In the peasant societies of the Middle East two millennia ago, as in many peasant societies still today, it was rare to see anyone without some kind of scar or deformity or suppurating sore. Even the relatively healthy showed the signs of hard labor. Faces we now take for forty-year-olds belonged to twenty-year-olds. Malnutrition led to stunted growth and skin disorders. Rotting teeth, open sores, crippled limbs were all par for the course. The surprise is not that up to three out of five people born would die before adulthood, but that two out of five made it through this minefield of physical threat. And much of that was due to the work of the wise women.
They understood bones and muscles, herbs and drugs. They manipulated limbs and bones in what we now call osteopathy, often with seemingly miraculous results—a fact that should come as no surprise to anyone who has made it to a chiropractor's office doubled over in agony, then risen from the table feeling almost Lazarus-like, able to walk without pain or crutches. They knew how to bind a sprain, how to set a broken bone, how to clean and disinfect and protect an open wound. How to treat eye infections, skin diseases, snakebite, worms, dysentery. And of course how to help in childbirth. These women, without formal training, without literacy, without FDA-approved drugs, saved lives.
The herbs Maryam and her grandmother used were not as reliable as modern drugs, to be sure, but they were the accepted medical treatments of the time. What worked for peasants also worked for the elite of Athens and Rome and Alexandria. There, the Hippocratic tradition was carried on and developed in the work of honored medical men such as Soranus, who authored the textbook Gynecology, Pliny with his Natural History, and the famed first-century pharmacologist Dioscor-ides. But not only men. Aristotle's wife, Pythias—named after the Pythia, the woman who acted as the Delphic oracle—specialized in obstetrics. Seneca wrote in praise of the skill of his physician, a woman. And a certain Cleopatra—not the Egyptian queen, but another Cleo—was so expert in gynecology that her book on the subject would remain a standard reference into the sixteenth century.
Women physicians had a major advantage over their male colleagues: though they too were members of the ruling class, they had easier access to the vast knowledge of traditional wise women. They simply had to ask their own slaves and servants. And this was essential. By Pliny's own admission, most of his expertise was based on traditional folk medicine. "The reason why herbs are not familiar," he wrote, "is because experience of them is confined to illiterate countryfolk."
The art and science of herbal healing was in knowing not just which herbs to use, but also how to prepare them, and above all, in what dosage. As with the sage tea I drank in the Judean hills, almost any herb prepared in sufficient quantity or strength will have some effect on the human body. Small amounts of saffron are an exotic spice; large amounts will induce abortion. Small amounts of sage give a subtle flavor to a stew; large amounts act like psychotropic drugs.
The seed, the fruit, the oil of a plant could all have differing effects, as could the bark or the flower. Some were best applied as a suppository, others as an infusion to be drunk or as a paste to be smeared over the affected part of the body. They could be blended into soothing unguents or used in a poultice—a mass of tight-packed leaves, reassuringly heavy on the skin like a cooling hand pressing down.
Maryam would have been expert at spotting fennel; she'd have climbed halfway down a ravine to find it, the spores tickling her nostrils with their bitter, pungent scent. She'd have recognized the small fleshy three-lobed leaves of rue with its mustard-like flowers, or the tiny yellow flowers and feathery silver-gray leaves of artemisia, even then called "the virgin's plant." With her shepherd girl's knowledge of the terrain, she'd have known which plants colonized which slopes and hilltops. The squill that covered the hillside across from Cana could be used to treat vomiting and food poisoning. Wild mint grew lavishly in low places, as it still does in what remains of Magdala, and helped prevent infection of cuts and gashes. Fever-reducing anemones grew thick on the hills in springtime, as did galangal, a sharper, sweeter form of ginger, which stopped vomiting and nausea.
She'd harvest roots and stalks, tie them into bundles, and carry them home in a sling across her back. There, she'd spread the herbs out on the reed roof canopy to dry in the sun. Within a few days, the leaves would shrink and curl, crumbling beneath her fingers and ready to be pounded into powder.
Resins were even more valuable. Salome taught her how to prepare myrrh—from murra, Aramaic for "bitter"—an antiseptic and painkiller whose strong scent also made it an effective perfume when preparing bodies for burial. Tap the bark of the myrrh tree in the fall and its resin appeared as a clear liquid, then quickly set into pale yellow tears clinging to the trunk. Scoop off the tears and you could then pound them into powder to mix with oil for salves and poultices.
Maryam never saw the most prized resin of her time. That was a cultivated rarity worth its weight in silver: opobalsam, from the balsam trees in Herod's heavily guarded groves near the Asphalt Sea—the salt lake we now call the Dead Sea. Instead, Salome showed her how to milk the purplish bark of the storax, a kind of gum tree also known as liquidambar. The poor man's opobalsam, it had almost as many uses as myrrh, but was especially valued for bronchial and lung infections and as a healing agent for wounds and skin diseases.
Two thousand years later, peasants in some parts of the Middle East still revere the storax tree. It is considered so sacred that it should never be cut; to use even its dead branches for firewood brings bad luck. Stories circulate that this is the tree from which Moses' rod came, the one that sprouted when he thrust it into the ground. Rosaries are still made from its seeds.
