The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.
—Albert Einstein
The World As I See It
Joyous feasts alternate with solemn sacrifices and everything is accomplished by magical operations that free the soul from fear and stimulate man’s imagination. It was for magical purposes (to fend off and cure diseases) that images were carved, poems were written, music played and public monuments erected.
—Kurt Seligmann
The History of Magic and the Occult
We all know that as we are beneficent toward nature, it becomes beneficent toward us.
—Xenophon
Xenophon (428–354 BC): Historian. An associate of Socrates, Xenophon fought in Cyrus’s army against Cyrus’s older brother, Artaxerxes, in the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC. Cyrus was defeated and killed. Xenophon’s adventures in reaching Greece from the midst of Asia after the defeat are documented in his March of the Ten Thousand. He also wrote a history of Greece entitled Hellenica, the memoirs of Socrates, Memorabilia, as well as a dialogue on estate management, entitled Oeconomicus.
From the beginning of time, humans feared unseen evil spirits and the condemnation and evil spells of all-powerful supernatural beings. To protect himself, man developed magic, spells, and rites to prevent disease and suffering, prevent catastrophic events of nature, and to repel evil and sinister beings.
As Kurt Seligmann describes in The History of Magic and the Occult, it seemed to the first humans that evil spirits that cause pain, disease, and death could be found behind every rock and tree and lurking in every blade of grass:
Spirits lurked everywhere. Larvae and lemurs lived beneath the earth; vampires escaped from the dead to attack the living; Namtar (pestilence) and Idpa (fever) plagued the cities. Night was ruled by the demons of evil, of the desert, of the abyss, of the sea, of the mountains, of the swamp, of the south wind. There were the succubi and the incubi, carriers of obscene nightmares; the snare-setting Maskim; the evil Utoq, dweller of the desert; the bull demon Telal; and Alal the destroyer.
Geologists (Greek for “talkers about the earth”) believe that the earth is 4,500,000,000 years old. There have been four Ice Ages, when glaciers covered large portions of the earth’s Northern Hemisphere, and four global warmings. The last global warming and glacial retreat was 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
A December 5th 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that geneticists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany extracted the oldest known human DNA, dating back to more than 300,000 years ago, from a fossil femur obtained from a cave shaft located in northern Spain. The Sima de los Huesos (the pit of bones) contained the skeletal remains of 28 ancient humans from a species never before reported.
Physically, these earliest humans looked like Neanderthals. However, a genetic analysis reported in the journal Nature revealed that their maternal DNA extracted from bone marrow mitochondria was different from that of both Neanderthals and more modern humans. Their DNA was more closely related to a relatively unknown human species—the Denisovans.
Anthropologists theorized that the people in the Sima cave could have been a distinct human species that had interbred with the Denisovans; they may have been directly related to the ancestors of the Denisovans or the relatives of both Denisovans and Neanderthals, or even related to a species of humans that had occupied parts of Europe and Asia, including Homo heidelbergensis.
There is evidence that the first communication of information by humans, including primitive observations of disease, astronomy, and math, are dated before 35,000 BC.
Twenty-five thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon artists stenciled impressions of their hands on the walls of more than twenty caves in northern Spain, Italy, and southwestern France.
The Gargas Cave in the French Pyrenees has the most handprints from more than 150 different infants, teenagers, and adults, and most are left hands. Created during the late Ice Age, the majority of the outlines were created with earth pigments blown through a reed or tanned skin tube, which may explain why the left hand was the predominant subject.
Many of the stenciled hands are mutilated by the removal of several joints of at least two fingers. Creating plaster casts of the holes found in the mud walls and ceiling of the Gargas Cave revealed that the holes had been created by fingers that terminated bluntly in scar-tissue bulges. This evidence shows that the fingers had been deliberately “truncated,” perhaps for a medical or religious ritual to bring good luck, fend-off disease, or to satisfy the hunting gods. Another theory is that the amputations were intended to represent the band’s animal totem or health guardians.
“We have invented nothing!” Pablo Picasso exclaimed as he emerged from France’s famed Lascaux Cave. Inside the cave, Picasso had examined some of the most incredible art in the world—it is dated back to 17,000 years ago! In 1868 the first of such prehistoric art was discovered in Altamira, Spain, and unbelieving visitors to the cave asserted that the paintings were no more than twenty years old, and dismissed them as “the expressions of a mediocre student of the modern school.”
Later discoveries of additional cave paintings in Spain and France caused the disbelievers to have a reversal of opinion: former critics began swooning over the ancient artists’ incredible talent. Only one of these new discoveries would rival the caves of Altamira for sheer brilliance of talent—the Lascaux Cave, which was discovered accidently by a boy who was looking for his lost dog.
The Lascaux Cave houses 600 paintings, approximately 1,500 individual engravings on stone, and many patterns of dots and geometric designs that tantalize the viewer. The ceilings and walls are covered with herds of animals, including aurochs (early forms of wild cattle), bison, reindeer, horses, and other species that are shown running, fleeing, galloping, and charging at the viewer.
Working in the flickering light of torches and fat-burning lamps and employing a stick, plant fibers, or finger-tip, the ancient painters of Lascaux first outlined and then colored-in their animal art. After thousands of years, the Lascaux paintings have continued to maintain their original brilliance.
Modern chemical analysis of the paints showed that the artists had developed and refined a difficult skill to create pigments for optimal clarity, stability, and brilliance. They powdered, ground, and mixed their materials, combining iron and manganese oxides with early mortars to create red, black, and yellow pigments; then they mixed the powders with water before they tinted the wall paintings. In some cases they mixed in additional binding agents, including blood, urine, fat, “fish glue,” egg white, and a multitude of plant juices. To enhance certain colors or to create burnt tones, they toasted the pigments with burning coals. The process was the forerunner of what is today considered industrial chemistry.
The ancient artists of the Lascaux Cave dealt with the concepts of depth and three-dimension by employing natural rock outcroppings and overlapping drawings of animals of different sizes to provide the artistic depth. Many of their early techniques would not be recreated by artists for thousands of years.
Cave and rock art and drawings are found all over the world; it is a prehistoric form of communication that passes on messages. The earliest cave drawings are dated in the Upper Paleolithic period of about 30,000 to 10,000 BC. Many of the cave drawings were connected to ritual magic that asked for fertility, health, plenty, and success at hunting.
An element of a request for fertility is found in some of the drawings. The drawings suggest certain depictions of humans and food animals, such as bison and wild cattle, that were without wounds or piercings by spears or arrows, were intended to ask the good spirits to increase the numbers of food animals and humans.
