The severity of judgement, they say, makes men censorious and unapt to pardon the errors and infirmities of other men: and on the other side, celerity of fancy makes the thoughts less steady than is necessary to discern exactly between right and wrong.

That Organon remains largely unstudied and even ignored reveals the real agnosy of our institutions and teachers charged with training future generations of homœopaths.

On my last trip before completing this book, I visited Zizhou county, about 200 miles north of Yan’an, where peasants had tried to engage a lawyer to defend themselves in the courts against the oppressive and brutal control of local Party officials. Not much had changed here in the seventy years since Mao’s Long March and his ‘liberation’ of the peasants from their ‘cruel landlords’. Now, the peasants were afraid not of landlords but of the Party officials who prey on them just as the landlords once did.

Among these varied groups of farmers and menials, there are a chosen few set aside as ambassadors to spiritdom, or shamans, known as bhagats.