A Practice That Outlasted Its Original Gods

Temple sleep was not unique to Greek religion: Egyptian religion practiced its own forms of dream incubation, including at temples associated with Imhotep, the deified architect and physician later assimilated into Greek Asclepius worship in Ptolemaic Egypt, and at the sanctuary of Serapis at Canopus, illustrating how readily incubation practice traveled and merged across the culturally intertwined religious landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.

The practice did not end with the Christianization of the Roman world; early and medieval Christianity absorbed incubation into the cult of certain saints associated with healing, most notably the physician saints Cosmas and Damian, whose shrines in the Byzantine world and beyond continued to attract pilgrims who slept there specifically in hope of a healing dream or vision, transferring the structure of pagan temple sleep onto a Christian saint's intercession with minimal change to the underlying ritual logic. Historians of ancient and medieval religion treat temple sleep as one of the clearer documented cases of a specific ritual technology, sleeping in a sacred place to receive divine healing guidance, surviving a change of religion while the deity or saint credited with the cure changed around it.