Sacred Tales Research Articles

The Role of Incubation in Ancient Greek Asklepieions

The sanctuaries of Asklepios served a healing function in the Greek world throughout antiquity. In modern historiography, it is believed that the sick were treated there by incubation, i.e., sleeping in the temple to obtain a divinatory dream. However, the sources are not clear on this matter. In this article, I analyse four sources that, in my opinion, are the most representative of the issue of treatment methods in the Asklepieions. From the classical period, inscriptions describing healings from Epidauros and the comedy "Wealth" by Aristophanes are extremely important, while from Roman times they include "The Sacred Tales" by Aelius Aristides and the Apellas’ inscription from Epidauros. It is significant that none of these sources describes the incubation ritual, and the treatment methods presented in them are rational from the viewpoint of contemporary medicine. Incubation was practiced in the Asklepieions, but its role, in my opinion, was much smaller than commonly believed.

Science in Scriptures —Analysing the Presence of Modern Technology in Ancient Indian Mythology

Myths are the study and interpretation of sacred tales (which can often be religious) of any particular culture or civilisation and Mythology as the dictionary suggests is the study of these Myths. This paper attempts to study and analyse the various instances where the depiction of Modern scientific technology is being found in the various mythological scripts in India.

Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales

Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales, composed in the 2nd century CE, is considered a unique literary work, in which the author claimed to have recorded the dreams he had received from Asclepius over a long period of time. Modern historians explore the value of the Sacred Tales both as a literary work and as a personal oneiric record of actual dreaming experiences. In this article, I take into account the modern insights offered by the embodied human cognition paradigm in order explore the possible long-term influence and repercussions of the Sacred Tales on the readers’ imagination and dreaming experiences. In particular, I suggest that Aristides’ oneiric descriptions would have been meta-represented in the readers’ minds upon reading the text, priming specific images, representations, mental, and emotional states as well as expectations about potential divine revelations during the ritual of incubation. Later, those readers who would find themselves in similar bodily, mental, and emotional conditions like the ones experienced and described by Aristides, could have implicitly used the primed representations for meta-representing a personal epiphany of Asclepius. Thereby, the Sacred Tales would have provided the raw material to feed the readers’ imaginative simulations and to elicit a personally meaningful divine revelation.

Two sacred tales in the Seoul metropolis: The gospels of prosperity and development in modernizing South Korea

This article examines the ways in which the emergence of the Seoul Capital Area offered both opportunities and challenges to religious actors in modernizing South Korea. South Korea rebuilt itself from the ruins of the Korean War through an accelerated process of urbanization and industrialization in accordance with a state-led modernization drive. This process, in turn, led to an unprecedented population concentration in Seoul and its surrounding area, where new political and economic centers emerged side-by-side with slums and shantytowns. Amid this turbulent social change, some of today’s most well-known Protestant leaders – especially Pentecostal Cho Yong-gi and Calvinist Kim Chin-hong – joined the caravan of rural-to-urban migration and commenced their ministries in Seoul, adapting their religious messages and practices to address the social aspirations of the growing urban population. This article demonstrates that despite their shared concern for the problem of urban poverty, Cho Yong-gi and Kim Chin-hong faced successes and failures in different ways as they adopted ministerial programs of the gospel of prosperity and the theology of development, respectively.

Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales: A Study of the Creation of the “Narrative about Asclepius”

Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales is a complex literary text, and its first book—the diary—puzzles scholars, as it has no parallel in the entire work. This paper offers a justification for this section by arguing for a deliberate contrast between the diary and Books 2–6 of the Sacred Tales, as a result of which the latter section is crafted as a narrative about Asclepius. I will first identify a large series of shifts in the ST: starting with Book 2, change concerns the protagonist, which from Aristides' abdomen turns to Asclepius, the narrator, dream interpretation, genre, and arrangement of the events. Secondly, I discuss the impact of these shifts upon the readers' response: while the diary invites the readers to relive the everyday tension between known past and unknown future, the spatial form of Books 2–6 creates the opposite effect, turning the readers' attention away from the human flow of time towards Asclepius, and leading them to perceive features of his divine time.

The dreams of Aelius Aristides: A psychological interpretation

The topic of this article is the religious experience of Aelius Aristides, a second century A.D. sophist. Aristides was a member of the cult of Asclepius, a Greco-Roman religious healing cult. Aristides recorded his experiences in this cult and this personal narrative includes detailed descriptions of many of Aristides’ dreams. This unusual diary is called the Sacred Tales. Our psychological analysis of Aristides’ religiosity will begin by assessing the numerical frequency of the dream images appearing in the manifest-contents of Aristides’ dreams. Our identification of the predominant images in the manifest contents of Aristides’ dreams will help us to decode the latent unconscious meaning of several of Aristides’ dreams. Our goal is to identify the main source of Aristides’ psychological problems.

