Incubation and Healing

The shrine of St Menas at Abu Mena was, before all else, a healing shrine: pilgrims came to the Mareotis desert because the saint was believed to cure there. The cure was sought above all through incubation — sleeping in or near the holy place to receive a dream-visitation and a remedy from the saint — a Christian late-antique practice continuous with, and transformed from, the older pagan incubation of the healing gods, and parallel to the incubation cults of the Anargyroi (Cosmas and Damian) and the other healing saints. The shrine’s sacred spring and its healing baths supplied water for washing and for drinking, and the eulogia — holy water or sanctified oil carried home in the stamped flasks — extended the cure to the sick far from the shrine. The healings themselves are known chiefly from the Miracles of St Menas; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 they are reported here as the collection attests them, named to source, and never asserted as documented fact.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

The Shrine as a Healing Place

Abu Mena was a city built around a cure. The excavated complex — the tomb-church over the crypt, the Great Basilica, the baptistery, the pilgrim hostels (xenodochia), and, crucially, the bath buildings and the water-system fed by the sacred spring — is the physical apparatus of a great healing shrine, designed to receive, house, wash, and send home crowds of the sick and the seeking (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991; and see The Great Pilgrimage City). The hostels imply pilgrims who stayed; the baths and the spring imply a cure that worked through water and washing; the flask-industry implies a blessing carried away. The whole machinery of the place presupposes that what drew people across the desert was the hope of being healed by St Menas — and the texts that survive of the cult, the Miracles of St Menas, are precisely a collection of such cures.

The healing function placed Menas in a well-defined late-antique class: the wonderworking healing saint, whose shrine became a centre of pilgrimage for the sick. In the Christian East this class was led by the Anargyroi — the “silverless ones,” Cosmas and Damian, the physician-martyrs who healed without fee — and included Cyrus and John (the Egyptian Anargyroi, whose shrine at Menouthis near Alexandria lay in the same region as Abu Mena), Thecla at Seleucia, Artemios at Constantinople, and others, all of whom drew the sick to sleep at their shrines in hope of a dream-cure (Frankfurter, Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001). Menas belongs squarely in this company, and is among its greatest representatives by the sheer scale of his shrine and the reach of his cult (see St. Panteleimon the Healer, the fellow great martyr venerated as a wonderworking healer).

Incubation: The Christian Transformation of an Old Practice

The central technique of the healing shrine was incubation — from Latin incubare, “to lie down upon” — the practice of sleeping at the holy place in order to receive, in a dream, the visitation of the saint and the means of a cure. The patient came to the shrine, prepared himself, and lay down to sleep within or beside the holy precinct; in the night the saint was believed to appear in a dream, sometimes speaking, sometimes touching or treating the sufferer, sometimes prescribing a remedy to be carried out on waking; and the patient rose healed, or with instructions for his healing (Frankfurter 1998; Papaconstantinou 2001).

This was not a Christian invention but a Christian transformation. Incubation was the characteristic practice of the great pagan healing cults of the Greco-Roman world, above all the cult of Asklepios, whose temples (the Asklepieia at Epidauros, Pergamon, Kos, and elsewhere) drew the sick to sleep in the sacred precinct and receive the god in a dream — a practice whose votive records, the inscribed cure-narratives of Epidauros, are the direct ancestors of the Christian miracle-collection. As the temples of the healing gods closed and the shrines of the healing saints rose, the practice migrated: the sick still came, still slept, still received a dream-visitation and a cure — but now from a saint, by the power of Christ, rather than from Asklepios (Frankfurter 1998; on the cult of the saints in this region, Papaconstantinou 2001). The continuity is real and was sometimes geographically exact: the Egyptian Anargyroi Cyrus and John were established at Menouthis, by tradition, precisely to displace a healing cult of Isis on the spot, taking over the incubation-clientele of the older shrine (Frankfurter 1998). The Christian shrines did not merely tolerate incubation; they inherited and Christianized it, turning the dream-cure of the healing god into the dream-visitation of the healing saint.

Read against this background, the healing practice at Abu Mena is the Egyptian instance of a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon: a great late-antique incubation shrine, in which the older mechanism of the dream-cure was filled with new, Christian content. The saint replaces the god; the relic-tomb replaces the temple; the eulogia replaces the votive; and the cure is referred to Christ, whose servant and intercessor the healing saint is. This is the framework within which the cures reported in the Miracles of St Menas are to be read.

The Spring, the Baths, and the Water of the Saint

Water was at the heart of the healing at Abu Mena. The shrine possessed a sacred spring, and the excavated complex includes substantial bath buildings — a fact of the archaeology, not merely of the legend — through which the healing water was made available to pilgrims for washing and bathing as well as for drinking (Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989; Grossmann, “Abu Mina,” 1991). The water of the shrine was itself a vehicle of the cure: the sick washed in it, drank it, and carried it away. The healing baths thus stand alongside incubation as the two great mechanisms of the cure — the dream-visitation and the holy water — and the two were complementary, the saint’s appearance in the night and the washing in his water working together in the experience of the pilgrim.

