The
vivifying air, the well cultivated gardens surrounding the shrine, the
magnificent view, all tended to cheer the heart with new hope of cure.
Many of these temples owed their fame to mineral or merely hot springs.
To the homely altars, erected originally by sacred fountains in the
neighbourhood of health-giving mineral springs, were later added
magnificent temples, pleasure-grounds for festivals, gymnasia in
which bodily ailments were treated by physical exercises, baths and
inunctions, also, as is proved by excavations, living rooms for the
patients. Access to the shrine was forbidden to the unclean and the
impure, pregnant women and the mortally afflicted were kept away; no
dead body could find a resting-place within the holy precincts, the
shelter and the cure of the sick being undertaken by the keepers of inns
and boarding-houses in the neighbourhood. The suppliants for aid had
to submit to careful purification, to bathe in sea, river or spring, to
fast for a prescribed time, to abjure wine and certain articles of
diet, and they were only permitted to enter the temple when they were
adequately prepared by cleansing, inunction and fumigation. This lengthy
and exhausting preparation, partly dietetic, partly suggestive, was
accompanied by a solemn service of prayer and sacrifice, whose symbolism
tended highly to excite the imagination.
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