Temple Sleep
Enkoimesis (ancient Greek: ἐγκοίμησις) is a term often used to describe the therapeutic dream treatment carried out within the holistic healing sanctuaries of the divine physician Asklepios.
The etymology of the word reveals something of the nature of the specific experience — it describes an action or process of being lulled/put to/lying down to sleep within a particular place. This is also called incubation or temple sleep.
Enkoimesis may have involved hypnosis and/or the use of certain soporific fumigations (opium for example) or sleep and dream-inducing herbal medicines. It may even refer to the drugged, deathlike sleep of anaesthesia.
Ancient Hellenic physicians were familiar with an impressive pharmacopeia and practiced a range of medical procedures — as evidenced by the many surgical implements and tools discovered on temple sites. Such practical and material techniques for healing may have been purposefully concealed from the average dream temple punter, in an attempt to preserve the mystique of the divine physician god — and the power the therapeutae had to invoke him (Θεραπευταί — God’s attendants, the temple priests and healers).
Cuneiform records from ancient Sumer suggest some of the earliest applications of medical anaesthesia were developed in the ancient Near East, in the temple-hospitals of the health goddess Gula. Euthanasia (easy death) was also practiced there by the asû (physicians) and āšipu (spirit doctors) — of Mesopotamian medicine.
Gula had temples in Umma, Uruk, Nippur, Assur and Babylon. She travelled with the ‘god-collecting’ Hittites to Hattusa in Anatolia and to Ugarit and Emar in Syria. Her temples significantly predate the sanctuaries of Asklepios. Details of the treatments and remedies developed in her temples - and earlier - were recorded on cuneiform tablets and preserved in medical libraries for her trainee physician-priests to study. This information could easily have blended with local knowledge throughout the Fertile Crescent, Africa and the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world.
§ 27 A man with an abscess within his abdomen. When asleep in the sanctuary he saw a dream. It seemed to him that the god ordered the servants who accompanied him to grip him and hold him tightly so that he could cut open his abdomen. The man tried to get away, but they gripped him and bound him to a door knocker. Thereupon Asclepius cut his belly open, removed the abscess, and, after having stitched him up again, released him from his bonds. Whereupon he walked out sound, but the floor of the Abaton was covered with blood.
— Cure inscription from the Asclepieion of Epidaurus
Pedanius Dioscorides — a Greek physician born in the ancient Cilician city of Anazarbus/Justinopolis in Anatolia, was a pharmacologist and botanist in the first century AD. He recorded in his five volume De materia medica that ‘wine of mandrake’ was used as an anaesthetic for treatment of pain or sleeplessness, and was to be given prior to surgery or cautery. The use of nightshade preparations for anaesthesia, often in combination with opium, persisted throughout the Roman and Islamic empires. The text of the epic Shahnameh by the Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi appears to provide evidence for an ancient Iranian application of anesthesia — a combination of cannabis and camphor to alleviate the pain of surgery and childbirth - and suggests that such methods had been used in surgical procedures in Persia since deepest antiquity.
The Sanctuary of Asklepios and Apollo at Epidavros
Just to the east of the Sanctuary of Asklepios and Apollo at Epidavros, on Mount Kynortion, is the Sanctuary of Apollo Maleatus (a local form of Apollo). The Early Helladic origins of this shrine reveal the beginnings of a healing cult in the area — thought to have centred principally around a Bronze Age/Mycenaean goddess before eventually transferring to Apollo.
Within the sanctuary of Asklepios and Apollo at Epidavros, the dormitory structures of the enkoimeterion and the sacrosanct avaton (translates: what may not be set foot upon) were built for the purpose of servicing sleepers who came for the ‘dream cure’.
Avaton (ἄβατον) is a term that was used to describe a prohibited area in a range of religious buildings and precincts in the ancient Hellenic world. It continued to be a proscription into the Byzantine and Christian era, where dream healing, incubation and oracular vision cults were transferred to certain saints, nuns and martyrs.
In the case of the temples of Asklepios, it may have been where the temple snakes were housed — the inner sanctum of the god, holy of holies. Snakes could also have provided the priests with useful diagnostics. Like dogs, snakes have exceptionally sensitive olfaction, with an extradimensional smell-sense provided by the ‘Jacobson’s organ’ - located above the roof of their mouths (vomeronasal).
Operations may have been carried out in the seclusion of the avaton, away from the rest of — perhaps fitfully — sleeping witnesses.
§ 17 A man had his toe healed by a serpent. He, suffering dreadfully from a malignant sore in his toe, during the daytime was taken outside by the servants of the sanctuary and set upon a seat. When sleep came upon him, then a snake issued from the Abaton and healed the toe with its tongue, and thereafter went back again to the Abaton. When the patient woke up and was healed he said that he had seen a vision: it seemed to him that a youth with a beautiful appearance had put a drug upon his toe.
— Cure inscription from the Asclepieion of Epidaurus
The Aesculapian Snake is a non-venomous species of tree snake honoured in the temples of Asklepios, and this creature was respected as the animal form (theriomorphic) of the god. Dogs were also sacred animals to Asklepios, as they had been to the Sumerian goddess of health, Gula. — see my other articles for more information about Gula and dream dogs.