It was this holy water of the spring, above all, that the famous flasks carried home as eulogia, the portable blessing of St Menas (see The Menas Flasks). The flask is the take-home extension of the shrine’s healing water: filled at the spring, stamped with the saint’s image, and borne away, it allowed the blessing to be applied to the sick who could not come to the Mareotis themselves. The eulogia could be drunk, anointed on the afflicted part, or kept as a blessing in the household — the cure made portable, the holy water of Abu Mena travelling, as the flasks themselves did, across the Mediterranean world. The healing at the shrine and the diffusion of the flasks are therefore one phenomenon seen from two ends: the cure sought at the spring, and the cure carried home from it.

The Cures as the Miracles Attest Them

What the saint was believed to do at the shrine is known chiefly from the Miracles of St Menas, the collection of healing and protection wonders wrought at and through the shrine, surviving in Greek and in Coptic (the Coptic texts edited and translated by James Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; and see The Miracle Collections). The Miracles are a hagiographic collection of uncertain date, of the same family as the cure-collections of the other healing saints — the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, of Cyrus and John, of Artemios, of Thecla — and they must be read as such. They are not a clinical register or an archive of documented events; they are a devotional collection attesting what the cult held the saint to have done. Per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, every miracle that follows is reported as the Miracles attest it, pinned to that source, and never certified as fact.

The cures the Miracles recount are of the type characteristic of the incubation shrine. The collection attests healings of the blind, the lame, the paralysed, and the chronically sick; the casting-out of demons; the rescue of those in danger; and the saint’s appearance in dreams and visions to the afflicted, in which he speaks, instructs, reproves, or heals (the Miracles of St Menas, as edited and translated in Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; cf. Papaconstantinou 2001 on the Menas miracles among the Egyptian cults). In these accounts the structural pattern of the incubation cure is visible: the sufferer comes to the shrine, sleeps there, is visited by the saint in the night, and is healed or directed — the same shape as the cure-narratives of the Anargyroi and the other healing saints, now told of Menas. The Miracles also attest the saint as a protector and a vindicator of justice — defending the wronged, recovering the stolen, exposing the deceitful — alongside the bodily cures, so that the collection presents Menas not only as a physician of the body but as a guardian and avenger of his suppliants (the Miracles, in Drescher 1946; Papaconstantinou 2001).

Two qualifications belong with this report, and both are required by the method of this collection rather than added to it. First, the historical disposition: the Miracles of St Menas are a hagiographic collection of uncertain date, and the cures they recount are reported here as the collection’s testimony, not as documented events — exactly as the wonders of the Martyrdom of Polycarp or of any martyr-act are reported as the claims of their source. The collection is firm evidence for what the cult of Menas believed and practised; it is not, and is not used as, evidence that the events occurred as narrated. Second, the relation to the firm material record: the existence of a great healing-and-incubation shrine at Abu Mena is not in doubt — the baths, the spring, the hostels, and the flask-industry are in the ground — but the individual cures of the Miracles are testimony, not record. The archaeology proves the institution of healing; the Miracles attest the experience of it. Holding these two apart is the same discipline the collection practises throughout (see Archaeology versus Passio).

The Eulogia as Portable Cure

The incubation cure was, by its nature, tied to the shrine: one had to come, to sleep, to be visited. The eulogia broke that tie. The holy water of the spring, and the sanctified oil of the shrine, carried home in the stamped flasks, allowed the saint’s healing to be sought at a distance — applied to the sick in a far-off city by a relative who had made the pilgrimage, or kept in a household as a standing blessing against illness and danger (Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010; Frankfurter 1998; Hahn, Strange Beauty, 2012). This is why the flask-distribution and the healing cult are inseparable: the flask is the cure made portable, and the breadth of the flask-distribution is the measure of how far the hope of Menas’s healing travelled. The pilgrim who could reach Abu Mena slept at the shrine and washed in its water; the sick who could not were reached by the eulogia the pilgrim carried home. The Miracles, accordingly, attest cures wrought not only at the shrine but through the saint’s blessing at a distance — the holy water and oil of Menas working far from the Mareotis (the Miracles, in Drescher 1946; cf. Vikan 2010 on the eulogia’s function).

In this the cult of Menas exemplifies the late-antique theology of the holy place and its blessing: the conviction that the holiness, and the healing power, of a saint and his shrine could be carried in a material substance — water, oil, dust, bread — sanctified by contact with the holy, and applied where it was needed (Hahn, “Loca Sancta Souvenirs,” and Strange Beauty, 2012; Vikan 2010). The flask between the pilgrim’s hands and the dream-cure at the shrine are two expressions of one faith: that the great martyr Menas was present and powerful to heal, at his tomb in the desert and through his blessing wherever it was carried.

References

Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Miracles of St Menas, edited and translated; the chief witness, with the Greek collection, to the shrine’s healing and incubation practice and the cures attested of the saint.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage and healing context of Egyptian saints’ shrines; incubation and its transformation from pagan practice; the Anargyroi of Menouthis.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented cult of Menas among the Egyptian healing saints; the miracle-collections and their setting.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989; and “Abu Mina,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The archaeology of the shrine, including the baths, the spring, and the water-system of the healing complex.)
Vikan, Gary. Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. (The eulogia as portable blessing and cure, and the function of the pilgrim flasks.)
Hahn, Cynthia. “Loca Sancta Souvenirs: Sealing the Pilgrim’s Experience”; and Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. (The theology of the holy place and its blessing-substance.)