The “taming” of fire by man brought the “mastery” of metals that eventually led to human progress and civilization. Iron was the primary key of this transition, which raised the quality of human life from a brutish animal-like hunter gatherer existence to civilization. This early history of the ferrous metal was enough to give iron a special supernatural quality. Additionally, the first purified iron was extracted from meteors that fell from the heavens.
The ancient Egyptians referred to iron as “the metal from the sky,” and the Aztecs referred to iron as “the gift of heaven.” The earliest known iron tools and weapons date back past the third millennium BC. Historically, in 150 BC, amulets of meteoric iron were placed in the tomb of Tutankhamen to give him health in the afterlife and protect him from evil spirits.
In 1848 the skull of an early man was discovered in a cave in Gibraltar. By the time it arrived in England in 1856, a full skeleton of the same type of being also arrived. It had been uncovered in a cave in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany—thus explaining the name “Neanderthal.”
Since the original discoveries of Neanderthals, the remains of Neanderthalers have been uncovered in Spain, France, Belgium, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Italy. The Neanderthals are dated back to 75,000 years ago by anthropologists (the Greek word for “talkers about what man is made of”).
In 1931 and 1932 a team of American and English researchers discovered two adjoining caves on Mount Carmel in what was then Palestine (now Israel) in which they found the remains of twelve humans and numerous stone tools.
The bones from one cave called Mugharet es Skhul (the Cave of the Young Goats) were a mixture of modern men and Neanderthals. Bones from the adjacent cave were one hundred per cent Neanderthal. It was determined that the modern men and the Neanderthals had cohabited for some time, had “married” and born children, who then bore more children.
Geneticists (Greek for “birth followers”) agree that if this scenario is correct, then these two “peoples” had to be genetically the same species of man. It would have been genetically impossible for them to be on separate evolutionary paths and successfully produce babies through cross-breeding.
The academic community of anthropologists now believes that there was only one species of man as far back as 150,000 years ago, and he was found over Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, and Africa.
There are distinct physical differences between the peoples of Scandinavia, Russia, the Mideast, Africa, and Latin America. Many of these unique characteristics will immediately identify where in the world an individual’s family had originated from.
Skulls were discovered in a cave in Fontechevade, France, that for all practical purposes looked like modern Frenchmen. However, with them were the skeletons of tortoises and rhinoceroses that were from the warming period between the third and fourth Ice Ages.
As the last Ice Age drew near its end, it is thought that several different peoples immigrated into the Neanderthal territory, including the Cro-Magnon. Five Cro-Magnon skeletons were discovered in the Cro-Magnon cave in south central France. They were examples of one of the two types of peoples appearing everywhere some 15,000 years ago, and they looked similar to the modern day Swedes and Norwegians.
The town of Abbeville, France, is found where the River Somme meets the English Channel. In 1830 Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes held the post of customs officer in Abbeville. He had plenty of spare time between the comings and goings of ships, so he was able to read about geology and to write stories, plays, and books related to government regulations.
During an afternoon stroll along the banks of the Somme River, de Perthes came across workmen, and as he stopped to observe them he noticed an unusual stone nestled in the gravel of the river bank. He had discovered an ancient axe, round on one end and a flaked blade point at the other end. He came back to the river bank in his spare time and found the bones of ancient elephants and rhinoceroses where he had previously found the axe.
It was sixteen years later that de Perthes finished his book showing that there had been tool-making men on Earth fifty to a hundred thousand years earlier, but it took an additional fifteen years for the academic community to accept his findings!
In the Middle East where the country of Iraq is located, flowed two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, that brought water and mineral-rich silt to a green belt east of Eden known as the “Fertile Crescent”—the Garden of Eden! This green belt curled toward the west toward the Syrian beaches of the Mediterranean Sea and southward to where the Biblical city of Jericho would be built. This Fertile Crescent is where civilization and agriculture as we know it came to be and flourished some 10,000 years ago.
On the hills along the two rivers wild wheat and barley grew, and wild animals including goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, and dogs were found in the lower meadows. The people who moved into the Fertile Crescent became farmers and herdsmen instead of hunter-gatherers, and by 9,000 BC they were tending their herds and flocks and domesticating, planting, and harvesting wheat and barley.
It is believed that written history in words is about 5,000 years old and that humans as we know them have been around for about 500,000 years; therefore, approximately ninety nine percent of the period of time that humans have been on earth is “prehistoric!”
The Beginnngs of Astrology and Medicine
Early prehistoric people’s waking hours and dreams were filled with evil spirits and devils that ransomed health and safety for high-value sacrifices and constant prayer. Prehistoric peoples suffered unimaginable events that they perceived were beyond their control, including infertility and birth defects (monsters) of every description. Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, cleft lip and palate, missing limbs, extra limbs, cycloptic eye, spina bifida, hernias, heart defects, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, conjoined twins, dwarfs, and giants, as well as inborn errors of metabolism causing PKU and congenital events that produced unexplainable confusion like homosexuality, plagued them. They suffered from starvation, epidemics, and plagues and from the cannibals that ate them and their children, as well as from ecological and natural disasters that seemed to appear in an endless stream.
Practices that were conducted by shamans and healers are thought to have originated in Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) times. They were designed to fend off the offending evil spirit and beg help for prevention and resolution of a myriad of problems, including health and disease prevention and cures from a bevy of benevolent spirits.
Relics of Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) shamanism have been uncovered in Israel. An old woman whose burial site dated back to 10,000 BC was obviously thought to be united with nature and animals, for she was buried with specially arranged stone diagrams, fifty tortoise shells, a human foot, and skeletons of birds (including eagles), boars, leopards, and cattle.
In 8000 BC, the heavens bombarded the Mesopotamian world with an unpredictable deluge of events beyond man’s capacity to compete. The concept of a form of “stellar control” was a natural result of man’s awe—nothing “just happened,” for everything was controlled by the gods. The stars were the symbol of divinity in the ancient Sumerian culture; the predictable stars in the clear night sky became the mother and father of what is called “astrology.”
In the earliest stages of astrology the planets, the sun, and the moon were each given a relationship with a god, who was associated with the power to control life as it was known on Earth:
Mercury was a quick, cunning, bisexual god, and was gifted with a calculating wisdom.
Mars was set in place as the ruler of violence and war.
Jupiter was looked upon as the king-like ruler of men.
Saturn was viewed as a distant cooling sun in exile and was seen as being quick-tempered and cruel.
Over time, these relationships and connections between stellar events and man became generally accepted, and they were merged into what is today called astrology. Studies of Ice Age scrimshaw show clearly that man was familiar with lunar cycles by 30,000 BC. Fragments of documents from the reign of Sargon of Agade (2870 BC) record how predictions were made from the position of the sun, the moon, the five known planets, and a collection of other documented phenomena, including comets, eclipses and lightning storms. Since the beginning of astrology and the appearance of rationalism three hundred years ago, astronomy and astrology shared overlapping and layered facts and importance.
