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Did An Ancient Snake Cult Really Heal People?

It’s the year 98 AD. You are a young woman living in a tiny village in Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, and you are in agony. Several months ago your abdomen began to bloat.  It’s gotten to the point where you can’t keep any food down.  Day by day, you’re growing weaker.  You’ve prayed and sacrificed at the local temple, but it’s done no good.  The wise women of your village have given up. Nothing has worked and you’re losing hope.  Maybe there is one god who might help you. But that means traveling to one of his shrines.  The closest one is in the city of Pergamon.  The god is Asclepius and his healing temples are shrines of the serpent.  You must go and plead for your life. Perhaps he will have mercy on you.

In 98 AD something very strange and deeply supernatural was happening in the city of Pergamon and other cities of the Roman Empire. And it had been going on for centuries.  The power that was centered in them has appeared around the world and is appearing now.  It does so in culture-specific forms designed to meet current expectations. In the past it presented itself as a worldwide pantheon of gods to be worshiped, but in our day the forms have changed.  As the world continues to disintegrate into chaos, this dark power is appearing in our skies, our governments, our churches, our streets and our bedrooms. It is the same power that has haunted human civilization throughout history, so we need to understand what it is and how it operates.  And nowhere has this evil power been more effective than in supernatural healing.

At the end of the first century AD in the city of Pergamon, there was a Christian church, a little group of believers in Jesus.  In the New Testament book of Revelation, Jesus sends a message to that church. It begins this way in Revelation 2:12-13 “And to the angel of the church in Pergamon write, ‘These things says He who has the sharp two-edged sword: “I know your works, and where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is…’

Pergamon was one of the most important centers in the Roman world.  As our suffering young woman arrives, she enters a city built of white marble that glistens in the sun. Its acropolis is at the pinnacle of a thousand-foot mountain that overlooks the Aegean. The center of it all is the mighty Temple of Zeus.  Pergamon was a Throne City from which Satan exerted unique control. There have been many such throne cities throughout history. They exist today. Out of them flows cultural and spiritual power that shapes all of human society leading it ever-deeper into destruction.  Throne cities manipulate human desire and fear.  Pergamon was such a city. 

When she arrives, our young woman is directed to a lovely temple complex dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing.  Who is this god? In the preface to their classic scholarly work entitled, Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies, authors E. and L. Edelstein make this remarkable statement: “The worship of Asclepius…came to play such a role in the religious life of later centuries that in the final stages of paganism, of all the genuinely Greek gods, Asclepius was judged the foremost antagonist of Christ.”

Belief in Asclepius controlled the minds and spiritual lives of millions. Whole cities such as Epidaurus, Cos, Tricca and Pergamon were dedicated to him.  Julian, the Roman Emperor who ruled in the fourth century AD, and who was called the Apostate because of his attempt to revive dying paganism, viewed Asclepius as the greatest gift of Zeus to the human race.  He said of him, “He visits no one of us separately and yet he raises up souls that are sinful and bodies that are sick.”

Who was Asclepius?

To the Greeks and Romans he was a “half deity”, the son of the god Apollo and a human woman, a good example of what might be called a “hybrid”.  The Bible talks about such hybrids in Genesis chapter 6, where it says that the sons of god – angels – copulated with human women.  From that union came beings of great power. When Asclepius died it was claimed that he became a full god.  He was a healer who could even raise the dead from their darkness.  The supposed founder of all the medical arts, his rod with a single serpent twined around it is a medical symbol still used today.  The deep appeal of this god was to the poor and sick of the world, to all those who were heavy laden and needed rest.  His message reached out to them and from all across the Roman Empire they flocked to his temples.

What does our very ill young woman experience when she arrives at the shrine?

It’s a beautiful tourist attraction with quiet, lovely grounds and landscaped groves of cypress trees.   To see it, you would never believe that it is part of Satan’s Throne.  Unless he’s in the health spa business. And why not? Each shrine had unique libraries, theaters and gymnasiums.

