Fresh Batch #140: Did Temples Function as Clinics and Hospitals?

Why the Lack of Evidence at Pre-Empire Sites?

The sanctuaries in Southern Etruria, Latium, and Roman Campania (dated to the 4th-1st centuries BC) may eventually be able to give incredible insight regarding history and the transition of power from Etruria to Rome, or the region’s evolution should the status quo claims be incorrect. Jean MacIntosh Turfa wrote in an article Anatomical Votives and Italian Medical Traditions (Mur. Etr. p. 224), “The votives, even examples without provenance, offer good documentation of artistic influences, manufacturing procedures, worship, politics, and medicine. A basic, unchallenged assumption is that they are petitions or thank-offerings for healing or fecundity. The recognized sanctuaries, already more than 130 (including over 30 sites in Etruria and the Faliscan territory, with a like number in the territory of Rome and Latium), seem to fall into two categories. At most sanctuaries, healing is one aspect, not necessarily the most important, of the favorite local cult, as is the case with Punta della Vipera (Minerva), Aricca (Ceres and Proserpina), Lavinium (Juno Sospita, Satricum (Mater Matuta), and Lucus Feroniae (Feronia, of course). There, anatomical votives seldom encompass all possible types, but often are only heads and/or statues (as at Castrovalva, Civita Musarna, Feltre, Magione, Narce, Peciano, Piedimonte d’Alife, Poggio Buco, Priverno, Sparanise, Trevignano Romano, Vaste) or heads/statues and hands or feet (Alatri, Amelia, Anagni, Anzio, Ardea, Castrocielo, Chiusi, Este, Fossombrone, Fregellae, Alba Fucens, Minturnae, Monteleone Sabino, Nocera Umbra, San Giuliano, Sant’-Angelo in Formis). Some sites received a specific but very limited selection of the repertoire—for instance, representing fertility only or eye diseases only, as at Cori-Colle Margherita and the temple site at Altari (uteri only), Egnazia (breasts only, presumably to ensure lactation), Teano (babies, heads, figurines of pregnant women), Bolsena and Nomentum (eyes only). Interesting combinations occur at Viterbo (babies and feet), Marsilian d’Albegna (uteri, breasts, and feet), and Schiavi d’Abruzzo (heads, male and female genitals). One is tempted to interpret hands, feet, or even heads in such contexts as pars pro toto expressions of willingness to devote one’s actions, travels, and so on to the god, rather than emblems of specific diseases.

“The small second category includes specialized sanctuaries in which the main local cult (seldom of Asklepios or Apollo) is perhaps associated with a healing spa or clinic, and belongs to a major city: Veii, Caere, Tarquinia, Vulci, Rome; or to an important Latin or international sanctuary: Pyrgi, Gravisca (note the relation to Caere and Tarquinia), Nemi, Palestrina, Ponte di Nona, and (probably) Lavinium. At these sites, great quantities of votives include all possible types and organs, including the otherwise rare polyvisceral plaques or statues. Well documented are the Ara della Regina of Tarquinia and the Veientine sanctuary at the Campetti site. At a very few sites, notably Gravisca, there is evidence of continuity from the Archaic cult into fourth-century and later worship, although the character of the votives changes abruptly in the fourth century B.C. One can only assume that prior to about 325 B.C., healing petitions were consecrated with more generic offerings of produce, vases, jewelry, and other items. The fourth- to first-century terracotta votives are probably not the gifts of aristocrats, or of slaves, but an inexpensive commodity made available for a class, perhaps socially equivalent to the Roman plebs, which until then had little buying power.

“The phenomenon of anatomical votives coincides generally with the rise in popularity of the cult of Asklepios (associated with Apollo) in Greece, and with the burgeoning prosperity and social changes of the Hellenistic kingdoms in Greece and the East. There is considerable regional diversity, though, in cult practices and even in the design of votives.”

I suspect we are looking at the diffusion of the Therapeuts. Æsculapius, the solar archetype founder of the Jewish-Buddhist sect, can be broken down as Ash-Kul-Ab, or אש-כל-אב = Fire-All-Father, with the addition of the Latin termination. This “founder” or “father” of the healers is none other than Helios, the sun, the origin of the word heal, because the sun heals and the Theraputae, or Essenes, are a group whose name in both languages signifies healing and miracle working. The association of Asklepios (Greek; Ἀσκληπιός) or Aesculapius (Latin) with Apollo is yet another proof of Apollo being the sun.

Again from Turfa (Ib. p. 225), “Greek sanctuaries have furnished few if any accurate representations of human internal organs—as would be in keeping with the state of local medical practice, Hippocratic or otherwise. This is not quite the case with Etruscan and Latin votives.

“Many Italian suppliants had access to an interesting array of dedicatory organs beyond simple eyes, ears, and limbs. Besides male and female external genitals, there were available at many sites models of hearts, uteri, testicles, intestines, and several varieties of “polyvisceral” ensembles—whether a plaque displaying internal organs (trachea, heart, lungs, spleen, liver, intestines, etc.) or a statue, figurine, or torso modeled with an incision displaying the same organs in relief as if revealed against a clothed or nude body. Besides raising questions of taste, such models should be evidence for the state of anatomical knowledge by the late fourth century or slightly later. The artistic treatment of models changed over the following three centuries, but without apparent improvement in anatomical accuracy.”