The Chaldeans were famous for their accurate observations and mathematical skills. They noted that the planetary bodies and stars in the skies adhered to a predictable pattern. They observed that the stars traveled in a “fixed order” across the heavens and the planets traveled eccentrically and in the same plane as the entire stellar cosmos.
The first charts of planetary movement (ephemerides) were created, and the first ephemerides date back to the time of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal during the mid-7th century BC.
In preparing their cosmological charts and maps, the Chaldeans used the 12 primary constellations through which the sun and the moon predictably traveled and which became the early “Zodiac.” Every two hours the constellations would change their position in the sky by 30 degrees, or one-twelfth of the complete circle. For centuries, all astronomical observation remained tied to the rising and settings of stellar bodies within the cosmos. There was a second set of twelve divisions, separate of the first known as “houses.” They were numbered from the east downward under the horizon and represented various aspects of life: 1–Life, 2–Poverty/riches, 3–Brothers, 4–Parents, 5–Children, 6–Illness/health; 7–Wife/husband, 8–Death; 9–Religion, 10–Dignities, 11–Friendship, 12–Enmity. The planets were identified by what houses they resided in and also by their relationships to each other and their intersecting angles which would reveal the influence they would have.
A close relationship has always existed between health, medicine, and astrology; until the 18th century the two pursuits were overlapping and mixed, with knowledge of astrology an essential part of a doctor’s basic training and a map to his treatment plan. An astrological chart would be created to determine when the patient would retire each evening, when to expect the disease peak or rise to a crisis, and what therapies to prescribe.
The different parts of the patient’s anatomy were thought to be under the influence of specific Signs and planets that were also related to specific diseases. The patient’s health and vitality were thought to be heavily influenced by his Birth Chart, and it was thought with the correct care and eating the correct diet, he could avoid disease.
Hermetic Medicine
Astrological medicine was first organized in the work of Hermes Trismegistos, the name that the Greeks gave to the Egyptian god, Thoth, and although some limited amounts of the treatments it recommended are still practiced, this system theorized that man reproduced himself in miniature (microcosm) and the structure of the universe (macrocosm). It went on to point out that different diseases were specific to the different decans or ten degree divisions of the Signs. For example, stomach issues were indicated in the first decanate of Virgo.
The Four Humours
The Greek physician/philosopher Hippocrates (460 BC) postulated that a man’s character and health were related to a balance of the four “humours”: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The four humours were loosely connected through astrology with the triplicities, the four groups of Signs: fiery, earthy, airy, and watery.
“A physician without knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician.”
—Hippocrates
Culpepper’s Herbal Remedies
The Arabs were the first to link the healing and curative nature of herbs with specific “astrological signs and planets.” A variety of systems were employed to determine which planet affected an herb typically through an interpretation of the triplicities. The Complete Herbal by Nicolas Culpepper (1616–1654) lists herbs according to the diseases they relieved or cured. For example, agrimony was good for liver complaints, Jupiter rules the liver; therefore, Jupiter rules agrimony. Each planet was designated as “lord of a day” (Sun/Sunday, Moon/Monday, and so forth). Therefore herbs gathered on their planet’s day, especially in the first and eight hours, were at their most efficient:
Aries Briony (purging, cramps, stitches); Crowfoot (drawing a blister); Honeysuckle (biliousness); Nettles (pleurisy, sore throat); Rhubarb (mild purgative).
Taurus Arrack (swellings of the throat); Beans (the water good for the complexion; half a bean will stop a cut bleeding); Elder (root cures adder sting; flowers boiled, water calms sunburn).
Gemini Carrot (helps conception); Fern (swollen spleen; makes ointment for cuts or prickles); Haresfoot (diarrhea and dysentery); Lavender (headache, toothache; fainting, apoplexy and dropsy).
Cancer Flax (inflammation, tumors; diseases of the chest and lungs); Privet (sore mouth, treating sores); Saxifrage (stomach weakness, cramps, convulsions; the leaves give a good flavor to wine).
Leo Bay (berries good for cold, rheumatism; they mightily expel the wind); Celandine (piles and haemorrhoids); Walnuts (pain and inflammation of the ears).
Virgo Caraway (helps digestion, sharpens the eyesight); Horehound (consumption, pain in the side, yellow jaundice); Myrtle (stops the spitting of blood; diarrhea and dysentery).
Libra Asparagus (expels the stone; stirreth up lust); Chestnuts (the cough); Daisy (pleurisy and pneumonia); Garden mint (hiccoughs).
Scorpio Broom (clears the chest); Furze (jaundice, cleaning the kidneys); Hops (cleanse the blood; cure venereal disease); Tobacco (rheumatic pain; toothache; powdered kills lice).
Sagittarius Betony (removes spots from face and hands); Borage (clarifies the blood; fortifies); Dandelion (cleans the urinary passages); Moss (eases inflammation).
Capricorn Amaranthus (stops all bleeding); Beet (burns, weals, blisters); Hemlock (roasted, good for gout and inflammation; very dangerous); Onion (coughs; earache; increase the sperm).
Aquarius Heartsease (good for convulsions in children); Hemp (expels the wind, but makes men sterile; kills worms); Medlar (stops miscarriages); Quince (sore mouths).
Pisces Dock (cleans the blood, strengthens the liver; takes away freckles); (removes warts, chilblains); Sage (blackens the hair; cures headaches); Succory (‘drives forth cholera’).
Ancient Prescriptions
Stanley Finger, a neuroscientist and a medical historian, stated that “The assertion that the brain may have been given a special role in higher functions prior to the advent of the great civilizations is based on the fact that skulls with holes deliberately cut or bored into them have been found in a number of Neolithic (New Stone Age) sites.”
The procedure of drilling a hole in the skull by cutting, drilling, and scraping is called trepanation and was common in ancient times. In prehistoric ages the excised bone plug was often worn as a charm or amulet to fend off evil spirits. It is thought that trepanation was employed by ancient shamans to ward off crippling headaches and seizures and allow “evil spirits” to flee. At a single French burial site, dated back to 6500 BC, approximately a third of the 120 prehistoric human skulls exhibited trepanation holes.
Trepanation has been widely practiced throughout the world, including Africa, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and across Europe. More than 10,000 trepanated skulls have been unearthed from ancient Peruvian excavation sites.
In 1991 a human body (named “Otzi”) was recovered from the Otztaler Alps of South Tyrol at the 10,600 foot altitude. He lay there covered by glacial ice for 5,300 years. He was a dark-skinned male, aged between twenty-five and forty years. His build and stature were that of the Late Neolithic populations of Italy and Switzerland (DNA analysis confirmed links to Northern Europe). His facial hair was shaved. A full body scan showed that he had “black lung” resulting from the inhalation of campfire smoke, arteriosclerosis, arthritis (in his neck, right hip, and lower back), and healed rib fractures from trauma that had occurred long before his death.
