The Asklepios Cult
Where Brains, Minds, and Bodies Interact With the World, Creating New Realities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.v1i1.14Keywords:
Asklepios, Asklepieia, Hellenistic era, healing deity, cognitive approach, bio-cultural theory of religion, patterns of practice, cognitive governance systemsAbstract
The Asklepios cult flourished especially in the Hellenistic era, when the god encountered significant diffusion and popularity. The application of cognitive theoretical suggestions, along with a historical approach, can promote the understanding of the healing of diseases at the Asklepios temples and how people thought about and explained their experiences in his sanctuaries. This essay outlines the ways in which the Asklepios cult drew on the common ideas, conceptions and concepts shared by the people of the Hellenistic world. The construction of the Asklepieia, the propagation of the god’s healing power, the decision to visit one of his temples as well as the particular rules, norms, restrictions and actions, which the supplicants should follow, are presented as the product of the continual interplay of the embrained and embodied individuals living in that era and their social, cultural, conceptual and symbolic environment.
References
Donald, M. 2001. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness .New York and London: W. W. Norton.
Day, M. 2004. “Religion, off-line cognition and the extended mind”. Journal of Cognition and Culture 4(1): 101–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853704323074778
Geertz, A. 1999. “Definition as analytical strategy in the study of religion”. Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 25(3): 445–75.
—2010. “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22.4: 304–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006810X531094
Holowchak, A. M. 2001. Ancient Science and Dreams. Oneirology in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Jensen, J. S. 2010. “Doing it the Other Way Round: Religion as a Basic Case of ‘Normative Cognition’”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22.4: 322–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006810X531102
Jouanna, J. 2012. Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers. Edited with a preface by Philip van der Eijk, translated by Neil Allies. Leiden: Boston Brill. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004232549
LiDonnici, L. R. 1995. The Epidaurian Inscriptions. Text, Translation, and Commentary. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.
Martin, L. “Cognition and Religion”. Culture and Research 1 (2012): 25–42. Online: http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/culres. Accessed November 10, 2012.
Martin, R., and H. Metzger. 1992. La Religion grecque. Translated in Greek by Mina Kardamitsa. Athens: Kardamitsa.
Miller, P. C. 1994. Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Norman, D. A. 1993. Things that Make Us Smart. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Nutton, V. 2004. Ancient medicine. London and New York: Routledge.
Roepstorff, A. 2008. “Things to Think With: Words and Objects as Material Symbols”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363: 2049–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0015
Roepstorff, A., J. Niewöhner and S. Beck. 2010. “Enculturing Brains through Patterned Practices”. Neural Networks 23: 1051–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2010.08.002
Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach .London: Blackwell.
Riethmüller, Jürgen W. 2005. Asklepios: Heiligtümer und Kulte, 2 vols. Studien zu Antiken Heiligtümern.Heidelberg: Verlag Archäologie und Geschichte.
Zahn, R., J. Moll, V. Iyengar, E. D. Huey, M. Tierney, F. Krueger and J. Grafman. 2009. “Social Conceptual Impairments in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration with Right Anterior Temporal Hypometabolism”. Brain 132(3): 604–16. Accessed August 10, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn343
