The Huffing Pythoness of Delphi
Dan Clore
July 15, 2003
Questioning the Delphic Oracle
When science meets religion at this ancient Greek site, the
two turn out to be on better terms than scholars had
originally thought
By John R. Hale, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Jeffrey P. Chanton
and Henry A. Spiller
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.
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.
Extraordinarily for misogynist Greece, the Pythia was a
woman. And she did not inherit her office through noble
family connections.
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.
A traveler in the next generation, Pausanias, echoes
Plutarch's mention of the pneuma rising in water. Pausanias
wrote that he saw on the slope above the temple a spring
called Kassotis, which he had heard plunged underground and
then emerged again in the adyton, where its waters made the
women prophetic.
Plutarch and other sources indicate that during normal
sessions the woman who served as Pythia was in a mild
trance. She was able to sit upright on the tripod and might
spend a considerable amount of time there (although when the
line of consultants was long, a second and even a third
Pythia might have to relieve her). She could hear the
questions and gave intelligible answers. During the oracular
sessions, the Pythia spoke in an altered voice and tended to
chant her responses, indulging in wordplay and puns.
Afterward, according to Plutarch, she was like a runner
after a race or a dancer after an ecstatic dance.
On one occasion, which either Plutarch himself or one of his
colleagues witnessed, temple authorities forced the Pythia
to prophesy on an inauspicious day to please the members of
an important embassy. She went down to the subterranean
adyton unwillingly and at once was seized by a powerful and
malignant spirit. In this state of possession, instead of
speaking or chanting as she normally did, the Pythia groaned
and shrieked, threw herself about violently and eventually
rushed at the doors, where she collapsed. The frightened
consultants and priests at first ran away, but they later
came back and picked her up. She died after a few days.
The New Tradition
Generations of scholars accepted these accounts. Then, in
about 1900, a young English classicist named Adolphe Paul
Oppé visited excavations being carried out by French
archaeologists at Delphi. He failed to see any chasm or to
hear reports of any gases, and he published an influential
article in which he made three critical claims. First, no
chasm or gaseous emission had ever existed in the temple at
Delphi. Second, even if it had, no natural gas could produce
a state resembling spiritual possession. Third, Plutarch's
account of a Pythia who had a violent frenzy and died
shortly afterward was inconsistent with the customary
description of a Pythia sitting on the tripod and chanting
her prophecies. Oppé concluded that all the ancient
testimony could be explained away.
Oppé's debunking took the academic world by storm. His
opinions were so strongly expressed that his theory became
the new orthodoxy. The absence of the wide opening that the
French archaeologists had expected seemed to prove his
argument. Additional support for Oppé's theory came in 1950,
when French archaeologist Pierre Amandry added the further
negative that only a volcanic area, which Delphi was not,
could have produced a gas such as the one described in the
classical sources. The case seemed closed. The original
tradition of the Greek and Latin authors lived on only in
popular books and in the words of local guides, which, in
Oppé's opinion, had been the source of the chasm and vapor
myth in the first place.
The situation changed in the 1980s, when a United Nations
Development Project undertook a survey in Greece of active
faults (those along which earthquakes have been generated in
the past few hundred years). As a member of that survey, one
of us (de Boer, who is a geologist) noted exposed fault
faces both east and west of the sanctuary. He interpreted
them as marking the line of a fault that ran along the south
slope of Mount Parnassus and under the site of the oracle.
But being aware of the classical tradition and unaware of
the modern skepticism and debunking, he attributed no
special importance to his observation.
More than a decade later de Boer met another of us (Hale) at
an archaeological site in Portugal where Hale, who is an
archaeologist, sought de Boer's geological opinion on the
evidence for earthquake damage at an ancient Roman villa.
Over a bottle of wine, de Boer mentioned that he had seen
the fault that ran under the temple at Delphi. Hale, who had
learned the approved view as an undergraduate, contradicted
him. But in the lively conversation that ensued, de Boer
converted him with his description of the fault, his account
of how faults could bring gases to the surface and his
references to the classical authors. Realizing the
importance of the observation for the interpretation of the
ancient accounts, the two decided to form a team for further
exploration of the site.
