Sisters of Fate : The Myths that Speak Themselves [1 ed.] 9781443844475, 9781443842181

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Sisters of Fate

Sisters of Fate: The Myths that Speak Themselves

By

Michael Thomas Hudgens

Sisters of Fate: The Myths that Speak Themselves, by Michael Thomas Hudgens This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Michael Thomas Hudgens All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4218-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4218-1

To my parents

Nous ne prétendons donc pas montrer comment les hommes pensent dans les mythes mais comment les mythes se pensent dans les hommes, et á leur insu. —Claude Lévi-Strauss Mythologiques I, Le cru et le cuit

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Part I: At the Edge of the World Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 Fate and Destiny Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 Richard Wagner and the Women of Fate Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 21 The Vantage from Outside of Time Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 41 Time and the Wheel of Fortune Part II: At the Center of the World Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 53 Socrates and the Oracle at Delphi Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 63 Plutarch on Daimons Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 71 Strabo the Geographer Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 77 The Vapor Which Springeth from the Ground Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 89 The Adyton, Within and Without

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Table of Contents

Envoi........................................................................................................ 101 Index........................................................................................................ 103

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 2–1. Viking longboat sculpture, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2005 ................ 18 Fig. 3–1. The Last Judgment papyrus, 2001 .............................................. 24 Fig. 3–2. Alexander the Great sarcophagus (detail), Istanbul, 2012.......... 29 Fig. 3–3. Socrates, Athens, 2006 ............................................................... 38 Fig. 4–1. Time and the Wheel, 2010 ......................................................... 43 Fig. 5–1. Sanctuary, or Adyton, is at center right, 2006 ............................ 53 Fig. 5–2. Ascending Mount Parnassus to the temple, 2006....................... 54 Fig. 5–3. The site was reassembled, 2006 ................................................. 54 Fig. 5–4. The Temple of Athena, 2006...................................................... 55 Fig. 5–5. Parnassus, 2006 .......................................................................... 56 Fig. 6–1. Plutarch, Athens, 2006 ............................................................... 63 Fig. 7–1. Omphalos among the Delphi ruins, 2006 ................................... 72 Fig. 7–2. One of several depositories at Delphi, 2006............................... 74

PREFACE Here before you is a study of a few special women of antiquity who were purveyors of prophecy. The feminine principle is in evidence as the women tried to follow natural law and to recognise the integrity and goodness in human nature. Despite phenomena and attendant superfluities often surrounding accounts of these women, they were not deities. Some worked in the supernatural, others did not. The outcome was, their prophecies were intended to prompt men to make decisions and to take action. The will of men was presumed to be free, and as to prophecy, men had an option: take it or leave it. Some rejected the prophecy, and others, like Macbeth, should have. One argument made in these pages is that the control of these women over events was indirect, suggestion rather than supernatural. The first half of the study, “At the Edge of the World,” considers Shakespeare’s three witches—actually “wild women” in Shakespeare’s source, Holinshed––forest creatures on the “blasted heath.” This is followed by a pair of rather incredible spirits from the films of Akira Kurosawa; and then, by the goddess Erda and her daughters, the Norns, of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung. The second half of the study, “At the Center of the World,” is devoted to the priestesses of Delphi, the Pythia, who were speakers for Apollo. A powerful humanistic element can be discerned in their prophecies, adding support to an argument that these women were actually competent political analysts, with help from Plutarch and others at Delphi who kept them apprised of events in the known world. The Oracle at Delphi operation, it turns out, was more media than mystery. But good media. Doing the right thing was paramount, and a fair number of their prophecies were squarely on the mark. The book ends with a description of a piece of cloth on a simple loom. The horizontal threads, or woof, run in layers along the warp, the vertical threads. Woof is past action, warp is time. Action intersects time. That which is already woven no longer changes, but new actions are constantly appearing, changing the cloth with new forms, waiting to be read by the Sisters of Fate. Harbour of Rhodes, 9 May 2012

PART I: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER ONE FATE AND DESTINY

Men think in myths, as myths think themselves out in men. Instances of this declaration by Lévi-Strauss (Mythologiques I 1983, 20) are found in certain female figures associated with predetermination. One example would be the Fates of Greek mythology, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who are said to decide one’s destiny as they deal good and evil at birth. Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis determines the length, and Atropos severs it. In Nordic myth, the Norns, often identified as Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, function differently because the rope they spin is made up of the strands of past, present, and future. They see what is to come but do not change it. They would if they could. Instead, they warn, like the priestesses at Delphi speaking for the god Apollo. This study examines the destinies described and acted upon by diverse Sisters of Fate and how they intersect the freedomʊor the lack of itʊof mankind to make decisions and take action. Prominent on this continuum are Shakespeare’s three women of the “blasted” heath, poised to waylay the future king of Scotland, and singing the words, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1,11). Macbeth doth come. The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters1 of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about, Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, And thrice again, to make up nine. (1.3, 31–36)

Macbeth, approaching the moor with Banquo, says, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (Ibid., 38). Banquo is repelled by the women:

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swift travellers

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Chapter One What are these, So wither’d and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth, And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught That man may question2? By each one her choppy finger laying Upon her skinny lips. You should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (Ibid., 39–46)

Macbeth tells them to speak “if you can,” and they utter the wordsʊthe prophecyʊthat will change the history of Scotland: FIRST WITCH All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis! SECOND WITCH All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! THIRD WITCH All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter! (Ibid., 48–50)

Macbeth’s reaction is noted by Banquo: Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair?

