Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many ancient healing and medical techniques involved ritual interactions with divinities, such as the creation and use of amulets, the use of natural (often bodily) substances and other drugs associated with specific humours and elements, visits to temples and shrines, incubation practices, and engaging with flora and fauna associated with divine figures. How can we understand these kinds of ancient healing practices and medical treatments that relied upon and engaged with entities which, according to the dominant epistemological frameworks of modernity, do not exist? And how can we do so without too hastily resorting to etic explanations that would categorize all such beliefs and practices as irrational? In response to these questions, this paper offers a thought experiment designed to demonstrate the rationality of ancient beliefs in divine healing. I situate such beliefs in the ancient classificatory system of elemental theory, a kind of totalizing system that explained natural processes and phenomena in terms of their correspondence to the four fundamental elements (earth, water, air, and fire). Focusing specifically on the healing properties associated with water, I show how certain waters and the mixtures of elements they contained would have been understood by ancient medical practitioners, philosophers, and natural scientists as especially salubrious because of their sympathetic connections to certain deities. In doing so, I provide a scientific, rather than purely theological, explanation for divine healing and argue that the apparent ‘irrationality’ of ancient epistemology – and specifically the ways in which it seems to violate the boundaries between science and religion – is a result of our (modern historians and academics) classificatory systems, and not a reflection of their (ancient intellectuals) category errors. This paper thus contributes to efforts by scholars such as Darren Lehoux, Thomas Kuhn, and Anthnoy Grafton to consider the kinds of work that systems of classification perform in any historical time period, including our own.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".