![Entangled roots with two small light blue flowers in the center](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-05/iStock-1303627311_0.jpg?itok=b2PYLm8D) # Miraculous Entanglements May 26, 2025 *By* [*Eugenia Rainey*](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/people/eugenia-rainey)*, Postdoctoral Fellow.* Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey. *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.* What happens when a person in a health crisis participates in a religious ritual and the emergency is then averted? Examining successful ritual cures in Lucumí, also known as Santería and La Regla de Ocha, I initially called such dramatic results “miraculous cures.” But the word miracle is problematic and so is its imagery, which smacks of a hand descending from heaven to pass over a body and fix it. Why does one person get a miracle and not another? It doesn’t leave me kindly disposed toward God. In cancer cases, medicine refers to these instances as “spontaneous remission,” a term as equally problematic as miracles. There is nothing spontaneous about ritual cures. Maybe I should call what we consider miracles “uncanny cures.” Like many people, I’ve seen plenty of things not lending themselves to straight-forward explanation, but I think that few people know what to do with these events. Such experiences are not uncommon in Afro-Atlantic religions like Lucumí. “Uncanny” has a nice secular ring to it. Secularity is important to me because religious answers often seem simple, or, rather, they seem simplistic. I loathe simple answers to complicated questions like how and why someone gets cured. Lucumí is practice-based, not dogma-based. It provides rituals for people to manage the here and now rather than cultivate a distant afterlife. Consequently, there is far less conceptual distance between matter and spirit. The uncanny is experienced in the here and now. One of these ritual cures happened to a *santera*, a Lucumí priestess, in south Florida. I will call her Nancy. She collapsed at a religious event and was taken to the emergency room. For some time, she had been suffering stomach pains that her doctors could not diagnose. A respiratory technician at the ER scanned her lungs for pneumonia, accidentally dropping the scanning probe to reveal a dark mass. Nancy had an extreme case of portal vein thrombosis. The entire portal vein system to her liver was blocked. A team of baffled doctors, surprised she was alive, had no treatments to offer but a high-risk surgery, and they had little confidence of its success. An experienced diviner informed Nancy that Shango, her tutelary orisha (Lucumí divinity), did not want her to undergo the surgery. She recovered, miraculously. Her portal vein thrombosis did not go away, but her body did produce tiny passages to provide enough blood flow to her liver to keep her alive. She did not tell her doctors about the myriad rituals performed by her fellow *santeros* to produce those tiny passages. Her doctors considered Nancy among the fraction of patients whose spontaneous recovery they could not explain. Perhaps the real problem is not how we think about miraculous cures—the divine hand descending from heaven—but how we think about the body. Bruno Latour argues that the body is not an independent object but “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements.” In Lucumí the field of possible elements is expanded through ritual. In Lucumí (any many other religions) another word for ritual is work; that work is labor intensive. Rituals allow spiritual and physical interactions. Diana Espiritu-Santo notes that “the experience of human-spirit interaction is…a normal extension of the development of a particular kind of self…” Nancy developed this particular kind of self through intense ritual work. Lucumí rituals do not operate on a passive body. Neither bodies, nor anything else in the world, are passive in Lucumí. The world is not full of finished things but things in a state of constant emerging. The Lucumí world functions much like the animist cosmos as described by anthropologist Tim Ingold, a place where the “…dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally, bring each other into existence.” A rock is alive in a *rock-like* way, a cloud is alive in a *cloud-like* way, and a person is alive in a *person-like* way. A person’s attention can be trained to register rock-like and cloud-like lives in a person-like way; your entanglement with the environment thickens through this ritual work, and you come into being, constantly and reciprocally, with your environment and with the other lives in it. I don’t contest that miracles are real or that the divine plays a role in the world through ritual. I contest that these uncanny cures happen *to* us rather than *with* us. Miracles happen every day, and miracles fail to happen every day. The question isn’t how to get or how to explain a miracle. The question is what sort of self can we develop in our entangled landscape, and how can we make those relationships as rich and as vital as possible. See also:- [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection)