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A The Wounder Heals: A Meditation on the Serpent as Mythic Symbol of Health Michael W. Sexson The possible nest in the invisible tree, Which in a composite season, now unknown, Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous, Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one. —Wallace Stevens, "Saint John and the Back-Ache" The cryptic statement "the wounder heals" originates in the story of Telephos, King of Mysia, who, in defending his land against invading Greeks, was wounded in the thigh by Achilles. Since the wound refused to heal, Telephos consulted the oracle of Apollo, who uttered ÏŒ Ï„Ï• ώσας ίάσÎμται, or "the wounder heals." Telephos sought out Achilles, and since the Greeks had received an oracle that said that the Trojan war could not be won without the assistance of Telephos, Achilles was more than willing to help in curing the wound. Odysseus interpreted the paradox to mean that the spear of Achilles was responsible for the wound, and so Achilles scraped some rust from the spearhead, put it into the wound, and Telephos was cured. A deeper apprehension of this paradox requires that we pick up the thread given us by the Telephos story and follow it, like Theseus, into a mysterious labyrinth, one that contains at its center, not the Minotaur, but a serpent. If, as the oracle suggests, health is dependent upon locating the source of our disease, we must seek out that original "wounder," that primeval villain who, in countless stories and myths, is responsible for so many of our woes. Following the thread along the twists and turns of the labyrinth, we are required first to rehearse once Literature and Medicine 1 (Rev. ed., 1992) 107-116 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 108 THE WOUNDER HEALS again the familiar litany of maledictions directed against the serpent, but, once in the center, encountering his essential, primary nature, we shall be compelled to recognize a being whose "venom and wisdom [are] one." As we concentrate on the snake as primordial wounder, a collage of images appears from the deepest zones of personal and collective experience. Among the pictures is the first snake we ever saw—a boa constrictor behind glass at the zoo. We recoil at the remembered image, much as we did at the real thing, less in fear, perhaps, than in horrified fascination. The scene changes to a recurrent dream of bathing in a shallow pool filled with dark, dangerous serpents. These personal visions then metamorphose into images from myths, fairy tales, legends, and stories we have heard or read. We see Gilgamesh, the great Babylonian hero, sleeping by a pool as a serpent steals up alongside him and devours the plant that will make him, rather than Gilgamesh, immortal. We watch as legions of heroes go into battle with scores of snakes: Hercules as an infant strangling two serpents; Perseus hacking off the snaky-haired head of Medusa; the Scandinavian hero Sigurd attacking the giant serpent Fafnir; the Polynesian Maui squaring off against a monster eel; Apollo and Zeus destroying, respectively, Python and Typhon; Cadmus, another Greek hero, shooting arrows into the poison-spewing mouth of the serpent who guards the Castalian pool; and, of course, Saint George driving a long, thin spear into the open mouth of a small, curiously harmless-looking winged dragon. Gaining dominance over all these images, however, is the most famous wounder of all, the serpent coiled around the tree in the story of the Garden of Eden. Who does not know the tale of how a snake, the most "subtle" of God's creatures, beguiled the woman into tempting the man to taste of the fruit containing the knowledge of good and evil? Who has not seen at least a dozen different pictures of this odious creature wound around a tree? And who cannot recall an image of the gigantic human-headed serpent massively coiled around the axis mundi in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting? We need to mark well the image of the snake wound around the tree. Initially, contemplating the image, we are repelled, thinking of how, according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this malicious being was responsible for...

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