But one feature was the same in all of them. At the center of the complex was a strange temple filled with couches.  Soon after our young woman arrives she begins to experience the true weirdness of the place. Non-venomous snakes are crawling everywhere. They are all over the grounds and inside the buildings, especially in the temple. And they are welcome here. This is their home.  Beneath the temple are tunnels constructed to house them.  After every Asclepion was built, at the time of dedication, hundreds of serpents were brought in to be housed on the grounds, because a serpent is the symbol of the god.

Our young woman is assigned to a priest who listens to the facts of her case.  He might give her a regimen to follow, but this is not nearly as important as instructions that might come from the deity.  She is then ordered to worship by making a sacrifice on one of the altars.  In the evening, a draught of wine is administered and she goes to sleep on one of the many couches in the temple.   It is during this temple sleep, called incubation, that miraculous healings take place.

Did actual, physical healings occur in the shrines of Asclepius?  The archeological evidence is fascinating.  These shrines existed for hundreds of years.  Many thousands of sufferers came to them. If no healings had ever happened, certainly they would not have been successful for so long. A record of miracle cures has been preserved on stone tablets found at the Asclepion of Epidaurus in southern Greece.  Very likely they represent only a small portion of the tablets that once existed.  They purport to be the personal testimonies of eye-witnesses to the power at work in the shrine. Think of them as ancient Yelp reviews. 

Here’s what might happen when you slept in the temple.

The healing would begin with a dream.  Sometimes it would be of the god himself, who would appear as a bearded, scholarly man, the personification of the ideal physician.  But as he stared at you, somehow there would be a strange, faraway look in his eyes. He would seem to know all about your physical condition.  Often, he would cure you right there in the dream.  When you awoke, you would find yourself miraculously healed. The following are just a few examples from the many stone tablets.

A young woman named Erasippa, perhaps the young woman of our story, came to the temple with her stomach swollen with worms. She was burning all over and couldn’t keep down any food.  In a dream, the god massaged her stomach and kissed her.  Then he gave her a drug to drink and ordered that she vomit. In the dream, she vomited and covered herself with it.  When morning came and she awakened, her dress was covered with the evil stuff she had vomited in the dream.  From that point, she was well.

For six years a soldier suffered with the point of a spear embedded in his jaw.  He dreamed that Asclepius removed it and placed it in his hands.  He went away healed carrying the spear point. A man of Torone came to the temple after having drunk a potion given to him by his step-mother.  She had placed live leeches in it which were living inside of him.  Obviously, where the evil step mother tradition began. He dreamed that Asclepius cut open his chest with a knife, took out the leeches and placed them in his hands. At daybreak, he left the temple cured, the leeches out of his body.

The mother of a woman suffering from terrible swelling in her extremities slept in the temple for her daughter.  She dreamed the god cut off her daughter’s head, emptied out the diseased fluid and replaced it on her body.  The mother left the temple and found her daughter well.  On the same night her daughter had had the same dream.

On and on the cases go.  Some didn’t see the god in a physical form. Some were visited by one of his servants.  A man with a cancerous sore on his foot went to sleep. While he slept, one of the sacred snakes crept out and licked it.  The next morning he was healed after dreaming that a handsome young man had placed a drug on the wound.

Sometimes, instead of curing the patient outright, Asclepius would prescribe a simple regimen.  When one individual came to the temple continually coughing blood, the god’s prescription was to eat pork for the rest of his life, constantly stuffing himself with it.  This he did, believing that if he missed a single day for the rest of his life the disease would return. And so the BBQ industry was born.

Now clearly, these stone tablets were a form of advertising.  A skeptical view might say that they were all fabricated.  But that doesn’t account for the centuries-long success of the temples and the untold thousands who came to them.  Others might say that healing happened, but it was just the Placebo Effect.  People wanted to be healed and believed in the power of the temple, so they were healed.  Once again, not an adequate answer. It might account for a percentage of the healings, but the Placebo Effect can’t remove a spear point.

