History of Asclepios

Paul first visited the Sanctuary on a visit to Greece when he was 16, little did he know that the seemly innocuous visit was to have such an impact many years later.

Asclepios was the Greek God of healing, and worshippers built large temple complexes around Greece in his name. Throughout the period, and into the era of the Roman Empire, people would visit these temples to be healed.

Built in the sixth Century BC and lasting until 500 AD, the Sanctuary of Asclepios at Epidaurus is a spiritual place. It was a healing center as well as a cultural center in ancient times. It is adorned with a multitude of buildings most famous of which is the ancient Theater of Epidaurus, shown below.

The Sanctuary of Asclepios (Aesculapius) at Epidaurus always held aloof from war and power struggles and remained true to its original calling as a place of healing. It would appear that Nature itself was here fully in tune with the wishes and intentions of the god of healing, for the area around Epidaurus has numerous springs and plentiful supplies of water. The ancient Greeks approached health from a holistic point of view, and the Sanctuary included a theater, gymnasium, and stadium as well as traditional medical treatments. 

The god worshipped here was Asclepios, the god of health, the ‘most man loving’ of all the gods of the ancient Greeks. He had so much affection for mankind that he would help them in all circumstances, healing them from any kind of disease, and he would certainly have liberated them even from death, if Zeus had not intervened personally to restore the unsearchable divine order.

Asclepios is thus recognised as the god protector of medical science, starting from his own sons Machaon and Podalairios, produced a long row of famous ‘Asclepiades’ (physicians) among them Hippocrates. Also the Asclepieia is where his priests effected ‘miraculous’ cures, with the sole use of the ‘admirable divine power’, as it is quoted in the first of the two marble stelae found during an excavation at Epidauros in 1881.

They considered it fundamental to teach men to think only enlightened thoughts, because they believed, and they proved it, that when our thoughts are maintained in a pure and harmonious state, then even our bodies become healthy and harmonious.

The healings of the body and mind which occurred there were the natural outcome, firstly of the worship of the ‘Saviour’ (the divine good) and secondly of the spiritual rebirth which takes place when an individual identifies himself and becomes conscious of his true nature.

The true nature of man was considered to be mainly spiritual. His natural state is a condition of perfect harmony and health which remains undisturbed as long as it is kept ‘in tune’ with the divine harmony and order which governs the universe.

Disease is the unnatural condition caused by something foreign which comes to disturb the reigning harmony. The resulting disharmony is only temporary, the natural law is that perfect harmony will be restored again, because the living god is the god of health, who destroys everything contrary to himself.
This disease, this enemy ,however, which tries to disturb our natural harmony is not real, it has no real substance; it is but a chimera, an illusion, a dream.

Though fantastic, however, these enemies of our natural harmony are very dangerous, because they assail our minds and our thinking creating a lot of conscious or unconscious fears or phobias and terrible passions. If they are not controlled in time they can strangle us, like the Lernea Hydra. Initially they attack a man mentally and if they find that he is unguarded or spiritually too weak to behead them immediately, they settle in his mind and from there they spread to incapacitate also his body.

The Asclepiadians thus considering that the cause of every disease is mainly mental, the method to cure it would be also mental or spiritual. The patient who failing to guard his mind has let himself become sick (either because he did not know how to protect himself, or owing to the lessening of his spiritual resistance or because of his little faith in the Divine) will be healed at the Asclepion. Here the high spirituality of the priests and the profoundly religious, spiritual and artistic atmosphere of the place will help him to cast out all his erroneous beliefs and illusions and recover his natural and harmonious condition.

A radical healing is thus obtained only when the mind itself is cured; when there is a change of mind. For together with the mind, the body also is necessarily healed. The body can of course be also cured directly with various material medica but this cure is only temporary. As the generative cause of the disease dwelling in the mind has not been eliminated, it may at any time call forth new disharmonies in other parts of the body.