor making a wreckage out of the person's skull and nothing happens to them, this is pretty heavy duty miracles. That's what I don't quite understand, that part is amazing.

FH: I didn't understand that either except that Mesalina comes in, or something. I"ll tell you one story about Lourival. His English woman, wife, second or third or fourth wife that he had, stayed with him for quite a few years I dunno know - 10 or 15 years until she had to run away because he was getting so mad- and she saw him opening, hammer and chisel, a young boy's skull. He'd fallen out of a seventh floor window on his head and had headaches. Family was there - After a time the young man just collapsed insensible on the floor and the relatives, the parents thought he was dead and they started keening and moaning and weeping and sobbing and yelling...

Then Lourival picks up his guitar, sang one of his sambas about unfaithful women and jealously -that was his music- and after he had done this for about 20 minutes, he put his guitar down and said I need a needle and thread and twenty candles. So cotton thread was produced, he tied one thread to each finger and each toe and the other end of the thread to one of these twenty candle. Had them all lit.

Then the young man opened his eyes and Lourival says, "Ah you're back again okay? Let's get these threads off. Get up now - dance, dance!" Dance it was - they were very happy. This is a second hand story- I didn't see this but his wife told me this and she was sensible enough.

I did see was him commune, as it were, with a deaf girl. Very interesting. It was in my London flat and I had a big party for him and he used my bedroom into which I sort of crowded all the bits and pieces out of the big room - I only had two rooms - to make space for the party and that was my bedroom. And he was in there with this young woman and we all crowded in suddenly into this rather smallish bedroom and though she was entirely deaf he started singing to his guitar and she slowly closed her eyes. he had been sitting on the edge of the bed so he lent back then slid onto the floor. And then he went on playing and she began to sort of move in rhythm with what he'd been playing.

"I can't cure her, he said, I can't cure her, but I can make her happy." She would have to be deaf. But and then indeed she loved him very beautifully at the end you know. She came to herself and flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. Very happily. And went away happy, instead of being in the gloom.. he lifted something. And he was in time with her. And there was also an opera singer in the room and he got the opera singer -a tenor-to sing something, and his voice just trembled the room, so I don't know whether she got it through her skin, or sound vibrating through the bedsprings, or the floor - it ceases to be interesting after a time. That kind of question. It's just the natural history of it.

SM: He was an Indian, this man?

FH: No, he says he had a Russian grandfather who was one of his spirits; his mother was a prostitute in this seaside village and then in Rio. . He said the family house had been burnt down. He just escaped and was found sheltering under a fallen tree by a Lebanese merchant of some kind and taken home by him and he immediately operated on him for stomach ulcer - I don't know what that meant -he was only 6 at the time. I don't know - it seems to be in the story- he had several stories about his childhood and none of them quite chiming with each other. But that's the kind of story you have to put up with when you hear these guys going on about themselves.

And then he went into condomble - which is their voodoo, and Macumba which is a black voodoo, and got thrown out constantly because he was too wild, and he set up shop on his own, you might say, and there when I met him, the second time I had met him, he'd been invited -he told us and I think it was possibly true because he knew all the colonels whom I'd met and he knew the foreign minister and the foreign minister I think it was who then invited him, - the president had fallen ill from a brain tumor - to come and do his best. But he'd taken one look at the president and seen that it was too far gone and had to refuse the honor.

But then he also said that he had come to the US and met Marilyn Monroe, which was a figment of his imagination. So he just had these wonderful stories. Wild with all these stories; the fascination of which I must say I got very nauseated with after some weeks because if you can't stop doing it you know...

And then he just got beyond himself. And he alarmed his neighbors enormously, and his wife. He kept her pretty well locked up. But she eventually fled with their daughter and then some of his colonel friends came and locked him up in a mental hospital for a bit. He went around the mental hospital sort of opening the cabinets in the nurses room and swallowing quantities of drugs and poisons. "Hah Hah! It's okay. (Gobble)... He got out again but then he was taken back because he just went off his nut. It's very dangerous being a shaman.

SM: How old was he when he finally went off completely? 50? 40's?

FH: Fifties I should think. I'm not certain of that. .

SM: What a strange life.

