Print

---

Maybe the ancients had the "cure" all along.   For a long time I've been
mulling over this quote from Arthur Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers, A History
of Man's Changing Universe".   Tonight I'm passing it along in celebration
of Nicki the Dancer and Rat the  Poet:

*   *   *   *
on the basic concepts of *armonia*: harmony, and *katharsis*: purge,
purification:
"The  Pythagoreans were, among other things, healers; we are told that they
used medicine to purge the body, and music to purge the soul.  One of the
oldest forms, indeed, of psychotherapy consists in inducing the patient, by
wild pipe music or drums, to dance himself into a  frenzy followed by
exhaustion and a trance-like, curative sleep - the ancestral version of
shock-treatment and abreaction therapy.  But such violent measures were
only needed where the patient's soul-strings were out of tune -- overstrung
or limp.  This is to be taken literally, for the Pythagoreans regarded the
body as a kind of musical instrument where each string must have the right
tension and the correct balance between opposites such as "high" and "low",
"hot" and "cold", "wet" and "dry".  The metaphors borrowed from music which
we still apply in medicine - "tone", "tonic", "well-tempered",
"temperence", are also part of our Pythagorean heritage."

* * * * * * *

So, fellow Parkinson's travellers, shall we dance?


Mary Yost, stiff and slow