Delphi (4 page)

Figure 1.4
. The latest plan of the fourth century
BC
temple of Apollo in the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi, indicating the possible location of the adyton where consultations took place (© EFA [Amandry and Hansen FD II Temple du IVième siècle fig. 18.19])

No issue has been more hotly debated than the process by which the Pythia was inspired to give her response. First, the ancient sources. Before the fourth century
BC
, there is no source that discusses how the Pythia was inspired, but all say that she sat on her tripod, from which she uttered “
boai
” “cries/songs” (e.g., Eur.
Ion
91). From the fourth century
BC
, some sources mention her shaking a laurel branch, but perhaps as a gesture of purification rather than of inspiration.
²⁹
We have to wait until Diodorus Siculus in the first century
BC
for the first mention of a “chasm” below the Pythia.
³⁰
Some subsequent writers agree with this, but others describe it is a space she physically descends into and prophesizes from.
³¹
In Diodorus's narrative, it was this chasm, and the powerful vapor that emerged from it, that led to the initial discovery and installation of an oracle at Delphi. He recounts the story of how a goatherd noticed that his goats, approaching a particular hole on the mountainside, started to shriek and leap around. Goatherds began to do the same when they approached, and also began to prophesize. The news of the spot spread and many people started leaping into the hole, so “to eliminate the danger, the locals appointed one woman as prophetess for all. They built her an apparatus [the tripod] on which she could be safe during her trances.”
³²

Plutarch, in the first century
AD
, mentions the
pneuma
(translated as “wind,” “air,” “breeze,” “breath,” or “inspiration”), and that occasionally the oikos was filled with a “delightful fragrance” as a result of the pneuma, but he does not describe its exact nature. Instead he relays a long-running argument among his friends about why the oracle is less active now than it was in the past. The arguments include less pneuma; the moral degeneration of mankind leading to its abandonment by the gods; the depopulation of Greece and the departure of the
daimones
(spirits) responsible for divination. But Plutarch also insists that the Pythia did not at any point rant or rave. Instead, he comments that, after a consultation session, the Pythia “feels calm and peaceful.” In fact, the only time the Pythia is said to have sounded odd was on the occasion when the entire process of consultation had been forced (the goat was deluged in cold water to
ensure that it shivered to provide the right signs for the consultation to go ahead). The result was that the Pythia's voice sounded odd. “It was at once plain from the harshness of her voice that she was not responding properly; she was like a labouring ship and was filled with a mighty and baleful spirit,” which suggests that, in normal circumstances, the Pythia responded in a normal-sounding voice and manner.
³³

Strabo, a geographer of the ancient world writing in the first century
AD
, represents the Pythia as sitting on the tripod, receiving the pneuma, speaking oracles in both prose and verse. Another writer, Lucan, however, still in the first century
AD
, gives a very different impression of the Pythia, in which the her body is taken over by the god through the inhalation of the vapor, and she raves as a result. In the writings of Pausanias, a Greek travel writer from the second century
AD
, the Pythia also drinks from the Cassotis spring (the one that runs by and under the temple at Delphi) for inspiration. In the writings of Lucian, a rhetorician from the second century
AD
, the Pythia chews laurel leaves for inspiration and drinks not from the Cassotis, but from the Castalian spring. In the Chrisitian writers, for example John Crysostom, the picture focuses again on the effects of the pneuma: the Pythia's “madness” is caused by the “evil” pneuma rising upward from beneath her, entering through her genitals as she sits on the tripod.
³⁴

Thus the most well-known modern picture of a Pythia, inspired/sent “mad” by breathing in/being taken over by “vapors” from a chasm below the tripod, and giving as a result raving and insensible answers (which then have to be made sense of by the priests around her) is a composite one, from mostly late Roman and indeed several anti-pagan sources. Scholars have long pointed out that in particular the Roman assumption of the Pythia's madness, and search for an explanation for it (via the chasm and its vapors), could well have emerged from the mistranslation of Plato's description of her divine inspiration as
mania
(linked in Greek to
mantike
—“divination”), which became the Latin
insania
(“insanity”). To a Roman audience, used to divination carried out through a series of taught, more scientific “arts” (e.g., the reading of livers from sacrificed animals), understanding her mania, her madness, as a result
of intoxication by gas from a subterranean chasm rendered the Delphic oracular process “intelligible and satisfying.”
³⁵

Yet despite this understanding of the raving Pythia as a consequence of cultural mistranslation and subsequent elaboration, and despite the fact that no source mentions it before the first century
BC
, the picture of the Pythia breathing in vapors from a chasm below her tripod has always been the dominant model for understanding how the oracle at Delphi functioned. To such an extent that finding the mechanism of the vapors was originally regarded as the litmus test for successful archaeological investigation at Delphi. The original excavators of the site were extremely disappointed not to find a chasm below the temple—they felt almost cheated by the “deception” of the literary sources.
³⁶
The stakes were understandably high: at the time of Delphi's excavation in the 1890s, interest in the oracle, and in psychic research more generally, could not have been stronger. In 1891 the burlesque opera
Apollo
, or
The Oracle at Delphi
played to great acclaim on Broadway. In the same year, John Collier painted his famous
Priestess of Delphi
in which a sensual priestess breathes in vapors from her tripod over a chasm (see
plate 4
), and the Society of Psychical Research was started by Cambridge academics and published its first volume examining the oracle at Delphi. In the wake of the disappointing excavations, thus, there was a feeling that the ancient sources had lied. The scholar A. P. Oppé in 1904 in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies
argued that the entire practice at Delphi was a farce, a sham, put on by the priests of Apollo, tricking the ancient world.
³⁷
Others sought different explanations for the Pythia's madness: they focused on the laurel leaves, and suggested the Pythia had been high from eating laurel. One German scholar, Professor Oesterreich, even ate laurel leaves to test the theory, remarking disappointedly that he felt no different.
³⁸
Others opined that the answer relied not in some form of drug, but in psychology. Herbert Parke and Donald Wormell argued in the 1950s that the Pythia, in the heat of the moment after so much preparation on the particular day of consultation, and after so many years perhaps involved with the temple as one of the women guarding the sacred flame, would have found herself in an emotionally intense relationship with the god, and could easily have fallen victim to
self-induced hypnosis.
³⁹
More recently, scholars have employed a series of anthropological approaches to understand belief in spirit possession, and applied these to how the Pythia may have functioned.
⁴⁰