I may be interpreting this wrong, but the way Turfa describes the more accurate depiction of organs in ancient Italy indicates a stronger, earlier relationship between the Italians and the Egyptians, regarding the healing cults, than either of the cultures had with the Greeks, and may indicate the Aesculepius archetype being more ancient in Italy than in Greece. But even with the more accurate depictions, the Italian artists still preferred to abstain from realism. Turfa continued (Ib.), “The models are always stylized and schematized to create an orderly, often symmetrical appearance, leading a modeler to “arrange” intestines neatly, eliminate asymmetrical details, rearrange organs slightly for a better view, or add details, such as increasing the number of annular striations on a trachea, adding lobes to the lungs for decorative effect, or even bending the trachea down and adding pellet eyes to give it the appearance of a snake!”

Post-Morem Delivery, Born from the Side of the Mother

Turfa wrote (Ib. p. 229), “Post-mortem delivery has been attributed to many personalities in myth and history, from Asklepios and Dionysos to the legendary Italian warrior Lichas to (probably incorrectly) Sextus Julius Caesar, namesake of the famous family. The phenomenon must have been of early importance, as it seems the only raison d’être for the character of poor Lichas in Aeneid 10.315-17:

inde Lichan ferit exsectum iam matre perempta

et tibi, Phoebe, sacrum casus evadere ferri

quod licuit parvo.

“In fact, Virgil’s early pedigree is not so far from the facts, recorded in the lex regia mortuo inferendo attributed to Numa Pompilius (c. 713-673 BC) in Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis (Digesta 11.8,2 Marcellus 28 dig.).

The law states: “Negat lex regio mulierem, quae praegnas [sic] mortua sit, humari, antequan partus, ei excidatur: qui contra fecerit spem animantis cum gravida peremisse videtur.” (The law of the kings forbids burial of a woman who died pregnant until her offspring has been excised from her body; anyone who does otherwise is held to have destroyed the prospects of the offspring being alive when he buried the pregnant mother.) The probably incorrect derivation of the name Caesar by Festus and later authors has occasioned many scholars to scoff at the alleged regal date of this law, but the anatomical votives, some probably of the late fourth century BC, all predate Julius Caesar’s late Republic as well as any Imperial legislation. Further, the internal evidence of this lex regia (and others) has been shown by Alan Watson to be consistent with regal date. This lex is recorded in the Digest as just another burial regulation, not a likely category for social, partisan comments—but burial restrictions and the prohibitions against waste of resources are consistent with the next-earliest body of law, the Twelve Tables. (Funeral excesses were prohibited, including the burial of a corpse with gold, except for dental work: “neve aurum addito… at cui auro dentes vincti escunt, ast im cum illo sepeliet uretve, se fraude esto.” E.H. Warmington, Remains of Old Latin III (LCL, Cambridge, Mass. 1967) 502-503, table 10.8-9.) Watson has suggested that compliance with this ruling may have been viewed as fas rather than ius.”

Again (Ib. pp. 229, 230), “There is no evidence to indicate who would have performed this operation in the Republican period. A Hippocratic physician, really a philosopher or theoretician, would probably not have attended most deliveries, especially in rural areas. A midwife (obstetrix) would probably be involved in childbirth, but does not seem a likely candidate to perform any kind of surgery. Undertakers (libitinarii) may have been accessible in urban centers at this time, but in rural areas the family itself must have made funeral preparations. In either case, the operation is not likely to have begun until well beyond the four- to six-minute window for fetal salvage without brain damage. One is left to imagine the forerunner of the barber-surgeon or bonesetter, perhaps in the person of the town blacksmith or veterinarius. (It is interesting to note that the practitioner of one of the first known successful live Caesarean sections was allegedly a swine-gelder, one Jacob Nufer of Switzerland. The incident took place in 1500 AD according to J.P. Boley, “The History of Caesarian Section,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 32 (1935) 557.)”

Turfa wrote (Ib. p. 232), “Neither Greek nor Italian sites prior to the Empire have provided very good evidence of actual clinics or hospitals associated with healing sites. Architecturally, these might be difficult to recognize, as is even the abaton of Hippocratic miracle cures.”

Alleged Abaton of Epidaurus, 2010

Abaton is philologically Abaddon, the angel of the abyss, or the sun in winter. According to Wiki, in Ancient Greece, an abaton was an enclosure in the temple of Asclepios where patients slept. In Ancient Egypt, any one of the sacred cult sites where a body part of the dismembered Osiris was claimed to be buried was an abaton. These are related to the sun. I leave it with you to determine if this is a coincidence.

Turfa continued (Ib.), “A few sites have produced medical or surgical instruments, but only in contexts which could be construed as votive, not professional/clinical. A certain amount of treatment can be attributed to healing waters, either for bathing, as at Corinth, or for drinking, in the case of the mineral springs, known in Italy through Pliny’s references and modern geological identification of sources at well-known sites.”

How are these people from over fifteen centuries earlier being born alive through the “sides” of their mothers and surviving? They’re not. Why are scholars admitting these details into the historical record and then trying to make sense of them? Because they’re uninitiated into the mysteries and have no idea that what they’re looking at is astrotheology, or, if they do, they’re omitting these facts at the behest of peer pressure or the institutions who fund them.

Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem:

Matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses.

Begin, baby boy, to know the smile of your mother:

They took ten months long to their mother’s distain.

I wrote in A Godsacre for Winds of the Soul, “In Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, he references the sun, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, etc., who laugh as soon as they were born, the ten months of gestation referring to the old year. Buddha was born from the side of his mother, as certain Christians taught of Jesus. Caesar was as well, which is why we have a Caesarean section. This is astrotheology that can be figured out at the beginning of winter. It is explained in a previous Spirit Whirled.”

Italy lacks the epigraphic evidence that is found in Greece. Is this a quality of a younger civilization, especially given their unique languages that have nothing to do with Indo-European like Greek has, yet an almost successive affinity to Phoenician, or is it a quality of a much older civilization than the Greek one? I maintain the latter. To dive deep into the subject of Ancient Italy, read The Real Universal Empire.

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