Asclepius

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Asclepius (Greek Asklēpiós, Latin Aesculapius) is the Greek god of healing and medicine — in the older myth a mortal physician so skilled that he raised the dead, for which Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt and then set him among the gods. He was held to be the son of Apollo, himself a healer, and the mortal Coronis; the centaur Chiron is named as the one who taught him the art. His emblem, a serpent coiled about a staff, remains the sign of medicine to the present day.

His worship spread across the Greek world from the fifth century BCE onward and became one of the most popular cults of antiquity. Its great centres were Epidaurus in the Peloponnese, the island of Kos, and Pergamon in Asia Minor — the same Kos that was home to the Hippocratic physicians, so that the god and the emerging medical profession grew up side by side rather than at odds. The distinctive rite was incubation: the sick came to the sanctuary, underwent purification, and slept overnight in a hall set apart for the purpose, hoping the god would appear in a dream either to heal directly or to prescribe a remedy. Inscriptions left by the cured — the iamata of Epidaurus — record these dreams and recoveries in the patients’ own grateful words, and stand among the fullest evidence we have for ancient popular religion. Rome adopted the cult in 293 BCE, importing the god, by tradition in the form of a sacred snake, to an island in the Tiber during a plague.

A second Asclepius belongs to a different body of writing. In the Hermetic texts of late antiquity, “Asclepius” is the name given to a disciple of Hermes Trismegistus, the figure to whom several of the dialogues are addressed and the title of the longest Hermetic work to survive in Latin. This Asclepius is presented as a sage and disciple — in the tradition, a grandson of Hermes Trismegistus — rather than the deity himself, a literary persona through which the Egyptian-Greek revelation is expounded. The two are connected by name and by the prestige of healing wisdom, not identical; later Neoplatonists, who read both the cult and the Hermetica within a single sacred cosmos, treated the lines between them loosely.

What the surviving record shows most plainly is how thoroughly healing and the divine were entwined in the ancient understanding of sickness. The Asclepian sanctuaries were not an alternative to medicine but its companion, places where diagnosis, regimen, and the hope of a god’s visitation all belonged to the same visit. The temples eventually closed under Christian rule, their incubation halls in several cases passing to saints who healed in dreams much as the god had. The staff and serpent outlasted the worship.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — III. To Asclepius

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Iamblichus