HEALING TEMPLE OF AESCULAPIUS

Sound, Color, Vibration, and Dream Therapy

Asclepius was the Greek god of Medicine and according to the common account a son of the healing god Apollo by Coronis, a daughter of a Thessalian prince Phlegyas. Coronis was killed by Artemis for unfaithfulness, and her body was about to be burned on the pyre, when Apollo snatched the boy out of the flames, and handed him over to the wise centaur Chiron, who instructed him in the cure of all diseases.

According to the local legend of Epidaurus, Coronis, having accompanied her father on a campaign to the Peloponnesus, is secretly delivered of the child, and exposes it on a mountain near that town, where it was nourished by a herd of goats. Such was the skill of Asclepius that he brought even dead men to life; so that Zeus, either for fear of his setting men altogether free from death, or at the complaint of Hades, killed him with his thunderbolt. Apollo in revenge slew all the Cyclopes who forged the thunderbolts, as a punishment for which he had to serve Admetus for a time. In Homer and Pindar, Asclepius is still but a hero, a cunning leech, and father of two heroes fighting before Troy, Machaon and Poladeirius. But he was afterwards universally worshiped as the god of healing, in groves, beside medicinal springs, and on mountains. The seats of his worship served also as places of cure, where patients left thank-offerings and votive tablets describing their complaint and the manner of its cure. Often the cure was effected by the dreams of the patients, who were required to sleep in the sacred building, in which there sometimes stood, as might be expected, a statue of Sleep or Dreaming. His worship extended all over Greece with its islands and colonies; his temples were especially numerous in the Peloponnesus, the most famous being that of Epidaurus, where a great festival with processions and combats was held in his honor every five years.

He is commonly represented with a beard, and resembling Zeus, but with a milder aspect, sometimes with Telesphoros, in a thick veil, or Hygieia and Panacea at his side; his usual attribute is a staff with a serpent coiled around it.

*Excerpt from Dictionary of Classical Antiquities by Oskar Seyffert

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