In the ten lines following, Banquo raises the question of control: I’ th’ name of truth, Are you fantastical3, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner You greet with present grace4 and great prediction Of noble having and of royal hope, That he seems rapt withal5. To me you speak not. If you can look into the seeds of time6 And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favors nor your hate. (Ibid., 51–61)

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confer with creatures of fantasy 4 honor 5 spellbound at the thought 6 genesis of events (notes 1–6 are from the Harbage The Complete Pelican Shakespeare.) 3

Fate and Destiny

5

To “look into the seeds of time” is not to shape events but merely to read them. The term weird sisters, “the goddesses of destinie,” as stated in Holinshed (1808, 268), suggests they can do more. If they control fate, they possess the power to predetermine events. The witches make it clear that Banquo, even though “lesser” by birth than Macbeth, is the better man: FIRST WITCH Hail! SECOND WITCH Hail! THIRD WITCH Hail! FIRST WITCH Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. SECOND WITCH Not so happy, yet much happier. THIRD WITCH Thou shalt get7 kings, though thou be none. So all hail, Macbeth and Banquo! FIRST WITCH Banquo and Macbeth, all hail! (Ibid., 62ʊ69)

Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, one of Shakespeare’s sources for Macbeth, appeared in 1577, and Macbeth was first performed in 1611, according to Harbage (1969, 1107). In Holinshed the sisters are not witches but “creatures of the elder world.” Understandably, it was Shakespeare’s duty as a dramatist to keep his audiences at the Globe at least as spellbound as Macbeth, and the decision to depict the sisters as grotesques not only was good for business but would create empathy for Macbeth in spite of his misdeeds. It is this scrim of ambiguity that often veils Shakespeare’s work and enriches it. Holinshed’s history sheds light on whether the sisters are passive or active, on looking as opposed to controlling. Holinshed reports the encounter as “a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland”: It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other companie, saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund8, there met them thrée women in 7 8

beget open place in an otherwise wooded area

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Chapter One strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said; "All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis" (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father . . . ). The second of them said; "Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder." But the third said; "All haile Makbeth that héerafter shalt be king of Scotland."

The response from Banquo in Holinshed is not a reaction to Macbeth but to his own hurt feelings at being slighted. Then Banquho; “What manner of women (saith he) are you, that séeme so little fauourable vnto me, whereas to my fellow heere, besides high offices, ye assigne also the kingdome, appointing foorth nothing for me at all?” “Yes (saith the first of them) we promise greater benefits vnto thée, than vnto him, for he shall reigne in déed, but with an vnluckie end: neither shall he leaue anie issue behind him to succéed in his place, where contrarilie thou in déed shalt not reigne at all, but of thée those shall be borne which shall gouerne the Scotish kingdome by long order of continuall descent.” Herewith the foresaid women vanished immediatlie out of their sight. (1808, 268)

In the hours that follow, Banquo and Macbeth try to treat the prophecies lightly: But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken. (Ibid.)

The attributes of nymphs and fairies do not include “beards” or “choppy” (chapped) fingers on “skinny lips.” Only their apparel ʊand indeed, their demeanorʊ is “strange and wild.” As to Holinshed’s use of the term weird sisters, Tolman (1905, 89) posits this argument: “In Anglo-Saxon literature, ‘Wyrd’ is the name of the personified goddess of fate. Wyrd is ‘the lord of every man.’ The word is also a common noun; each man has his own wyrd, or destiny.” So it is in Beowulf, chapter 6, ”Fares Wyrd as she must,” and in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 3.617: “But O, Fortune, executrice of

Fate and Destiny

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wierdes9,” and in The Legend of Good Women, 2580 (9.19): “The Wirdes, that we clepen10 Destinee.” “In the second of these lines we have a personification,” Tolman points out, “but the conception is of more than one Wyrd”: The word weird, as has been said, was taken into modern English from Macbeth. Its significance, however, has not been understood. The word in its present use is an adjective, and has a range of meaning indicated by the words wild, mysterious, uncanny, ghostly; weird in Macbeth was vaguely felt to express this combination of ideas.

Shakespeare’s three women, Tolman believes, connect to Nordic myth: In the Scandinavian mythology, as it was preserved in Iceland, “Urthr” was the eldest and most prominent of the three Norns, or sister-Fates. The loss of an initial w disguises the identity of the word with the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fate, “Wyrd.” Both words are to be connected with the Latin vertere, the German werden, the Icelandic vertha, and the Anglo-Saxon weorthan. Apparently because the name “Urthr” is made from that form of the verbal stem which appeared in the plural of the past tense, this goddess came to be looked upon especially as the fate of the past (des Gewordenes).

Tolman mentions a source who argues that it was bungling word-play of the twelfth century which first gave to the two sisters of Urthr, the fates of present and future, the names “Verthandi” (Pronounced werthandi—die Werdende), the goddess of that which is now coming to be—from the same verb as “Urthr” and “Skuld” (allied to shall, soll ). The three Norns guard one of the three roots of Ygdrasil, the great Ash-tree of Existence. Urthr and Verthandi, the Past and Present, stretch a web from east to west, “from the radiant dawn of life to the glowing sunset, and Skuld, the Future, tears it to pieces.” The weird sisters, therefore, is a phrase which means “the fate sisters,” or the Sister Fates. Schmidt’s explanation of weird, in his ShakespeareLexicon, as “subservient to Destiny,” fails to bring out the dignity of the word both in Holinshed and Shakespeare. The weird sisters are not subservient to Destiny; they are destiny.

