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Posted on 07/15/2003 10:26:59 AM PDT by presidio9
The temple of Apollo, cradled in the spectacular mountainscape at Delphi, was the most important religious site of the ancient Greek world, for it housed the powerful oracle. Generals sought the oracle's advice on strategy. Colonists asked for guidance before they set sail for Italy, Spain and Africa. Private citizens inquired about health problems and investments. The oracle's advice figures prominently in the myths. When Orestes asked whether he should seek vengeance on his mother for murdering his father, the oracle encouraged him. Oedipus, warned by the oracle that he would murder his father and marry his mother, strove, with famous lack of success, to avoid his fate.
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The oracle of Delphi functioned in a specific place, the adyton, or "no entry" area of the temple's core, and through a specific person, the Pythia, who was chosen to speak, as a possessed medium, for Apollo, the god of prophecy. Extraordinarily for misogynist Greece, the Pythia was a woman. And unlike most Greek priests and priestesses, the Pythia did not inherit her office through noble family connections. Although the Pythia had to be from Delphi, she could be old or young, rich or poor, well educated or illiterate. She went through a long and intense period of conditioning, supported by a sisterhood of Delphic women who tended the eternal sacred fire in the temple. The Classical Explanation Tradition attributed the prophetic inspiration of the powerful oracle to geologic phenomena: a chasm in the earth, a vapor that rose from it, and a spring. Roughly a century ago scholars rejected this explanation when archaeologists digging at the site could find no chasm and detect no gases. The ancient testimony, however, is widespread, and it comes from a variety of sources: historians such as Pliny and Diodorus, philosophers such as Plato, the poets Aeschylus and Cicero, the geographer Strabo, the travel writer Pausanias, and even a priest of Apollo who served at Delphi, the famous essayist and biographer Plutarch.
Strabo (64 B.C.-A.D. 25) wrote: "They say that the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which rises a pneuma [gas, vapor, breath; hence our words "pneumatic" and "pneumonia"] that produces divine possession. A tripod is set above this cleft, mounting which, the Pythia inhales the vapor and prophesies."
Plutarch (A.D. 46-120) left an extended eyewitness account of the workings of the oracle. He described the relationships among god, woman and gas by likening Apollo to a musician, the woman to his instrument and the pneuma to the plectrum with which he touched her to make her speak. But Plutarch emphasized that the pneuma was only a trigger. It was really the preconditioning and purification (certainly including sexual abstinence, possibly including fasting) of the chosen woman that made her capable of responding to exposure to the pneuma. An ordinary person could detect the smell of the gas without passing into an oracular trance.
Plutarch also recorded a number of physical characteristics about the pneuma. It smelled like sweet perfume. It was emitted "as if from a spring" in the adyton where the Pythia sat, but priests and consultants could on some occasions smell it in the antechamber where they waited for her responses. It could rise either as a free gas or in water. In Plutarch's day the emission had become weak and irregular, the cause, in his opinion, of the weakening influence of the Delphic oracle in world affairs. He suggested that either the vital essence had run out or that heavy rains had diluted it or a great earthquake more than four centuries earlier had partially blocked its vent. Maybe, he continued, the vapor had found a new outlet. Plutarch's theories about the lessening of the emission make it clear that he believed it originated in the rock below the temple.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciam.com ...
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Not that it will help. With or without chemical enhancement, I'm guessing the Delphic Oracle does not hold a lot of interest from this crowd. No matter.
What I do find amusing is that the writers at SCIAM are so hopelessly liberal that they can not miss making an irrelevent sociological assessment of Ancient Greek culture in the second or third paragraph. Were there existing cultures that were not "mysogynistic" by their terms at that time? I was under there opinion that outside of Greece the favored dating technique was "caveman" (hit 'em over the head with a club and drag 'em away by the hair).
And definitely not by the feet!
<]B^)
Considering none of the students and very few of the faculty in today's public schools even know the meaning of the word 'extirpated'.
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Note: this topic is from 7/15/2003. Thanks presidio9. |
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Perhaps the ancient gods have moved to the side line to observe how our current Gods behave. One day we may know.
:’)
(time index set to the Delphi segment)Mysteries of the Ancient World - Myths and Legends (at 43:15)
March 13, 2016 | Questar Entertainment
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