Tag: Incubation
Apollo the Destroyer: "coincidentia oppositorum" in hyperborean mysticism and eschatology
Although mostly considered in his "luminous" and "uranic" meaning, in the archaic tradition Apollo combines the most extreme dichotomies in his mystical and eschatology: the bow and the lyre, wisdom and "mania", depth and elevation, the catabasis and the journey in spirit to the White Island, the "Fall" of Being and the return of the Golden Age. Starting from ancient sources, we can find similar concepts not only to those of North Asian shamanism and Celtic spirituality, but even to the sacred vision of some modern poets โ like Blake, Shelley and Yeats - whose Apollonian chrism will appear clearer to us if we analyze their โWeltanschauungโ in the light of the Platonic and Heraclitean doctrines.
Asclepius: genesis and myth, from hero to god
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.
Sacredness, myth and divinity in the civilization of the ancient Sardinians
The chosen land of a heroic and warrior elite who lived pervaded by the dimension of the Sacred, Sardinia can rightly be counted among the most important spiritual centers of antiquity: the aim of this study is to reconstruct through the lenses of history, of myth and tradition the development of the ancestral Sardinian ethnos and its culture
Parmenides, priest of Apollo: the "incubatio" and sacred healing
In an extract previously published on the site [cf. Ioan P. Culianu: the hyperborean shamanism of ancient Greece] we illustrated the retrospective of the Romanian religious historian Culianu on the existence of a Hyperborean shamanism in the ancient Mediterranean area: a "technique of ecstasy" attributable to the divine figure of Apollo Hyperborean of which the major interpreters, called "iatromanti", were the ancient scholars and philosophers. We focus here on one of these "enlightened": Parmenides of Elea (IV - V century BC), born in Elea / Velia (today Ascea, in the province of Salerno), where he founded the Eleatic School together with Zeno.