Dominante spaziale e struttura argomentativa nel V Discorso Sacro di Elio Aristide

Aristides' own definition of the Sacred Tales as diegesis allows us to read them using narratological categories. The work contains circular or, better, spiral-like time structures. The Fifth discourse is dominated by spatial circularity, coexisting with a paradoxical indifference for the real space itself while Aristides' attention focuses on the oneiric one. It has an argumentative structure based on illustration and accumulation; the altered spatio-temporal axis shows that Asclepius' intervention crosses the boundaries between time and space, dream and reality. The Sacred Tales owe their simple stylistic structure, strikingly different from other discourses of Aristides, to many factors, including their psychic and religious content.

Wellbeing: a cultural history of healthy living

Introduction. Prologue. The ancient advanced civilizations - Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia. Greece. The ideal of health in Ancient Greece. The Pre-Socratics.The Hippocratic Corpus. Diocles of Carystus, a Fourth-Century Health Pedagogue. 'Knidic' Dietetics. Health in Plato and Aristotle. Dietetics in Alexandria. Cures and Miracles, Asculapius and Hygeia. Public Health Care and Sport. Early Stoics and Cynics. Rome. People and Literati - Dietetics in Ancient Rome. New Doctors, New Theories. Sport and Baths. The Sacred Tales of Publius Aelius Aristides. The Roman Stoa: Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Arelius, Epictetus. Galen. Jewish and Early Christian Traditions. Jewish Doctrines of Health. Christus Medicus. Early Christian Doctrines of Health. Medieval Traditions in the East and West. Healing and Health in Early Monasticism. The first German pharmacopoeia. Dietetics in Islam. Medieval Doctrines of Health in the West. Asceticism and Mysticism - Feasts and Beauty Care. Western and Eastern Clerical Scholars: Maimonides, Petrus Hispanus, Roger Bacon. Hildegard of Bingen. Saints and Miracle Workers. The Power of the Stars. Doctrines of Health in the Renaissance. Petrarch's Conception of Health. Alberti and other Intellectuals around 1500. House Books and Manuals - Health and Literature. Further Humanists - Platina, More, Luther. Philosophy of Health and Prophylaxis in Venice - Mercuriale, Rangone, Cornaro. Gabriele Zerbi and the Gerontocomia. Paracelsus' Teachings on Health. Herbal Books. Dietetics in Daily Life. Dietetics in the 17th Century. Cartesianism and Conservative Tendencies. Van Helmont, Sylvius and Other 'Iatrochemists'. Doctrines of Health in England - the Dietetics of the State. Health through Planning - the Utopias. The Dietetics of the Enlightenment - Philosophers, Pedagogues, Charlatans. Doctrines of Health in the Eighteenth Century. Medical Theories of Health. The French Enlightenment and Rousseau. Tissot, Triller, Mai: Health Education at Grassroots. Public Health Care. Around 1800. The Notion of 'Lebenskraft' (Vital Force) - Hufeland and Kant. The Recurrent Topic of a Dietetic Regime for Intellectuals. Alternative Paths to Health. Goethe. Romantic Medicine - Schelling, Carus, Novalis. The Nineteenth Century. Trends in the Nineteenth Century. Rudolf Virchow and the Dietetics of Reason. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Philosophical Critique of Positivism. The Revolution in Nutrition and Alternative Paths to Health. Afterword. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

The Rhetoric of Religion

Abstract The paper explores the intersections between rhetoric and religion in Graeco-Roman antiquity, both pagan and Christian. Rhetorical forms of religious expression include discourse about the gods (narrative, eulogy, preaching, naming) and discourse addressed to the gods, especially prayers and hymns. Rhetoric itself possesses a religious dimension in the power of words, the effectiveness of speech, and the magic of persuasion. Discourse can have supernatural effectiveness, and the orator can be invested with religious powers. Aelius Aristides (2nd c. CE) displays these different aspects; his Sacred Tales illustrate the cross-fertilization of rhetoric and religion.

