Episode 16: The Music of Eros
In this episode of the Therapeutic Landscapes podcast, we share a presentation by Dr Bettina Borg Cardona on music, dance and holistic healing at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Epidaurus.
Epidaurus was one of the most famous therapeutic landscapes of the ancient world, a place of pilgrimage where people travelled through the Peloponnesian landscape to seek healing from Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing. Set within a valley surrounded by mountains, the sanctuary offered a model of healing that was deeply embedded in both sacred and natural space.
Bettina’s presentation invites us to think about healing in a wider and more relational way. At Epidaurus, healing was not only concerned with the physical body. It was also connected to dreams, ritual, purification, sacrifice, sound, movement, water, landscape, the psyche, the gods, and the patient’s place within a larger cosmic order.
One of the central practices at the sanctuary was dream incubation, where patients slept in the hope of receiving a healing dream from Asclepius, who might appear in human or animal form, often as a snake or a dog, suggesting a form of healing that worked through the body, the unconscious, the symbolic imagination, and the sacred presence of place.
The episode also explores the importance of music and dance, especially through the figure of Apollo, god of music and medicine. Bettina discusses the paean, a circular song-dance associated with healing, renewal, relief and deliverance from pain or adversity. Performed around a sacred centre, the paean brought voice, movement, body, community and ritual space into relationship.
Bettina presents music as a way of perceiving the order of the cosmos, by drawing on ancient Greek ideas of harmony, proportion, number and circular movement, Bettina shows how music was understood as part of the pattern that holds nature, the body and the universe together.
She also reflects on her own experience of visiting Epidaurus, where the sound of the wind moving through the trees became a formative moment in her research. In the context of the sanctuary, that sound opened up a different way of listening, as though the landscape itself was alive, communicative and full of presence.
The presentation closes with the figure of Eros, understood as a cosmic force of relationship between the things of the world. Through this lens, healing becomes a process of coming back into connection: with the body, the psyche, the sacred, the natural world, and the wider pattern of life.
This episode is about healing as harmony.
Harmony with landscape.
Harmony with rhythm.
Harmony with the sacred.
Harmony with the body and psyche.
Harmony with the music of the wider cosmos.
It is a presentation about Epidaurus, ritual, music, dance and the possibility that healing may begin when we learn to listen again: to the landscape, to dreams, to the sacred centre, and to the relational music that connects us with the whole.
Bio
Dr Bettina Borg Cardona is a teacher and researcher from Malta. She completed her PhD at Canterbury Christ Church, UK, in 2025. Her work focuses on music and the imagination in their healing capacity, engaging with premodern conceptions of the imaginal and their relevance for contemporary thought. In particular, she is interested in the relational, symbolic, and participatory nature of experience, and the role of harmony as a structuring principle in both psyche and world. She is inspired by the Mediterranean landscape and sea.
Link
Instagram: @harmonia_anima_mundi