Ancient Sound Healing
Ancient Healing centers were attached to amphitheaters, theatrical performance and music were considered essential to to prepare a patient for healing.
A few years ago I was contacted by a Vanderbilt archeologist/professor who was part of a team researching a temple at the center of an ancient healing sanctuary called Epidauros. This sanatorium, on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese Peninsula in Greece, was once the epicenter of a healing movement devoted to a Greek healing deity named Asclepius. The team wanted informal validation that their hypothesis that a circular ceremonial structure called the Thymele was a kind of sound amplification engine. After studying the layout I was able to add a musical/therapeutic perspective to their hypothesis: This ancient structure was a highly refined sound healing tool with precise harmonic proportions in the subterranean chamber that could have been tuned as a resonator, amplifying relatively weak sound sources of lyre, aulos (a type of double chambered flute) and human voice.
The structure they were painstakingly uncovering and digitally reconstructing is a circular rotunda with a hollow subfloor tall enough to stand in. It is a spiral labyrinth that I was able to point out resembles the shape of a cochlea.
“Asclepius was the most renowned healing deity of Greek antiquity. His sanctuary at Epidaurus flourished for about a thousand years, from ca. 500 BC until ca. 400 AD, when pagan cults were shut down by decree of the Emperor Theodosius. The cult employed many of the same techniques as did human doctors, from medicines and drugs to surgery and dietary regimes, but elevated these techniques to a super-human efficacy.” Peter Shultz
Asklepaeon were built all over the Greek world and later adopted by the Romans. There are only a handful left intact, and the one in best repair is Epidauros. The amphitheater at Epidauros is world famous for its acoustics. It is reported that a quiet voice on stage can be heard on the hillside above, thanks to the unique acoustic properties of the placement of the limestone seating that simultaneously dampens low frequency sound and amplifies the upper mid- range, which is the critical zone of both human speech and human hearing.
The amphitheater at Epidauros is still used for performance every summer from July through August. The other structures in Epidauros, temples, the thymele, and the incubation dream pods are merely outlines of stone now. This place and many others around the Ancient Greco-Roman world were once teeming with life and belief and hope.
While all visitors to Epidauros, patients and those accompanying them, would have participated in sacred performance at the amphitheater, a more intensive ritual performance was reserved for patients preparing for healing.
“…those in need of healing might have taken therapeutic benefit from listening to and even participating in performances within the Thymele. We know that the Greeks employed musical therapies. One tradition about the philosopher Pythagoras, for instance, describes how he would position those with physical and emotional ailments in a circle, place a lyre player in their centre, and have them sing and dance to paeans to cure them. There are stories also of paeans healing those stricken by plague or madness.” Bronwen Wickisser
The very first morning after we landed in Athens we took a private guided tour of the Acropolis, the central citadel of Athina. The Acropolis and its most visible structure, the Parthenon, has stood guard over the city for 3,000 years. Touring the Acropolis, we were blessed to have as our guide Vassiliki, who is a history teacher and very knowledgeable about the ancient healing rites of Asklepius and Hippocrates. She told us that the healing centers were attached to amphitheaters, and that theatrical performance and music were considered essential to prepare a patient for healing.
While the Greek doctor-priests were knowledgeable of herbal remedies, soft tissue and osseous manipulation, as well as surgery, they considered the spiritual somato-emotional component essential to a complete healing. In fact, many ailments were resolved in the preparatory phase of group involvement in performance, ritual, music and dance. The Ancient Greek healing rites around the Asklepius movement are purported to have healed people in a hypnagogic dream state. Ritual and music were used to open the consciousness to this state of lucid dreaming.
“Within the Asclepia, dream therapy or divine sleep, later to be called incubation sleep by Christian practitioners, reached perfection as a healing tool. Dream therapy is a prime example of the imagination as diagnostitian and healer. Most of the patients to receive this therapy were severely ill, and all the usual medicines had proven ineffective. At night, the patients went to the temple or outlying buildings to await the gods. In preparation, “the priests take the inquirer and keep him fasting from food for one day and from wine for three days to give him perfect spiritual lucidity to absorb the divine communication.” The diagnosis and healing took place during that special state of consciousness immediately prior to sleep, when images come forth automatically like frames of thought projected on a movie screen. (We now call this “hypnogogic sleep.”)
— Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine by Jeanne Achterberg
The hypnogogic state can be facilitated and enhanced by music. As I have developed my catalog of therapeutic music over the past two decades, I have kept up with the research. Because of new, more refined imaging technologies, neurological music therapy is validating much of what composers and performers have gleaned from lived experience and intuition. I have incorporated those findings into my music and sound engineering. While the latest research validates music’s therapeutic value, its use in healing is ancient. The theory of its power has been long understood and utilized. The path forward with healing/therapy music is illuminated by the past. Epidauros is possibly the best preserved of the ancient centers of healing that we know incorporated sound and music to open human consciousness to the powers of the subconscious and its innate ability to self correct.
Tomorrow we go there…Stay tuned!
Sources
https://www.anasynthesis.co.uk/index.php/thymele/myth-and-worship
https://www.anasynthesis.co.uk/index.php/thymele/wickkiser-s-words