Otzi had multiple blue tattoos in the form of parallel lines and small crosses on both sides of his lower back, calf, ankles, and inner aspects of his right knee. These marks are thought to be therapeutic signs to repel evil spirits. His belongings found with the body included a copper axe, a 180 cm bow of yew wood, a deerskin quiver containing fourteen bone and stone pointed arrows, a sharp flint-bladed knife, collections of an agaric tree-fungus known for antibiotic properties, iron pyrite, charcoal and flint (fire starting tools), and size six leather shoes (with lace holes) insulated with straw. A radiocarbon dating of Otzi and his belongings indicate that he lived during 3300 BC.
In March 2013 a study in Lancet reported the results of full body CT scans on 137 mummies: one third (44) showed advanced vascular calcification. The mummies originated from Egypt, Peru, the southwestern U.S., and the Aleutian Islands, and they were dated at 2000 BC.
Cardiovascular disease is not genetically transmitted as doctors of the 20th and 21st centuries would have you believe; rather, cardiovascular disease is a collection of diseases that are caused by free-radical damage to the lining of the arteries (inflammation) and nutritional deficiencies (e.g., cardiomyopathy/selenium deficiency; congestive heart failure/thiamine deficiency; coronary thrombosis/omega-3 deficiency, aneurysms/copper deficiency, atrial fibrillation/degenerative disc disease, and others).
The magic-filled Ebers Papyrus, dated back to 1550 BC, contains a base of superstitious recipes including incantations for fending off disease-causing demons and evil spirits.
Listed in the Ebers Papyrus was a prescription for the eye, to be employed for all ailments of the eye: “human brain, divide into two halves, mixed one half with honey, smear on the eye in the evening; dry the other half of the brain, mash, sift, smear on the eye in the morning.”
Jackie Campbell at the KNH Center for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester in England has completed an exhaustive study of the ingredients ancient Egyptian physicians recommended for their patients. She determined that two thirds would actually have worked:
According to Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia (1977) sixty-two percent of the Egyptians’ choice of ingredients listed in the papyri were still employed in the 1970s. Many, in their original form or in synthetic forms are still used today.
To prepare their remedies, the Egyptians used processes known to 20th century pharmacists. They knew how to concentrate remedies by boiling them, when to dilute them, and by macerating or grinding produced more of the medicinal substances. The Egyptians were skilled at extracting active substances from plants and producing water and alcohol tinctures.
Compared to the 1973 British Pharmacological Codex sixty-seven percent of the ancient Egyptian remedies complied with standards and protocols—with the exception of injectable remedies, the Egyptians produced and issued the same categories of medicines as modern pharmacists.
The medical papyri showed that the Egyptians used enemas, draughts and tinctures, lotions and liniments, creams, ointments, and mouthwashes. The Egyptians employed eye drops administered through a bird’s feather shaft, pills, powders, and poultices, and for gynecological problems used pessaries; for nasal congestion, physicians recommended remedies to be poured on hot stones and the steam inhaled via a hollow reed. They routinely prepared and dispensed suppositories by mixing the active agent into a heavy animal fat, rolling the mix into a pill solid enough for insertion and which then would melt at body temperature.
The opium poppy has historically been connected with the cultures of the Near East including Turkey; however, there is a species of P. somniferum that originates from southern France, Spain, and northwestern Africa.
There is an ancient cave dated back to 5500 BC that in addition to many artifacts found there were intact capsules of opium poppy discovered in a religious artifact. In the Swiss Lake village dated back to the Early Bronze Age (300 BC), stores of poppy seeds and presscake were found along with collections of flax (Linum spp.), barley (Hordeum spp.), einkorn, emmer, and bread wheat (Triticum spp.).
It is not agreed upon whether the poppy was a semi-cultivated weed or a cultivar. The Swiss Lake dwellings were unearthed in the Swiss Foreland between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. These are located where the rivers originating in the highlands and mountains drained into the lowlands, forming lakes and the headwaters of the major European rivers such as the Rhine, Rhone, Po, and the Danube.
It is not known by what means or route the people or poppies arrived from Iberia to Switzerland. However, the northward path along the Rhone River seems the most plausible, and it is thought that farming cultures arrived from the Balkans by exploring the Danube.
Initially, the poppy plant was cultivated in Switzerland in large quantities as a food seed that was pressed for oil and milled into flour; there is no evidence that the poppy was smoked or used as medicine in early Western Europe.
From 1600 to 1200 BC, the poppy trade was part of the northern European amber and tin trade routes and as a result spread eastward from Switzerland, and both intentionally and accidently as a windblown weed spread to the eastern Mediterranean. Then in the Late Bronze Age, poppies are finally listed in Greek records, including in Homer’s Iliad, where the poppy was lauded and routinely employed as a potent medicinal herb (Theophrastus and Discoides) and where poppies and pomegranates (Punica) were commonly employed in art and jewelry.
From the Greek city states, poppies spread into the cultures of Crete, Egypt, the Middle East, and the Near East, where the plant began to be used as a narcotic— opium. In ancient Crete, there appears to have been a poppy goddess who wore a crown adorned with three poppy seed capsules.
Some individuals took on the responsibility to call on good spirits and gods to defend and heal the victims of evil spirits. As villages, societies, and kingdoms developed, the culture’s witches, magicians, priests, physicians, and god-kings took high positions or became “supreme deities” to protect their people and even attempt to control global and stellar events.
Priests, physicians, and god-kings began to build temples and towers to formalize their communications to spirits both good and evil. They mapped out the stars and constellations, and they chanted and sang their prayers to the spirits of Hea (Earth) and Ana (Sky). They knew the spirits and gods changed their minds like the winds changed their directions, so prayer (in all its forms), the burning of sacrifices (incense, goats, and humans) were thought to be required to keep in good graces with their good and evil spiritual masters. They would perhaps chant: “Remember him who makes sacrifices. May forgiveness and peace flow for him like molten brass. May this man’s days be vivified by the sun!—Spirit of the Earth, remember! Spirit of the Sky, remember!”
During these times of subservience to evil, maleficent, and also beneficent spirits and gods, the river tribes of the Tigris and Euphrates flourished. The Sumerians developed the lower Euphrates valley 5000 years BC; the black Akkadians dominated Babylon 3000 BC; the Elamites, the early Persians, are traced from the fourth millennium; the star-gazing constellation experts, the Babylonians, became founders of a “World Empire”; the Assyrians, as servants of Babylon, conquered western Asia and Egypt; and the Medes were a perennial culture who were only later in time defeated by swarms of Persians who eventually conquered all of Asia.
