The Raven’s Eye: Sympathetic Healing in Old English Medicine, by Sinéad Spearing

Among the more unsettling entries in Bald’s Leechbook III — the ninth-century compendium of healing remedies preserved in The British Library — is a curious prescription for swollen eyes:

Wiþ aswollenum eagan genim cucune hræfne, ado þa eagan of on deft cucune gebring on wætre ond do þa eagan þam men on sweoran þe him þearf sie, he wyl sona hal.

For swollen eyes: take a raven before it is dead, remove its eyes while it is still alive, bring them into water, and place them on the nape of the neck of the one in need. He will soon be healed.

To modern sensibilities, the instruction is stark — even cruel. Yet beneath its macabre surface lies a rich interplay of symbolic logic, ritual healing, and early physiological observation.

The Raven as Healer and Seer

The raven has long held a complex place in folklore: a bird of death, yes, but also of vision, intelligence, and second sight. It was the raven Noah sent first from the Ark; the bird who did not return, absorbed perhaps into the mystery of land not yet revealed. In Norse tradition, Odin’s ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) flew across the world gathering knowledge, returning to whisper secrets into the god’s ear. In some stories, Odin himself takes the raven’s form.

Even now, the superstition persists: the Tower of London famously keeps six ravens as guardians of the Crown — and a seventh, always in reserve.

This symbolism — keen sight, memory, divine communication — would not have been lost on early healers. The raven was not just ominous; it was oracular.

A Case of Sympathetic Healing

This remedy, like many in the Leechbooks, appears to operate on the principle of sympathetic healing — the belief that objects with shared qualities or forms are energetically connected. In this system, like affects like: the keen, healthy eye of the raven is placed in symbolic — and perhaps energetic — proximity to the swollen human eye, with the intent of transferring vitality from one to the other.

The choice to place the eyes on the nape of the neck is especially intriguing. Today, we understand that blood vessels in the neck supply the eyes, and that visual strain often accompanies muscular tension in this region. Whether by anatomical observation or intuitive correlation, early healers may have perceived this link long before it was mapped.

Notably, the remedy demands that the eyes be removed before death — a rare and precise instruction. It suggests a belief not only in likeness, but in life-force: that the raven’s living sight, in all its clarity and potency, might still be accessed and applied if taken at the right moment — while the vitality remains.

The Context of the Leechbook

Bald’s Leechbook survives in a ninth-century manuscript known as Royal MS 12 D xvii, housed in the British Library. Often dismissed as a quaint or gruesome relic, it is in fact a highly structured compilation of medical practice, blending classical learning with folk wisdom, Christian prayer with pre-Christian ritual.

Leechbook III, the most enigmatic of the three volumes, leans toward remedies that incorporate charms, animal parts, ritual phrases, and what might be interpreted as magical thinking. But to read this as evidence of ignorance is to miss its intellectual cohesion. These were practitioners who saw the world as deeply interconnected — body, spirit, language, nature, and the unseen all woven into the act of healing.

The Physiology of Belief

While modern medicine may recoil at the notion of placing raven eyes on the neck, contemporary science continues to explore the power of belief, ritual, and symbolism in healing. Placebo studies, somatic therapy, and psychoneuroimmunology all acknowledge that the mind-body connection is more powerful than once believed.

In this light, we might see sympathetic healing not as superstition, but as a symbolic language of medicine. A way of working with the unseen mechanisms of hope, suggestion, and somatic resonance — long before we had the instruments to name them.

Life at the Threshold

That the eyes must be removed before death tells us something important. The act is not simply practical; it is ritualised. It places the healer at a threshold: between life and death, vision and blindness, animal and human. The remedy does not draw merely on the object, but on a moment — the point at which vitality is still present, hovering.

To heal, the practitioner must confront death — not avoid it. The act may seem barbaric to modern eyes, but it is also a form of defiance. Healing, here, is not gentle. It is a spiritual wrestling with dissolution.

A Note from the Author

When I first read this remedy, I found it disturbing. But the more I sat with it, the more I began to sense its internal logic — and its strange, haunting beauty. The Leechbooks are not only medical texts; they are mirrors of a worldview in which medicine was never just medicine.

This is the ground I walk in my research and my writing. Not to romanticise the past, but to remember what we once understood: that healing is not only physical. It is cultural. Symbolic. Sometimes, it is a negotiation with darkness.

And sometimes, the raven is not an omen of death. He is the physician.

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If you’re interested in learning more, then do consider Old English Medical Remedies: