Pharmakon by Rinella Michael A.;

Author:Rinella, Michael A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Medicina magica vs. Medicina scientifica

It has been argued that little or no connection or continuity existed between Greek medicina magica and early medicina scientifica as represented by the Hippocratic Cnidian and Coan schools. The aetiology of the latter can be distinguished through its being “for the most part free from magical and religious elements and based upon natural causes.”30 There is, within this viewpoint, a firm boundary between Hippocratic medicine and earlier healing because “in these treatises disease is regarded as a natural process, a disturbance of the equilibrium of the body, and physiology replaces divine nosology.”31 Yet other sources indicate these two realms were “closely connected” and argue in favor of an ongoing “real and deep-rooted communication between the two.”32 Within this viewpoint Greek medicine from at least the seventh century BCE “used procedures that are to our eyes indistinguishable from the techniques used by sorcerers.”33 Recent analysis has gone so far as to reject the very categories “magic,” “religion,” and “science” as being artifacts of nineteenth-century religion and anthropology, as well as the still pervasive belief in the “supposedly unimpeachable truth” of contemporary science.34

The Greek word for seer, mantis, comes form mainein, connoting a state of frenzy or ecstasy, and mainesthai, connoting madness. Magic-wielding seers were a well-known occupational stratum in the ancient Greek world.35 Divination took such forms as bird augury—in the Iliad Agamemnon’s seer Calchas is a skilled bird-diviner, “the clearest by far of all the seers who scan the flight of birds” (1.80–81)—and hepatoscopy, divination based on the examination of an animal’s liver.36 Plato makes derogatory remarks about the former in the Phaedrus (244c) and the latter in the Timaeus (71a–72c). In the Meno “prophets and the tellers of oracles” are said to engage in nothing more than “well-aimed conjecture” (95c), while in the Phaedrus the life of a seer is assigned a fifth-place ranking among souls that have caught “sight of part of what is true” (248c–e). The considerable influence divination exerted on political affairs is treated as unwarranted in the Statesmen (290c–d) and in need of curtailment in the Laws (908d, 909d).

Among Greek seers there existed no recognized “orders” in the medieval monastic sense, but a tradition of sorts existed. Greek seers were concentrated into groupings associated with a family name. The demi-god Melampus was one such notable seer, curing the daughters of King Proteus, who had been driven mad and were wandering the countryside under the delusion they were cows. Their cure comes through a prescription of frenzied dancing and a pharmakon consisting of black hellebore, a substance recommended in several ancient texts as a cure for madness.37 In addition to the famous Melampodidae, there were “the Iamidae from Olympia and Klytiadae connected with them [whose] . . . activities lasted for centuries,” as well as the “Telmissians in Karia,” and finally “the priest families in Eleusis, the Eumolpidae and Kerykes, who officiated for about one millennia until the mysteries were finally outlawed by the Christian emperor.”38

Elements of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Iranian

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