The Flourishing of Ancient Egyptian Medical Papyri
In 1822 the translation of the Rosetta Stone led to the translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri, including many that were related to Egyptian medical papyri.
The 19th century interest in Egyptology led to the discovery and translation of many sets of complete medical documents, including the Ebers Papyrus, the Edwin Smith Papyrus (1550 BC), the Hearst Papyrus (1450 BC), the Berlin papyrus (12000 BC), the London Medical Papyrus, and others dating back to 3000 BC.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus is a textbook on surgery and details anatomical observations and the “examination, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis” of numerous diseases. It is thought to have been written in 1600 BC; however, it is thought to be a copy and summary of several earlier medical texts. The medical information it contains is known from 3000 BC.
Imhotep, in the 3rd dynasty, is credited as the original author of the papyrus text, and is considered the founder of ancient Egyptian medicine. The earliest reported surgery was performed in Egypt in 2750 BC.
The ancient Egyptians were consciously aware of the importance of diet, both in “balance and moderation.” Egypt was rich with fertile land because of the mineral-rich silt delivered by the annual Nile River floods. However, the poor, landless, and the hungry were a constant feature of Egyptian society.
The primary ancient Egyptian crops included emmer wheat and barley, which were consumed as loaves that were prepared by baking and fermentation with yeast. Typically one Egyptian farmer supported twenty people and their livestock.
The barley was also fermented to brew beer, and a large variety of vegetables and fruit were commonly grown. Oil was produced from the flax (linseed) plant, and there were herbs and spices that were grown, traded, and imported by farmers and merchants.
Meat (mutton, lamb, goat, pig, birds, etc.) was plentiful and available to royalty, the wealthy, and farmers. Fish was generally consumed by the masses.
There are some writings that indicate that the Egyptians followed some forms of food restrictions and prohibitions; for instance, Herodotus declared that the pig was unclean. To gain the favor of kings and members of the royal court, it was not unusual to bring offerings to show appreciation. Recorded offerings to King Unas (2494–2345 BC) included “milk, three types of beer, five different wines, ten loaves, four of bread, ten of cakes, four types of meat of different cuts, joints, roast, spleen, limb, breast, quail, goose, pigeon, figs, ten types of fruit, three varieties of corn, barley, spelt, five kinds of oil and fresh plants . . .”
Ancient texts (3300 BC) from the Middle East record the use of biological weapons. The ancient documents note that the Hittite’s empire, which covered the territory from Turkey to northern Syria, shipped tularemia-infected rams to their enemies. Tularemia (rabbit fever), a deadly bacterial disease, is still used as a bioterror weapon in the 20th and 21st centuries.
It is believed that tularemia, the “Hittite plague,” which roared through the Middle East in the 14th century (1335 BC) was initiated by warring factions. In letters to the Egyptian King Akhenaten, the besieged city of Simyra, a Phoenician city near the border between Lebanon and Syria, the citizens complained of the man-made pestilence.
Egyptian scribes of the New Kingdom gathered and compiled ancient papyri devoted specifically to medicine. The Ebers Papyrus (1550 BC) contains many incantations and foul applications designed to fend off disease-causing demons, and additionally it contains 877 prescriptions for specific diseases. The Ebers Papyrus outlines a systematic medical process: listening to patients’ complaints, framing a diagnosis based on physiological theories, and making a clinical examination. It is thought to be the earliest medical directive achieved in Egyptian medicine, and it also is thought to contain some of the earliest recorded notes on tumors:
When thou examinest a person who suffers from an obstruction in his abdomen and thou findest that it goes-and-comes under thy fingers like oil-in-a-tube, then say thou: ‘It all comes from his mouth like slime!’ Prepare for him:
Fruit-of-the-Dompalm
Dissolve in Man’s Semen
Crush, cook in Oil and Honey
To be eaten by the Patient for four mornings.
Afterwards let him be smeared with dried, crushed, and pressed maqut grain.
When thou examines the obstruction in his abdomen and thou findest that he is not in a condition to leap the Nile, his stomach is swollen and his chest asthmatic, then say thou to him: ‘It is the Blood that has got itself fixed and does not circulate.’ Do thou cause an emptying by means of a medicinal remedy. Make him therefore:
|
Wormwood |
1/8 |
|
Elderberries |
1/16 |
|
Sebesten |
1/8 |
|
Sasda-chips |
1/8 |
Cook in Beer-that-has-been-brewed-from-many-ingredients, strain into one, thoroughly and let the Patient drink.
This remedy drives out blood through his mouth or rectum which resembles Hog’s Blood when-it-is-cooked. Either make him a poultice to cool him in front, or thou dost not prepare him this remedy, but makest for him the following really excellent Ointment composed of:
Ox fat
Saffron seeds
Coriander
Myrrh
Aager-tree
Crush and apply as a poultice.
When thou examines a person who has hardening, his stomach hurts him, his face is pale, his heart thumps; when thou examines him and findest his heart and stomach burning and his body swollen, then it is the sexen-illness in the Depths and the fire is consuming him. Make him a remedy that quenches the fire and empties his bowels by drinking Sweet-Beer-that-has-stood-in-dry-Dough. This is to be eaten and drunk for Four days. Look every morning for six days following at what falls from his rectum. If excrement fall out of him like little black lumps, then say to him: “The body-fire has fallen from the stomach. The asi-disease in the body has diminished.” If thou examines him after this has come to pass and something steps forth from his rectum like the white of beans and drops shoot forth out of him like nesu-of-tepaut, then thou sayest: “What was in his abdomen has fallen down.” Make For Him This Remedy So That His Face May Cool. Stand the cauldron over the fire, then make a mixture in it and cook it in the usual way.
To Drive Away the Hardening in the Abdomen:
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Bread-of-the-Zizyphus-Lotus |
I |
|
Watermelon |
I |
|
Cat’s dung |
I |
|
Sweet Beer |
I |
|
Wine |
I |
|
Make into one and apply as a poultice. |
|
The medicine of the ancient Egyptians is recorded from the beginnings of written history and civilization (3200 BC). Through and until the Persian invasion of 525 BC Egyptian medical practices went unchanged and were considered very advanced. They included surgery, bone setting, and a complete and wide-ranging pharmacopoeia.
Homer in 800 BC stated in the Odyssey: “In Egypt, the men are more skilled in medicine than any of human kind” and “the Egyptians were skilled in medicine more than any other art.”
The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt in approximately 440 BC and wrote extensively of his observations of their medical practices.