The Epidaurian iamata — are dream narratives inscribed upon stelae at the sanctuary. They detail supernatural interactions with Asklepios, his family and his snakes. These meetings occurred in visions or dreams. In the iamata, the god Asklepios is described performing a (sometimes physically impossible) surgery on a patient, or the patient might have an injured area licked better by one of the sacred snakes. Asklepios might even prescribe a particular course of treatment.
It has me wondering whether there could have been a hypnodelic process at work for at least some of these magical dream cures. This might involve combining psychoactive substances with hypnosis, or perhaps even psychodrama techniques —such techniques were used to great effect at many of the ancient oracular shrines.
The stories of successful healings described in the iamata would have worked as a strong psychological priming for pilgrims visiting the site. Functioning as a kind of medical propaganda to validate the healing prowess of Asklepios and his attendants.
Votives were also offered to the gods of the Asklepion. These talismanic offerings, in the shape of body parts wanting to be healed, have a incredibly ancient lineage. Thousands of similar objects have been found in the Peak and Cave Sanctuaries dedicated to the healing, nature and child-birth assisting goddesses of Neolithic Crete.
Tamata — votive plaques of the Greek orthodox church provide us with continuity for this kind of religious sympathetic magic.
The Rod of Asklepios is the symbol of the divine dream healer god Asklepios — a staff with a single serpent wound around it. The symbol of the god’s daughter Hygieia, personification of health and vitality is the Bowl of Hygieia — a cup entwined with a drinking serpent. Such potent masculine and feminine symbolism directs us to a natural philosophy of wellbeing. Becoming healthy was about finding balance and harmony — and it could be attained through synchrony with the regenerative force of nature. The healing male archetype holds and directs this force, the healing female archetype nurtures and nourishes it.
Alongside straight-forward medicine and surgery, the healing repertoire of the Asklepion combined the beauty of nature, harmonious music, exercise, intellectual stimulation, healing dreams, emotional catharsis through drama and purifying baths in sacred waters. The entire complex was designed to recalibrate pilgrims to divine health.
The sanctuary of Asklepios and Apollo at Epidavros is surrounded by a Sacred Grove, which itself sits in the lap of a circle of mountains. This purposeful planning delineates the sacred precinct. To enter into this place is to find yourself in a divine zone, girded against a discordant world of mortals.
Disease is chaos, health is harmony. Both can be delivered and removed by the gods. We are products of our environment. The longer we spend in good, healthful, even divine surrounds, the more our body and soul seem to transform and reflect our environment, we are more flexible and mirror-like than the biomedical reductionist model can allow. The ancient Hellenes were healing geniuses and they understood that nature, beauty, aesthetics and psychology were vitally important aspects to consider when designing their best health institutions — this is something we could do very well to learn from in modern times. It is too hard to be well in a sick world.
The figure that came to personify the accomplishment of the Asklepion treatment is the hooded dwarf Telesphoros — his name means ‘accomplisher’ or ‘bringer of fulfilment’. He is sometimes referred to as the child of Asklepios and is often shown accompanying him and Hygieia.
“Time extending through the ages is a child playing at a game of chance. The child is king. This is Telesphorus, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.” — inscription on Carl Jung’s mandala centred on Telesphorus, the Greek demi-god of healing
The Perfumed Dream Garden: A New Dream Temple for Epidavros
I host dream retreats in Archaia Epidavros and am creating a new Enkoimeterion in the village — A Perfumed Dream Garden that will sit within a 5 acre orange grove.
Here we will commission stone klinē — special beds for sacred sleep. The word clinic derives from this word (medicine delivered at the bedside) and we shall plant herbs and flowers that correspond and summon the gods, so that they might appear to us in dreams.
One of the goals of the project is to create a living perfume of the gods, using the vital fragrances of the plants associated with them. So you might bathe in the divine aura of Apollo for example. I think it is very important that the scents are created from a blend of living plants, those still woven into the matrix of nature.
I’ve been inspired by ‘Smellosopher’ Keren Bester and Egyptologist and Experimental Archaeologist Dora Goldsmith in this regard, to consider how olfaction provides sensory access to memory and has been considered throughout ancient history as diffusion of divine essence.
Archaia Epidavros is famed for its orange trees. A striking feature of the village is the intoxicating and heavenly perfume from the orange blossom. In ancient times Archaia Epidavros was the gateway town for pilgrims visiting the sanctuary of Asklepios. This beautiful village is littered with ancient temples and sunken villas.
I think it is vitally important to preserve and cultivate the wonderful biodiversity and natural landscape of the area. I am also working to encourage herbalists to purchase neighbouring plots to cultivate their herbs organically. What could be better for your lucid dreaming or herbal sleeping remedy than to have herbs grown in the healing soil of the dream healer god Asklepios!
Initiation into Dream Mysteries: Drinking from the Pool of Mnemosyne by Sarah Janes
(Published Inner Traditions 2022)
22sarahjanes22@gmail.com
themysteries.org