The Classical Explanation Revisited
During our first field trip, in 1996, the two of us
conducted geological surveys and examined the temple
foundations that the French archaeologists had exposed. The
temple has a number of anomalous features that would call
for some special interpretation of its function even if the
reports of Plutarch and others had not been preserved.
First, the inner sanctum is sunken, lying two to four meters
below the level of the surrounding floor. Second, it is
asymmetrical: a break in the internal colonnade accommodates
some now vanished structure or feature. Third, built
directly into the foundations next to the recessed area is
an elaborate drain for spring water, along with other
subterranean passages. Thus, the temple of Apollo seemed
designed to enclose a particular piece of terrain that
included a water source, rather than to provide a house for
the image of the god, the normal function of a temple
building.
During that first exploration, we traced the major east-west
fault line, called the Delphi fault, that de Boer had
observed during the earlier survey. Later we were to
discover the exposed face of a second fault in a ravine
above the temple. This second line, which we named the Kerna
fault, ran northwest-southeast and cut across the Delphi
fault at the oracle site. A line of springs that ran through
the sanctuary and intersected the temple marked the location
of the Kerna fault below the ancient terracing and the
accumulated debris from rockslides.
That same year a father-and-son archaeological and
geological team, Michael D. Higgins and Reynold Higgins,
published a book that suggested we were on the right track.
In their Geological Companion to Greece and the Aegean, they
noted that the line of springs did indeed suggest the
presence of a "steep fault" running northwest-southeast
through the sanctuary. They also pointed out that no
geological reason necessitates rejecting the ancient
tradition.
Higgins and Higgins theorized that the gas emitted might
have been carbon dioxide. A decade earlier a different
scientific team had detected such an emission at another
temple of Apollo, the one at Hierapolis (modern Pamukkale)
in Asia Minor (now Turkey, and home to the ruins of many
great Greek cities). Following the lead of Strabo, modern
researchers have discovered that the Apollo temple at
Hierapolis had been deliberately sited over a vent of toxic
gases, which in the finished temple emerged from a grotto in
the building's foundations.
The temple at Hierapolis was not a place of prophecy, and
the carbon dioxide was not so much intoxicating as toxic,
claiming the lives of sacrificial animals, from sparrows to
bulls. Even today the gas, which is emitted irregularly,
kills sparrows that perch on the wire fence intended to keep
people out. Other temples of Apollo in Turkey, however, were
oracular, and they were built over active springs, such as
those at Didyma and Claros. A link clearly seemed to be
emerging between temples of Apollo and sites of geologic
activity.
The Perfect Gas
Although the newly discovered faults at Delphi indicated
that gases and spring water could have reached the surface
through cracks that the faults created in the ground below
the temple, they did not explain the generation of the gases
themselves. De Boer, however, had observed travertine
deposits, flows of calcite laid down by spring water,
coating the slopes above the temple and even an ancient
retaining wall. These flows suggested to him that the water
had risen through deep layers of limestone to the surface,
where it had deposited calcite mineralizations (a phenomenon
also seen at Hierapolis in Turkey). A search through Greek
geologic studies of Mount Parnassus revealed that among the
Cretaceous rock formations in the vicinity of the temple
were layers of bituminous limestone that had a petrochemical
content as high as 20 percent.
A link clearly seemed to be emerging between temples of
Apollo and sites of geologic activity.
De Boer now began to see a system taking shape. Faults,
which were well exposed on the uplifted slopes of Mount
Parnassus, had cut through bituminous limestone. Movement
along the faults created friction that heated the limestone
to a point at which the petrochemicals vaporized. They then
rose along the fault with the spring water, especially at
points where the presence of cross-faulting made the rock
more permeable. Over time, gas emissions would decrease as
calcitic crusts clogged the spaces inside the fault, only to
be restored with the next tectonic slip.
