Association for Medical Humanities 8th Annual Conference: The Drama of Medicine University of Leicester

Session 4a: Once upon a time

Medicine’s Original Psychodrama: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes

Professor Zoë Playdon 13 July 2011

The phrase ‘Once upon a time’ powerfully and evocatively reminds us of an element fundamental to our consciousness, the relationship between the part and the whole. Philosophically, we feel this as the relationship between our life-in-time as biological beings and our life-in-eternity as a zoological species. Psychologically, we express it as the relationship between the emergent individual consciousness and the wine- dark sea of the collective unconscious. Mythologically, it is told as the interpenetration of the personal and the archetypal. However, to the Greek mind, these three intertwined meanings, which we have to reach for analytically, since we have only one term for the concept, were instantly apparent, encapsulated in their language as two distinct words for life: bios – biology, individual life in time – and zoe, zoology, archetypal life in eternity.

Part Whole Time Eternity Individual Collective Conscious Unconscious Personal Archetypal Bios Zoe

This relationship between bios and zoe, between time and eternity, between the individual and the archetypal, is the central concern of Greek myth, exploring for us the emergence of newness, reawakening our awareness of individual actions within eternal values, requiring us to find personal responses to collective change. The fullness of myth’s meanings, its luminous resonances, can only be explored while in its presence – as William Blake puts it:

Those who bind to themselves a joy Do the winged life destroy; But those who kiss the joy as it flies Live in Eternity’s sunrise.1

1 Blake, W. (1972) ‘Poems from the Note-Book 1793, 59’ Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University Press, p. 184.

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Like all art, and indeed, like patient care, meaning is located in the immediate encounter, as the relationship between subjects. These subjects are not simply singular but, in Thomas Mann’s phrase, are always ‘opened behind’2 to admit, constellate with, become part of, other subjects. So, as the contemporary mythologist Jules Cashford points out, ‘We are all born into a story. We enter the story of our family, which changes as we enter it’.3 Our experience of myth, as the cultural theorists say, is intersubjective, co-constructed, provisional, located, inscribed, contextualised: it inspires the flight of our imagination, it touches our deepest intuitions, it requires our complex emotional and intellectual responses – all at the same time.

For the Greek of the 6th - 4th century BCE, the purpose of myth was to educate through recreating a specific emotional experience, with the intention of providing auditors with an opportunity for deep insight, and thereby changing their ways of seeing and being. Originally sung as part of a lyrical tradition that comes down to us in the Homeric Hymns,4 myths provided the dramatic base for ritual that developed into theatre. Small wonder, then, that to our Greek, attendance at theatre was 'an act of worship, and from the social point of view obligatory',5 with the front seats reserved for State officials, all of whom were priests, including the priest of Asklepios, the god dedicated to medicine.

Whether it be the story of a person, a profession, or a culture, no story is complete without its Founding Story. These ‘Stories of Origin, or Myths of Creation . . . are sacred stories which explore a vision of the whole universe and the place of human beings, and all other beings, within it.’6 For Western biomedicine and its doctors, their story ‘opens behind’ to Hippocrates, and Asklepios, and overflows into the fullness of myth: into Chiron the Centaur, the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, Perseus and the Gorgon, Demeter and Persephone, and far-shooting Apollo. But presiding over the profession, providing its founding story, lies the myth of Hermes and his numinous symbol, the Caduceus, the staff with two intertwined serpents.

First, then, I should like to consider the main drama of the myth, the relationship between Hermes and Apollo; then I should like to relate Hermes’s attributes to medicine; and thereby explain why the Caduceus is the symbol both of Hermes and of Western biomedicine.

The story of the Hymn to Hermes is one of how Hermes achieves a relationship with Apollo, in order to be taken seriously and to win his place in Olympus. Imagination and intuition are always seeking entry to our rational minds, which may need to be tricked or charmed into recognising them, as Hermes the Imagination has to trick Apollo the Literal-minded. At the point at which Apollo discovers that he has no choice but to accept the new reality that is Hermes – for he cannot stop him – he also discovers that Hermes brings wonderful gifts, which fill him with ‘a deep and

2 Mann, T. (1936) Joseph and His Brothers. Vol. 1. ‘The Tales of Jacob’. Translated by . New York: Alfred A. Knopfler, p. 78. 3 Cashford, J. (2010) Gaia. London: Kingfisher Art Productions, p. 2. 4 Cashford, J. (2003) The Homeric Hymns. London: Penguin. 5 Harrison, J. E. (1913) Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Oxford University Press, p. 10. 6 Cashford, J. (2010) Gaia. London: Kingfisher Art Productions, p.2.

