It was Plato who first mentioned the ancient, common and famous (not only mythological) attribute of Υπερβορέος for Αβάρις. This Abaris is a "physician" from the "north" in Charmides (fragment 158 c). The quotes probably cover "thaumaturgy", respectively "Hyperborean" or "Realm beyond ours, in which The North Wind swept". Fragments 156d-157c further explained the principles of good medicine, as practiced by the "Thracians" (whoever they were, for the Attic reference to barbarians lacked the finer ethnonimic granularity which moderns are used to). Socrates detailed them for the younger and apparently more beautiful Charmides:

As the eye cannot be healed without healing the head first, and the head cannot be healthy if the whole body is not healthy to start with, so the disease must be addressed by physicians at its very root, if we want to cure for real. Real, in Platonic concepts, meant the higher realm of the soul.

This Platonic soul is "parsed" nowadays into various technical brands of analysis. The soul is only diminutively connoted in post-modern medicine (hence the derogative but very apt name "shrink"). On the contrary, for the soul to thrive, there were harmonic principles to be followed, namely incantamenta, medicamenta and unguenta. According to Old European medical tradition, at that time they were all pointing to some special "material", certainly and utterly different from music, drugs and ointments.

Abaris was held in high esteem by several neoplatonists, including Porphyrios and Iamblichus.

Understandably, in modern times, almost everything super-human, from telepresence to antigravitation, and from prolonged fasting to Pythagorean miracles, including immortality, levitation and resurrection from the dead, have been attributed to Abaris. This was done by mystery-loving commentators, based on false interpretations of the happax legomena in mainstream sources, including Suda, Hesychius, Stephanus Byzantinus and Isidorus Hispalensis.

If and how Abaris related to "magick" will probably remain unknown. This thick corpus of knowledge is neglected by the eurocentric medical schools, the hippocratic and the knidic. Despite being more recent, they had only led all the way down to what many describe as the current technoanimism of mainstream, official medicine. Hoewever, and in conclusion, the name of Abaris the Hyperborean which may be generical, is still revered. It could represent a confirmed and convenient way to refer to a medical tradition which has long disappeared, despite its obvious merits and long, attested effectivity.

References Plato. Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet. Oxford University Press. 1903.