Page 12 - Summer 18

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witness to a sacred mystery, the shepherd respectfully backed off, leaving the child’s destiny to the gods. Raised under the protection of Apollo, Asklepios learned the art of healing from his father and the wise centaur Cheiron, to whom he was entrusted. The ancients revered him as the personification of healing and the founder of medicine.
Another account of Asklepios’s birth is more traumatic. The great god Apollo was the ardent and jealous lover of the exquisite, Lapith princess, Coronis. On departing for his temple at Delphi, Apollo gave the responsibility of guarding her to a snow-white crow. No sooner had he left, than Coronis, already pregnant with Apollo’s child, invited the youth, Ischys, whom she passionately and secretly loved, to share her bed. The alarmed crow set flight for Delphi to warn its master of the infidelity, but Apollo had already divined the betrayal, and infuriated that the crow had not pecked out Ischys’s eyes before he could lie with Coronis, cursed the bird. The curse of the god turned the crow black, and all its descendents have been black ever since. Apollo’s sister Artemis, Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt, who is always attended by hunting dogs, avenged the insult to her brother by slaying Coronis with her silver arrows.
At the sight of her lifeless body, Apollo was filled with remorse and distracted by grief. But, as she was about to be cremated on the pyre, he regained his presence of mind and called upon Hermes, to cut the still-living child from Coronis’s womb. The child was infinitely dear to Apollo; he named him Asklepios, and left him in the care and tutorship of Cheiron the centaur.
‘The mythos of Lac caninum is a revelation of the mystery of the remedy and is richly threaded through with clues to its nature, relationships, and indications.’
To interpret these myths in the light of Lac-can we must perceive Asklepios and the dog as one, and all the players in the myth enacting the emotions and life experience of the remedy. We then witness a loveless relationship or marriage; a distant, authoritarian father; an indifferent mother, who rejects, abandons, or neglects her child; lack of maternal bonding; absence of breast-feeding; a traumatic or caesarean birth; absence or death of the mother – literally or metaphorically; a home environment damaged by jealousy, suspicion, lust, infidelity, and resentment; an abused mother; a broken home; and the vital influence of the male role model.
Emotions are laid bare, some of which do not as yet appear in the repertory for Lac-can, but which are born out in practice, and should be added – jealousy, suspicion, deceit, ailments from love betrayed, resentment, hatred and revenge, impulsivity, remorse and grief at the loss of a loved one. We are also witness to a ‘divine child’ blessed with psychic and spiritual gifts and destined to live a remarkable life. We can create a new rubric – ‘apt for healing.’
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Anubis was the very ancient, Egyptian God of the Dead