For millennia, humans had one obvious and reliable source of light – the Sun – and we knew the Sun was essential for our survival. This might be why ancient religions – such as those in Egypt , Greece , the Middle East , India , Asia , and Central and South America – involved Sun worship. Early religions were also often tied up with healing .
Sick people would turn to the shaman, priest or priestess for help. While ancient peoples used the Sun to heal, this might not be how you think. Since then, we’ve used light to heal in a number of ways.
Some you might recognise today, others sound more like magic. From warming ointments to sunbaking There’s not much evidence around today that ancient peoples believed sunlight itself could cure illness. Instead, there’s more evidence they used the warmth of the Sun to heal.
The Ebers Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical scroll from around 1500 BCE. It contains a recipe for an ointment to “ make the sinews [..
.] flexible ”. The ointment was made of wine, onion, soot, fruit and the tree extracts frankincense and myrrh.
Once it was applied, the person was “put in sunlight”. Other recipes, to treat coughs for example, involved putting ingredients in a vessel and letting it stand in sunlight. This is presumably to warm it up and help it infuse more strongly.
The same technique is in the medical writings attributed to Greek physician Hippocrates who lived around 450-380 BCE. The physician Aretaeus, who was active around .