Is Tolman correct? Do they act or do they only see? 9

fates, destinies call

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8

Chapter One

He propounds a compelling argument when he says that the sisters address Macbeth and Banquo “as the Norns of the Past, Present, and Future. This fact, which seems to be true in a general way of their speeches in Holinshed, comes out very clearly in Shakespeare.” Over Shakespeare’s dialogue, Tolman inserts the names of the Norns, explaining the present tense of the second line: This title the king is now bestowing upon him, perhaps at this very instant. In Holinshed, it is “shortlie after”’ the three women meet the two warriors that the king honors Macbeth by making him thane of Cawdor: URTHR, THE PAST All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis! VERTHANDI, THE PRESENT All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor! SKULD, THE FUTURE All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!

The same interpretation can be applied to the Banquo prophecies, Tolman believes, pointing out that Banquo is lesser by birth than Macbeth, cousin to the king, and greater in integrity because Macbeth’s ambition will corrupt him: URTHR, THE PAST Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. VERTHANDI, THE PRESENT Not so happy, yet much happier. SKULD, THE FUTURE Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.

Finally, Tolman gives a rebuttal to his position and then defends it: It may be that Shakespeare’s exact division of the roles into Past, Present, and Future, is in a measure accidental, being suggested by Holinshed in the case of the speeches to Macbeth, and simply repeated in the words addressed to Banquo. It seems probable, however, that the careful distinction observed here between the three Norns is intentional. That “the weird sisters” are those “creatures of the elder world,” the mighty goddesses of destiny, can hardly be questioned. (Ibid., 95)

Fate and Destiny

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Richard Wagner’s representation of the Norns in his tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen is given consideration in the next chapter of this study.

References Harbage, A., ed. 1969. William Shakespeare: The complete works. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Holinshed, R. 1808. Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 5. London: J. Johnson. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1983. “Le cru et le cuit,” Mythologiques I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tolman, A. H. 1905. “The weird sisters.” The views about Hamlet and other Essays. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER TWO RICHARD WAGNER AND THE WOMEN OF FATE

Aficionados of Opera became roiled by Wagner’s four-opera Ring of the Nibelungs long after the 1876 premiere because of political events in a rapidly changing world. Nazi Party strategists believed they saw their übermensch in Wagner’s four tales, and the fact that Wagner was known to be anti-Semitic1 helped support their case. But this is secondary to the work itself, and Wagner’s decisions with his Ring are laudable. His choices bring northern mythology to the masses. Incorporating Germanic myth gives dimension to his Women of Fateʊthe Norns, and specifically the goddess ErdaʊErda with an e, Wagner’s spelling, Erda for earth2. The plot of Wagner’s Ring is straightforward (in the manner of an arrow traveling a very great distance): Alberich the dwarf steals from the careless Rhinemaidens the Rheingold that has the power to give him control of the world. Then the custodian of the world, the god Wotan, identified with Odin, takes the gold from Alberich. Erda warns Wotan: the Ring will be your destruction. He refuses to return it to the Rhinemaidens and thus brings about not only his undoing but that of the Norse pantheon. Not entirely is it greed or ambition leading him to do this; Wotan is trying to save his race of gods. To this end, he has built Valhalla to convene the best of the world’s warriors for a future battle that he believes would assure survival of his kind. In recent years, the mention of Wagner has led to a discussion of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose role is tangential to this. It is known that Tolkien detested Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, and even though he denied it, The Lord of the Rings can be seen as his response. Tolkien claimed that the only thing the two have in common is a ring and, “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases” (Birzer 2001). 1

Some of his invective against Jews appears to have been directed toward one individual, German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864); his work, however, influenced Wagner. 2 In ancient Greece, Gaia is the earth mother.

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Chapter Two

Not quite. With Lord of the Rings, admirable though it is, Tolkien was trying to shoot a flaming arrow at the planet Jupiter (Through an astronomer’s telescope, it would have been only a small puff of smoke among Jupiter’s swirling rings). In Wagner, Alberich crafts a gold ring that gives great power; in Tolkien, it is Sauron who does this. In both works, the ring would give world domination to the possessor, and in both it finally betrays its possessor. In Wagner, the giant Fafner commits murder to get the ring, in Tolkien, it is Smeagol-Gollum. Both Fafner and Gollum hide in a cave for centuries. In each work, a son inherits the shards of his father’s swordʊSiegfried in Wagner, Aragorn in Tolkien. In both, an immortal woman gives up immortality for love, and in both, the world is renouncedʊby Wagner’s gods and by Tolkien’s elves. In both, the ring is returned to its origin, to the Rhine in Wagner, to Mount Doom in Tolkien. Finally, in both, the world enters a new era. The outcome? Destruction of the old order, brought about by selling out for the power that the Ring can bestow on its possessor. Audiences in Wagner’s day would have recognised his gods as the European hierarchy of Church and state, committing a fatal error by making a bad bargain (Spengler 2003). It is not insignificant that Tolkien chose to cast his story another way, with the hierarchy trying to correct the error. When Ring of the Nibelungs premiered in 1876, it quickly gained a sizable following, in large part because of fairly widespread sentiment for a new world order. This had begun with the European Revolutions of 1848 and swept across the continent in the 28 years that followed. Wagner, like others, had played to this feeling in some of his previous work, and he brought it to the Ring as well. It was probably inevitable that 44 years after the Ring’s premiere a minor regional figure named Hitler would use the opera to sanction his dogma. Hitler and Herman Goebbels got it wrong, as they did with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche; they skimmed the surface, taking what appeared to fit their ideas about an übermensch. The cynicism and irony implicit in Nietzsche flew far over the heads of Hitler and Goebbels. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. What appears to have set him most on edge were elements of paganism he saw in Wagner: the old religion, headed by the god Wotan, being replaced by something new, a religion without a god. The old order is dying in Wagner, it is true, but the second part of Tolkien’s argument does not stand up because a new world order never comes into being. Had Siegfried survived in the final opera Götterdämmerung,

