Genesis of the cult of Asclepius, first a hero-healer and then a divinity of Dream and Medicine in the Hellenic pantheon: from the textile origins to the Homeric and Hesiodic texts.
di AnnaMB
originally published on the blog by the Author
image: Anton Raphael Mengs, "Asclepius"
Asclepius is the Greek god of healing and medical practices; we have traces of it from the eighth century. aev and will continue to receive public and private cults up to the IV-V century. ev in very different places and contents. Its sanctuaries (among the most important Epidaurus, Kos, Athens and Pergamum) were destinations of massive pilgrimages, served as health resorts managed by specialized personnel and were scattered throughout the Greek world, in Asia Minor and, later, in Rome and in the provinces of the Empire. He acted "softly" by manifesting himself during incubation (incubation in Latin, in Greek enkΓ³imesis), which consists of sleeping in a sacred space (enkoimeterion) and receive healing, a communication or a response in a dream.
Its symbol is a stick with a coiled snake; the widespread iconographic representations (reliefs, statues) from the fourth century. aev onwards confirm and consolidate the bond with this animal that "excites fantasies, insinuates the suspicion of a" secret ", evokes the sphere of death and sex" [1], with which, however, the god never identifies himself, but manifests himself through it on the plane of dreams or realityΓ .
The heroic dimension
In book V of theIliad it is said of Aphrodite who was wounded in an attempt to defend her son Aeneas in a clash: the Danai (the Greeks), the goddess complains back on Olympus, now they also take it out on the immortals. Her mother Dione comforts her by reminding her that many of them suffered at the hands of men; even the frightening Hades suffered the bitterness of a wound, but Peon healed him with herbs and medicaments that soothe the pain. Peone is the "healer of the gods" and in the Odyssey his "lineage" is, by extension, the category of doctors; initially distinguished from Apollo, he will end up identifying with it when the latter's function as god of healing was fully developed, whose art "failed only when he himself killed" [2].
Asclepius is also named in theIliad and it is the oldest source we have. His name appears in four songs as the father of the two medical heroes Macaone and Podalirio, who were in charge of thirty ships that left the Thessalian cities of Tricca, Ecalia and the βrocky Itomeβ to fight together with the Achaeans against Troy. In Homer, Asclepius belongs to a heroic dimension, not a divine one. He is one iatros (doctor) and does not perform actions: he is remembered as the progenitor, probably of high rank, of one lineage of mythical warriors with medical capabilities of extraordinary efficacy; although Homer does not constitute a strictly historical source, there is no reason to doubt that Asclepius and his descendants belonged to a mythical tradition consolidated in Thessaly and much more ancient, with which the aedi were familiar and which they consciously integrated into theand putΒ [3].
Textile origins
Homer, however, does not inform us about the history of Asclepius or his relations with Apollo: both aspects will be developed between the eighth and sixth centuries. aev, in correspondence with the consolidation of the Apollonian line of Greek religion. If Hesiod, a contemporary of the Homeric tradition, already provides the first information on the birth and death of Asclepius and on his kinship relations, it is thanks to Pindar (III Pythica) that we know this moving and passionate tale in the version that will become more widely recognized.
The textile origins of Asclepius are therefore very ancient. In this region of northern Greece, between the narrow valleys on the slopes of Mount Pelio, when a lunar goddess who represented the nocturnal world of birth and death dominated Lake Bebiade [4], was the reign of King Phlegias "with beautiful horses". One day of her daughter of him Coronide, while she was cooling off in the waters of the lake [5], she was seduced by Apollo and became pregnant with the pure seed of the god, but she "fell in love with what she did not have", as Pindar recalls, and refused the wedding arranged by her father. A stranger arrived, the valiant Ischys son of the king of Arcadia, a mortal, and she voluntarily granted herself to him. Apollo's reaction is predictable: he entrusted his revenge to her twin Artemis who fired her fearsome golden arrows on the kingdom of Phlegias.
The woods burned, many died; Coronis was shot in her bed just before giving birth. But when his body had already been laid on the funeral pyre and the flames licked it, Apollo wanted to save his son by redeeming him from a fate he did not deserve: he opened his mother's womb, took out the child and handed him over to the centaur Chiron to instruct him. Asclepius grew up learning the arts of healing and relieving suffering with sweet spells, drugs, potions, bandages and interventions. He became a portentous healer, but overstepped his limits: he was persuaded to bring the dead back to life and Zeus punished him by killing him with lightning.
So far, the story as it is told by the choral lyric of the VI-V century. aev: Asclepius is a benevolent mortal practicing a handiwork, not (yet) a god. He did not fail to point out [6], in this version, the moralizing tone of the judgment on the conduct of mother and child: both driven by desire, for one the guilt was betrayal, for the other ambition.
variants
There are no moralizing purposes instead in the testimonies of the so-called Hesiodic vein, which preceded and influenced the lyric one. Hesiod, who also dedicates a poem to Precepts of Chiron, reports two variants in the genealogy of Asclepius: one confirms the Thessalian origin and informs us in a nutshell of the story that will be developed by Pindar (the love of Apollo and Coronides at the lake of Bebiade, the anger and revenge of the god, but without comments on the conduct of the characters); in the other, the first testimony on the death of Asclepius electrocuted by Zeus, his mother is the Messenian princess Arsinoe, who has nothing to do with the tragic story of the homologous Thessalian.