There are those who claim that the testimonials were only fabrications of the priests who used the people’s faith in the god to get them to obey their medical prescriptions.  Like having a deity in your pocket to lend authority to your orders.  The idea is that the only real power in the shrines was in the priests themselves and as they grew to be more scientifically sophisticated they came to realize this.  Eventually, they stopped being priests and became “real physicians”. 

That doesn’t work either. In the shrines of Asclepius, the human physicians treated people and the god treated people and everyone knew the difference.  The great Galen of Pergamon, one of the fathers of modern medicine because of his early use of scientific methodology, made this observation: “Even among ourselves in Pergamon, we see that those who are being treated by the god obey him, when on many occasions he bids them not to drink at all for fifteen days, while they obey none of the physicians who give this prescription.” Everyone knew the difference between the god and the men. Something quite strange was happening in those shrines.

An encounter with Asclepius established a very firm religious faith.  To receive healing from the god required sacrifices. The god demanded to be worshipped, which meant giving yourself body and soul to him if you wanted to be healed.  The Powers of Darkness have gifts to give, but always they come with chains.

There was a shrine to Asclepius in Rome.  Worship began there as early as 292 BC.  According to Roman history, the god was brought at the direction of the Delphic Oracle. 

How did Asclepius come to Rome?

A plague had stricken Italy.  A ship was sent to Epidaurus to receive the god and bring him back to the great city.  It’s said that when the ship arrived in Epidaurus, a huge snake voluntarily crawled aboard.  When the ship entered Italy, the serpent slithered onto an island in the Tiber and immediately the plague stopped.  The Roman shrine to Asclepius was built on that island called Isola Tiberina.

As the message of Jesus Christ and His power to heal grew in strength in the Roman world, worship of Asclepius faded away and his shrines fell into ruin.  But the serpent power at work in them did not fade away. It simply found new names and new centers in which to express itself.   Eventually, that dark power entered the organized Christian church.  The temple of Asclepius in the Tiber became the Church of St. Bartholomew and continued as a mecca for healing with temple sleep under the direction of a new set of priests, with people placing their faith in a saint instead of a Greek god.

Healing through pagan gods in the Roman Empire was not limited to Asclepius.   Incubation was practiced in many pagan temples.  As the church absorbed paganism in order to make Christianity more “palatable”, the power behind the healings of Pergamon gained many new avenues.  People traveled great distances to countless other new shrines that bore the names and bones of saints.   Many of the same healing techniques used by Asclepius continued in the Christian church. French historian of the sixth century, Gregory of Tours, records a number of examples of church sleep in order to find supernatural healing.  This was just a Christianized form of ancient incubation. The power behind the cult of Asclepius was quite happy to reside in churches. Yet another case of syncretism which we have discussed in past episodes.

The gods of Spirit Healing worked across the entire world. Ancient Egypt was a center of their power.  Their priest physicians were known throughout the world as masters of medicine.  They clearly stated that their knowledge came from the gods. To bring healing, they performed mysterious rites to bring down the power of their deities. Temple sleep was often used to receive both knowledge about cures and direct healing.

The Egyptian world was one of endless invisible war between so-called good and evil gods. It was filled with demonic spirits some of which could be helpful and others destructive to the human body. Suffering people prayed, worshipped and made desperate offerings. If healings came, they always did so at a price.

The medical practices of ancient Babylon and Assyria were centered on a fear of demons. In the majority of ancient texts the terms for sickness and possession by evil spirits are the same. So healing involved exorcism. Their capricious gods controlled the demons and used them to inflict punishment on humans. Who were these evil spirits? They came from one of three possible categories. First, demons could be spirits of the dead, second, supernatural entities of a lower order than gods or third, terrifying hybrids born of human and supernatural copulation. Suffering people had no defense against such monsters except by the intervention of a god.  So desperately worship and pray.

To find cures, divination was used and temple sleep was common. Priests were professional dreamers.  During the fatal illness of Alexander the Great, one of his generals slept in the Temple of Marduk in Babylon in the hope of finding a cure. Unfortunately, for Alexander his death had been fore-ordained by the real God, Yahweh, as foretold in the prophecy of Daniel.

