Traiteur

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A traiteur is Cajun healer whose primary method of treatment involves using bare hands. An important part of Cajun folk religion, the traiteur is a faith healer who combines Catholic prayer and medicinal remedies to treat a variety of ailments, including earaches, toothaches, warts, tumors, angina, and bleeding. In the past, they substituted for trained physicians in remote rural areas of Acadiana. Most traiteurs consider their healing abilities a gift from God, and therefore refuse to accept payment in exchange for their services.

In Southern Louisiana, the co-existence of allopathic medicine and traiteur offers patients a range of resources for treating illness. Traiteurs and their patients do not view the two systems as conflicting. For example, when Lawrence, the Houma traiteur becomes ill, he goes to the doctor, yet also employs week-long, occult candles (which are highly commercialized), visits to another traiteur, Catholic novenas (a rite involving nine days or weeks of recitation of a series of prayers) and native traditional herbs to get well. Switching from one healing system to another is common among these practitioners and their patients, whose religious syncretism is matched by syncretism among medical systems. Another example of this fluidity is evident in the language with which the patients label their illnesses. Lousay A., a Cajun healer, is shown at his weekly home "clinic" hours one Saturday treating patients. One woman describes her condition as la mal angle, Cajun French for shingles, while another woman explains that she has herpes simplex, the medical term for the virus. Even in language, the traditional and the biomedical is heard to exist side by side without conflict.

In French Acadiana, the term Treateur or Traiteur is used to describe a person who has learned the art of faith healing. Treateurism is a very old tradition that is dying out, and very few Treateurs now exist except in the more rural areas of Louisiana, particularly in the south-central areas of Louisiana regionaly known as "Acadiana" where the true cajuns dwell.

Traditionally, the rituals of the Treateur are passed down from gender to gender. So a male must pass it down to a female, and visa versa. Traditionally, the Treateur must be asked to perform the treatments and will rarely offer them outright unless the need is great, and they can not ask for a payment of any kind, although it is acceptable for the Treateur to accept gifts for treating a person. However gifts for a true Treateur are never expected.

The Treateur uses prayer and somatic hand movements for the basic ritual. Many will also use first aid techniques, herb lore and common sense in addition to the rituals.

As an example, if treating someone with a Coupe-de-Soleil, or sunstroke, one would perform the ritual, and then have the person drink as much water as they could while having them lay down, and wiping them with a towel dampened with cool water.

A Treateur treats with basic first aid, and ritual prayer mostly. But some will use herbal remedies if they are known, although the herbal remedies begin to cross over into certain types of voodoo and white magic, which some of the more superstitious Roman Catholics deem as too Pagan for their liking.

The rituals involved with Treateurism are simple and time honored, and do not transgress the teachings of the Catholic church, thus it is an acceptable method of faith healing and treating those of Catholic persuasion.

However the methods are purported to be able to work on a person of any faith, or even an atheist, should one be so moved as to ask for a treatment.