The chasm idea, however, was hard to forget. The Rev. T. Dempsey in the early twentieth century argued that perhaps, just as Plutarch had suggested the oracle worked less in his day thanks to less pneuma, the chasm had, in modern times, completely closed up.
⁴¹
Others sought even more ingenious explanations for how the vapors had been created without a chasm, including one in which the Pythia herself descended to a room below her tripod to light a fire that produced the smoke (possibly from the hemp plant) she then breathed in, as if it were vapors from the god.
⁴²
This explanation, coupled with the analysis of a particular stone block filled with mysterious holes and grooves, thought to be that on which the tripod and omphalos were positioned and through which the vapors arose (still on view at Delphi but now recognized as a stone later recut as an olive press), crystallized the sense that the ancients had “bought” a hoax for more than a thousand years at Delphi.
⁴³

More recently, the debate over the presence of inspiring vapors at Delphi has re-emerged, thanks to a reassessment of Delphi's geology.
⁴⁴
Analysis by the geologist Jelle De Boer and the archaeologist John Hale through the 1980s and 1990s led, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to their publishing evidence for two major geological fault lines crossing at Delphi (one running east-west, the other north-south) directly underneath the temple of Apollo (see
plates 1
,
2
;
figs. 0.1
,
0.2
). At the same time, they argued that the bedrock beneath the temple was fissured, which would allow for small amounts of gas to rise up through the rock, despite the absence of a chasm. This gas originated from the bituminous (full of hydrocarbons) limestone naturally occurring in this area, which would have been stimulated to release its gas by shifts in the active fault lines beneath. Testing both the travertine (itself a product found only in active fault areas) and the water beneath the temple at Delphi, they found ethane, methane, and ethylene, which had been used as an anaesthesia in the 1920s, thanks to its ability to produce a pleasant, disembodied, trancelike state. They postulated that the geology
of Delphi could thus have produced enough of these potent gases to, within an enclosed space like the adyton, put the Pythia into a trancelike state.
⁴⁵
The ancients may not have been lying after all.

This research created huge excitement in public and academic circles, but in reality, while fascinating, it still did not really solve the problem. Even if intoxicating gases were produced in the temple at Delphi, and these gases did “inspire” the Pythia (despite that none of the sources before the first century
BC
point to this as the method of inspiration), how did the answers she gave, even if massaged and shaped by the priests of Apollo, remain suitable, useful, right enough for the oracle to continue as a valid institution for over one thousand years? Or as Simon Price, a scholar with a reputation for pushing straight to the heart of a problem, put it: “Why was it that the sane, rational Greeks wanted to hear the rantings of an old woman up in the hills of central Greece?”
⁴⁶
To understand this, we must put the process of oracular consultation at Delphi in its wider religious context, and think more carefully about the way in which the oracle was perceived.

Oracles were an essential, and respected, part of the Greek world. They were also everywhere you looked. Scholarship has demonstrated the vast array of oracular sanctuaries on offer, which varied from the Pythian priestess at Delphi to the consultation of the rustling of leaves of Zeus's sacred tree at Dodona in northern Greece, to consultation with spirits of the dead, like at Heracleia Pontice on the Black Sea (see
map 1
).
⁴⁷
Sometimes even the same god could have very different forms of oracular consultation at his different sanctuaries: so while Apollo
Pythios
(as Apollo was worshiped at Delphi) had the Pythia at Delphi, at the sanctuary of Apollo
Pythaios
in Argos, his priestess took part in nocturnal sacrifices and drank the blood of the sacrificial victims as part of her inspiration to prophesize.
⁴⁸
But this form of divination (putting a question to a god through a priestly representative) was also just one of the forms of divination available in ancient Greece. Another was the reading of signs from particular natural events and actions and interpreting them in relation to a particular question. Just about everything could be read: the flight of birds (although not the movement of fish), patterns of words, sneezing, entrails, fire, vegetables, ripples on water, reflections in
mirrors, trees, atmospheric phenomena, stars, as well as randomized dice, beans and other forms of “lot” oracle. In addition, there was a host of wandering
chresmologoi
or
manteis
(“oracle-tellers” or “seers”) who could be engaged on the street in any major Greek city for consultations, which could be conducted in a variety of ways, from the reading of appropriate oracle responses in books of oracles to connecting with dead spirits.
⁴⁹

Key here is that the Greek world was filled with a “constant hum” of divine communication.
⁵⁰
It was a system used by all levels of Greek society, and as well, it was a system in which everyone had their “preferred” form of communication, which could alter depending on the type and importance of the question to be asked. The Athenian general Nicias in the fifth century
BC
had his own personal seer as did many other military commanders. In the sixth century
BC
, Peisistratus, the Athenian tyrant, never consulted Delphi, but liked using chresmologoi. Alexander the Great in the fourth century
BC
liked his manteis to come from Asia Minor. Such seers could be incredibly well respected: Lampon was a seer in the fifth century
BC
but also a friend of the famous general and statesman Pericles and responsible for the foundation of Thurii in South Italy. Nicias's chief seer, Stilbides, was also one of his top soldiers.