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the Twilight of the Gods, Tolkien would have a target. Siegfried would be viewed as representing a new world order, but then, so would his parents, the Walsung twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, or the Valkyrie Brunhilde. But they all perish, along with the old gods. Still, Siegfried is the best candidate for the chosen one, and this becomes evident as he crafts his new sword, which he calls Notung, not from the shards of the old sword but the filingsʊthe splinters of it (Spengler 2003). He had cut down a mighty ash tree and burned the trunk until it turned to charcoal. He piled it high and pumps the bellows. Alas, though, Siegfried has to die. In Act III, next-to-last scene of Götterdämmerung, he is murdered, speared in the back. And what of the sword Notung? With nobody left to wield it, the sword turns out to be a red herring—certainly not the only one in Wagner. Unlike Tolkien’s work, the closing of Wagner’s Ring ends in despair. These are Wagner’s stage directions, his own words, for the closing of Götterdämmerung: The layer of dark cloud on the horizon is riven by a reddish glow that grows brighter. . . . The roof and walls of the hall have collapsed, and from the ruins the men and women stare in intense wonder at the fire spreading across the heavens. As the light reaches its utmost brightness, the hall of Valhalla can be seen in its midst, with the gods and heroes seated there, exactly as described by Waltraute in Act One. Bright flames are seen to invade the hall. When the gods are completely engulfed in the fire, the curtain falls. (Wagner, Metropolitan Opera, 1990)

No phoenix rises out of those ashes. But Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (IMDB 2012) closes auspiciously. The Hobbit Frodo, by all appearances the polar opposite of the heroic Siegfried, says, “I wish the Ring had never come to me! I wish none of this had happened!” Gandalf the wizard replies, “So do all that come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” Not unlike Hemingway: we soldier on. And Tolkien’s elf-queen, instead of accepting the ring and preserving her power, says, “I will remain Galadriel, and I will diminish” (Ibid.). Both works stand alone, of course. Tolkien’s Ring is not derivative, but what he ends up doing, he never intended: he makes Wagner even more accessible, just as Wagner had made Norse myth accessible. According to Spengler (2003): Tolkien has taken back Wagner’s Ring. That may be his greatest accomplishment, and a literary accomplishment without clear precedent.

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Chapter Two To be sure, The Lord of the Rings is not a great work of literature to be compared to Cervantes or Dostoyevsky. But it is a great landmark of culture nonetheless. Its revival in a reasonably faithful cinematic version has far-reaching effects on the popular mind.

Both Tolkien and Wagner serve up their feasts rather nicely, on disparate silver platters. And the two works are compatible, which hit home with the author of this study, seeing the reaction of students to both Rings. It was one of those epiphanies that come along in university teaching. Students of a philosophy class, having viewed the 1990 Met version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, immediately started talking about Peter Jackson’s film Lord of the Rings. Naturally, the students would connect the two, since both were about rings, but several were aware of the enormity of Wagner’s work and the continuum he covered. They felt greater empathy with the Tolkien characters yet sensed the grandeur of Wagner’s gods. Some picked up on the subtleties in Das Rheingold, the humor between Wotan, Alberich, and the fire deity Loge3. Would the students’ perception of Wagner have been possible without Tolkien?4 Interestingly, a couple of musically inclined students pointed out Wagner’s extensive use of the leitmotif in The Ring and how these were associated with specific characters as well as objects like Wotan’s spearstaff and Siegfried’s sword. These miniature themes also denote certain subplots in the operas. In similar fashion, numerous films, including the 1960 Magnificent Seven (a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai) successfully used the leitmotif as a marker for major characters and other filmmakers followed suit. The class considered how Wagner reached back to the ancient Tree of Life, Yggdrasill, from which Wotan cut his spear-staff. This is from the Völuspàʊthe Prophecy of the Seeress: I know an ash stands, named Yggdrasill, a high tree, washed with white clay; from it come the dews that fall in the valleys 3

Equivalent to Loki, a trickster not unlike Kokopelli, the Hopi flute-player. In the author’s Medieval studies c. 1978 Tolkien was one of our major commentators; however, several of us read his Ring for enjoyment.

