Prayer to Apollo

A modern LABRYS text (see greek-agathodaimon-001) — four lines, but the list of gods in them is knowledgeably arranged.

Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia are the usual triad of a healing sanctuary. The fourth, Telesphoros, is a genuine and not obvious addition. He is a small deity in a hooded cloak, represented as a child beside Asclepius and Hygieia; he was worshipped above all at Pergamon, and appears late, in the second century AD.

His charge is not the healing but its completion. The name itself is Telesphoros, "he who brings to an end", from telos: a recovery carried through, not one begun.

Hence the order in this invocation: Apollo averts the disease, Asclepius treats it, Hygieia is health itself, Telesphoros sees the recovery through. Four stages of one business, each with its own deity — the very Greek and Roman habit of dividing a task among gods, which the Romans carried as far as a deity for each pass of the plough (ceres-012).

Telesphoros, however, is thinly attested, and this corpus contains a card, greek-telesphoros-001, for which no original could be found: the editions bearing on this deity are few and hard to reach.