Markham Judah Geller - Melothesia in Babylonia Medicine. Magic, and Astrology in the Ancient Near East

It is worth remembering, when translating ancient data dealing with technical subjects such as astral medicine, that what is being described are universal problems which have always been with us and persist until our own day. Although astrological influence today is hardly reckoned to have any scientific basis or relevance to drug therapy, there are nevertheless modern adherents to both astrology and herbal remedies who would adopt a different point of view. A good case in point is a company known as Bach Remedies, whose literature is widely distributed, offering herbal treatments for the following kinds of mental and physical states:

You are shy or feel anxious about something

You are anxious but cant say why

You feel an extreme terror about something

You fear you might lose control

You find yourself making the same mistakes

You feel down in the dumps and dont know why

Your talkativeness leads to loneliness

You feel impatient with the slow place of people or things

You give up when things go wrong

You cant make your mind up

You feel overwhelmed by your many responsibilities

You feel guilty or blame yourself

You expect to fail and lack confidence in your skills

You feel unclean or dislike something about yourself

Sometimes you are a tyrant when you want to lead

You feel critical of or intolerant towards others

You feel wounded, spiteful, jealous, or want revenge

This selection from the Bach Remedies brochure features common types of anxieties and insecureties, the kinds of conditions for which today one might seek psychological counseling or psychiatric help. The Bach Remedies brochure groups the symptoms into various categories: face your fears, live the day, reach out to others, know your own mind, find joy and hope, live and let live, and stand your ground.

The recommended treatment for each of the modern Bach Remedy conditions is some form of herbal remedy, many of which are easily recognisable from the garden, such as cherry plum, honeysuckle, clematis, wild rose, mustard, olive, heather, impatients, wild oat, willow, elm, pine, crabble apple, pine, vervain, and Star of Bethlehem. Although not exactly like the various magical spells listed in BRM 4 and similar texts above, nevertheless the underlying human feelings of self-doubt and angst are common to both ancient and modern lists. In the ancient world, however, no recourse to psychotherapy was possible, and the only treatments available to a Babylonian patient were either incantations or therapeutic recipes, consisting mostly of plants and drugs to be administered in various forms or attached to the person within an amulet. Although we cannot associate Akkadian plant names with most of the above modern garden herbs, nevertheless the common feature is that quite ordinary plants and herbs, also used for standard culinary purposes, could form the basis of a pharmacopeia to be used to treat psychological distress of different sorts.

The only thing missing from the Bach Remedy list, from an ancient perspective, is when such herbal remedies are best applied, and modern herbal medicine has no real answer to this question. Ancient physicians, however, working in the latter half of the first millennium BC, could find a ready answer in the form of astrology and astral medicine, which attempted to determine when incantations and recipes had an optimal effect on the condition to be treated, whether physical disease or mental problems. Because of the fragmentary nature of our ancient source material, we cannot always know how astrology was applied to medical recipes or even incantations, since this knowledge may have been orally transmitted and taught without necessarily being committed to writing. In a similar way, one could easily imagine a Bach Remedies brochure in the hands of a modern astrologer, intent to find the most propitious times when such herbal remedies could be used to cure the kind of psychological problems to which astrology is often addressed. There would be no record of such calculations, apart from those in the know.

I The Uruk taxonomy (SBTU I 43)

This Late Babylonian Uruk tablet is a one-column tablet divided into four sections, each corresponding to a part of the body, with each section associated with a particular bodily organ. Each of the four divisions of the tablet contains a list of diseases somehow assigned to the four regions and related organs. As such, the tablet could be thought of as an unusual form of disease taxonomy, although the organising principles in which diseases are associated with specific organs are far from obvious. The tablet has so far defied explanation because of its uniqueness, since it is not characteristic of any other Late Babylonian medical text, and because we lack any ancient commentary on its cryptic format and puzzling data. The text, edited below, was collated from a photograph kindly supplied by Hermann Hunger, who produced the editio princeps .

SBTU I 43

cf. Kcher 1978: 2425, Stol 1993: 26f., Heeel 2010: 30f.

Fig. 1 : SBTU I 43