De Boer's reasoning seemed in accord with the findings of
the early 20th-century French archaeologists, who had
finally reached bedrock under the adyton a few years after
the publication of Oppé's article. Beneath a stratum of
brown clay, they encountered rock that was "fissured by the
action of the waters." We believe that faulting and
fracturing rather than water may have created these
fissures, although groundwater may have widened them over
time; in early attempts to reach bedrock, the French
archaeologists noted that the holes kept filling up with
water. We also believe that the visible chasm in the adyton
may have been a gaping fissure that extended into the layer
of clay above the faulted bedrock.
As careful geologic research and reasoning solved riddle
after riddle, we were still left with the question of what
gases might have emerged. De Boer learned that geologists
working in the Gulf of Mexico had analyzed gases that
bubbled up along submerged faults. They had found that
active faults in this area of bituminous limestone were
producing light hydrocarbon gases such as methane and
ethane. Could the same have been true at Delphi?
To find out, we asked for permission to take samples of
spring water from Delphi, along with samples of the
travertine rock laid down by ancient springs. We hoped to
discover in this porous rock traces of the gases that were
brought to the surface in earlier times. At this point,
Chanton, who is a chemist, joined the team. In the
travertine samples collected by de Boer and Hale, he found
methane and ethane, the latter a decomposition product of
ethylene. Chanton then visited Greece to collect water
samples from springs in and around the oracle site. Analysis
of the water from the Kerna spring in the sanctuary itself
revealed the presence of methane, ethane and ethylene.
Because ethylene has a sweet odor, the presence of this gas
seemed to lend support to Plutarch's description of a gas
that smelled like expensive perfume.
To help interpret the possible effects of such gases on
human subjects in a confined space, one like the adyton,
Spiller, a toxicologist, became a member of the project. His
work with "huffers"--teenage drug users who get high on the
fumes from substances such as glue and paint thinner, most
of which contain light hydrocarbon gases--had shown a number
of parallels with the behavior reported for the trance state
of the Pythia.
Spiller uncovered even more parallels in the reports of
experiments on the anesthetic properties of ethylene carried
out more than half a century ago by pioneering American
anesthesiologist Isabella Herb. She had found that a 20
percent mixture of ethylene produced unconsciousness but
that lower concentrations induced a trance state. In most
cases, the trance was benign: the patient remained
conscious, was able to sit up and to respond to questions,
experienced out-of-body feelings and euphoria, and had
amnesia after being taken off the gas. But occasionally Herb
would see violent reactions, the patient uttering wild,
incoherent cries and thrashing about. Had a patient vomited
during such a frenzy and ingested some of the vomit into the
lungs, pneumonia and death would inevitably have followed.
Thus, according to Spiller's analysis, inhaling ethylene
could account for all the various descriptions of the pneuma
at Delphi--its sweet odor and its variable effects on human
subjects, including even the potential for death.
An Unexpected Inspiration
Two thousand years ago Plutarch was interested in
reconciling religion and science. As priest of Apollo, he
had to respond to religious conservatives who objected to
the notion that a god might use a fluctuating natural gas to
perform a miracle. Why not enter the woman's body directly?
Plutarch believed that the gods had to rely on the materials
of this corrupt and transitory world to accomplish their
works. God though he was, Apollo had to speak his prophecies
through the voices of mortals, and he had to inspire them
with stimuli that were part of the natural world. Plutarch's
careful observations and reporting of data about the gaseous
emissions at Delphi show that the ancients did not try to
exclude scientific inquiry from religious understanding.
The primary lesson we took away from our Delphic oracle
project is not the well-worn message that modern science can
elucidate ancient curiosities. Perhaps more important is how
much we have to gain if we approach problems with the same
broad-minded and interdisciplinary attitude that the Greeks
themselves displayed.
John Hale, Jelle de Boer, Jeff Chanton and Rick Spiller have
formed an interdisciplinary team to investigate the Delphic
oracle. Hale, an archaeologist at the University of
Louisville, has written two previous articles for Scientific
American. De Boer is a professor of geology at Wesleyan
University. Chanton, a chemist, teaches in the department of
oceanography at Florida State University, and toxicologist
Spiller is director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center.
--
Dan Clore
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o8TY
[Snip]
Delphi was predicated upon mushroom worship. The geography of the site is
the nearest in Greece to the identity of the sacred mushroom. It has
parallels with the grin of the Chesire cat.