Reclaiming Rituals of Touch: The Sanitization of Spirit

A Beautélanin™ Library Essay by Judith S. Pluviose, Esq. From the series: “This Skin Remembers.”
(Powered by NoirScience™ — Rooted in MélanoMatrix-D™.)

The Sanitization of Spirit

What the Europeans did was not only theft; it was sterilization.
They didn’t just take the movements; they stripped them of memory.
They extracted the technique and discarded the spirit.
The rhythm became routine. The prayer became procedure.
The music of the hands became “manual therapy.”

In their books, the flow of the Yanvalou became effleurage.
The drum pulse became tapotement.
The palm sweep that once invoked ancestors became a “relaxation technique.”

They could not replicate the rhythm because they feared it.
They could not name the spirit because they did not believe in it.
So they broke it down into anatomy, pressure, and sequence,
clinical terms that feel cold on the tongue.

That was the most honest act of dishonesty they ever performed:
To steal the sacred, then sterilize it.
To make it palatable by cutting out its soul.
To translate movement into method, and then call it European.

After the White Plague

Let’s be clear:
I do not call it the Black Plague — because it was not ours.
It was the White Plague — a sickness that consumed Europe’s own body and conscience.
There were no Black people filling those mass graves,
but somehow blackness was named as disease.

When Europe fell to its own rot, it turned outward for resurrection.
Africa was its pharmacy.
The Caribbean was its field.
The East was its prayer book.

After the White Plague, Europe came to the colonies to drink from the wells of life —
and instead of gratitude, it offered erasure.
It renamed every seed, every herb, every movement it took.
It called our healing primitive, and their imitation professional.

The Hands Remember

Centuries later, the world still studies their sanitized version —
unaware that every stroke still carries a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to them.
Because rhythm cannot be stolen.
You can mimic it. You can institutionalize it.
But the spirit remembers who it came from.

When I lift my hands over a client’s face,
I am not repeating “Swedish effleurage.”
I am remembering my ancestors’ language of care.
I am honoring Haiti’s pulse, Africa’s heartbeat, the Caribbean’s sea.

I am reclaiming the right to touch our own skin — with reverence.
To rename what was renamed.
To restore what was taken.
To let rhythm return to ritual.

Beautélanin™ Closing Reflection

“We do not borrow from Europe.
We remember what they stole.”

Every motion we restore is a memory returning home.
Every ritual we reclaim is an act of healing.
Every touch we perform is a form of resistance.

Because this skin — our skin — remembers.

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Where beauty lives in melanin, and every ritual is rebellion.