Pliny the Elder also wrote favorably of them in historical review. Hippocrates, considered “the father of medicine,” as well as Herophilos, Erasistratus, and later, Galen, studied at the temple of Amenhotep and acknowledged the contribution of ancient Egyptian medicine to Greek medicine.
Magic was a double-edged sword. It could be an all-powerful protector, and it could be conversely a terrible and vicious destroyer. Sorcerers became independent agents who acted beyond the laws of religions, gods, and kings, and who could formulate spells (for good or evil) that could save or kill for a price.
Cuneiform inscriptions from the royal library at Nineveh, which in the seventh century BC King Ashurbanipal had compiled from the ancient Akkadian texts, are an example of sorcerers incantations designed to kill:
The imprecation acts upon man like an evil demon. The screaming voice is upon him. The maleficent voice is upon him. The malicious imprecation is the cause of his disease. The maleficent imprecations strangle this man as if he were a lamb. The god in his body made the wound, the goddess gives him anxiety. The screaming voice, like that of the hyena, has overcome him and masters him.
Individual sorcerers were believed to possess “the evil eye” that empowered them to kill by merely glancing at an individual. Other sorcerers manufactured dolls or images of their victims that they burned or stabbed with needles or knives, inflicting various levels of damage depending on what level of sickness or death was desired:
He who forges the image, he who enchants–The spiteful face, the evil eye;
The mischievous mouth, the mischievous words.
Spirit of the Sky, remember!
Spirit of the Earth, remember!
Incantations were formulated against black magic and ubiquitous demons of disease, which entered houses like snakes to inflict infertility upon women, kill children with disease, and decimate fields like hoards of Asian armies:
They fall on one land after the other.
They raise the slave above his rank,
They cast the freewoman out of the house where she gave birth,
They cast the young birds out of their nests into emptiness,
They drive the oxen before them, they drive away the lamb,
The evil, the cunning demons.
The calls for peace were often raised in the midst of chaos and dread through hymns, prayer, and incantations for peace. Fragments of such incantations were discovered on a broken tablet:
The garlands . . . exalted shepherd . . . on the thrones and alters . . . the marble scepter . . . exalted shepherd, King, shepherd of the peoples.
The hymns and prayers of peace would end when Namtar, the terrible demon, would unfold his black wings to spread disease and pestilence, and even strong and successful humans would make offerings, sacrifice lambs, and pray to the gods and spirits to save their families and themselves from sickness and death:
Spirit of Mulge (master of hell), Lord of the countries, remember.
Spirit of Nin-gelal (Earth), Lady of the countries, remember.
Spirit of Nindar (Saturn), mighty warrior of Mulge, remember.
Spirit of Paku (Mercury), sublime intelligence of Mulge, remember.
Spirit of En-Zuna (moon), son of Mulge, remember.
Spirit of Tishku (Venus), Lady of the hosts, remember.
Spirit of Udu, King of Justice, remember.
Evil beings and demons were able to sicken and kill both man and his flocks; however, they could not end life on Earth completely, nor could they completely or permanently disrupt the cycles of nature (the tides, seasons, and so forth). An eclipse of the sun or moon could produce panic or be blamed for disease, but in short order the sun and moon reappeared as symbols of order and producers of life.
The Beliefs of the Chaldean People
As human societies moved forward over time they developed better laws and interpretations of signs. The Chaldeans, Semitic people who settled in southern Babylonia in the area of modern Iraq, and ruled Babylonia from 625–539 BC, studied the stars and constellations in night sky and the Chaldean priests recognized a “Supreme god.”
The Chaldean Supreme god was considered a creative god tied to eternal laws. Two thousand years earlier a caste of priests had been created, to whom all occult knowledge was entrusted. These priests became masters in the magic and prescience of the day and were taken to predicting the future from the livers and intestines of animal sacrifices and from the fire and smoke and the sparkling fire reflected in precious jewels. They would predict future events from the noise emanating from bubbling springs and unusual shapes of leaves and plants. They would communicate with snakes, and birth defects in both man and animals could be used for their predictions of the future of animals, humans, and nations. Dreams were looked at as predictors of the future health and fortunes of men and nations.
Weather events such as rain, cloud formations, wind, and lightening would be interpreted for predictions of bad health and plagues. Even the splitting and cracking of furniture and wooden paneling were believed to predict the future. Such defects were referred to as Assaput or prophetic voices. Flies and appearances of other insects and dogs of various colors were messengers of forthcoming health status and events.
The priests constantly looked to the night sky, stars, and constellations for laws of harmony, and through observation they recognized there was order in the heavens that was predictable. A compilation of this celestial order produced what we call today astrology; the priests interpreted this cycle as a harmonious play. They recorded how events in the heavens controlled events on Earth, such as the tide winds. The priests looked at this celestial hierarchy as the superior ruling over the inferior Earth. In other words, the star-gods in the heavens ruled and controlled all earthly events below.
Metals have always been related to the underworld since they were found in the hidden reaches of the Earth where light from the sun, moon, and stars never fell on them. However, the Chaldean astrologers saw a relationship between metals and the planets—a concept which drove the medieval alchemists and physicians.
Chaldeans believed that gold was the metal of the sun, silver was the metal of the moon, lead was Saturn, tin was Jupiter, iron was Mars, and copper was in Venus.
Sacred numbers are part of the astronomer’s world and the tools of the astrologer. These numbers are directly and indirectly related; they seem to support and assist one another and are used to make predictions. The believed the number 7 occurs in the main stars of the Great Bear, the Lesser Bear, in the Pleiades, and in Orion. The number 7 also fits the days of the moon quarter and the 7 Planets of antiquity.
There are the 12 zodiacal symbols, 30 is the number of a moon period, and 30 are the number of years of Saturn’s orbit around the sun. The product of 12 and 30 is about the number of days in a year.
The avid astrologer finds fertile fields in celestial numbers for their questions and predictions. Along with astrology, the idea of mystical numbers found support, and thus numerology has found daily use by passionate devotees. The Chaldeans were accurate observers of the stars and planets, and many of their beliefs were derived from what we now call meteorology, physics, chemistry, and medicine.
Astrology is a mix of myth, science, and religion. The author of The History of Magic and the Occult, Kurt Seligmann, states, “In its vast domain there is nourishment for both spirit and soul, and there can be no doubt that astrology owes its longevity to its psychic rather than to its intellectual value.”
Astrology and numerology are such profound discoveries that no generation or time has been without their effect.
Chaldean royalty conceived and built the temple tower known as the ziggurat. The tower featured steps that expressed the relationship between the celestial world above and the Earth below.
The ziggurat represented a miniature world and was known as the “mountain of Earth.”
