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.

The archaeological findings of Velia allow us to reconstruct the "Apollonian Way" of Parmenides, pre-Socratic philosopher, Apollo's iatromancer and healer