Between evocation and domain Zalmoxis the demon, the demigod of healing, of life beyond death. His magicians and priests could heal diseases and wounds, and even grant immortality to men, just by casting their magic spell (Plato, the Charmides). This story stems from times long gone. Few tracks are left of Zalmoxis, and of his long persisting religion in the Carpathian area, later erased by the Roman conquest.

The historian Herodotus notoriously mentioned Zalmoxis, and then Plato in the Charmides Dialogue. Herodotus conjectured Zalmoxis as a former slave of Pythagoras’, the philosopher who introduced the notion of immortal soul. But the reverse might be the real truth. Abaris, a renowned Hyperborean priest and magician who served under the God Apollo. At the moment of his death, he turned into a crow. He then reappeared more than two centuries later and brought Apollo’s sacred arrow to Pythagoras, as a symbol of the continuing tradition.

I come from long ago, from a time long passed. I come from a faraway land much beloved by Apollo, the great distant God of prophecy and archery, the God of diseases and of cures.