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In this newsletter…
- History of the Caduceus
- The Modern Message of the Caduceus: Partnering Health Care with Self-Care
- Ideas for Self-Care
- June Recipes: Strawberries
The caduceus in its original form, a serpent encircling a leafy tree branch, dates back to Ancient Egypt. It was originally associated with Troth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, and later adopted by the Greeks for Hermes, their god of knowledge.
For the Greeks, the caduceus became a symbol of the higher knowledge gained by uniting the wisdom of the polar extremes—the staff representing Aesculapius and intervention
together with the serpent, representing Hygaea/Mother Nature and the power of natural healing.
The caduceus served to remind the citizens of Ancient Greece that health was the reward for those who could successfully balance and integrate the dualities of natural healing with interventional medicine.
The Greeks saw in the opposing forces of the caduceus a balanced, complementary system similar to the polarities in all of nature and in human nature. Dualities exist within the human body as:
- Mind/Body
- Reason/Intuition
- Intervention/Natural Healing
- Balance/Imbalance
They also appear as energetic polar forces in our Universe:
- Sun/Earth
- Hot/Cold
- Day/Night
- Expansive/Contractive.
The energies of the Universe, the life force of plants and animals, and the human psyche are a melding of these dualities.
To the Ancient Greeks, a person in good health was someone in a relative state of balance, acceptance, and attunement to these opposing forces. Disease symptoms were viewed as the body’s messages sent to instill greater personal awareness and understanding. The caduceus, then, embodied the healing power that could be attained by balancing the body’s inherent healing ability with complementary and appropriate strategies of intervention.
