The Seven Sleepers and the Shaman's Initiation

The legend of the Seven Sleepers is ancient and well enough known that the leading German version of Groundhog Day is called Seven Sleepers' Day. The story is that around 250 AD seven young Christian men lived in Ephesus, in modern Turkey. When the emperor Decius launched a terrible persecution of Christians, they risked death by refusing to sacrifice to idols. Fleeing the emperor's wrath, they took refuge in a cave in the hills. According to some versions, the emperor had them walled in; according to others they were hidden by their friends. They slept. When they awoke, thinking that only a single night had passed, it was the reign of the Christian emperor Theodosius, more than 200 years later. They entered Ephesus, startled to see it full of churches and crosses, and were recognized and honored before they died.

The cave where they are supposed to have slept quickly became a site of Christian worship. A church was built, and the site became a major cemetery with more than 800 burials. Excavation at the site shows that this happened very quickly, before the end of the fifth century. Written accounts survive from the sixth century, and the legend spread rapidly in Greek and Syriac. Some historians think the story of the Seven Sleepers goes back to an actual event of around 450 AD -- perhaps the discovery of well-preserved bodies in a cave, perhaps the appearance of men who claimed to have been sleeping since Decius' persecution. Around 450 AD a great dispute was raging among Christians over the bodily resurrection, and the return to life of Christian sleepers would certainly have played into that debate. The bishop of Ephesus at the time, a certain Stephen, was also very controversial, having deposed and jailed his predecessor and been banned by the Council of Chalcedon, and he might well have made much of such an event to solidify his position.

However it happened, the legend of the Seven Sleepers became entrenched in Christian lore and appears in many texts and works of art. (Above, a window in Rouen Cathdral.) One detail worth nothing is that this sleep appears as gift from God, saving the men from persecution and allowing them to witness for God before the people long after the normal course of their days.

The Seven Sleepers also appear in the Koran, which adds the detail that as they slept they were guarded by a dog. The legend became very widespread in Muslim lands; above is a page from a sixteenth-century Persian omen book, a means of divination.

The story of these "long sleepers" was hardly invented in the sixth century. It draws on an ancient body of myths widespread in Mediterranean culture. There are numerous such stories in Jewish lore, including several that focus on a pious Jew allowed by God's favor to sleep through the whole 70 years of the Babylonian Captivity. Greek versions were common enough that Aristotle cited one in his Physics, part of his argument that time has no meaning without change. Several versions of the long-sleeping story were told of Epimenides of Crete, a shadowy poet and holy man who may have been called to Athens around 600 BCE to purify the city after a great sacrilege. Epimenides was a favorite topic of E.R. Dodds, whose Greeks and the Irrational catalogs Epimenides' ascetic feats, out of body experiences, prophecies, and so on. Our sources call Epimenides theophilestatos, beloved by the Gods.

Why was this story so widespread, and why was long sleep universally considered a blessing from the Gods? Hard to know, of course, but one way to understand the story is to see it as an echo of shamanistic beliefs. What shamans in many cultures did was to fall into a sort of sleep, or trance, in which their souls left their bodies and explored other planes of existence. The lore of shamanism is full of shamans whose power was so great that they could do this for years; even more common are stories of shamans who did this on their first magical journeys, falling into comas of fabulous length before wakening to tell of marvelous things. The dog that guarded the Seven Sleepers' cave seems particularly telling here, since a dog that guarded the land of the dead is an ancient shamanistic motif that ended up in several different mythological systems.

For shamans, their ability to enter the trance state and travel in other lands was a great divine gift, even the greatest gift. Perhaps such stories lingered in the Mediterranean world after most aspects of shamanism had faded out, and when those stories were adapted to new religious ideas the notion that this sleep was a divine gift survived.