In ancient India the same desperate fear of the supernatural world pervaded everything. In Vedic writings, disease was caused by an attack or possession by an evil spirit and could be punishment for sin.  When reincarnation was accepted as a foundational belief, disease became punishment for transgressions in a previous life. Miraculous cures by the gods are recorded in the Rigveda. There were appeals to demons along with incantations and ceremonies to expel them. Traps were laid for them by making an offering in a fire in a ditch surrounded by hot water.

The Celts, my ancient ancestors, were terrified of disease. A priest mediator would attempt healing and his treatments involved prayers, magic incantations, and sacrifices to the gods of the forests and skies.  One myth tells of a Cauldron of Renovation empowered by Cerridwen, a shape-shifting Welsh goddess of healing. A fire was built and dead bodies were thrown into the cauldron.  All night they would boil and the next day it was believed they would rise from the dead as warriors.  And if they didn’t, of course, there was a stew.

To learn more, I recommend an exhaustive, and utterly exhausting study, entitled The Healing Gods of Ancient Civilizations by historian and medical doctor Walter Addison Jayne. What was the result of being healed by one of these false deities?  Constant fear that the physical crisis would return, which led to constant fearful worship of these alien beings.

I don’t use the term alien to mean imaginary sentient creatures from another planet. An alien is someone owing allegiance to another country or government. Someone belonging to a very different place – strange, foreign, opposed as in nature.  That’s a dictionary definition. Also, I use alien to describe a being that has been alienated, excluded and estranged.  All of that perfectly describes Satan and all of his dark host.  Those are the beings we are going to talk about and how they have manifested themselves throughout history. And they are manifesting right now as they prepare for their ultimate revelation. As in the past, they will present supernatural healing as proof of their power and authority. During that time, which is yet to come, human suffering will greatly increase.  But these beings that claim to be gods are doomed and they know it.

The greatest crisis and confrontation in history began when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, entered this bloody, murderous, vile world filled with pitiful human slaves.  With Him came the ultimate message of God’s love, a message of true healing and freedom forever.  Jesus revealed the real God, who stands against the pantheon of alien monsters, the slave masters of Outer Darkness. 

The center of Jesus’ ministry when He walked this earth was healing, both physical and spiritual.  No one had to go to a temple or some other holy place to meet Him.  He was out among the suffering people, sometimes in a crowd so thick it was hard for Him to move.  No special gifts and offerings had to be made to get his attention. Healing came when people just touched His clothes. A woman who had spent everything she had on doctors, yet was still slowly bleeding to death, touched his robe and instantly was healed.  One Roman Centurion asked Jesus to heal his desperately ill servant.  He knew that Jesus was so powerful all He had to do was say the word. 

And what did Jesus get out of it?  There was at least one case where those who were healed didn’t even return to thank Him. What did He get?  Eventually, death on a Roman cross. Why in the world did He bother?  Out of nothing but love.  The New Testament says that He looked on all the thousands who came to Him to be healed and felt deep compassion for them. He loved those people, just as He loves you right now. Nowhere do you find compassion expressed by any of the alien healing false gods. What do they want?  For you to be their desperate worshiping slave who will do any degrading thing to get their help. My friend, are you their slave right now?  

Jesus’ deepest healings were of diseased souls, by giving forgiveness for sins which brings true freedom forever. He could do that because He was God and He was going to pay the price for every sin He forgave by dying on that cross. And His eternal power continues today.  Has it entered your life?  Have your sins been forgiven? All you need to do is talk to Him right now.  Tell Him your soul needs healing from all the destructive things you have said and done. His eternal healings are free.

What Jesus did changed everything around the world forever.  Giving His life to pay the price for our freedom was a heavenly dagger in the heart of Satan. With that act, the final phase of the great invisible war began.  And it is moving toward a conclusion. We have much more to say about the alien gods of Spirit Healing so stay with us. In the next essay, we’re going to look at one of the strangest healing cults in all of history. And they performed their miracles out of tombs.

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