Hellenistic Religion
November 16, 2025 § Leave a comment
I’ve been reading Hellenistic Religions: The Age of Syncretism, edited by Frederick C. Grant and published in 1953. It’s a collection of primary sources from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia in 331 BCE until Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE, and then through the early Roman empire, which he calls the Hellenistic-Roman period. We tend to forget that Christianity is, then, also a Hellenistic religion, especially as Paul was a Hellenistic figure himself and the ultimate syncretist.
Grant offers brief introductions to his categorizations of these sources and to the individual texts themselves. These are personal accounts of encounters with gods, instructions from a donor patron for the establishment and maintenance of a new shrine, accounts of and instructions on how to petition an oracle, and so on.
They reveal that pagans were having experiences and talking about the gods in ways that are quite similar to our own experience and language in some ways, and especially to those of their Christian contemporaries. Here’s an example, the account of a healing told by a man named Philadelphus by the god Asclepius written by Aelius Aristides, a Greek author and orator, 117–181 CE:
“This is what Philadelphus dreamed. ‘What happened to me was as follows: I dreamed that I stood in the entrance to the sanctuary, where also some other people were gathered, as at the time of the sacrifice for purification; they wore white garments and were otherwise festively garbed. Then I spoke about the god and named him, among other things, Distributor of Destiny, since he assigns to men their fate. The expression came to me out of my own personal experience. Then I told about the potion of wormwood, which had somehow been revealed to me [in a previous account in Aristides’s work cited by Grant]. The revelation was unquestionable, just as in a thousand other instances the epiphany of the god was felt with absolute certainty. You have a sense of contact with him, and are aware of his arrival in a state of mind intermediate between sleep and waking; you try to look up and are afraid to, lest before you see him he shall have vanished; you sharpen your ears and listen, half in dream and half awake; your hair stands up, tears of joy roll down, a proud kind of modesty fills your breast. How can anyone really describe this experience in words? If one belongs to the initiated, he will know about it and recognize it.’”
This account is so vivid, so personal. I have felt exactly like this myself. One can imagine Paul feeling like this in his visions, too. Or Jesus himself.
Aristides’s account goes on to describe how this wormwood treatment (wormwood is a poison) worked for Philadelphus, as did other odd cultic instructions later involving mud and running. One thinks of Jesus spitting into dirt and putting it on a blind man’s eyes.
Holding in the Light – Meetings for Healing
January 9, 2025 § 1 Comment
Usually, when we’re asked to hold someone in the light, it’s in the midst of some other situation, very often just after meeting for worship, and we devote no real time or attention to the practice. This is why I feel it’s mostly an outward form whose only value is the shared sympathy it evokes in the gathering. This is no small thing, but it’s not a serious attempt at healing or even comforting the person held. For real attempts at healing, we need a dedicated meeting for healing.
I know that Friends with deeper commitment to the gift of healing than mine, and with broader and more current study and experience, hold meetings for healing among Friends. I’ve never attended one, so I don’t know what these other models are. But I’m sure that other approaches could be at least as effective as the one I describe below. But this is what I know can work—not often, to be honest, but sometimes.
I mentioned my training in Silva Mind Control in previous posts in this series. As a teacher, I used to lead programs for graduates of the course in which healing circles figured regularly and prominently. That practice might offer a model for our own meetings for healing.
The Mind Control practice was an energy circle. We sat in a tight circle holding hands. If we were working on someone in the group, they sat in the middle. The leader would guide a meditation in which we used the deepening technique Mind Control taught and then visualized energy—light—moving from us out of our right hands into the person next to us, and on around the circle, and back into us through our left hand from the person on our left. It was like a spiritual cyclotron, which is a physics particle accelerator that uses two “D”-shaped magnets to spin electrons around in a circle.
At some point, the leader would ask us to all visualize the energy curving up to an apex above the center of the circle and then either funneling down on the person in the middle or out to whomever we were working on at a distance. If the latter, then we called up whatever visual images of the recipient we have, either in memory or in imagination.
It was that simple, all of it easily adapted to Quaker faith and practice. First, deepening, however you do that. Then calling up the Light within. Then cycling the energy—the Light—in the circle until a “clerk” senses that the circle and the energy/light are ready. Then focusing the “beam” on the recipient and holding it there until the “clerk” feels the work is done.
Whatever the “therapeutic” results for the recipient, the practice builds strong bonds between the participants. The energy is often palpable, beautiful, even thrilling, with compassion and desire for healing rising within in wonderful waves. This emotional energy is perhaps where the healing actually draws its power, rather than the exercise of imagination.
Through the Flaming Sword 