The Healing myth of the Psyche: Asklepios
Author: Christopher Chayban
The myth I have chosen to discuss is the myth of Asklepios. This myth is psychologically pertinent to the healing of the psyche through the dream. An ancestor of Jungian psychology you might say, the interpreter of the dream embodies the archetype image of the Asklepios, and the archetype of the “Divine Physician.” Asclepius, in his own right could be seen as a symbol of the process of individuation, “He started as a mortal, then a demigod, thirdly a minor deity, until he became the most important medical deity of the Greek world.” (ancient.eu). As a chthonic god or earth father, he can be seen as a redeeming image of the masculine for the spirit of our times. One that is not antagonistic to the feminine.
The story begins with the mother, Koronis “the Crow Maiden” (Gods of the Greeks pg.143), was pregnant with Apollo’s son (Asklepios). Koronis did not love Apollo, she loved a man named Ischys. Apollo sent a white raven to spy on the two and their affair. When the raven brought back the news of Koronis’ unfaithfulness, Apollo was seething with anger. So much so that at the sight of this anger, the raven’s feathers turned black. Apollo ordered Artemis to kill Koronis and she shot her in the breast with an arrow. As Koronis was being burnt upon the funeral pyre she said it was a shame that her son in her belly should go too. Apollo performed a Caesarian-section (Healing dream and ritual pg.22) and pulled the child out of the mother’s belly. The miraculous birth, which comes out of death is a paradox and thus a motif of the divine child, as well as the hero. Except, Asklepios wasn’t a warrior hero he was a physician hero, a “heros iatros.” (Asklepios Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence pg.72) Barbara Hannah tells us that he was suckled by a dog mother (Archetypal symbolism of Animals pg.85.) Kerenyi tells us that Apollo soon after his birth took him to the docile centaur Chiron, who taught him the art of healing ”(Gods of the Greeks pg.144).
Asklepios is a symbol of the self. The associations around him all point to a union of opposites (Levy). As stated earlier, his birth occurred during a death, he is both man that recognizes his material and mortal nature and a God, with his spiritual and eternal nature. He unites the conscious with the unconscious. Born to the Sun (consciousness) god Apollo and Koronois the “Crow Maiden,” to which the crow, we know in its black feathered form is a symbol of the nigredo and the unconscious. One Asklepios’ animals is the cock, which is sacred to Apollo’s mother Leto (Gods of the Greeks pg.144), is solar bird that gives the morning call at sunrise. The coming of the Sun (consciousness) but still in the liminal state at dawn (symbolreader.net), in between day (consciousness) and night (the unconscious).
He is associated with the lunar animals of the dog and the serpent who express the same psychic content (Asklepios Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence pg.32). The wolf and serpent are associated with Apollo to which in Asklepios, we get the dog and serpent. These animals are associated with the underworld. The dog is associated with the underworld in other mythologies, as the guard to the underworld for Hades or as the Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead, Anubis (Healing dream and ritual pg.20). The dog is associated with healing, it eats the right grass and herbs and helps by licking wounds. Jung once said that the saliva or spittle has the correlate of the soul or psychic substance (Archetypal symbolism of Animals pg.85.). The dog is man’s best friend, a helpful animal and a guide of souls, but is also a trickster as in the myths of the Native Americans. The dog is a symbol of the instincts and the connection to nature.
Which brings us to the serpent, who shares similar qualities of the dog in that it is associated with the unconscious and leads to the wisdom of the unconscious. The serpent guards treasures of the inner world and is regenerative or a symbol of death and rebirth (symbolreader.net) that can be shown by the shedding of its skin. It can wound or heal with its poison and Asklepios himself is an embodiment of the wounded healer. It’s not too far a stretch to say that the dog and serpent are a kind of primitive anima for Asklepios, who lead back to the unconscious to the mother he never knew. The archetypal motif of the night sea journey (Healing dream and ritual pg.iv) surrounds Asklepios, as the chthonic sun hero who goes down into the depths of the sea dream (the unconscious/underworld) and comes back up, like the serpent, renewed in consciousness and waking state. He carries a staff with a serpent coiled around it. The staff is indicative of the sun tree, the phallic mother, in which the serpent (another symbol of opposites) is climbing. This is analogous to the yogic tree of the chakras and the kundalini, travelling up the spine in the quest to reach consciousness (Healing dream and ritual pg.68). His connection with the serpents is associated with the Gorgons as well, where Athena gives him Medusa’s blood. When the blood is used from the left, it kills, to the right, it heals and brings people back from the dead (Healing dream and ritual pg.31-32). Which is to say in the left, if one remains unconscious, one will perish, and in the right if a content is made consciousness, healing occurs.