4

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it stands ever-green over Spring of the Past. (Völuspà 2001, 33)

When Yggdrasill was alive, its roots and branches had extended throughout the universeʊto the heavens, to the underworld. Next, in the Völuspà, under the heading “The Maidens of Fate”: From there come the much-knowing maidens, three from the sea that lies under the tree: one was named Past another Present ʊthey carved in woodʊ and Future the third; they laid down the law, they chose lives for the children of men, people’s fates. (Ibid., 34)

These, of course, are the Norns, usually identified as Urd, Verdandi, and Skuldʊpast, present, and future. Carved in wood is a general description; “wood” also means “plank,” as found in one’s domicile and upon which family events were customarily recorded, particularly in Norway. Carved in wood is equivalent to cast in stone. According to Persson (2012): Oftentimes the nornor are named as evil, fiendish and vile. The original meaning of the word “norna” is a matter of great dispute. In their fatesettling context it has been connected to the Swedish dialect word “norna” (nyrna), a verb that means “inform secretly.” Another etymology ties the word to an Indo-European root “ner,” which means “twist” or “twine.” Behind this meaning of the word the conception about the thread of destiny, which the nornor twist and twine. In the cosmic visions in Voluspá the nornor appear as universal powers. Their abode is next to the spring at the foot of Yggdrasil. There are three of them, and their names are Urd, Skuld and Verdandi. Their power is great: they decide the destiny of all humans and the laws of cosmos.

In Wagner’s Ring the presence of the Women of Fate and that of their mother Erda are among the compelling scenes of the tetralogy. He brings in Erda from the Germanicʊand she and the women cohere so well in terms of the story that audiences always want more of them. Persson says,

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Chapter Two Of those mentioned in [Voluspá] it is only Urd who stands out as a genuine power of destiny. As such she is of particular interest. It is characteristic for the shifts in the belief in destiny that Urd not only was perceived as a personal entity of destiny, but also as the consequence of destiny, as the dark destiny and its result: death. (Ibid.)

In Wagner’s account as in others, the three sisters twine the strands of destiny with the purpose of throwing out the rope in a certain direction, setting the scope of the individualʊeven demarcating lands to be conquered. In the prologue to the final Ring opera Götterdämmerung, one of the NornsʊSkuld, the futureʊintends to cast the rope to the north, but it is shortʊtoo shortʊand suddenly snaps. Yet, all along the sisters had known that it would. Seeing the strands asunder only confirms what Erda had said, that the gods are doomed. Maybe it was miscalculation by Wagner that Erda, one of his most compelling creations in the Ring, appears only twice. The first time is a warning to Wotan, and the warning is significant in this study: she says that impending events could be reversed, that Wotan is not doomed by fate to destroy himself. Wotan has free will. In the 1990 Met production, Erda, who represents what was, comes up out of the ground, covered in frostʊperhaps the frost of the ice age. In what is a major musical point of the Ring, Erda, sings. The eternal world’s first ancestress, Erda, warns you. . . All that is shall come to an end A dark day dawns for the gods I charge you, shun the Ring!

Wotan chooses not to do so. Later, he returns and calls her up again. He wants her to tell him the future, but it is too late, and he knows it. Wagner describes her in his stage directions: Light gathers at the cave-vault, a bluish gleam illuminates the figure of Erda rising very slowly out of the depths behind. She appears to be covered in hoarfrost; her hair and clothing give off an icy shimmer.

Erda has no answer for him5.

5

The response is not amphibilous, with the dual meaning characteristic of the Delphic Oracle.

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My sleep is dreaming; my dreaming, brooding; my brooding, working of Wisdom. But while I sleep the Norns are waking; they wind the rope and truly weave what I know: the Norns will give Thee answer.

The prologue to the final opera Götterdämmerung has the three Norns, described in Wagner’s synopsis as “daughters of the wise primeval mother Erda,” spinning the “golden rope of world-knowing, twining together the strands of the past, the present and the future.” Once upon a time, this same rope had been tied to Yggdrasill, but when Wotan cut a branch to make his spear-shaft, the tree was fatally wounded, and its “foliage faded and fell.” In the synopsis for Götterdämmerung, By his order the dead tree was felled recently, and its logs piled around Valhalla, in readiness for the destruction of the gods’ great hall by fire. Weaving their knowledge into the rope in turn, the Norns are at pains to tie it to branches and rocks to keep it taut. The threads tangle and the Norns recall Alberich’s theft of the gold; the rope is damaged by the sharp edge of a rock, and their attempt to draw it tight again breaks it.

And the stage directions that follow are Wagner’s words: The Norns rise in horror and move together to the center of the stage: they take the pieces of the rope and use them to tie their own bodies together.

They sing: Our eternal knowledge is at an end! The world will know nothing more of our wisdom Down! To mother! Down!

The 11th century might be said to mark the end of the Norse gods, at least according to Garrison Keillor (2007) writing about Vikings in one of his essays.

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Chapter Two [T]he Vikings were expert woodworkers, which was how they were able to discover America 400 years before Columbus. Their ships were well built; it is amazing that they survived the ravages of the North Atlantic with their shallow draft that enabled sailing close to shore. And when St. Olaf converted them to Christianity in the 11th century and they swung away from Odin and Freja and Thor and the skaldic sagas and took up the epistles of St. Paul, they gave up domination by force and learned the art of passive aggression.

