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"Physician,
Heal Thyself" Jan
Swearingen
In the Symposium, Diotima's speech, recounted by Socrates, is a lessonin love and language, in the proper relation between teacher and student, and in the necessity of love to any true understanding between individuals. The role Diotima is given in the Symposium was not unusual for women as priestesses and healers in Plato's era. The Greater and Lesser Eleusinian mysteries inducted participants into an understanding of human and divine love, and their relationships to one another. While we don't know much about the details of these mysteries, we do know that they were taken seriously by participants for many centuries by people from all walks of life, educated and uneducated. Among their healing powers is believed to be a purification ritual hinted at in Empedocles Katharmoi, among other sources, in which in a three day process individuals were taken underground, isolated, and re-emerged cleansed and with a new identity, a new self. Diotima chides Socrates for having skipped a step in the mysteries. He wanted to skip over the "lesser" mysteries dealing with Aphrodite Pandemos, fleshly earthly love, and enter directly into the "greater" mysteries dealing with divine love. By reminding him of the necessity to sustain a link between physical and spiritual aspects of love if he is to be fully "healthy", Diotima chides Socrates for precisely that trait for which he is best known: disdain for the physical in favor of the conceptual and philosophical. According to Diotima's teaching, this repudiation of physical being, health, and truth constituted an illness, just as it does in many other therapeutic traditions past and present.
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