Karmu

Karmu was a healer of Cambridge, Massachusetts — an auto mechanic by trade who, from his home, gave healing to everyone who came to see him, and turned no one away. The young seekers of the Cambridge spiritual community of the late 1960s and 70s found their way to his door, and our community honors him as one of its ancestors. Murshida Halima Sussman names him among her own mentors, and he is remembered in this community as the healer Murshid Samuel Lewis called his “Black Christ.”

Karmu gave herbal medicines to all who came — his “black” medicine, given straight or in capsules, or disguised in a sangria-like fruit punch he called “red” medicine. His most-used herbs were aloes, goldenseal, valerian, snakeroot, and Life Everlasting. In 1968 this was extraordinary: there were no shelves of packaged herbs in every city, and when Karmu needed sixty pounds of aloes, it took a special order through Attar, the one herb store in Cambridge. What was unusual then now seems commonplace — he was decades ahead of his time.

The song “Healer Man (Karmu)” on the album Voice of the Heart: Remembering was written in 1981 in his memory, and a documentary, Karmu: A Place in the Sun, tells his story — the trailer can be watched in our video library.