Where did herbs end and faith begin? The very question reveals its modern bias.
In Nain, the village across the Jezreel Valley from Nazareth, where the gospel of Luke has Jesus raising the widow's son from the dead, there is one tiny church. Most of the time, it is locked. You have to go across the road and ask the family who hold the key to open the door for you. The key seems absurdly large for such a small building, and it is also peculiarly ornate, since once the door is open, what strikes you most of all is the utter plainness of the place. No lush adornment, no massive accumulation of gold-encrusted icons, no well-funded renovation. Almost shabby, in fact. A place where faith must do its work unaided by pomp and circumstance. And it does.
Walk to the far end and you find a table pushed up against the back of the altar, seemingly littered with pieces of paper. Look closer, and you see that these are letters written in thanks for miracles, or asking for them. Most are in English, though clearly not from native English-speakers; it seems that pilgrims here believe that Jesus responds better to English. Nearly all the letters concern illness, usually that of someone near: "for my daughter," "for my grandson." The profusion of them behind the altar is testament to the healing powers of prayer, for each one is written in thanks or in anticipation of thanks.
They lie there, open, in no particular order, for everyone to read and renew their faith. Yet when you start to read them, you can't help feeling as though you are prying into other people's private affairs—of both health and faith. When you come to one that starts "Dear Jesus" and ends "Love, Adrienne," you have to stop reading. These are indeed love letters.
Sixty miles to the south, the thick stone walls and carefully tended gardens of the isolated monastery of Saint Gerasimos create an oasis of shade in the heavy heat of the Jordan Valley. One of the three Greek Orthodox monks who lives there tells how Gerasimos tamed and lived with a lion, and how he also tamed "Maria of Egypt," a former prostitute whose story makes Mary Magdalene seem a model of chastity. But Gerasimos is celebrated more for his healing powers than for his taming ones. Behind the altar in the monastery church—as richly decorated as the one in Nain is simple—the wall is covered with flesh-colored effigies of legs, feet, arms, hearts, eyes, babies, even what appears to be a kidney. The larger effigies, some almost lifesize, are made out of wax; the smaller
ones out of pressed tin. Heal my hand, my foot, my eye, my heart . . . Each effigy bears witness to personal tragedy, to distress and hoped-for relief.
These are votives, offered to the saint either in thanks for healing the body part represented, or in the hope of it. They're a tradition that goes back two thousand years and more, to the temples of the great goddess Isis, famed throughout the eastern Mediterranean for her healing powers. And they work now as well as they did then, when there was no dividing line between faith and healing, just as there was none between astrology and astronomy, or between mind and body, or even—witness the human disguises of many of the Greek gods—between the divine and the human.
Herbal medicine, folk religion, osteopathy, magic, and formal religion all blended together in people's minds. Just a few years ago, this would have been sneered at as "primitive" or "superstitious," but modern research on placebos and on the mind-body connection clearly shows that the mind does affect the body. Every good healer, whether village wise woman or Harvard Medical School graduate, knows the limits of science, and the importance of faith.
Inevitably, health fused with salvation. The very word began, after all, as a medical term, as in salve, or healing ointment. It meant physical healing, and beyond specific healing, deliverance from disease and by extension, from death. A divine function.
By Maryam's time, the Middle East had seen a long line of healing goddesses. As far back as 4000 B.C. the Sumerians worshipped Inanna, the queen of heaven and earth, who embodied the trinity of love, healing, and birth. Later, the Assyrian goddess Ishtar fulfilled the same role, with an emphasis on easing pain. But the greatest of all the healing goddesses, and the longest-lived—she was worshipped from 2500 B.C. well into the sixth century A.D.—was Isis, whose cult spread out of Egypt to encompass the whole of the eastern Mediterranean.
Belief in Isis was not a cult as we now think of the term, but a highly developed culture. She was worshipped by serious scientists who had, perhaps, a greater sense of humility in the face of knowledge than we are used to today. In the fourth century B.C., for instance, the famed university of Alexandria included a medical school established under the pharaoh Ptolemy I, a student of Aristotle. Physiology and pathology were taught at this school, and post-mortem dissections led to the discovery of the system of blood circulation as well as the nervous system. But magical texts and folk cures were also taught, and given equal weight. Moreover, the medical school was attached to the temple of Isis Medica, which was in essence a sanitarium. Faith healing took place there, alongside a range of services that some today would still consider the perfect spa experience: drug-induced sleep and dreams, massage, herbal remedies, purges, bleeding, mineral baths, and a plentiful supply of sacred spring water to be drunk fresh from the source.
The priests who officiated as healers at Isis Medica were known as therapeutae—therapeutics—the same name that would later be adopted by an Egyptian Jewish monastic movement in which women participated equally with men. An early gnostic Christian group, the Peretae, worshipped Isis as "the right-hand power of god," using medical analogies that displayed a sophisticated understanding of human anatomy. And even when Christianity began to displace older forms of worship, Isis lived on within it. The gnostics morphed her into Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom, and in the visionary Wisdom of Solomon, Sophia instructs the writer in "the nature of all living things," including the healing uses of plants and roots.
