[The struggle of early Christians against Isis medica: breaks and continuity in traditions in the context of health and healing].
The study of health and healing gods may offer significant examples of how certain ideas survive, with hardly any substantial loss, across periods of great change. It is no surprise that, following centuries of struggle by early Christians against the worship of pagan gods, some originally heathen ideas and elements of thinking should have been in due course, if with prudence, adapted to Christian needs and sensibilities. A most remarkable instance of such practice is to be found, somewhat surprisingly, in the life of the bishop St. Cyril of Alexandria. He opposed rigorously the cult of Isis, above all in Egypt, but nevertheless adapted features of Isis to his conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary as 'Theotokos'. In this manner Isis, the goddess-mother, with her child Horus became--in a certain measure--a type of the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, accompanied by the Infant Jesus. The legendary arson perpetrated at the start of the 6th century A.D. against a temple in Cologne wherein a healing deity was worshipped should, it is argued here for the first time, be understood in the context of conflict between early Christianity and the cult of Isis. There is good reason to believe that the aforementioned temple set on fire by Gallus, later Bishop of Clermont, was in fact the shrine of Isis in Cologne.
Institut für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin, Universität zu Köln. fmoog@uni-koeln.de
Ferdinand Peter
FP
Moog
D002835:Christianity / Q000266:history*; D003469:Culture; D000076144:Egypt, Ancient; D005858:Germany; D006262:Health; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D008602:Mental Healing / Q000266:history*; D009229:Mythology; D012068:Religion and Medicine