“Essay and Impasse”
Excerpt adapted from Eleni Stecopoulos' Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (Nightboat Books, 2024)
For over a millennium in the ancient Mediterranean, those who could not be treated successfully by conventional means could seek healing at an Asklepieion or Aesculapium, a clinic dedicated to Apollo and his son, Asklepios, the divine physician. While practices differed across these sanctuaries and the eras in which they operated, all of them shared the common element of incubation, or enkoimesis, ritual sleep to produce a dream in which the suppliant would receive a remedy or prophecy. Those who traveled to the Asklepieion were generally people with longstanding ailments whom physicians had turned away, or those who intended to incubate on behalf of people too ill to make the pilgrimage. All were welcomed no matter their age, status, or origin — except for those in labor or at the point of death. At Epidauros, both a cult center and an organized therapeutic center, suppliants took part in a ritual sequence that culminated in sleep in the inner sanctum or abaton, the closed or sunken part of the dormitory.
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I wanted to go to this dark core.
To the abaton, a-vato:
not be stepped into, forbidden, untrodden.
Access is restricted to those who have prepared to meet the god.
In the Asklepieion, the specific name for the abaton is enkoimeterion, the place that encloses you in sleep. Gustaf Sobin describes it as a “restricted dormitory.” Edward Tick translates it as “an impassable place.”
The abaton’s restriction mirrors the condition that brings you there. The site absorbs this difficulty and formalizes it, sacralizes it. As a place of stillness, it replicates the impasse of living with a condition for a long time. The impasse of the many attempts, the many essays. You practice this impasse by entering a physical impasse, a dormitory with no outlet. You go as far as you can and fall asleep. Who came to the Asklepieion? Those who had not healed. In many cases, they were patients who had sought cures for years, who had become desperate. The man with a spear point stuck in his jaw for six years. The woman pregnant for five years. The man who has lost his eye. The paralyzed man. The bald man!
Sleep gives you the way in/out. Sleep creates access. But to get that access you need to lie still in inaccess.
A-BATON
A-PORIA
A-PATHEIA
They derive from different paths, but abaton has become fused with aporia for me, that state of impasse in philosophy which is also an ordinary word for questioning or wondering in Modern Greek. And an early Christian sense of apatheia also means impassability. Apatheia is the ultimate apophatic condition. And it is also impassivity, the incapacity to suffer.
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The origin of the physician’s name is also a mystery.
Almost certainly one component of Asklepios is ēpios: gentle, mild, or soothing. Unlike those with apatheia, Asklepios feels. He is a chthonic deity known for his kindness. He accepts all who seek healing. Pindar calls him “that gentle deviser of limb-healing relief from pain” or, in another translation, “the gentle craftsman of body-strengthening relief from pain.” In the Nemean Odes, the centaur Chiron is described as having taught Asklepios “the soft-handed craft of medicine.”
Soothing care is also embodied in the name of Asklepios’s wife, Epione. Like their children Hygeia (health), Panacea (universal cure), Iaso (healer, remedy, recovery), Aigli (radiance), and Akeso (process of curing), Epione’s name conveys an aspect of Asklepios. Medicine is composed of related yet distinct principles, processes, and tools, each a necessary part. The family is rounded out by Podaleirios and Machaon, physicians to the Greek army in the Iliad, and Telesphoros (who brings the ceremony to fruition), the daemon of convalescence.
My favorite etymology, the one that aligns with the poets, came to me the old way. I learned it firsthand at the foot of Mount Pelion, in the land of the centaurs, the home of Chiron who teaches Asklepios and is fatally wounded by Heracles’s poisoned arrow. I had been treated for a sprained ankle by Vasilis Tritakis, a physician and acupuncturist who combines Hippocratic principles with Traditional Chinese Medicine and plant medicine based on Dioscorides’s materia medica. The next day I asked him for an interview. After showing me the spot by the bay where the ancestors exercised, bathed their horses, and tanned leather, Vasilis pulled over by the side of the road and we got down to talking about Asklepios and the doctor’s own path as a healer. With his square jaw and dark-gray hair pulled back in a low ponytail, he cut a macho yet gentle figure himself. He could easily have won the Hunky Jesus contest in San Francisco’s Dolores Park.
Vasilis explains that “the principle of gentle-natural healing is encoded in the word Asklepios.”
He takes my notebook and deciphers the name, though what he writes is more like the scaffolding that surrounds a ruin.
ΑΣΚΛΗΠΙΟΣ
Α-ΣΚΕΛΗ > ΑΝΙΣΟΡΡΟΠΙΑ
ΗΠΙΑ
(ΠΟΙΩΜΕΝ)
A-skle-(e)pios
A - SKELE - EPIOS - POIO
First, the A is again a-, the negating prefix. He draws it large and asymmetrical, with one of its legs shorter than the other. Askele, literally “that which has no limbs,” means “withered” or “unstable,” the way someone falls when they’re worn out. A skelos is a leg or limb, a strand, a segment, as in the three-legged triskelion symbol for Sicily. It can be the side of a triangle (as in isosceles, equal-legged) or a part of the equation, the leg of a chair or the leg of a journey. A related word is skeleton, the supporting framework or essential part of something; also, what has withered, dried up, and is no longer flesh.
Here, Vasilis says, askele means the tendency of the organism to imbalance. Imbalance or disequilibrium: off-kilter, one leg shorter than the other, needing support. Like Asklepios’s staff, a third point of contact with the ground, with a serpent spiraling around it, keeping it always in flux, always moving and balancing.
And this support comes to you ēpia — in non-invasive ways, through mild substances and gentle manipulation like massage. Soft-handed craft, subtle treatment. Asklepios makes the body soft.
