The Healer and the Cup

The visual emblem of the Pharmakolytria is a small vial, flask, or cup of medicine held in her hand, the sign by which the martyr is read in the icon as a healer. This file treats that iconographic attribute and the devotional practice that surrounds it: the blessing of holy water and oil in her name, the use of her intercession and of blessed oil and water against poisoning and sorcery, and the place of her cup beside the medicine-box of St. Panteleimon and the Holy Unmercenaries — with a structured note on what the vial signifies (medicine-flask or anointing-vessel) and the date of the attribute.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

The Vial in Her Hand

In the developed Orthodox iconography of St. Anastasia, the martyr is shown holding two things: a cross, the sign of every martyr, marking her witness unto death; and a small vial, flask, or cup — a little vessel of medicine or healing liquid — which is her distinctive attribute and the visual emblem of the Pharmakolytria (treated in full in The Martyr with the Vial). The cross identifies her as a martyr among martyrs; the vial identifies this martyr, the deliverer from potions, the healer. To read an Orthodox icon is to read its attributes, and the small flask in Anastasia’s hand is the attribute that says, without a word, that the saint depicted is the one to whom the sick and the poisoned pray (Greek Menaion, 22 December; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

The logic of the attribute is the logic of the title. Because she is the Pharmakolytria — the one who looses the bonds of the pharmakon, the drug that may heal or harm — the icon places in her hand the very thing the word names: a small vessel of pharmakon in its good sense, the healing drug, the remedy, the antidote, held out as the cure that answers and undoes the poison. The vial is pharmakon turned to its merciful face, the medicine that delivers from the poison (see Deliverer from Potions). The attribute is thus not an arbitrary ornament but a compressed statement of the saint’s whole patronage: in her hand is the cure for what the title says she looses.

This attribute is reported here as exactly what it is — an iconographic convention of the developed cult, a way of depicting the saint that grew with her veneration as a healer — and not as a detail of biography. Nothing in the historical core or in the connected Passio describes Anastasia carrying a vial of medicine; the flask is the cult’s emblem for the Pharmakolytria, attested in the iconographic tradition and the hymnography, and it is to that tradition that it is pinned (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Passio Anastasiae; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).

The Sign of the Unmercenary Healer

The small vessel of medicine is not Anastasia’s alone; it is the shared iconographic language of the healer-saints of the Orthodox East, and her place within that company is the key to reading her cup. The Holy Unmercenaries — the Anargyroi, the “silverless ones” who healed without fee — are shown with the instruments of healing: most characteristically a small box, casket, or spoon of medicine, the surgeon’s or physician’s kit. St. Panteleimon the Great Martyr, the unmercenary physician of Nicomedia, is regularly depicted holding a small medicine-box and a spoon or lancet, the emblem of the healer who cures freely in Christ’s name (see St. Panteleimon the Healer). Cosmas and Damian, the Anargyroi of Asia, carry the same instruments. The vial in Anastasia’s hand belongs to this iconographic family: it marks her, with them, as a saint of the cup and the cure, a healer to whom the faithful turn (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; Greek Menaion, 22 December).

The parallel is more than visual. Like the Anargyroi, Anastasia heals freely, by intercession, asking nothing; like Panteleimon, she is a martyr whose healing patronage is read out of her martyrdom, the one who conquered death now invoked against the body’s afflictions. The difference is one of specialization within a shared vocation: where Panteleimon is the unmercenary physician without restriction, and Cosmas and Damian the silverless healers of every sickness, Anastasia’s patronage is focused by her title on the particular evil of the pharmakon — poison, noxious drug, and the sorcerous potion. Her cup is the healer’s cup, but it is held out specifically against the poisoner and the enchanter (see Deliverer from Potions; Martyr and Healer). The icon, by giving her the vial, places her among the unmercenary healers while the title fixes her special office among them.

