Old Wives' Tales (eBook)

TWO

From Goddess to Sorceress

Women healers in Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome

Men generally have a view of the nature of their society. They also have views concerning what validates the society’s arrangements. The two things, image and validation, never are and cannot be wholly distinct … A society can possess a world creation story, in which the creation of the world and the foundations of society itself are tied up: the cosmic and social foundation stones may be identical or both may be invoked to validate the social order … 1

LET US BEGIN WITH A TALE. There was a garden of paradise in Sumar, which had four rivers, including the Euphrates and Tigris. The great mother goddess Ninchursag allowed eight beautiful plants to grow in this garden, though she forbade the inhabitants to eat from them. Enki, the water god, defied Ninchursag and ate from them and she, angry about it, condemned him to death though she did not expel him from the garden. Enki fell ill, eight of his organs were affected and his strength began to fail him. But a fox was able to persuade Ninchursag to save Enki from death. She then enquired about his suffering and created one healing deity for each of his sick organs. 2

Ancient cultures believed that medicine was the prerogative of women, a prerogative ordained by the goddess and reflected in practice. Yet the history of medicine usually begins with the ‘father’ of medicine, the Greek physician Hippocrates. This beginning reflects the need of doctors to show the antique but scientific basis of their profession. It also reflects assumptions regarding the rightful practitioners of medicine. For within the Hippocratic tradition of medicine, which dominated European medical thought until the seventeenth century at least, women had few rights and little role or scope. Moreover, as inheritors of this tradition we now have particular notions of what is medically orthodox and what is not. ‘Old wives’ tales’ have been placed firmly in the camp of the medically unorthodox and the inferior. Within such a perspective there is little room for assessing either the value of the methods or the social importance of ‘unorthodox’ practice.

The gap between our current perceptions of medicine and the prime role enjoyed by women in healing in those early pre-classical cultures is enormous. We cannot know for certain how this gap developed, but certain themes current in modern attitudes towards medicine can be traced backwards through time. The themes concern the development of scientific orthodoxy through its association with political and religious elites. The tradition we have now inherited has its origins variously in Egypt, Greece, Rome and Palestine. This chapter attempts to outline some of the more important elements relating to the practices of medicine in these ancient cultures.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPLANATION OF DISEASE AND HEALTH

The earliest explanations of disease were religious. Among many ancient cultures and many ‘primitive’ cultures studied by anthropologists, the same phenomenon has been recorded. Medicine and religion were so closely inter-related that it was impossible to disentangle the two. The deities who created life or commanded death were also responsible for health and sickness. The Sumerians held Ninchursag, the goddess of life, accountable for health and childbirth. The Assyrian goddess Ishtar was both mother goddess and goddess of health. Isis, the great goddess of the Egyptians, was also their physician. The Minoans, Myceneans, Cretans and early Greeks also worshipped female deities of healing and life. The goddess of death was also the goddess of resurrection. Gula, the Assyrian goddess of death, was labelled ‘the great physician’. Isis carried about her symbols of death. In the cycle of existence, life and death were inextricable.

But if the benign deities were attributed with knowledge of health and were held responsible for it, malign demons were charged with sickness and ill health. It is believed that the Sumerians were the first to personify the demons of disease. Such personification also developed among the peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome and among the northern Teutonic tribes. The Israelites believed that it was the Destroying Angel who stood by the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, and that Satan afflicted Job. The Anglo-Saxons believed that the spirits of sickness were called elves or dwarves and fired arrows or darts – known as ‘elf-shot’ – at their victims. The belief in the power of demons to bring on sickness is an element in Christian exorcism rites.

Cures were thought to be effected, in the first place, by prayer or command to the deity or demons. But oral rites were always accompanied by practical measures. These practical measures were given authority by their creation and use by the goddess. An Egyptian remedy for a headache, for instance, states that it was:

made by the goddess Isis for the god Ea himself, in order to drive away the pains in his head:

To be mixed and smeared on the head. 3

Prayer and practice were important factors in the treatment of the sick. For the fear generated by the unknown and arbitrary nature of sickness could be assuaged by appeals to the supernatural, while practical treatment secured an immediate sensation of relief and control. The remedy was believed to work partly because of its method, partly because of the intrinsic worth of its ingredients, but largely because of the power of its practitioners. The pharmacological base may not have been well founded, yet it represented a process of experimentation which was essentially scientific. For though failure and success could be explained in terms of the wrath or good will of the deities, the approach remained fundamentally empirical. The priestesses were required not only to know the properties and attributes of the healing deities and the appropriate prayers and incantations but also to have an extensive knowledge of botany, minerals, and animal derivatives used in medical prescriptions. Indeed, the Sumerians, Egyptians and Assyrians, for instance, had an impressive list of drugs used in the treatment of specific diseases in the form of pills, suppositories, lotions or ointments.

PRIESTESSES, HEALERS AND MIDWIVES

The religious explanation of illness and its treatment helped support and perpetuate the position of its earthly functionaries. The practitioners of healing in the preclassical cultures of the Near and Middle East were also the religious guardians.

In nearly all areas of the world, goddesses were extolled as healers, dispensers of curative herbs, roots, plants and other medical aids, casting the priestesses who attended the shrines into the role of physicians of those who worshipped there. 4

In Sumer, Assyria, Egypt and Greece until about the third millennium the practice of healing was almost exclusively in the hands of priestesses. And within those societies, the role of priestess was paramount. In Sumer, for instance, there were many kinds of priestesses whose importance in the economic, political, cultural and social life of the country was enormous. Business was conducted in the temple and there is evidence that writing was developed there by women: ‘It was the goddess Nidaba in Sumer who was paid honour as the one who initially invented clay tablets and the art of writing … The official scribe of the Sumerian heaven was a woman . . .’ 5 Archeological evidence indicates that the earliest examples of writing were discovered at the temple of the Queen of Heaven in Erech, in Sumer, over 5000 years ago. 6

Links between spiritual leaders and political rulers were also strong. Nearly all the high priestesses of the god Nanner in Ur were members of the royal family. In Assyria and Egypt, similarly, priestesses were called from high-born and royal families. A picture on the wall of the tomb of King Ramses III in Egypt shows Isis in the role of healer and the priestess/physician as intermediary. So close were the links between high priestesses and ruler that many of the queens of those ancient cultures were also temple physicians. In the grave of Queen Shubad of Ur, 3000 BC, there was buried not only food for her journey but also her prescriptions for stopping pain and medical instruments of bronze and flint.

Many of the Egyptian queens were also notable physicians, for example Queen Mentuhetep (2300 BC), Hatshepsut (1500 BC) and Cleopatra (100 BC). Pictures on the walls of temples and tombs of Egypt often illustrate women in their role of priestess/physician, and the writings of Diodorus, Euripides, Pliny and Herodotus testify to their eminence.

Yet among the women healers in Egypt and elsewhere there was some separation of roles. Midwifery was exclusively a woman’s concern, but was not necessarily conducted by a priestess. Priestesses were limited in number and high in rank. It was sufficient that they attended the sick who presented themselves for treatment at the temple. There were not enough of them to attend every confinement. And there were other reasons to explain why midwifery was separate from the temple ritual. Religion depends on mystery – on explaining or comprehending the unknown, but childbirth is a common, mechanical event. The midwife might have had skills, but they were craft skills perfected by practice, though...