Turning to the sacred healer

When no other remedy was available, the peoples of the Greco-Roman world turned to Asklepios (Roman Aesculapius) "the kindest of gods to humans" and his divine family. We are looking here at a benign cult of healing through dream incubation that flourished fror more than a thousand years,from as far east as modern Ankara to as far west as the British Isles.

     The practice of Asklepian healing begins as a quest. You go on a pilgrimage, when you have failed to find other remedies for what ails you. You travel to a holistic center. You are cleansed and purified. You pray. You are shown images of the gods, and evidence of what happened before”. You see hundreds, maybe thousands of votive offerings and inscriptions depicting healings that have taken place. This stirs up the psyche, fires the imagination, primes you for a big experience in the sacred night. The temple helpers will ask you about your dreams, looking for a dream of invitation, noting when the caliber of your dreams indicates that you are not ready for the big experience. If you cannot produce a dream of invitation,you may not be admitted to the inner sanctum, to the abaton ("forbidden place") where you will seek a direct encounter with the sacred guide and healer.
    Contact with animals and animal spirits is a vital part of this tradition. The snake is a primary healing ally of Asklepios. There were snake pits in the Asklepian sanctuaries, and seekers of big dreams often had to brave up to serpents (non-venomous, but still scary for many) slithering over them in the night. In the testimonies, healing was often delivered by the experience of a snake licking or biting or coiling round an afflicted part of the body.

     You will meet dogs in the temple, and may be licked by a dog in a healing vision. A dog, a second Asklepian animal ally, is the guide of souls and guardian of passage to the Underworld in many traditions, the friendliest of animals to man, and a primary “bridge to nature” in many lives, ancient and contemporary.

     We can speak with some confidence about what went on the in the Asklepian temples because of the immense body of "testimonies" from grateful patients that survive. We have a convenient and fairly exhaustive collection of these thanks to the work of Emma and Ludwig Edelstein in the 1940s. The second edition  is available in a single-volume edition from the Johns Hopkins Press.
     We have the words of invocations sung for the sacred healer. My favorite is rendered in English as

Healer of all, come blessed one

     We know that the moment of sacred encounter in the incubation chambers typically came about not in a sleep dream but in the liminal state of hypnagogia, between sleep and awake.There is no more gripping account of the experience of meeting the healing god in the twilight state than in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales:  “I seemed almost to touch him. Halfway between sleep and waking, I perceived that he was there in person; one was between sleep and waking. I wanted to open one’s eyes but I was anxious that he might leave. I listened and heard things, sometimes as in a dream, sometimes as in waking vision. My hair stood on end, and I wept tears of joy, and the weight of knowledge was no burden…Only if you have been through it can you know and understand.”

Remote healing and shared dreaming

One of the most fascinating cases of Asklepian healing that I have found in the testimonies is that of a young Spartan woman named Arata and her devoted mother, who made the long and often dangerous journey to the temple of Epidaurus to seek healing for her daughter.
    Arata, we are told, was υδρωπ, "dropsical". Today, we might say that she had an edema, a serious swelling due to the build-up of fluids in the cavities of the body. When ordinary medicine could do nothing for her, the mother embarked on her journey. She must have undergone the customary cleansing and ritual purification, and made simple offerings to the sacred powers of the sanctuary, including honey cakes for the serpents of Asklepios.
    She would have been assisted by the therapeuts - the helpers of the healing god - to incubate a dream of invitation and to clarify her request to the god, for the benefit of her beloved daughter. She would have been shown testimonies of those who had been healed before, and images of the gods, building a mental climate of positive expectation. Eventually she was ushered into the abaton, the inner precinct of the temple, where she would have been encouraged to lie down on an animal skin and await the coming of the healing god in the sacred night.

    In the night, "She slept in the temple and saw the following dream: it seemed to her that the god cut off her daughter’s head and hung up her body in such a way that her neck hung down." We can picture how a butcher might hang an animal carcass on a meat hook.  Out of the neck came a huge quantity of fluid matter. Then the mother took down her daughter’s body and fitted the head back on the neck. 

    After she had seen this dream, she went home and found her daughter fully recovered, in good health and excellent spirits. Her daughter reported she had the same dream. 
     In this wild and primal experience, glimpsed through a few lines of an inscription chiseled on stone, we see the lineaments of a healing practice that reaches beyond ordinary medicine and beyond time and place. A sacred power appears to the dreamer, in response to a heart-felt prayer. Let us notice that the experience unfolding is possibly best understood as a lucid dream playing in the liminal space between sleep and awake.[1]
    The god of this dream is a ruthless surgeon, but his cutting is true and precise. Something that was wrong in the body of a person at a distance is drained and healed during this operation., Not only is the effect transferred to Arata, hundreds of miles away, but Arata sees the whole thing, as if she were with her mother and the god in the sacred space.
    We have here remarkable evidence of the reality and efficacy of remote healing and shared dreaming. We have confirmation that direct engagement with the sacred is the ultimate healing resource. We have a reminder that even the most terrifying image - if it is authentic and truly belongs to us - can open a way to healing and transformation, if we are willing to stay with it and work with it.

What can we learn from this tradition for our own lives, in the time of pandemic? We can take courage from the knowledge that help from greater powers is always available. We can build a temple of healing in our own imaginations.  In my online courses, I often lead group journeys to a Temple of Dream Healing. We can practice dream incubation in our homes, and grow the practice of asking for help from greater powers nicely.

   Aelius Aristides, a famous orator who walked very close to the gods of healing, addressed Asklepios like this:  “You in your kindness and love of man, relieve me of my disease and grant me the health that is required for the body to serve the purposes of the soul.” Now that is a creative way to invite the benign intervention of a god of healing!

    From the viewpoint of a god, or angel, a human who asks for help to serve “the purposes of the soul” must be rather more interesting than one who is just ringing the changes on “Gimme” (as in: “heal my liver” or “cure my baldness” – something people actually wished for at Epidaurus). However, Aelius Aristides, as a gentleman of late antiquity, could not resist slipping in a further wish: “And grant me a life lived with ease.”
     Then we have the Homeric Hymn to Asklepios:

Great to humanity, soother of cruel suffering…
You are welcomed, Master. By this song I beseech you.

1. The testimony of Arata's mother is printed in Emma J. Edelstein and Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (second edition, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998) as #423.21.

Graphic: modern statue of Asklepios in RM collection