Blessed Water and Oil in Her Name

The vial in the icon has its counterpart in devotional practice, where the pharmakon of the healer is made tangible in blessed water and oil offered in the saint’s name. The blessing of holy water (agiasmos) and the blessing and use of oil are among the most ancient and pervasive of Orthodox healing practices, rooted in the Church’s sacramental life and in the apostolic anointing of the sick (the practice draws on the same theology as the Mystery of Holy Unction; see Orthodoxy: The Great Feasts for the liturgical setting of blessings within the cycle). At shrines and in the devotion of the Pharmakolytria, blessed water and oil are received as the saint’s healing medicine — the pharmakon of her cup made available to the faithful, taken or applied against sickness, poison, and the assaults of the evil arts (Greek Menaion, 22 December; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

The continuity between emblem and practice is exact. The small flask the icon places in her hand is, in the life of the faithful, the cruse of blessed oil and the vessel of holy water carried home from her shrine: the iconographic pharmakon and the devotional pharmakon are the same thing under two forms, the painted vial and the blessed cruse. To pray to Anastasia and to be anointed with oil blessed in her name, or to drink holy water sanctified at her commemoration, is to receive in act what the icon shows in sign — the deliverer’s remedy against the poisoner’s draught (Greek Menaion, 22 December). The practice is reported here as devotional practice, what the tradition does and attests, and the healings sought through it as what the faithful hold, pinned to the cult per the methodology (METHODOLOGY §3.5–6).

Intercession Against Poison and Sorcery

The use of her intercession, and of the blessed oil and water that carry it, is directed in the developed cult specifically against poisoning and sorcery — the twin evils of the pharmakon in its dark sense. The prayers of her feast invoke her as the deliverer of those harmed by poison and by the evil arts, and the faithful turn to her, and to the oil and water blessed in her name, for protection against and deliverance from poisoning, witchcraft, spells, and noxious drugs (Greek Menaion, 22 December; see Deliverer from Potions). The invocation answers the very things Scripture condemns under the name pharmakeia — the sorcery of Galatians 5:20 and the enchantments of which the impenitent of the Apocalypse will not repent (Revelation 9:21; 21:8) — setting against them the intercession of a martyr and the blessed medicine of her cup.

Here the two senses of pharmakon meet in a single devotional act. The poison and the spell are pharmakon in its evil sense; the blessed oil and water are pharmakon in its good sense; and the saint is the Pharmakolytria who looses the one by the other, the deliverer who undoes the malign drug with the merciful one. The small vial in her hand, the cruse of blessed oil, the cup of holy water, and the prayer against the poisoner and the enchanter are all one gesture — the offering of the healer’s remedy against the harm that drug and spell can do. This is the inner coherence of the cult: title, emblem, blessing, and invocation say the same thing, that through this martyr the Church sets a cure against the curse (Galatians 5:20; Revelation 21:8; Greek Menaion, 22 December). It is reported as the devotional life of the cult, pinned to its source, not as documented event (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Nature and Date of the Attribute

[Disputed: what the vial signifies and when the attribute arose. (A) Medicine-flask or anointing-vessel. The small vessel in Anastasia’s hand is most often read as a flask of medicine or healing liquid — the pharmakon in its good sense, the antidote answering the poison, consonant with her title Pharmakolytria and with the medicine-box of the Unmercenary Healers (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Greek Menaion, 22 December). But the same iconographic vessel can be read as a cruse of oil or an anointing-vessel — a vessel of myrrh or chrism — assimilating her to the myrrh-bearing and anointing imagery of the Church’s healing rites rather than to the physician’s flask specifically; the small painted vessel does not, by itself, disclose which is meant, and the two readings are not always sharply separable in the developed iconography. (B) The date of the attribute. Like the Pharmakolytria title itself, the vial belongs to the developed cult and is not derived from the historical core or the earliest Passio; it is an attribute of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine iconographic tradition, not of the saint’s biography (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). The precise date at which the flask became her fixed and standard attribute is not securely fixed by the sources available here; this file reports the attribute and its devotional use as iconographic and cultic fact, with its meaning and dating treated as developed cult rather than as established history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The fuller iconographic treatment is in The Martyr with the Vial.]

References

Passio Anastasiae (Latin) and the Greek Passio of Anastasia (BHG 76–81). Cited as the source of the legend; the vial is not among its details.
The Greek Menaion for 22 December. (The hymnography of the feast and the healing patronage of the Pharmakolytria.)
Synaxarion of Constantinople (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The notice of the commemoration.)
Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, and H. S. Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. (s.v. φάρμακον.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936.
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961.
Scripture: Galatians 5:20; Revelation 9:21; 21:8.
METHODOLOGY.md, this repository.