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Apollo, Maia, the infant Hermes & Zeus Caeretan black figure hydria Sixth century BCE, Louvre, Paris irresistible longing’ to make them his own. What is more, when Hermes gifts the lyre to Apollo, it awakens Apollo’s own generosity and he, too, invests Hermes with unique gifts and attributes. The point is, that it is a relationship that transforms both of them. Let us look a little more closely at the qualities that belong to each initially.

Hermes with Lyre and Caduceus Apollo with Lyre and Raven Red-figure vase. 495-490 BC White kylix. 490 BC British Museum Delphi Museum

Apollo in the Hymn to Hermes is ‘Apollo the Archer’, ‘Phoebus Apollo’, ‘Far-Worker’, ‘Lord of the Silver Bow’. The wealth of his ‘great house’ with its ‘beautiful tripods/ and cauldrons and gold/ and piles of gleaming iron’ is described by Hermes to Leto, while Hermes describes Apollo to his face as ‘most violent of all the gods’, a reputation that Apollo seeks to live up to, ignoring Zeus’s direct instructions by trying to bind Hermes with ropes of willow, just as Maia had said he would.

‘Phoebus Apollo’, literally ‘Bright Apollo’ is, of course, the single, focused point of consciousness which is so poised on the threshold of good and bad that it becomes dangerous, like the sun, a mercilessly brilliant radiance that leaves no shade, that burns all that try to oppose it. In this negative aspect, he symbolises the remorseless

3 intellect’s desire for absolute fact, and the ruthless elimination of anything that stands in its way. When he directs it on you it is not possible to get out of the way of his deathly radiance, for he is the ‘Far-Worker’, ‘Apollo the Archer’ whose deadly arrows come from afar and never miss their target. As ‘Lord of the Silver Bow’, therefore, to Apollo belongs those qualities of absolute concentration and complete focus, to the exclusion of all other feeling, that we find, for example, in the statue of the Charioteer dedicated at his shrine at Delphi. It is, of course, typical of the so-called ‘medical model’, the focus on a literal target of diseased flesh, using an intellect that rigorously examines and excludes all possibilities until it has found its single target and achieved its aim.

Apollo Belvedere c. 120-140. Copy of bronze original 350-325 BC Vatican Museum

Hermes, however, presents us with a quite different kind of consciousness. Specifically, he is the ‘Slayer of Argos’, the hundred-eyed giant, Argos Panoptes, the All-Seeing, an image of the over-literal, hypervigilant mind. Just as Hermes charms Apollo with his lyre, so he charms to sleep Argos with the pipes he made after he had given the lyre to Apollo – and slays him. As Kerenyi puts it, Hermes ‘sees through’7 the ‘gleaming shell’ of the tortoise to its potential for music, just as he sees through shining Apollo to his potential as a musician. Hermes is the power of the Imagination, that not only sees newness everywhere but brings it into being, demonstrated by his invention both of fire and of the lyre, both literal fire and the imaginative fire of creativity, both the literal music of the lyre and the intuitive ‘joy and love and sweet sleep’ that it evokes. Just as he transforms the tortoise, so he transforms Apollo, with a winking intimation that the two may have more in common than either realise, since while Hermes can pick up the tortoise/ Apollo and transform them, Apollo drops Hermes as soon as he picks him up, and when he tries ‘to bind Hermes with strong ropes’:

7 Kerenyi, K. (1976) Hermes: Guide of Souls. Translated by Murray Stein. Zurich: Spring Publications, p. 26.

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. . . the ropes would not hold him and the thongs of willow fell far away from him and at once took root in the earth, there, beneath their feet, and, intertwining with one another, they easily tangled up all the wild-roving cattle . . .

