HealingA passage in the Vide ̄vda ̄t (7. 44; cf. Yt. 3. 6) distinguishes three types of
healer: the knife-healer (karəto ̄.bae ̄sˇ
̇
azo ̄), the herb-healer (urvaro ̄.bae ̄sˇ
̇azo ̄),
and the spell-healer (ma ̨θro ̄.bae ̄sˇ
̇
azo ̄). Pindar ascribes all three techniques
(but in reverse order) to Asclepius, who, he says, relieved all his patients’
sufferings, ‘treating some with gentle incantations, others with medicines
swallowed or applied externally, while others he set on their feet by means of
surgery’.^58 Darmesteter, who first noted the parallel, inferred that this triad
was canonical in Indo-European medicine.
However, they should not be regarded as mutually exclusive methods.
Incantations were sometimes, perhaps usually, employed in combination
with hands-on therapy. We have already noted that certain Atharvavedic and
Roman incantations refer to herbs whose efficacy they are designed to ensure.
When the young Odysseus was gored by the Parnassian boar, the sons of
Autolycus, his uncles, treated the wound and bandaged it expertly, while using
incantation to stop the bleeding (Od. 19. 455–8). The Indian epic hero
Yudhis
̇
t
̇hira, sorely wounded by arrows, is healed mantraus
̇adha ̄bhya ̄m, by
mantras and medicinal herbs (MBh. 8. 1063*. 15). The Irish mythical healer
Míach (a counterpart of Asclepius, as we saw in Chapter 3) is associated with
both: he re-attaches Núadu’s severed hand with a spell, and after he is killed
and buried 365 healing herbs grow from his grave.^59 In the Táin the wounded
Cú Chulainn is visited by a person from a fairy mound who sings him into a
three-day healing sleep. ‘Then the warrior from the síd put plants and healing
herbs and a curing charm (slánsén) in the wounds and cuts, in the gashes and
many injuries of Cú Chulainn so that he recovered during his sleep without
his perceiving it at all’ (Táin (I) 2107–44, cf. (L) 3123, 3167–9).
AV 6. 25 is a charm against sores or skin eruptions of the neck and
shoulders, ‘thefive and the fifty that gather on the nape areas... the seven
and the seventy that gather on the neck areas... the nine and the ninety
that gather on the shoulder areas.. .’. It is not clear whether the numbers
are meant to be of different kinds of pustule or whatever. In any case there is
a remarkable coincidence with references in German incantations to seventy-
seven diseases, or in one case to ‘ninety-nine and seventy-seven’.^60
(^58) Pyth. 3. 50–3. Cf. J. Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman (Paris 1877), 293 n. 2; Campanile
(1977), 88–91; Sergent (1995), 243 f.; Watkins (1995), 537–9.
(^59) Cath Maige Tuired lines 133–46 Gray. It seems far-fetched to see an allusion to surgery in
the manner of his death, his skull being cloven to the brain by his angry father Dían Cécht
(J. Puhvel in Cardona et al. [1970], 378 f.; Watkins (1995), 539).
(^60) A. Kuhn, ZVS 13 (1864), 128–35 (cf. 157), who illustrates the use of these and other
multiples of eleven in other connections in the Veda. The Avesta speaks of 99,999 maladies
(Vd. 22. 2, 6).
334 8. Hymns and Spells