Fig. 2–1.Viking longboat sculpture, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2005 (all photos by the author)

References Birzer, Bradley J. 2001.“Both rings were round.” ISI Lecture. Tolkien, Wagner, Nationalism, and Modernity-Lecture Archive. Accessed September 3, 2012. www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/birzer.pdf. Keillor, Garrison. 2007. “Isn’t it good, Norwegian oil.” Salon.Accessed September 4, 2012. www.salon.com/2007/07/18/keillor_99/ Persson, Johannes. 2008. “Nornor and Disir.” Accessed September 4, 2012. http://stavacademy.co.uk/mimir/nornordisir.htm Spengler, Oswald. 2003. “The ‘Ring’ and Remnants of the West.” Asia Times (Taiwan) Accessed September 4, 2012. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EA11Aa02.html Tolkien, J. R. R. 1978. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Richard Wagner and the Women of Fate

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—. Internet Movie Script Database. 2012. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Accessed September 4, 2012. http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Lord-of-the-Rings-Fellowship-of-theRing,-The.html Völuspà, the Prophecy of the Seeress, or The Prophecy. Tr. Bernard Scudder. Reykjavik, Iceland: Gunrun., 2001. Print. Wagner, Richard. 1990. Wagner’s Ring at the Met: Götterdämmerung. Notes. New York: The Metropolitan Opera.

CHAPTER THREE THE VANTAGE FROM OUTSIDE OF TIME

To read events yet to occur in the lives of men, Erda and the Norns and the three wild women of Macbeth would be outside of time, a state described by Augustine, AD 354–430. Augustine is said to have welcomed skeptical challenges to his beliefs and would often answer them with the kind of reasoning seen some 875 years later in Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica and other works. The Is-God-Omniscient argument was well known to Augustine and attributed to Epicurus (341 BC – 270 BCE): Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Augustine responded to it in Confessions (1998, 229), saying that God is outside of time and that the array of events occurring in human existence is contained in what might be only a split-second. It is of no small significance that he and the later Church Fathers insisted that each event could be changed by its participants. Free will, in other words. This can be seen in the Book of Job, sometimes overlooked as an example of free will—that of Job. And Yahweh is seen both outside of time and within it. In a theophany such as the face-off with Job, Yahweh has entered time. The Book of Job has a prominent place in wisdom literature, among other instructional texts including Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Solomon, as well as earlier writings going back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians. One example is The Maxims of Ptahhotep (2012), a text written around 2400 BCE by a vizier of the same name for young men of the ruling class who would soon hold high office. Ptahhotep’s aphorisms advocate veneration of one’s father as the highest virtue—and all superiors—with great emphasis on humility and integrity.

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The Book of Job is made up of prose and poetry, the prose usually dated as originating before the sixth century BCE and the poetry afterwards. Who wrote Job is not known, and two writers seem likely. The text reflects someone at least familiar with Hebrew literature and who was well traveled, based on references to locales outside of the Holy Land, including Egypt (Durant 1954, 343–46). Job is described in the King James Version prologue as “a blameless and upright man . . . who feared God and avoided evil.” With his vast holdings, “he was greater than any men of the East.” His ten children, seven sons and three daughters, gave him such grief with their partying and drinking that he “would send for them and sanctify them, rising early and offering holocausts1 for every one of them.” He did this “habitually,” saying, “It may be that my sons have sinned and blasphemed God in their hearts.” In heaven, Yahweh, outside of time, convenes the heavenly council of angels. Among their number is one designated as Satan, a title for adversary, whose duties appear less satanic than angelic—specifically, those of a recording angel. Yahweh asks him, “Whence do you come?” and the answer is, “From roaming the earth and patrolling it.” Yahweh asks him, “Have you noticed my servant Job, and that there is no one on earth like him, blameless and upright, fearing God and avoiding evil?” But Satan answered the Lord and said, “Is it for nothing that Job is God-fearing? Have you not surrounded him and his family and all that he has with your protection? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his livestock are spread over the land. But now put forth your hand and touch anything he has, and surely he will blaspheme you to your face.” (1.7–11)

Yahweh gives Satan permission to take everything from Job but in the next verse warns him not to “lay a hand upon his person.” So it is. Job first loses his earthly goods and then his sons and daughters. But he remains steadfast. In the next section, Job’s three friends, who have Edomite names, arrive to console him, and it is here the poetic discourses begin. The friends argue that he’s being punished for sins. He rejects what they say and insists that he’s been faithful and upright. He asks, But what is man’s lot from God above, his inheritance from the Almighty on high? / Is it not calamity for the unrighteous, and woe for evildoers? /

1

Burnt offerings

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Does he not see my ways, and number all my steps? / Let God weigh me in the scales of justice; thus will he know my innocence! (31.2ʊ6)

The term Scales of justice suggests the Egyptian papyrus art known as The Last Judgment, said to have been displayed in the homes of ancient Egyptians and available today in Cairo art galleries and elsewhere. In six sections a figure clad in pleated linen appears three times and has been identified as Ani, a scribe associated with papyrus texts of The Book of the Dead (Wasserman 1993, Plates 3 and 4). In the top section, he is kneeling in front of fourteen gods, making offerings to them and declaring that he is not guilty of any sin that would keep him out of paradise. In the second section, he is taken by Anubis to the Scales of Justice. Anubis,2 with the head of the jackal, is the god of tomb protection. The process of mummification3 itself is protection and prevents the body of the deceased from disintegration. If kept intact, it will be recognizable to the spirit and thus serve as a place to reside. The spirit is called the kha — the letters being a reversal of the word akh, suggesting an object that is radiant and spiritual. The kha can be viewed as a carbon copy of the earthly body. If the bodily remains were destroyed, another likeness such as sculpture could serve as the resting place until judgment day. The thinking was, the more physical copies, the better, be they wood or stone, the better the chance of resurrection. In the third section of The Last Judgment papyrus, at the Scales of Justice the heart of the deceased has been placed in a canopic vessel and is being weighed against a feather. If the heart is pure, it will be lighter than the feather. In the papyrus, so it is, ever so slightly. In the fourth section, Thoth, with the head of an ibis, records the good news and orders passage for the deceased. He is “judge of truth,” the “lord of divine speech, the lord of divine books,” and the “Lord of Ma’at.”