Narratives of Transformation: Pilgrimage Patterns and Authorial Self-Presentation in Three Pilgrimage Texts

This paper explores a theme important in pilgrimage narratives from a variety of cultures: the expression of the author/pilgrim’s developing understanding of the meaning and significance of his or her pilgrimage. It does so through three case studies: readings of three first-person narratives from widely differing chronological, cultural and religious milieux. The first narrative is Aelius Aristides’ The Sacred Tales, an ancient Greek text written AD c. 170, which evokes the culture of Graeco- Roman healing pilgrimage; the second is Friar Felix Fabri’s Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae (‘Wanderings in the Holy Land’), a Latin narrative of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land written c.1484–8; and the third is Pierre Loti’s Un pèlerin d’Angkor (‘An Angkor Pilgrim’), a French text relating a personal (and initially nonreligious) pilgrimage to the temples of Angkor in what was then French Indo-China, published in 1912. These three narratives were produced in cultures with profoundly different traditions of pilgrimage, including its practice, its cultural meanings and the modes of its description. These significant differences immediately raise the question of the meaning and usefulness of attaching the label ‘pilgrimage narratives’ to all three texts, and invite a reasoning for the exercise of comparison across cultures and across time.

Theme, Dream, and Narrative: Reading the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides

Theme, Dream, and Narrative: Reading the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides

Logica parva (review)

554 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:4 OCTOBER ~986 use their classical learning in espousing the new teachings. '~ And just beginning is the consideration of why late Roman and Byzantine dvilizadon is anything but the fossilized millennium so eloquently portrayed by Gibbon. '~ Press's Idea of Histo~ presents a dull, pedantic civilization which seems to have been bored by its own arguments. The texts show a lively and continually adaptive debate, replete with the wobbly opinions and quirks of human beings constantly seeking security in an uncertain world, t2 Press would have greatly benefitted from the work of Sorabji, Is who has forced us again to think about the essentials of time and space, and about how Aristotle formulated a long-influential concept of necessity . Press, however, apparently has not read much in the modern literature since about t965. JOHN SCARBOROUGH University of Wisconsin Paulus Venetus, Log/ca parva. Translated by Alan R. Perreiah. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1984; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984. PP. 37 ~. $59.95, cloth. Paul of Venice, the Augustinian friar who brought the Oxford logic to Italy at the end of the fourteenth century, was most famous in the late medieval and renaissance periods for his Log/caparva. The text is found in more than 8o manuscripts and went through more than two dozen editions. As an introduction, it deserved to be in such demand; it provides a wonderful unified overview of all the areas of late medieval logic. In a parallel way the translator's 118 page introduction also offers an invaluable overview, not only of this work, but also of today's state of scholarship regarding medieval logic in general. 2o V/d. e.g., E. H. Blakeney, ed., trans., and comm., F/a/an/Laaara//Ep/~/~taionura d/v/nature (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 195o); R. M. O|gilvie, The Libra] of Lactantius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Ernest Evans, ed., trans., comm., Tertullian's Treatise on the Resurrection (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 196o); and J. H. Waszink, ed. and comm., Quinli septimi Florentis Tertul2ian/:De an/ma (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1947). 21 E.g. Alexander Kazhdan, in collab. Simon Franklin, Studies on Byzantine Litercaureof the E/eventh and Twe/fthCentur/es (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), and John Scarborough, ed., Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, Dumb~zm Oaks Papers, 38 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984). zz One can do no better than cite the ~d century hypochondriac, Aelius Aristides. C. A. Behr, introd, and trans., Adius Aristides and the Sacred Tales (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1968). E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: University Press, 1965), 39-45' John Scarborough, Roman Medicine (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969; rpt. x976), 1o5-to7. z3 Richard Sorabji, Time, Creationand the Continuu~ (London: Duckworth, 1983) and Necessity , Cause, and Blame: Pe~pechve~on ArtiCle's Theo~ (London: Duckworth, 198o). BOOK REVIEWS 555 The present translation is based on the 1472 Venice edition of the text. This Venice edition was reprinted in 197o by Georg Olms Verlag from a Paris Biblioth~que Nat/ona/e copy which contains a number of penned-in corrections, some suggested deletions and a few illegible logical tables. Perreiah has attempted to get over the hurdles presented by these conditions by consulting the 1492 and 1565 editions as well as the earliest dated (14~ 1) manuscript. Although I would question his claim (12) that "the correspondence between the 14Ol manuscript and the 1472 edition is in fact so close that the later appears to have been copied from the former," (there are, on the average, ten variants in the 14Ol manuscript for each page of the 197o reprint), still I think his use of this manuscript and the two other editions has given him a solid, although not a critical, text for his translation. In genera1, the translation is both accurate and readable. Perreiah has organized and divided the work in a way that brings out the clarity and integration so characteristic of Paulus Venetus's original plan. The layout of the translation is far superior to the Venice 1472 Latin edition...