Apollo watched in wonder.

Hermes Slaying Argos Red-figure vase, c. 500 BC Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna

Throughout the Hymn, Hermes is called ‘Prince of Thieves’, a title which he confers upon himself and that Apollo confirms, and the Hymn’s opening comedy is the deliberately ridiculous way in which Hermes first steals Apollo’s cattle, then openly lies about the theft, while making clear by various whistles and glances that he is lying. What he has stolen, of course, is Apollo’s over-bearing power, which has become so self-aggrandising that he feels able to ignore Zeus’s command to ‘be of one heart and mind’. Zeus, we may infer, is aware of these shortcomings in his elder son, and perhaps this is why ‘he told Hermes the guide to lead the way.’ Hermes is Apollo’s psychopomp, his spiritual guide, intent on tricking him out of his violence and over-vigilance and restoring him to harmony – literally, the harmony of music. Of course, Hermes is the most irresistible of the two brothers, since he is the arresting Imagination, that transformative quality that exists beyond fear. The Imagination is primary and cannot be evaded, but must be accepted, as Apollo cannot resist the lyre, and in another myth, Paris is detained by Hermes even as he tries to run away from Aphrodite. But this does not mean that we need only Hermes. Both Hermes and Apollo must come in to make a whole, just as the end of the Hymn shows us ‘these two very beautiful children of Zeus’ united, sworn in first-friendship, each to the other. The Hymn tells us that we need both qualities, Intellect and Imagination, and that

5 they need each other, since the two are so closely allied as to be siblings of each other, so that any attempt to separate them is fundamentally mistaken.

Hermes and Tortoise Marble Roman copy of Greek Statue 1st century CE State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Of course this is relevant to medicine, which knows itself to be both an art and a science, in which practice, in the everyday clinical encounter, requires intellect, as propositional knowledge and factual certainty, to be combined with imagination, as intuition, compassion, and interpretation of individual circumstances and needs. We are back again to the relationship between the whole and the part, so that the whole of medicine – the art of its practice – contains that vitally necessary part which is called science. And it is no coincidence, therefore, to note that the etymology of ‘health’ is ‘hale’, Anglo-Saxon for ‘whole’; that ‘sacred’ means ‘making whole’; and that Indo-European root of ‘myth’ is ‘mu’, with its twin meanings of ‘to think’ and ‘to imagine’. Myth, we might say, is the third space where the apparent contraries of Intellect and Imagination are reconciled.

Why is this myth specifically medicine’s Foundation Story, though, and why is the Caduceus the abiding symbol of the profession?

Popular accounts of Greek myth and medicine, such as that given by Sir Kenneth Calman,8 generally trace a genealogy from Asklepios to Apollo, unaware of Hermes, and with an ignorance of the complex mythological identity of Asklepios’s mother and her lovers that is typical of such patrimonial inscriptions. But Apollo without Hermes is an unbridled force, a self-justifying rationalisation of irrational violence. Where enraged Apollo bursts into Maia’s cave and makes free to finger through her clothes and possessions, without so much as a by your leave, though he must know his cattle can’t be in her wardrobe, Hermes shows restraint and self-control. We know at

8 Calman, K. (2007) Medical Education: Past, Present and Future. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.

6 the start of the Hymn that he is ‘hungry for meat’ and he spends a long day rustling, slaughtering and roasting Apollo’s cattle. So, when it is roasting:

. . . glorious Hermes himself longed for the sacrificial meat - the delicious smell distressed him - immortal though he was. But his noble heart was not swayed and no flesh passed down his sacred throat, even though he yearned for it very deeply.