In Maryam's time, Isis was still worshipped as the great healer in major cities like Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome. In Athens, however, she had long had competition from a whole family of divine healers: Asculepius and his daughters, Hygeia and Panacea. A fourth-century B.C. bas-relief shows Hygeia standing in a sexy slouch, one hand on her hip, the other propped against a wall behind the seated figure of her father. The posture, the face, even the dress are stunningly modern, like a fashion model's louche pose. The long, flimsy robe follows the contours of her stance, while a shawl slung over her shoulders flows casually to the ground behind her. Head tilted to one side, she stares out at the viewer almost defiantly, as though to say "You got a problem with this?"
The gospels also blend physical and metaphysical healing. Written in the late first century A.D., they are documents of their time. As a preacher, Jesus would favor faith-healing over herbs, but he had clearly also been well trained in both folk medicine and what we now see as good medical practice. In Mark, when he raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead, saying that she's just sleeping ("talitha kumi"), he then tells her parents to give her something to eat. In this he sounds for all the world like my father, a family doctor in England, who'd tell a worried mother reassuringly, "It's just a bug," and as he was going out the door, "Make sure she eats something and call me in the morning." And when Jesus mixes spittle with clay to anoint a blind man's eyes in the gospel of John, giving him instructions to wash it out afterward, he is carrying out a familiar folk-healing rite. The same powdery yellow kaolin clay is still used by older rural Palestinians to stop fermentation in recipes containing grapes—and to mix into fever-reducing pessaries and compresses.
But of course there was more to clay and spittle than physical healing. The symbolism was clear. It was dust and water, inanimate and animate, heaven and earth: opposites achieving magical effect when brought together. The pattern is there in ancient Egyptian legend, when Isis kneads the spittle of the great god Ra with clay to create a sacred serpent which then bites him; delerious from the venom, Ra reveals his sacred name, and so transfers his power to Isis.
Knowing the name was the key to achieving magical power. Knowledge is power, a piece of knowledge itself as ancient as one of the oldest creation legends, that of Adam and Eve. When Eve picked the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, she was reaching not for food, but for wisdom. Food for the mind, if you like. But since wisdom was power, her reaching for it was a threat to the greatest power of all. She was cursed and, along with Adam, banished from Eden, which was suddenly revealed as a rather unattractive place of deliberate ignorance.
No wonder the names of gods were so often taboo. To know the name and speak it out loud was to steal divine power. In Palestine, in Egypt, in Rome too, a divine name spoken aloud compelled the god to obey the speaker. Roman priests would call on the guardian deity of a city under siege to abandon the city and come over to them. Towns and whole provinces were re-named with each new conquerer or occupier, a practice that would continue through the centuries (Jerusalem alone has been known by at least eight different names over the past two millennia). To name something, whether a city or a god, was to control it.
The same worked for demons. We still talk of wrestling with personal demons, and an essential part of the process of modern psychotherapy is naming and facing them. Two thousand years ago, the process was quicker, and often as effective. Both physical and mental illness were embodied in physical demons, which were then cast out.
Each demon had its own realm of mastery over certain parts of the mind and body. The Dead Sea scrolls—the sacred texts of the Essene desert monastics—included not just apocalyptic and wisdom literature, but also lists of devils' names along with the specific parts of the body and illnesses over which they had dominion. Healers who knew these names would call out the right one, commanding the demon to leave the sick person and doubling the power of the command by proclaiming it in the name of an all-powerful god—as, for example, "in the name of the Father."
Amulets of the time, made for the elite who could afford them, followed established oral formulas for exorcising demons. One surviving Palestinian amulet reads: "Adjured are you, spirit, in the name of I-am-who-I-am and in the name of his holy angels, to move away and be expelled and keep far from Klara daughter of Kyrana. You no longer have power over her. Be bound and kept away from her."
Another amulet addresses the fever itself: "I abjure you, fever and sickness, in the name of Abrasax, who is appointed over you, that he may uproot you from the body of Simon,
son of Kattia. I do this in the name of the engraved letters of The Name."
Whoever chanted such incantations—whoever knew the names—would have, at least for that moment, the power of good over evil. Healing, when done in the divine name, was seen as a sign of the grace of god. But there was an inevitable flip side to this: sickness could then be seen as the lack of divine grace. If good faith heals, then bad faith can make you ill.
"Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" the disciples ask Jesus in the gospel of John. They are not being deliberately cruel, but merely reflecting a problem explored two millennia later by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor, a book that begins in almost biblical language: "It is hardly possible to take up residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped."
Tracing the metaphors of sickness, Sontag went back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, where disease could be the result of supernatural punishment for a personal fault, a collective transgression, or a crime of one's ancestors. But it could also be the result of demonic possession or of natural causes. The attribution of cause depended to a large extent on the state of available treatment. "Theories that diseases are caused by mental states . . . are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease," wrote Sontag acerbically. And talking specifically about modern attitudes toward cancer: "Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious . . . Contact with someone afflicted with a disease regarded as a mysterious malevolency inevitably feels like a trespass; worse, like the violation of a taboo."
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