FH: And a most amazing face. He had a thin long face and and jaw and he would raise his eyebrows and half close his eyes simultaneously, and then put on a smile, a rather wolfish smile, as though he was saying - 'come closer or I'll bite'. It was a very interesting face. It was when I looked at that face I realized the fascinations that he was master of. And as I said I could begin to read how he got into people - sort of flirt with them, torment them... . And I knew that I read him well enough because sometimes we would exchange glances you know... but there were times that I was absolutely lost, especially when it came to wielding the razor blade and doing something apparently dreadful. I mean I couldn't possibly have got someone to open their mouth and with a pair of nail scissors clipped off their tonsils and so on. I wouldn't. I was a coward. I realize I was a shamanic coward. I couldn't do that one. I couldn't even understand how he got that far. It's very difficult to ask. Once he did something - a man was suffering from a broken nose and contused sinuses, and instead of doing anything to the nose, he went in at the eye with my nail scissors and apparently got something out, it looked like toenail, slight of hand it might have been.

He left nothing but a kind of bruise on the eye; and I asked him afterward how did you know that? Did you sort of see through into the eye? - "Of course I did you fool! Of course I did! That's what you do." And I said: "But how do you know...? "That's obvious!"

So I didn't ask him much, I just tried what it would be like being him. And having to do it that way rather than with X-rays. And I could see his point of what he did. It was very fascinating. It made me ambitious to do similar things, but also made me shear off, because I understood that you had to have a temperament to go with it which was not healthy for a sort like me. Can you imagine Dr. Fritz Huxley ? Going to meet his Uncle Aldous in California, performing psychic surgery on his cancer? (laughs) ... It's the daring of this sadism is so amazing!

SM: Well having seen that, for example, if you found that you had cancer of the lung, would you go down and look for a guy like that, if the Western medical people said it's inoperable, never mind, it's all over...

FH: Yeah, I think so, why not? I did ask him once. I was suffering from the effects of this terrible neck I still have and he said - 'Go to your doctor - you've got torticolis' - and I said yes I know but why can't you do something? I think it was because he didn't want to spoil the curious friendship that we had together.

SM: By making you a patient?

FH: Yeah, he didn't want me that way. He wanted me as a kind of ally. My then woman-friend had callouses on her toes - bunions- and he spent a half an hour shaving this bunion off with a razor blade with an infinite delicacy which was beautiful. But also she had been a member of his court in ancient Rome. He made a point of that. Once, the colonel of the tank regiment, and his wife and autistic child he was looking after, Lourival and his English wife and myself all went down to his seaside village where a marquee presented by another colonel had been put up in front of the door, and Lourival was smoking these joints of tree mushroom and there were two or three musicians and John the Baptist like this also (tilted head), part of the whole business ... and the colonel was a solid brawny chunky man, held himself in his cocky uniform, and Lourival for this had put on a woman's dress- as Mesalina- and he said to the colonel, "Hey colonel! I'm going to take out one of your skin cancers here' - these little things - little onions of skin. Took a needle and very carefully, just one, he levered this thing out, also with infinite delicacy and precision, and the colonel was holding out his arm like that, looking down, that's okay, nothing to it, nothing to it at all.

And he got the whole thing out and he said - "Match! - Strike a match somebody! - okay - let it burn - and then he put the glowing head into the wound and the colonel screamed, no anaesthetic touch at this moment, and immediately followed by Lourival embracing the colonel around the neck and kissing him on the lips -and saying, "You are my lover in ancient Rome!" How could the colonel of the tank regiment resist? Impossible. It was amazing. A beautiful piece of one-up-manship.

Meanwhile the colonel's wife was going s going off her head. I had sat down next to her to try to bring her to some resting place and he waved me away angrily and said - "Don't waste your time - she's mad that's what she is!." Then he started berating her for being such a bad mother that her son was autistic. Anyway, so The Colonel was his friend and a lover in ancient Rome. Well I really began to learn how to read the family situation or even a social situation just by watching him do his numbers. Really ingenious man. Lourival deFreitas: 350 doctors and 2000 spirit guides....

. . . . [Nero (Lourival) is talking] : " ... we have 50 Christians to be burnt - ah - yes good well I'm having a banquet in my gardens tonight so make 50 bonfires with stakes in the middle and we'll tie the victims to the stakes and we'll burn them while we're banquetting. So he described how he laid on his couches dressed in white sheets, and fires were lit, the victims were screaming and Lourival was saying 'You know- the taste of the roasted meat while you're smelling the burning Christians. .. Hmmm... Delicious ! Carne! Carneval! '
. And that's the kind of sadist he was; and that's why Nero came to him and Nero could make anyone do anything until he killed himself. Oh yes, he used to have these dreadful orgies and gladiator shows ... (fade) ...