2

In “The Family,” a text in The Book of the Dead,” this paragraph gives a sense of him: “Follow me,” said Anubis. “We’ll go a road few men have walked.” And the second speaker says, “In dark corridors we pass, a pair of jackals black as the black around us. We are beastly forms made beautiful in moonlight, beheld by gods, healed by gods’ eyes, held up by air streaming from their nostrils. Together we are twilight and dawn. I am the left eye and he is the right” (Ellis 1998, 209). 3 The Sahara Desert must have set the ancient Egyptians on the road to learning the mummification process. Bury a body in desert sand, and desiccation occurs. Something similar can be seen in Guanajuato, Mexico—Indian families buried in sand and preserved, intentional or not. The mummies repose behind glass in a basement below the cemetery of Guanajuato.

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Fig. 3–1. The Last Judgment papyrus, 2001

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In a passage from The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, he says, I have judged the heart of the deceased, and his soul stands as a witness for him. His deeds are righteous in the great balance, and no sin has been found in him. He did not diminish the offerings in the temples, he did not destroy what had been made, he did not go about with deceitful speech while he was on earth. (Ibid., Plate 3)

Had the feather outweighed the heart, the deceased would be condemned. Hunger and thirst would be the least of it; more likely is the prospect of being torn apart by a beast with the teeth of a crocodile, seen waiting at the scales for the verdict. In the fifth section, he is escorted by Horus, ruler of the sky and lord of heaven, to the final section before entering paradise. This last panel of the art would have the deceased standing before Osiris, the god of Paradise, the Lord of Eternity. But the deceased is not depicted entering; this is yet to come, and the artist leaves him at the threshold of the chamber where the god and two goddesses are waiting. Behind Osiris is Isis, goddess of love and his sister Nephtis, goddess of magic and beauty. This section of the papyrus shows some of the intricacy of Egyptian cosmology. Overlooking everything is the eye of Horus, protection against evil. The face of Osiris is green, the colour of life4. Osiris corresponds to life. He is celestial, the mortal pharaoh but a demigod at the same time. Like a pharaoh, Osiris holds crook and flail, the crook being the instrument of the shepherd and the flail a weapon and tool for threshing wheat. Crossed over his chest, they symbolize his function as leader, protector and provider. He wears the dual crown, white signifying upper Egypt—the southern part—the second crown surrounding it indicating Lower Egypt, the northern part of the country where all the branches of the Lower Nile empty into the Mediterranean. Chapter 38 is the climax of Job, a theophany, with Yahweh appearing in a whirlwindʊinside of time and delineating the totality of His creation, the cosmos. The poetry is elegant and full of anger at Job for having dared to question:

4

Sometimes, his face is black, the colour of earth, in particular the rich silt washed over the land by the flooding of the Nile.

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Chapter Three Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers. Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? 5 Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone, While the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy? And who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb; When I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling bands? When I set limits for it and fastened the bar of its door, And said: Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stilled! Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place For taking hold of the ends of the earth, till the wicked are shaken from its surface? The earth is changed as is clay by the seal, and dyed as though it were a garment; But from the wicked the light is withheld, and the arm of pride is shattered. Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in the depths of the abyss? Have the gates of death been shown to you, or have you seen the gates of darkness? Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell me, if you know all: Which is the way to the dwelling place of light, and where is the abode of darkness, That you may take them to their boundaries and set them on their homeward paths?

5

See William Blake’s illustrations for Job, in particular The Ancient of Days or God Creating the Universe.

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You know, because you were born before them, and the number of your years is great! Have you entered the storehouse of the snow, and seen the treasury of the hail Which I have reserved for times of stress, for the days of war and of battle? Which way to the parting of the winds, whence the east wind spreads over the earth? Who has laid out a channel for the downpour and for the thunderstorm a path To bring rain to no man’s land, the unpeopled wilderness; To enrich the waste and desolate ground till the desert blooms with verdure? Has the rain a father; or who has begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb comes the ice, and who gives the hoarfrost its birth in the skies, When the waters lie covered as though with stone that holds captive the surface of the deep? Have you fitted a curb to the Pleiades, or loosened the bonds of Orion? Can you bring forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or guide the Bear with its train? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens; can you put into effect their plan on the earth? Can you raise your voice among the clouds, or veil yourself in the waters of the storm? Can you send forth the lightnings on their way, or will they say to you, “Here we are”? Who counts the clouds in his wisdom? Or who tilts the water jars of heaven So that the dust of earth is fused into a mass and its clods made solid? (Job 38:2ʊ38)

Here, just before the end of Chapter 38, the lens is directed to the creatures of the earth and their reflection of Yahweh’s wisdom:

