Introduction

The author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease is renowned for his criticism of magical and superstitious conceptions and modes of treatment of epilepsy. He has been credited with attempting a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ explanation of a disease which was generally believed to be of divine origin and to be curable only by means of apotropaeic ritual and other magical instruments. One interesting point is that he does not reject the divine character of the disease, but modifies the sense in which this disease (and, as a consequence of this conception, all diseases) may be regarded as divine: not in the sense that it is sent by a god, for example as a punishment, and is to be cured by this same god, but that it shares in the divine character of nature in showing a fixed pattern of cause and effect and in being subordinated to what may perhaps be called, somewhat anachronistically, a natural ‘law’ or regularity.

On the basis of these positive statements on the divine character of the disease various interpreters have tried to deduce the writer's ‘theology’ or religious beliefs, and to relate this to the development of Greek religious thought in the fifth century.