The Ancient Greek Healing Temple – Asclepeion

This is, most sadly, not a photo of my summer vacation — one can dream, though. And back in the Ancient Greek times, dreaming is exactly why people went to this place in Pergamon, which was a particular type of healing temple called an _asclepeion_.

Named after the Greek god of medicine, asclepeions were visited by thousands of sick or injured people hoping for a cure. Although the physicians and priests who attended the ailing didn’t use the term “holistic approach,” in fact, this describes the methodologies followed. Cleansing, prayer, and dietary regulation include some of the regimens. One of the most important, however, was the careful cultivation of dreams.

In fact, our word “incubation” derives from the Greek term for an asclepeion’s dormitory (“abaton”). Patients who incubated their dreams might receive a type of hallucinogen, and hope to be visited with divine portents and healing instructions. The God Asclepius (or one of his children, like his daughter Panacea – and yes, that’s where we get the term) was thought to be able to visit the sleeper, who would then take her dream to a physician-priest at the temple to be interpreted. (See the second image for a mosaic of a sleeper.).

We actually have ancient records of some of these patients’ dreams. The most famous come from an Asclepeion called Epidauros. For instance, a poor man named Euhippus suffered from a spear that had somehow lodged itself in his jaw six years prior. At Epidauros his dream was recorded on a tablet: the writer Pausanius (second-century CE) relayed what happened: “as he was sleeping in the temple the God extracted the spearhead and gave it to him into his hands. When day came Euhippus departed cured, and he held the spearhead in his hands.”.

While #notacureforCOVID, the incubation of dreams still has cachet among some interested people, who try to steer their dreams to a specific subject – probably minus an appearance of Asclepius, however.