A Epidaurus finally, which will become the most important place of worship, the mythical story moves to the Peloponnese: the elements of guilt and suffering disappear, the daughter of Flegias travels with her father on an expedition and, already pregnant with Apollo, she will give birth here to her divine son. In the myth, therefore, the generalities of the mother may vary but not, this so constant, her condition as a mortal. In short, in the cultural circles, while the position of the god in the pantheon was being defined and the activities of the sanctuaries were flourishing, in the passage between the fifth and fourth centuries an attempt was made to purge the myth from violent and negative situations; together with the judgment the guilt of Coronides disappears, but above all he was interested in strengthening the kinship relationship with Apollo.
Between the earth and the sky
The lake near which Asclepius was conceived is a concave cave towards those depths where love and death so indistinctly coincide, where in even more distant times the love between a nocturnal and lunar goddess and the god Hermes in the guise of a phallosΒ [7]. Her place is the earth: the consultant leans his ear on it to draw response in the rite ofincubation, as well as "from the floor" rises the "fiery-looking" god as described in an invocation of the first half of the third century. ev [8].
Birth in the funeral pyre of the mother, a sin of human vanity e death by the hand of Zeus, the snake, absolute solitude in which it sinks intoenkoimeterion (the place used forincubation it is underground and is calledΒ abaton, "Inaccessible") [9]: these are just some of the symbolic representations of Asclepius, but the irreconcilability with the "celestial" Apollonian is only apparent. Thus, alongside the chthonic connotations, there are therapeutic skills and medical competences, his painless and reassuring way of acting; these aspects certainly participate in that Apollonian βluminosityβ which frees us from the dark torments of suffering, as well as the dimension of the dream in which it occurs it is ethereal and at the same time corporeal, for here the patient physically experiences the gentle healing touch of the god.
Let us therefore assume that Thessaly is the place of origin of myth of the healing hero: the success achieved in northern Greece must have contributed to the spread of the tradition and the enthusiastic adoption of the "new" cult by the southern regions [10], especially in the Peloponnese. In this region there was Epidaurus, which faces Athens on the Gulf of Aegina, and where theasklepieion best known of antiquity. The first epigraphic evidence dates back to the sixth century. aev [11]Β and the main nuclei were established by the fifth century; it experienced its most grandiose flowering phase in the first half of the XNUMXth century and the vitality of the cult of Asclepius is linked to it [12].
Note:
[1] W. Burkert, Greek religion of the archaic and classical period, Jaca Book, 2003, p. 22.
[2] K. KerΓ©nyi, The gods and heroes of Greece, the Assayer, 2002, p. 123. If Peon and Apollo were the same god or if they were two distinct divinities, even the classical philologists have questioned themselves; Antisthenes and Aristotle, in the fragments of theHomeric problems, had dealt with the question of whether Apollo had the prerogatives of a healer or not, arguing the first an affirmative answer unlike the second. Cf. M. Broilato (edited by), Crater of Mallo, Fragmenta, History and Literature Editions, 2006, p. 185.
[3] A. Suarez de la Torre, The myth and the cult of Asclepius in Greece in the classical and Hellenistic-Roman age, in Aa.Vv., The cult of Asclepius in the Mediterranean area, proceedings of the International Conference, Agrigento 20-22 November 2005, Gangemi, 2009, pp. 28 ff.
[4] Lake Bebiade, if the name is translated literally, should be considered as the lake of Boibe (or of the city of Boibe), a Greek goddess generally known as Phoebe who, according to Hesiod's family tree, was the female founder of the line. Apollonian: KerΓ©nyi, cit., pp. 419-21 and 433.
[5] From a pseudo-Hesiodic fragment. SuΓ‘rez de la Torre, cit., P. 30.
[6] Ibid, pp. 32 ff.
[7] KerΓ©nyi, cit., Pp. 123-4.
[8] Origen, Contra Haereses, IV, 32; cf. EJ Edelstein, L. Edelstein, Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies, vol. I, John Hopkins University Press, 1998, p. 167.
[9] In Greek koimao it means to lay down, to lay down, to put to sleep; the koimeterion it is the dormitory and, by extension, the cemetery.
[10] RL Farnell, Greek hero cults and ideas of immortality, The Clarendon Press, Oxford 1921, p. 249.
[11] There are two votive dedications to Asclepius and Apollo Pitius: "the number of dedications that make precise reference to the name of Asclepius remains in any case higher than that of dedications that mention the name of Apollo". M. Melfi, The sanctuaries of Asclepius in Greece, vol. I, The Herm of Bretschneider, 2007, p. 27.
[12] Burkert, cit., Pp. 19 ff.
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