Hermes and Paris with Hera, Athena and Aphrodite Black-figure vase, 6th century BCE Louvre, Paris

It is sacrificial meat, dedicated to the gods, and Hermes forbids it to himself, binding himself in an ethical code of relinquishment, which, at a fundamental level, parallels the self-regulation required by medicine. Faced with the task of rustling Apollo’s cattle, Hermes inventively makes himself sandals, creating his practice at the same time as he carries it out, ‘like someone working it out for himself’. Here, we see the divide between the Apollonic certainty that attends undergraduate medical education and the Hermetic uncertainty that characterises postgraduate medical education: in practice, you must necessarily act ‘like someone working it out for himself’ since no- one can do it for you. Similarly, autonomy as a doctor is gained through a demonstration of mastery, through your own efforts, as Hermes gains his place in Olympus. Hermes owns an earned authority, while Apollo’s is a conferred autocracy, so that even before his birth, his mother, Leto, had difficulty finding a birth-place since everywhere in Greece ‘trembled, they were all utterly terrified’ since it was rumoured that ‘Apollo will be very presumptuous,/ that he will dominate gods and mortals’.9 There are other parallels, too, that make Hermes the apt guide of medicine

9 Cashford, J. (2003) ‘Hymn to Apollo’,The Homeric Hymns. London: Penguin, pp. 27-37.

7 – the requirement to hold in balance both an ethical map and a business map, that reflects Hermes’s role in ‘setting up/ the business of barter among human beings’ for example, or his role as herald of the gods, the breaker of news, both good and bad, to mortals. Crucially, there are his qualities of intuition and imagination, the kind of knowledge that arises out of what Keats called ‘Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’10 This, after all, is the practice of medicine, the exercise of professional judgment, living with uncertainty, minute by minute, hour by hour, staying open to sudden changes, coping with twists and turns, and still finding the best route to health and wholeness for each individual patient. It is Hermes the compassionate Imagination who is the guide within the clinical encounter, drawing out the patient narratives and the doctor’s responses.

And then there is the matter of the Caduceus.

Staff and entwined serpents of Ningishzida Libation Vase of Gudea 21st century BCE Louvre, Paris

Hermes receives three insignia: a ‘shaft of cornel wood’ indicating his role as ‘blessed guide among the gods’; a ‘shining whip’ to mark his office as ‘keeper of the cattle’; and ‘a marvelous wand of blessing and fortune/ a golden one, with three branches,/ which will protect you and keep you unharmed’ – the Caduceus. This staff with two intertwining serpents considerably pre-dates the seventh century BCE composition of the Homeric Hymns: it is visible, for example, on the Sumerian Cup of Lagash, c. 2025 BCE. Mythologically, it enters medicine’s prehistory as the translucent image of the head of the Gorgon, covered in snakes: when Perseus severed the literally petrifying head – its gaze turned you to stone – the fountains of blood that gushed from the arteries either side of the vertebral column, like serpents either side of a staff, were caught and given to Asklepios: blood from the left artery kills, while blood from the right artery cures.

The snakes, therefore, are snakes of life and death, and the protection that the Caduceus provides Hermes with is for his unique role: of all the Olympians, he is ‘the only consecrated messenger to Hades’, the only god who can go into the realm of death and return whole, unscathed – not even Zeus himself can do that. Those who hold the Caduceus, our doctors, are asked by society to occupy this most difficult of proximal zones, the third space between life and death, and are further asked to

10 Rollins, H. E. 1958. The Letters of John Keats,1814-1821. Vol. 1. Cambridge: University Press, p. 193.

8 The Gorgon from the Temple of Artemis, c. 600 BC Archaeological Museum, Corfu

bring back loved ones who have strayed into that shadowy place, as Hermes returned Persephone to Demeter. Medicine, therefore, is archetypally an embodiment of an Hermetic spirit. To borrow Kerenyi’s words, doctors are asked to move ‘in this realm of human existence, this border area between life and death, as the Greeks believed their god Hermes did. The spiritual reality of the god Hermes, the basis of the faith he once inspired, involved a capability that, after all, also corresponds to an exceptional capacity of the mind: to be at home even in that realm.’11

Hermes Returns Persephone to Demeter Red-figure krater, 450-420 BCE Metropolitan Museum, New York

Hermes is at home in both worlds, moving between them: between zoe and bios, eternity and time, life and death, bearing the numinous symbol of their relationship, the Caduceus, the symbol of transformation that reunites them.

11 Kerenyi, K. (1975). Mythology and Humanism: the correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi. Translated by Alexander Gelley. London: Cornell University Press, p. 6-7.

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Caduceus after the style of Dutch 14th century CE woodcut

Symbol of MA Medical Humanities

KSS & Birkbeck College University of London

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