In Babylon the royals and priests built the El-Temen-An-Ki or the house of the foundation stone of Heaven and Earth. This monument was called the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The tower had seven stages that represented the seven planets, and its angles represented the four corners of the world pointing to Akkad, Saburtu, Elam, and the western lands.
The seven steps of the tower were painted different colors that represented the planets. The height of El-Temen-An-Ki was equal to its length. The resulting square was divided into seven, and yet respected the ancient belief of the fourfold world. For the first time in history numbers represented the world order.
A legend describes Pythagoras travelling to Babylon, where he taught the wonder and mystery of numbers. An earlier woodcut depicts a learned man wrapped in a doctor’s cloak placing his foot on the first step of the tower to attain “the knowledge of God.”
By ascending these seven steps the doctor would attain the knowledge of God, which would be found at the eighth degree—the threshold of God’s heavenly dwelling. In Lully’s book On the Ascent, the seven steps are stone, fire, plants, animals, man, starry heavens, and the angels.
The Babylonian commonwealth was operated according to the law that priests had formulated from observations of the universe. They believed that nothing could disrupt the world and its laws other than the “impiety of man.” Once provoked, the gods would leave the temples and choose to move to a foreign country (maybe even an enemy state). Then chaos would rule and Chaldea would become a victim of evil men and evil spirits. The temple towers were the symbols of the repository of all ancient wisdom. With the belief that their knowledge was to be valid forever, the kings had constructed the towers in such a fashion that they would resist the ravages of time and last forever. The ziggurat never attained a height above 300 feet. The royal seal was on each brick, and the kings who built them claimed the towers were like Heaven and built to be the equivalent status of superhuman. In the symbolic language of Asia, the towers builders said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower, whose top shall reach to the Heavens, so that we may not be scattered over all the Earth.”
Included in the rebuilt temple towers by Nabopalassar (who reigned 625–604 BC) was the Tower of Babylon. An inscription dedicating this event reads:
As for the temple tower of Babylon, El-Temen-An-Ki, which before my time had become weakened and had fallen in, Marduk the lord commanded me to lay its foundation in the heart of the Earth and to raise its turrets to Heaven. I caused numerous workmen to be assembled in my land to carry them. I set to work, I made bricks, I manufactured burnt bricks. Like the downpour of Heaven which cannot be measured, like the massive flood, I caused the Arabu to carry bitumen and pitch. With the help of Hea, with the insight of Marduk, with the wisdom of Nebo and Nisaba . . . I came to a decision. By means of exorcism, in the wisdom of Hea and Marduk, I cleared away the place and on the original site I laid its platform foundation.
The rebuilt tower again degenerated into ruin. King Nebuchadnezzar, Nabopalassar’s son and successor (who reigned 605–562 B.C.), refers to its restoration in an inscription: “The temples of Babylon I have restored. As for El-Temen-An-Ki, with burned bricks and bright ugnu-stone I raised on high its turrets.”
Eventually these famous towers disappeared with the lavishness and glory of Babylon.
Early Medicines: Antidotes and Curatives
Shamanism, the practice of contacting spirits through dream work and meditation (trances), is thought to be one of the oldest religions and is still practiced in many primitive cultures even in modern times. By means of fasting and meditation, shamans walked the spirit path to gather knowledge. Shamans collected knowledge and developed skills of magic enhanced by magical tools like rattles and bones, and their rituals included playing drums, chanting, singing, dancing, and making sacrifices around a fire.
The Celts (350 BC) of West and Central Europe created the Druids, a priestly class. Like shamans, Druids accumulated knowledge about the spiritual world and they became specialized as healers (doctors), midwives, and leaders with understanding of rituals, weather, law, and astrology.
In 371 AD, the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the official state religion. Roman soldiers enforced the official state religion and killed local priests who defied them. This cruel purge included the Druids who were decimated and killed.
It was 400 BC when Hippocrates and members of his “radical Greek movement” teased the “art” of medicine from the loins of magicians and priests. It is not clear whether Hippocrates himself authored the Hippocratic Corpus. However, these writings show that a small band of Greek physicians committed themselves to a new and revolutionary thought: “Disease sprang from natural and or physical causes from the patient’s environment, diet, and daily habits rather than Divine punishment or evil spirits.”
Prior to Euclid, geometry was utilitarian as practiced; it was created to meet a particular need in surveying or astronomy. The ancient Egyptians knew how to calculate the area of a circle. The Babylonians knew how to measure areas and volumes. It wasn’t until the Hellenistic period, around 300 BC, that the state of geometry (Greek: geometria—to measure the earth) changed forever with the works of a mathematician named Euclid.
Euclid published his revolutionary works in geometry in a series of books titled The Elements of Geometry. The series presents a collection of axioms and, from these deduces propositions and theorems. Although Euclid’s work was not a new thought, he was the first to show how these theorems could fit into a comprehensive and deductive system. According to Euclid’s axioms, any two points can be connected by a straight line; any straight line whose length can be determined can be extended in a straight line; a circle can contain any center and any radius; all right angles are equal to each other; the fifth axiom relates to the intersections of lines in a plane.
Since the beginning of time, humans have been fearful of poisons. In ancient Rome poisons were used to facilitate assassinations and state-decreed executions, which generated the search for a universal antidote. Two widely known antidotes, which were thought to provide protection against a wide variety of poisons, were Mithridatium, developed in 100 BC, and Theriac, developed during the first century AD. The number of herbs, metals, and elements that comprised these formulas is beyond comprehension.
Mithridatium is thought to have been formulated by Mithridates VI, King of Pantus (Turkey) who was a mix of Persian, Greek, and Macedonian ancestry. The King created the formula, which contained more than 45 substances, out of fears of assassination by poisoning from animal venoms and mystic poisons. He tested the effectiveness of his formula on slaves and condemned criminals.
In the first century AD, Andromachus the Elder, physician to Roman Emperor Nero, updated Mithridatium with the addition of viper flesh and increasing the dosage of opium. The resulting formula was referred to as Theriac. In the twelfth century it was also called Venice Treacle and was known to contain at least 64 ingredients, including minerals, poisons, animal flesh, herbs, flowers, sea onions (squills), and honey.
Theriac was thought to be a protectant and antidote against poisoning and also was believed to be a treatment for a plethora of diseases including bubonic plague. By the Middle Ages, Theriac contained more than 100 ingredients and required several years to “mature.” Throughout Europe, Theriac was still widely available well into the twentieth century.
According to John Griffin, “The two ancient products, Mithridatium and Theriac Andromachus, held central places in therapeutics for nearly two millennia. Concern for the quality of these products was the stimulus for requiring the public compounding of these preparations, later (this practice was) replaced by inspection of manufacture and examination of finished product . . . Perhaps in the final analysis, the contribution of Mithridatium and Theriac to modern medicine was that concerns about their quality stimulated the earliest concepts of medicine’s regulation.”
