When asylum meant safe from violence

The word asylum was originally used to refer to a place of sanctuary for criminals and debtors, offering them a place of refuge and protection from the law.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest citation of this word in English dates back to 1439. It was borrowed into English in a form identical to that of the Classical Latin asylum, but the word had arrived in Latin from Hellenistic Greek, ie the post-Classical Greek of the period of Alexander the Great (BC 356-BC 323). The Hellenistic form was asylon “refuge, sanctuary”, from the Ancient Greek adjective asylos “safe from violence, inviolable”.

Asylon is composed of two elements. The first is the common Greek negative prefix a- meaning “not, without”, as now found in many English words where we have used this borrowed Greek affix, such as asymmetrical “not symmetrical”, amoral “without morals”, and anonymous “with no name”.

The second element of the word has a less obvious source. It comes from Ancient Greek sylon (“booty, seized cargo, right of seizure”), which is perhaps derived from the verb sylan “to rob, plunder”, although the further etymology of sylan is not known with any certainty.

In contemporary usage, asylum has mostly lost its associations with criminals and debtors, and it has come to refer much more to (usually temporary) permission to stay somewhere under protection. This permission will have been granted by a nation-state to refugees who have fled from their homeland in order to escape from war or persecution and are hoping to obtain refuge in another nation.

“Asylum seeker” is a term which we often hear these days, but the term was actually first used in print (in American English) in 1929. The United Kingdom Refugee Council describes an asylum seeker as “a person who has left their country of origin and formally applied for asylum in another country but whose application has not yet been concluded”. They now state that “wherever possible, we prefer to describe someone as a person seeking asylum, as we feel that the term ‘asylum seeker’ is dehumanising”.

Instances of diplomatic asylum are something rather different. These are usually cases of extraterritorial asylum granted in embassies, legations, or consulates, such as when Julian Assange was given permission to stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London under the protection of the Ecuadorian government, at a time when attempts were under way to extradite him to Sweden and the USA.

When I was at junior school in the 1950s, we had heard the word asylum, but only in the much sniggered at, and now offensive, tabooed and happily vanished phrase “lunatic asylum”, which corresponds to contemporary and much more acceptable labels such as “psychiatric hospital”. This type of asylum, in the sense of a building or institution which provided shelter and support for people who were unable to look after themselves because of illness, old age, poverty, or social exclusion (such as lepers), is now said by the Oxford English Dictionary to be “mostly historical”.

The term lunatic originates in Latin luna “moon” because of the mistaken notion that psychiatric illnesses could be brought about by the influence of different phases of the moon on one’s mental state.