Who is Helios in Heliotherapy?
Helios was one of the Titan gods of the ancient Greek pantheon.
On occasion you may find him called Helius, his Latin name. His job was to take the sun across the sky each day. When the day was to begin,
he drove the four steeds of his chariot,
which carried the sun, into the sky and toward the west. Because of his strong association with the sun, in time Helios began to be identified with the god of light, Apollo.
Therefore as we start to look at heliotherapy, we understand it to be at first sun therapy.
Modern politically correct healing arts thinking notwithstanding, exposure to pure sunlight has been a healing therapy down through the ages. There were in times past and even now in some cases the use of the solarium and light as part of or and aid to the healing process.
[We will talk about this later, but anything can be overused. More is not necessarily better. This is especially true about primal heliotherapy.]
That being said heliotherapy is also light therapy in the use of various specific wavelengths of light for therapeutic purposes. Sunlight is full spectrum light. So what you do in light therapy
is isolate the specific wavelength of light that is purpose or healing effectual for the specific issue at hand.
In heliotherapy we are talking about physical light and not metaphysical light. I am not speaking here against metaphysical light as a tool in healing. That is a great visualization in the healing process. But it is not in the same class of what is called heliotherapy.
Judiciously used sun therapy can be healthful, therapeutic, and beneficial.