In statues, he is depicted both as a puerile boy and a senex man with a beard (Healing dream and ritual pg.32). Asklepios parallels Christ, Dionysus, Serapis and Osris, all chthonic God-men who integrated the feminine. He is married to Epione the daughter of Hercules (Healing dream and ritual pg.17), and has two daughters, Hygiea and Panakea. Hygiea as you might guess is connected with the word “hygiene,” and whether physical or psychic, is something that always accompanies a skilled physician. As first a mortal, he was immortalized in the heavens in the stars of Ophiuchus (Healing dream and ritual pg.27) or Serpentarius (the serpent bearer) after Zeus struck him down with a lightning bolt (symbolreader.net) per consequence of raising the dead.
In the cult of Asklepios, the attendees in the temple were called theraputes (From the words of my mouth pg.58). Edinger tells us that, “The Greek word therapeuein, “to heal,” originally meant “service to the gods.” Psychotherapy thus means, basically, service to the psyche. (Anatomy of the Psyche. pg.2). Much in the same way that the temple was a temenos, a sacred space for the sick to heal, the therapist tries to create a safe place for the patient to heal. In this temple, the process of dream incubation would happen.The introversion and going within ones’ self, kicked off the self-healing process of the psyche. The sickly would lay on a “kline” which means a couch or bed (Healing dream and ritual pg.51) that would trigger the healing dream process. It is where we get the word “clinic” and “clinician.” It said that the wounding and wound is what heals (Asklepios Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence pg.76-77). Translated in psychological terms, it is through the complex that we get to the healing at the archetypal core. It is said that only the divine heals (Healing dream and ritual pg.2) and the experience of the numinous, underscoring the importance of the connection to the transcendent as agent of healing. It is the Self that wounds the Ego complex (Levy) and only the Self, the origin of the wound has the capability to heal and experience of an epiphany (Asklepios Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence pg.26) which is to say a realization in consciousness. Asklepios, the Wounded Healer, and as a symbol of the Self would appear in the dreams of the sickly, much like Jung would appear as a deity in the dreams of his patients. An obvious allusion to the transference and countertransference dynamic in dreams, this also lay the possibility of inflation of the therapist, but C.A. Meier says it is better than the secularization of medicine (Healing dream and ritual pg.8), which without contact to the transpersonal, has less of an impact in the healing process. Asklepios says he will come as himself or as one of his animals, the dog or the snake.
“Be not afraid: I shall come, and leave my statues,
But see this serpent, as it twines around
The rod I carry: mark it well and learn it,
For I shall be this serpent, only larger,
Like a celestial presence.”
(Asklepios Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence pg.10)
Modern dreams of healing show this process still to be at work. C.A. Meier gives examples of the Divine Physician visiting in dreams and also that of the serpent and dog appearing in dreams of healing.
The first dream of the Divine Physician
“After he told me this I went to the spring and stopped it up with the lump of gold. I managed this successfully, but in doing so I was poisoned by the water and could only go a few steps farther before I sank down. As I lay on my back, the fiery man came and thanked me for what I had done. Then he kissed me on the mouth, and I felt that his fire penetrated my body. In this way he put out his own fire and disappeared. But the fire burned up the poison in my body, and I was cured.” (Healing dream and ritual pg.6)
The second of the serpent and dog:
“I was at an exhibition with my two sons Suddenly one of them, who had stayed a little way behind, called out, “A snake!” He had vomited up a worm about eighteen inches long (like a snake) and pulled it out of his mouth, and was holding it in the middle with his right fist. He ran to me to show me the snake. It had the head of a miniature dog. I said to him that I too had once had a worm like that, and that it was a good thing when it came out.” (Healing dream and ritual pg.21)
The ancient dream healing wasn’t just for reviving bodily it was a practice that involved “Soma Kai Psyche” or “Body and Mind” and paved the way for psychosomatic medicine of today (Healing dream and ritual pg.iv). Thus, the myth of Asklepios brings together body and mind through meaning in the dream, i.e. synchronicity (symbolreader.net). The myth of Asklepios is psychologically meaningful because it mirrors the process of the Jungian dream healing. It is a myth of raising unconscious contents to consciousness that connects us back to the unconscious without being devoured by it. In doing this kind of work, we all embody the “Divine Physician” and the archetypal image of that is Asklepios.
Resources:
Asclepius: Earth-Walking Healer, Son of Apollo. (2015, October 09). Retrieved March 30, 2018, from https://symbolreader.net/2015/
HANNAH, B. (2013). ARCHETYPAL SYMBOLISM OF ANIMALS: Lectures given at. S.l.: CHIRON PUBLICATIONS.
Hygieia, the Goddess of Health. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2018, from https://www.ancient.eu/
Kerényi, K. (1981). Asklepios: Archetypal image of the physicians existence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kerényi, K. (2010). The gods of the Greeks. London: Thames and Hudson.
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