Asclepios - A Short Description

Bust of Asclepios at his sanctuary in Nafpaktos

 

I was reminded of Asclepios recently by a friend, who presented me with a gift. And the Dream Healer came up in conversation the other day with another friend who is a healer, an acupuncturist. So in these times when so many of us need healing of one kind or another, I thought I’d post this essay about him, which is a short adaptation of a talk I gave a few years ago. This version was first published in 2020 in the Saunière Society newsletter.

A Sufi definition of healing - In the Sufi tradition, healing begins by finding our way back into contact with qualities of the divine seeded in us at the beginning of time, when we were all in the heart of the Beloved.

Once upon a time in ancient Greece, a young man (son of the god Apollo, and a mortal mother, Koronis) was brought up by Chiron the wise centaur. He learned the arts of healing and was given the art of visionary gifts by Apollo. He became renowned as a great healer. Temples were built in his honour (Asklepion) and with a practical purpose. People travelled to these temple sanctuaries if they wished to be healed of some affliction. They performed ablutions, fasted, prayed and spent the night there hoping to have a healing dream. For this was the way Asklepios worked – he appeared to the sufferer in a dream and would give advice on how to be healed, sometimes by prescribing certain remedies, sometimes giving psychological advice or instructions on what to do. In Edward Tick’s book Dream Healing he gives a marvellous description of how he could also heal from a distance, via his totem animal, the snake. Quoted below.

In 295 and 293 BC Rome was stricken with a plague that neither human nor divine help seemed able to eradicate. The priests were told to “Look to Apollo's son and not Apollo”. So a Roman ambassador, one Q. Ognulnius  was sent to the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus to ask for help, more specifically, to ask the sanctuary to give the god to Rome. The ambassador represented the entire Roman people. When he arrived there, he entered the sanctuary, and performed the ritual prayers and ablutions, abstaining from food, taking a bath, donning a white robe.  His prayer was answered and Asklepios appeared to him in a dream, holding a staff with a serpent entwined round it.  

And this is a quote from Ovid -

“he held his flowering wand in his left hand,
and with his right he smoothed his length of beard,
the kind physician speaking to a patient:
Let all your worries lie at rest, my dears,
I'll journey with you across the open sea.
Take notice of the serpent on my wand
Who coils around it, and you must know him well,
For he shall be myself tomorrow morning.
Larger than life as heavenly beings are.”

“he shall be myself tomorrow morning” - in other words the serpent that would appear  the next day would be himself in serpent form, and it would journey with them across the sea. The next morning “a golden serpent with a gold crown that glittered round his head” duly appeared. It hissed, stood upright then glided down the temple steps. He spent three days 'winding his way through the city to the harbour' and then came onto the Roman ship. Several days later the ship reached Rome, and the mouth of the Tiber. The serpent looked around him and, where the Tiber separates in two, around a small piece of land, the serpent chose this island to be its home. The Asklepion was built on Tiber Island with its walls curved in the shape of a ship, to commemorate the voyage of Asklepios from Epidaurus to Rome.

His main temples were at Epidaurus, Ephesus, Athens, Kos, but there were many smaller ones all over the Greek world.

Sanctuary of Asklepios on the Greek island of Kos

They were desecrated or destroyed, as ‘pagan’ once the Christians became powerful. His symbol for healing – one snake wound around a single staff (not to be confused with the staff with 2 snakes wound round them) can still be seen today.

 

 

He had 3 daughters – Hygeia, (health) Panaceia (all-curing) and Iaso (healer) and there is a sculpture of Hygeia over Saint Bernard’s Well, a former healing well, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

As he was only semi-divine he could not be an immortal like the gods but Jupiter/Zeus did immortalise him by placing him in the heavens as a constellation. He is known as Ophiuchus, the snake bearer.

There are some who would like Ophiuchus/Asklepios to be the 13th sign of the zodiac. Constellations are different from signs. There are many constellations in the sky, but only 12 (around the ecliptic) were chosen to be signs. Signs of the zodiac are a human created system, each given 30 degrees, an equal number, of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. You may be able to see from the image below that all the constellations included in the signs (Aries, Taurus etc) lie on both sides of the ecliptic (dotted line) while only the feet of Ophiuchus are on the line. (He is at the top of the picture, between Scorpio & Sagittarius.)



Also the actual constellations are clearly of different sizes, but the system of signs has adjusted these to make them all of equal size. The signs could of course be changed, to include a thirteenth, but it is unlikely that astrologers would agree to this – I could imagine a schism along the lines of that of the Christian church when it divided into Orthodox and Roman churches. Some would go with the new and some would want to stay with the old. And should Ophiuchus be given the same number of degrees as the other signs, which would mean dividing the 360 degrees into 13? My calculator gives the answer as 27.69 etc. Most untidy. But giving him a smaller amount of degrees as some say (the last few degrees of Scorpio and the first few of Sagittarius) would not seem fair either, to him or to the adjacent signs!

Yet you could say we need him more than ever at this time, the figure of the Snake-bearer, the Dream Healer. Rather than squeezing him into the system of signs, like a latecomer, a little humiliating for such a great being, maybe we could give him a special place of his own, his heels resting on the zodiac band, the rest of him rising above it, giving him a loftier view of heaven and earth.

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In the vast temple ruins of Asklepios’ sanctuary on Kos, while there are a few pillars still upright, most of the pillars and stone slabs that constructed the temple and its outbuildings, are now lying on the ground. They are remarkably preserved, considering they are thousands of years old; this is probably due to the warm, dry climate. Some of the stones are carved with animal heads. Others have more simple carvings, like the one shown below.



Circles are ancient symbols of course, and usually reference wholeness or unity of some kind (think of labyrinths, mandalas) and healing, especially through dreams, brings us back into the integrity of wholeness with one’s Self and the larger Cosmos or the Divine. So one is not surprised to find such a symbol in a place of healing.

Crop circles have been turning up around the world for decades now; they are both beautiful and mysterious. One that appeared in a field in the north of France (in 2020) has even attracted mainstream media attention. Although it has been dubbed the ‘Templar’ sign, I was struck by its resemblance to the Asklepion carving, much more ancient.



 

It is also rather similar to the Cross of Toulouse, sometimes called the Cathar Cross. The image below (rather old and grainy) is on the cobbled main square of Toulouse.




In this time of restricted movement and contact, we get relentless focus on covid updates, doom and danger of illness. I would recommend looking at youtube clips or other images showing this year’s fascinating crop circle designs, including the French one. Even if we can’t visit them, the wonders of technology can let us see them, and we are far more likely to stay healthy I think, if we focus on symbols of wholeness and  inspiration. 

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More explorations & photographs of Greek Asclepion temples, in Nafpaktos  & Day return to Delphi and Kos

 And this is the gift my woodcarver friend made for me, my very own portable snake & staff