In the year 1000 AD, a strange fate befell the mummies of ancient Egypt. The peoples of Europe somehow got the idea that by consuming a dried powder derived from Egyptian mummies they could gain miraculous healing power and longevity.
For many centuries, Europeans had used a curative powder derived from a dark, pitch-like substance called bitumen. Originally, bitumen was found oozing out of the cracks in the rocks of certain mountains in distant Persia.
After it was dried and hardened, bitumen was ground into fine particles that could be consumed orally or used as a topical medicine on sores, ulcers, and wounds. The downside was that Persian bitumen was scarce and pricey.
Egyptian mummies that had been soaked in pitch were dark and brittle. A new trade developed. Hundreds of thousands of mummies were dug up. The primary source of these mummies was the mass graves of the “hastily mummified poor.” Their bodies, whole or dismembered, were then shipped to apothecaries or drug traders of Europe, where they were ground into a black “butumen powder”!
Powdered mummy was used for every ailment and sickness. It was taken by mouth as a remedy for concussions, paralysis, epilepsy, ulcers, coughs, and headaches, and as an antidote for poisoning. Dried mummy was applied topically to bruises and broken bones, and it was believed to prevent infection and stop hemorrhage.
King Francis I, who ruled France in the 1500s, never travelled without his pouch of ground mummy powder should he fall from his horse or have some unforeseen injury.
People of Europe believed that bitumen cured many ills and that Egypt’s mummies contained bitumen. Pitch and bitumen are chemically very similar, and so there would have been some real healing benefit from the corpse’s mineral content.
The word “mummy” originated in Persia as the word “mum” and the Arabic word “mumiyah,” both of which translate to mean bitumen. As a result of the perceived benefit, the world’s annual demand for dried mummy grew ever stronger for many centuries.
By the 1600s, so many of the ancient Egyptian mass grave pits had been robbed and pilfered that, as a result, there wasn’t enough “ground mummy medicine” to meet the demand—prices soared!
A grisly trade developed to meet the demand; the bodies of animals, criminals, beggars, disease victims, and the freshly dead were converted into “instant” mummies by soaking them in pitch or asphalt and letting them dry quickly in the desert sun.
Over time, the word of the mummy “factories” and the wide-spread fraud of the mummy traders spread, sales dropped and by the mid-1700s, the world demand for ground mummy began to fade. The mummy factories adapted and sold their instant ground mummy as bone meal and fertilizer to British farmers.
Ground mummy was also used as an ingredient in the mixing of artist’s paints for portraits in the belief that work of art and the subject would live longer. The torn and discolored linen wrappings from mummies were sold in Europe and America, and by the 1800s, the paper mills in America began to use the resin-soaked linen to manufacture brown paper. In Egypt the poor desert people used the resin-soaked linen bandages for fuel.
The persecution of Jewish physicians and healers and their colleagues is a pervasive continuum in the history of medicine. In 1161, eighty-six Jews were burned alive as punishment for “an alleged plot by Jewish physicians to poison the citizens of Bohemia in central Europe.” In 1348 many Jews were “exterminated” for supposedly causing the Black Death in Europe, despite the fact that many Jews died during the ravages of the plague.
According to pronouncements of the medical faculty of the University of Vienna (1610), Jewish law “forced Jewish physicians to murder every tenth Christian by means of poisoning.”
Martin Luther, the German theologian wrote, “If they (the Jews) could kill us all, they would gladly do so . . . They do it often, especially those who pose as physicians.” Luther, also encouraged his followers to “burn down their synagogues.”
Several popes in the European Middle Ages forbade Christians from seeking help from Jewish physicians, and later in the seventeenth century, the clergy of Hall in Wurttemberg declared that, “it were better to die with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil.”
In 1905 Albert Einstein, a 26-year-old Jewish patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, first published in a paper his findings known as the “special theory of relativity” which made use of two key physical ideas that were known previously: the principle of relativity and the constant speed of light.
Prior to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity about the constant speed of light, physicists believed that electromagnetic waves moved through a medium called “ether,” similar to the process of ocean waves moving through water. They looked at ether as a background against which all movement took place, believing “all mass in motion moved relative to the ether.”
Einstein felt that it was a mistake to assume the existence of ether, which had not been verified experimentally.
In his theory of relativity, Einstein did away with the concept of ether completely, assuming only that the laws of physics, including the speed of light, worked the same no matter how the observer was moving. The mathematical consequences of Einstein’s theory were no less than Earth-shaking, and they have been experimentally verified. The expression of the theory is: “as an object moves with a velocity relative to an observer, the object’s mass increases and its length contracts.” Probably the most famous consequence of the theory is the equivalence of mass and energy that is explained in the simple equation: E = mc2.
The special theory of relativity also demonstrated a basic link between space and time: “four-dimensional framework referred to as ‘the space-time continuum.’ This continuum consists of three dimensions representing space up/down; left/right; forward/backward; and a single dimension representing time.”
Einstein’s theory is thought to be special because it applies the principle of relativity only to the special case in which the motion of objects is uniform.
In spite of the extraordinary contributions of Jewish scientists, doctors, and other professionals, in 1938 Germany revoked the licenses of Jewish physicians. The resultant doctor shortage caused Germany to reduce the period of medical training by two years.
In the years just before World War II, quotas limited the number of Jewish medical students and physicians at American medical schools. To judge the medical school applicant’s Jewishness, administrators examined student names and asked about religious affiliation on medical school applications. In 1940 the dean of Cornell University’s medical college limited the number of Jews allowed to enter each class, and the applications of Jewish candidates at Yale Medical School were marked with an “H” for Hebrew. The head of Columbia University’s Neurological Institute was instructed in 1945, “to fire all the Jews in his department or resign.” He resigned!
In modern times Jewish doctors continue to be subjected to fictitious allegations. In 1988 a Chicago mayoral assistant charged that “Jews injected the AIDS virus into African Americans,” and in 1997 a prominent Palestinian representative suggested that the “Israelis injected Palestinian children with HIV.”
Through the span of 28,000 years, from the time of the Lascaux Cave drawings to the medical robotics of the 21st century, humans developed hundreds, if not thousands, of theories to explain the causes and transmission of disease, our solar and weather events, and physical laws. The numbers of people who were tortured and killed in the pursuit of answers to questions of science and medicine numbered in the millions, and in most cases little or no progress was achieved.
The few individuals who dared to question the thinking of the priests and physicians paid the highest price. But there were those who were able to weave the prevailing theories into their new thinking—to move humanity forward and produce new sciences including alchemy, medicine, and pharmacy as we know them today.