Incubation

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Incubation is the practice of sleeping inside a sacred precinct in order to receive, in a dream, a cure or an answer from a god. The Greeks called it enkoimesis; the Latin incubatio gives the modern term. The dream itself was the point: the suppliant lay down in the holy place and waited for the deity to appear, to prescribe, to heal, or to instruct, and the experience was read on waking as a direct communication rather than an ordinary dream.

Its great home was the cult of Asklepios, the healing god whose sanctuaries — the Asklepieia — spread across the Greek and Roman world, at Epidaurus, Pergamon, Kos, Athens, and elsewhere. The pilgrim arrived, underwent purifications and offerings, and then passed the night in a hall set aside for the purpose. Asklepios was expected to come in sleep, sometimes in the shape of a serpent or a dog, and either heal outright or name a remedy to be carried out afterward. Carved tablets at Epidaurus, the iamata, record such cures in the god’s favour, and the testimony is not only lapidary: in the second century CE the orator Aelius Aristides kept a long account of his own dealings with the god, the Sacred Tales, a sustained record of a man who organised much of his life around what Asklepios told him at night. Comedy noticed the practice too; Aristophanes had already played it for laughs.

The same logic operated at oracular sites that were not primarily medical — the dream-oracles of Amphiaraus at Oropos and of Trophonius at Lebadeia, and, in the Roman and Egyptian spheres, the incubation cults of Serapis and Isis, where sleepers sought diagnosis or guidance by the same means.

What scholarship establishes is harder to fix than what the inscriptions claim. The cures are recorded as the cures of grateful patients; how the nights were actually managed — how far priests interpreted, staged, or supplied the dreams — the sources do not settle. A long-standing line of study, associated above all with Mary Hamilton’s early survey, traced the practice past the close of the pagan temples into Christian healing shrines: pilgrims slept at the tombs and churches of saints credited with medicine — Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, Thecla, Artemios — and woke reporting the saint’s visit and counsel. Whether this is genuine continuity or independent reinvention of a natural human hope is contested; the resemblance is plain, and the inference from it is not. What both phases share is the same wager: that sleep in the right place, before the right power, could be made to answer.

→ Related: Divination