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... day was all of a sudden changed into
night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the
Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very
year in which it took place. The Medes and Lydians, when they observed
the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of
peace agreed on. Herodotus, writing after the eclipse on May 28, 585 BCE … the prophetic priestesses are moved [by
the god] each in accordance with her natural faculties … As a matter
of fact, the voice is not that of a god, nor the utterance of it, nor
the diction, nor the metre, but all these are the woman's; he [Apollo]
puts into her mind only the visions, and creates a light in her soul
in regard to the future; for inspiration is precisely this. Thomas Topham, born in London, and now
about thirty-one years of age, five feet ten inches high, with muscles
very hard and prominent, was brought up a carpenter, which trade he
practiced till within these six or seven years that he has shewed
feats of strength; but he is entirely ignorant of any art to make his
strength appear more surprising; Nay, sometimes he does things which
become more difficult. There is no history: There is only
Biography. The attempt to perpetuate, to fix a thought or principle,
fails continually. You can only live for yourself: Your action is good
only whilst it is alive— whilst it is in you. The awkward imitation
of it by your child or your disciple, is not a repetition of it, is
not the same thing but another thing. The new individual must work out
the whole problem of science, letters, & theology for himself, can
owe his fathers nothing. There is no history; only biography. The Commune is the end of the old governmental and
clerical world, militarism, officialism, the exploitation, agiotage,
the monopolies, of the privileges, to which the proletariat owes its
serfdom, the Fatherland, its misfortunes and its disasters. Life, life! Death, death! How curious it is! |
Pythia, by Collier |
The trouble with Ian is that he
gets off with women because he can't get on with them.
Rosamond Lehmann, on Ian Fleming
May
28
is
the 148th
day of the year in the Gregorian
Calendar (149th
in leap years), with 217
days remaining.
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Purification of Pythia, ancient Greece
From about
1400 BCE, the
shrine at Delphi,
Greece, was sacred, probably to Gaia, the mother earth goddess, or to a
snake goddess. So important was it as a sacred site, it came to be
described as Omphalos,
the 'navel', or centre of the world. Later, it became sanctified to Apollo (son of Zeus, and god
of the sun, light, youth, beauty, and prophecy), perhaps signifying a
shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society, though this is uncertain
and still a matter of academic enquiry and debate.
Delphi gained its name from the dolphin, and Apollo was said to have visited the place as one of those sea mammals that barely survive today's polluted Ionian sea. Snakes were part of Delphic lore until c. 800 BCE when Apollo was said to have slain the serpent that guarded the sanctuary, establishing the oracle anew. (Thus, Apollo became one of the many dragon-slayers of mythology: St George, St Martha and Hercules among them.)
The serpent's name was Python, and had been made from mud and slime by Gaia. At first the oracle priestess (sometimes two in shifts) could only be consulted on one day a year. She might have become entranced, by a drug perhaps; she answered questions in hexameter verse.
The priestess, Pythia (Sybil), seated on a tripod above a crack in the earth, went into a trance while chewing laurel leaves. The temple priests formulated the oracle from the glossolalia ('speaking in tongues', as it is sometimes known in the Christian tradition) which the priestess spoke in her ecstasy. Every four years (the third of each Olympiad), the Pythian Games were held in honour of the priestess, the winners receiving a laurel wreath from the city of Tempe; Apollo himself had instituted these games so the world would never forget his great feat in slaying Python.
The leaders of ancient Greece relied on the Delphic oracle
for her prognostications and clairvoyance. King Croesus once simultaneously
asked seven oracles "What is the King of Lydia doing now?" Only the
Delphic oracle answered correctly that he was cooking a tortoise and a
lamb in a pot of bronze.
Jelle Zeilinga De Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, reported in Geology, August, 2001, that ethylene, rising up through fissures in the rock beneath the shrine, was probably the sweet-smelling vapour that put the priestess in her trance. Ethylene produces states of euphoria, associated with stimulus to the pleasure centres of the human brain. We know of this vapour from the 1st-Century CE writer, Plutarch (c. 45 - 125 CE), who, as a temple priest, was familiar with the shrine and reported that the priestess was under the influence of such a vapour. In his day, however, the vapours were weaker than in previous centuries, which may be attributed to changes in the bedrock beneath this fabled place.
Skeptical view of glossolalia
Geology of the Delphic Oracle
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