ABSTRACT
The first part of my title is drawn from a book review by no less a cultural pundit than E.M. Forster, published in the Egyptian Mail on 29 December 1918 during his little-known time as a jobbing journalist in Alexandria. As far as I am aware, it has never been reprinted since. The book he was reviewing was Canopus, Menouthis, Aboukir (Faivre 1918), a guide to the ruined sites at Canopus and Menouthis (modern Abuqir), a few miles outside Alexandria. Although not much is left to see on the ground, in the sixth and seventh centuries the shrine at Menouthis was one of the most important pilgrimage centres in the east, with a great reputation for miraculous cures. Its martyred saints, Cyrus and John, were invoked particularly to help with eye diseases. Healing was brought about through the practice of incubation, or sleeping in the shrine as close as possible to the entombed bodies of the martyrs, who channelled the divine healing power down to earth. This practice had a long history at Menouthis. In the Roman period, there had been a healing temple of Isis on the site (the Egyptian form of Menouthis means ‘place of the divinity’), where cures were effected in exactly the same way as in the Christian period – hence Forster’s joking reference to Cyrus and John ‘carrying on the work of the earlier firm’. Perhaps because of its importance as a healing centre, the sanctuary at Menouthis played an important part in the rivalry with paganism (the Isis shrine still seems to have been functioning as late as the last decade of the fifth century AD) and subsequently in Christian doctrinal controversies.
