The Old Healing Ways
Remembering the Kahkhards
When I was a young boy in the early 80s trying to grow into a sportsman, I seemed to always be getting hurt. I’d sprain my fingers catching a basketball wrong, twist my ankle trying to outrun someone on the blacktop, or wake up with another pounding earache that made even the lightest noise feel unbearable. These little injuries, though common for a child full of energy, were always met with a particular kind of care—one that now, years later, I realize was rooted in a far more ancient tradition than I ever imagined.
Even as we lived in the heart of Glendale, California—a city as modern and suburban as they come—my mother insisted on taking me to an older Armenian woman who lived nearby. She was soft-spoken, her hands always smelling faintly of dried mint and garlic, her apartment dimly lit, with dried herbs hanging from the walls and long cloths draped over tables. To me, she was just the neighborhood healer. To my mother, she was something more. And now I know the name for what she was: a kahkhard.
This woman would wrap my ankle in layers of cheesecloth, sometimes rubbed with egg yolk or honey or dusted with finely ground herbs she kept in glass jars labeled in Armenian script. For earaches, she’d press warm compresses filled with chamomile or gently blow a warm breath over my head while whispering something I couldn’t quite catch. She wasn’t a doctor, but I never doubted that she was healing me. And I never once gave it a second thought.
The Role of the Kahkhard in Armenian Culture
The term kahkhard refers to a traditional Armenian healer—a woman (and in rare cases, a man) who served as a keeper of ancestral knowledge, particularly relating to folk medicine, spiritual cleansing, and protection rituals. Though often viewed as "folk" or "unofficial," kahkhards were central figures in many Armenian communities, especially in the pre-modern era. They were the ones called upon when a child had a mysterious illness, when someone was thought to have been struck by the "evil eye," or when grief and fear seemed to have taken root in the body.
Kahkhards worked not only with plants and poultices but with words and symbols, wielding healing through prayer, divination, chants, and gestures. Some of them inherited their knowledge matrilineally, while others were believed to have been chosen by fate or divine signs. They stood in the space between medicine and magic, between science and faith—unofficial therapists, doctors, and spiritual mediators all at once.
Techniques and Tools of the Kahkhard
Kahkhards had a wide repertoire of methods, many of which date back to Armenia’s pre-Christian, Zoroastrian-influenced past:
Pouring Wax or Lead (mom ltsel or akos ltsel): Used to diagnose and treat emotional disturbances like fright, this ritual involves pouring molten wax into cold water and interpreting the resulting shapes. When the forms grow smooth, the fear is said to have been expelled.
Measuring Fright (vakh ch’apel): Using a string to measure parts of the body before and after prayers, kahkhards would determine whether a person had been spiritually "unbalanced" by a fright or a curse. Discrepancies in measurements were taken as signs of trauma.
Turning a Sieve: To identify the cause of illness or the source of misfortune, a sieve might be spun while names or questions were recited. The direction in which it turned or fell could reveal spiritual truths.
Healing Wraps and Salves: Kahkhards often made ointments from egg, honey, herbs, oils, garlic, or flour, applying them to the skin with blessings or chants. These natural substances had symbolic and energetic meanings in addition to their physical properties.
Survival Through Syncretism
After the official Christianization of Armenia in 301 AD, kahkhards did not disappear. Instead, their role evolved. They began to blend Christian elements—such as prayers to saints, the Lord’s Prayer, or crosses drawn with oil—into their rituals. Yet the core of their practice retained the cosmological and energetic logic of older belief systems. In many ways, kahkhards represent a living bridge between Armenia’s pagan past and Christian present, carrying the threads of a people’s understanding of illness, emotion, and spirit through centuries of change.
Memory and Meaning
As a child, I didn’t know any of this. I only knew that after visiting that woman—my neighborhood kahkhard—my body felt better. I’d leave her apartment with my foot wrapped in something strange and earthy, my head lighter, the pain dulled. And I didn’t question it. It was care, it was presence, it was ritual. It worked.
Now, as an adult steeped in research and reflection, I recognize that I was part of something profound. I was touched by a strand of wisdom that stretches back millennia—one carried not in books or clinics, but in gestures, prayers, and homemade compresses passed from grandmother to granddaughter. The kahkhards weren’t just healing; they were preserving a way of knowing—an embodied, intuitive, sacred science long before the word "science" existed.
And in a small Glendale apartment, with herbs in jars and blessings in whispers, one of them once wrapped my ankle and reminded my body how to trust again.