Much of the earliest anthropological concern with medical and health-related issues was closely linked to the study of comparative religion and ritual. As medical anthropology has matured into a semi-autonomous subdiscipline, the problem of explicating the relation between medical and sacred realities has receded into the background. This is in part for the apparent reason that the field addresses an increasingly broad range of topics that are not immediately relevant to the anthropology of religion. Yet it also seems to be due in part to a felt but unspoken need to establish an identity for medical anthropology as a clinically relevant, applied, and 'scientific' subdiscipline in sharp distinction from the theoretical, interpretive, and 'humanistic' fields of comparative religion and symbolic anthropology. The implicit assumption in much work is that folk and religious healing, or phenomena of ecstatic trance and spirit possession, can be acknowledged as religious in an emic sense, but must, in an etic analysis, be discussed in medical or psychiatric terms. In this methodological disposition the relevant questions have been whether religious experience is pathological or therapeutic, and whether religious healing can be understood as an equivalent form of psychotherapy. It is this reviewer's contention that medical anthropology is now mature enough to reopen consideration of the religious element in religious healing (and perhaps in ostensibly non-religious healing as well), and that comparative religion can in turn contribute valuable hermeneutic or interpretive tools to medical anthropology. That is, questions about the medical and the sacred can be posed in a fresh way that takes advantage of advances in both fields. The methodological point de repdre between the two disciplines may be found in phenomenological concepts of the sacred. While a fully adequate elaboration of a phenomenological approach cannot be presented in the present context,