In ēpia there is the sound of ποιέω: to do, to work, to act.
Ποιῶμεν = Πράττουμε (Modern Greek)
We do or practice
Poiéo, poiēsis, poiētes.
Asklepios, maker of gentle remedies to heal imbalanced limbs.
Who supports balance through soft-handed craft.
Who heals imbalance through gentle practice.
This is the practice that takes place in the clinic, derived from kline: what you rest on, what supports you.
H.D. on Freud’s couch. And in her vision of a circle with three lines, one of the pictures on the wall she sees in Corfu — a vision that could be the Delphic tripod but also an ordinary lampstand — these lines too are skeloi. Each a support, a leg of the journey, a length of time.
And what is that off-kilter A-frame in Asklepios, where one leg is shorter than the other, but another kind of kline, or incline — the imbalance, the asymmetry that provokes meaning, which is so often an aspect of those who see or divine? An archetypal figure for the association of asymmetry with interpretation, the Yoruba trickster Esu Elegbara limps, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “precisely because of his mediating function: his legs are of different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world.” Esu Elegbara is thus the keeper of the logos and the “divine linguist.”
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Blameless physician. The practice encrypted in his name. The principle activated by his name.
[H]e must be able to make the most hostile elements in the body friendly and loving towards each other. . . . It was by knowing how to create love and unanimity in these that, as these poets here say and I [the physician Eryximachus] believe it, our forefather Asclepius established this science of ours.
— Plato, Symposium
But Pindar says something else about the gentle healer. He loved money too much. He raised someone from the dead for profit. Struck down by Zeus for his hubris, he continues, ironically, to heal people from Hades.
It’s unknown how much the modalities of the Asklepieia overlapped with those of Hippocratic medicine in practice. Many surgical instruments dated to the Roman period have been discovered at Epidauros and Corinth. Under spiritual cover as a sanctuary where people sought miracles, the Asklepieia may have been sites of medical experimentation.
I once heard a guide at Epidauros describing enkoimesis to a group of tourists. He said that incubation was simply being placed under anesthesia to undergo surgery: the scenario of the god appearing in a dream merely a way to veil the procedure as a spiritual event and make it palatable to suppliants.
The Asklepieia, of course, were not cult centers where time stood still but medical institutions with evolving methods and treatments, shaped by the changing powers of diverse eras, from Spartan and Athenian dominance to Roman rule. Was Asklepios a psychic surgeon or a physical surgeon? The name of his son Machaon derives either from “battle” or “knife” and perhaps both; he has become synonymous with surgery and treating battle injuries. A contemporary person’s explanation of the miracle cure as technological progress is unsurprising. It also raises the specter of disenchantment and the tension we navigate today between practice, belief, and derision. Yet anyone desperate for a cure knows belief is not necessary for a trial. Modern medicine recognizes the placebo effect. But what if the opposite is also true? Does efficacy really have anything do with belief?
I have come to believe that doing obviates belief. Besides, the mantra we repeat over and over today in the face of apathy and lies is I believe in science. This is our credo now.
The experiment always takes place in not-knowing. Hope, perhaps, but even that is idiopathic:
Alphonso Lingis: “The first thought I have about hope is that hope is hope against the evidence. . . . So there is a kind of discontinuity in time, there is a break, and something starts out of nowhere.”
This space of impasse is where healing falls.
Healing is the essay in impasse.
The man with paralyzed fingers who is incredulous but dreams that the god stretches out his fingers as he is about to cast the dice. (Of course, the god keeps his hand in limbo until he says he is no longer incredulous!)
If surgery seems counter to the myth of gentle practice I’ve woven so far and the idea of dream incubation as the originary of holistic medicine — psychotherapy as medicine for the whole person — then it’s only because we resist the true face of medical pluralism in the West. The dialectic of the homeopathic and the allopathic. The subtle and the cut. Epione and Machaon. Residue and evidence. Words and gestures. This tension itself constitutes medicine in the West. Plato: He must be able to make the most hostile elements in the body friendly and loving towards each other.
One can become entranced by the spiritual, even magical, aspects of the incubation cults. Licked by gentle snakes. Dreaming someone else’s dream to align the cure. Divining the entrails for agreement. The man who lowers himself down a ladder then squirms his body until he is sucked into a hole feet first, all the while holding honey-laced barley cakes to pacify the snakes. I remind myself of the political and commercial nature of these sanctuaries. The shops selling votives along the final part of the Via Tecta at Pergamum. The payments at Epidauros. The politics of making gifts and being recorded in the temple. Being a citizen in favor. Sophocles, the former general, hosting the god in his home. The Attic Stelai recording assets seized from those who profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries.
“Listen,” says the slave Carion in Aristophanes’s Ploutos, “I’m going to give you an exhaustive exposé of the whole business.” Only the comedian provides an eyewitness report of what goes on in the abaton. Ordered to accompany Wealth to the temple so that his sight might be restored, Carion pretends to sleep but instead watches through the holes in his cloak as priests nick the ritual cakes and consume them.
I think about some charismatic physicians and healers I’ve known, with their savior complexes; I think of their critiques of the medical-industrial complex that too often veer into paranoia. The easy exoticism and appropriation of indigenous traditions packaged as so many consumer options. The money required for access to naturopathic and holistic therapies in the United States. I’m returned to my apophasis during twenty years of living with chronic conditions. And I marvel again at how the rejection of chronicity in the name of progress — the repression of chronicity practiced in forms such as incubation, core treatment of a soft-handed craft — created an intractable condition that still drags us today. What I call the chronic syndrome of the West.