Harmony in healing at the thymele of Epidaurus

Abstract

This dissertation takes as its focus the thymele, a circular building that was centrally located at one of the major healing sanctuaries of the ancient Greek world: that of the god Asclepius at Epidaurus. While the thymele’s purpose remains unknown, it has been linked with the two healing modalities of dream incubation and musical therapeutics that were practised at the sanctuary.

The central question of this dissertation is one of how the thymele might be approached, if the forms of ‘approach’ by pilgrims to the sanctuary, culminating in the encounter with the god experienced through song-dance and dreaming, are taken into account. The thymele has most recently been investigated through the ‘archaeology of the senses’ (Schultz et al., 2017), which attempts to subvert the Cartesian binary of the mental and material. However, this excludes the important quality of relationship with an ‘other’ experienced by ancient pilgrims, and which, I argue, necessitates an epistemology that takes into consideration a third, median realm that draws together the two. I suggest that such an epistemology is found in the Jungian and post-Jungian field of psychology, which might be described as ‘imaginal’ in regarding image to be the language of psyche.

Various elements of the thymele are therefore explored as a series of images over the successive chapters of this dissertation. These are images relating to healing, I suggest, which might be understood through ancient Greek ideas of harmony between parts and wholes linked to both dreaming and music. By way of an imaginal approach, drawing together ‘self’ and ‘other’, the researcher or reader is no longer a detached observer, but, like the pilgrim, ‘approaches’, becoming engaged in a transformative encounter with living images of the ‘two-million-year-old human’ who, according to Jung, continues to reside in the psyche, and in relationship to whom a greater wholeness might be experienced.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English