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Chapter Three Do you hunt the prey for the lioness or appease the hunger of her cubs, While they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in the thicket? Who puts wisdom in the heart, and gives the cock its understanding? Who provides nourishment for the ravens when their young ones cry out to God, and they rove abroad without food? (38:39ʊ41)

Among the animals mentioned in Chapter 39 is the ostrich, lacking divine understanding. The wings of the ostrich beat idly; her plumage is lacking in pinions. When she leaves her eggs on the ground and deposits them in the sand, Unmindful that a foot may crush them, She cruelly disowns her young and ruthlessly makes nought of her brood; For God has withheld wisdom from her and has given her no share in understanding. Yet in her swiftness of foot she makes sport of the horse and his rider. (39:13–18)

What follows is the legendary rendering of the war horse: Do you give the horse his strength, and endow his neck with splendor? Do you make the steed to quiver while his thunderous snorting spreads terror? He jubilantly paws the plain and rushes in his might against the weapons. He laughs at fear and cannot be deterred; he turns not back from the sword. Around him rattles the quiver, flashes the spear and the javelin. Frenzied and trembling he devours the ground; he holds not back at the sound of the trumpet, but at each blast he cries, “Aha!” Even from afar he scents the battle, the roar of the chiefs and the shouting. (39:19–25)

This brings to mind Bronowski’s account of the first horse in The Ascent of Man:

The Vantage from Outside of Time [R]ound about five thousand years ago, a new draught animal appearsʊthe horse. And that is out of all proportion faster, stronger, more dominant than any previous animal. . . .

Fig. 3–2. Alexander the Great sarcophagus (detail), Istanbul, 2012 The horse had begun by drawing wheeled carts, like the oxʊbut rather grander, drawing chariots in the processions of kings. And then, somewhere around 2000 BC, men discovered how to ride it. The idea must have been as startling in its day as the invention of the flying machine. For one thing, it required a bigger, stronger horseʊthe horse was originally quite a small animal and, like the llama of South America, could not carry a man for long. Riding as a serious use for the horse therefore begins in the

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Chapter Three nomad tribes that bred horses. They were men out of Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan and beyond; in the west they were simply called Scythians, as a collective name for a new and frightening creature, a phenomenon of nature.

Here, Bronowski’s description goes biblical: For the rider visibly is more than a man: he is head-high above others, and he moves with bewildering power so that he bestrides the living world. When the plants and animals of the village had been tamed for human use, mounting the horse was more than human gesture, the symbolic act over the total creation. We know that this is so from the awe and fear that the horse created again in historical times, when the mounted Spaniards overwhelmed the armies of Peru (who had never seen a horse) in 1532. So, long before, the Scythians were a terror that swept over the countries that did not know the technique of riding. The Greeks when they saw the Scythian riders believed the horse and the rider to be one; that is how they invented the legend of the centaur. Indeed, that other half-human hybrid of the Greek imagination, the satyr, was originally not part goat but part horse; so deep was the unease that the rushing creature from the east evoked. (1976, 79–80)

Chapter 40, the exchange between Yahweh and Job: The Lord then said to Job: Will we have arguing with the Almighty by the critic? Let him who would correct God give answer! Then Job answered the Lord and said: Behold, I am of little account; what can I answer you? I put my hand over my mouth. Though I have spoken once, I will not do so again; though twice, I will do so no more. (40:1–5)

Yahweh reminds Job who made the hippopotamus: Behold the strength in his loins, and his vigor in the sinews of his belly. He carries his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are like cables. His bones are like tubes of bronze; his frame is like iron rods. He came at the beginning of God’s ways, and was made the taskmaster of his fellows;

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For the produce of the mountains is brought to him, and of all wild animals he makes sport.. (40:15–20)

And His account of His creation of the crocodile is not without humor: Can you lead [him] about . . . with a hook, or curb his tongue with a bit? Can you put a rope through his nose, or pierce his cheek with a gaff? Will he then plead with you, time after time, or address you with tender words? Will he made an agreement with you that you may have him as a slave forever? Can you play with him, as with a bird? Can you put him leash for your maidens? (40:25–29). Finally, Job answers: I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes. (42:2–6)

Nevertheless, Job has made his point, and he knows it. And he knows that Yahweh has listened to him. Job’s freedom to decide comes from within. He is blameless and upright because he so chooses; he is the agent of his thoughts, his actions, and his words. There are classic instances of denial of free will. Among the best is an Argumentum Ad Misericordiam6 used by American attorney and death penalty opponent Clarence Darrow. On 22 May 1924, two university students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, killed 13-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago. It was Leopold who carried out the murder, a killing that was intended to be a “perfect crime.” Darrow defended the pair, and in his closing argument challenged free will:

6

misericordiam, literally “a pitying heart”

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Chapter Three I know that one of two things happened to Richard Loeb: that this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and came from some ancestor; or that it came through his education and his training after he was born. Do I need prove it? Judge Crowe said at one point in this case, when some witness spoke about their wealth7 that “probably that was responsible.” To believe that any boy is responsible for himself or his early training is an absurdity that no lawyer or judge should be guilty of today. Somewhere this came to the boy. If his failing came from his heredity, I do not know where or how. None of us are bred perfect and pure; and the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, our stature, the weight and fineness of our brain, and everything about us could, with full knowledge, be traced with absolute certainty to somewhere. If we had the pedigree it could be traced just the same in a boy as it could in a dog, a horse or a cow.

And to make certain the judge heard him the first time, Darrow repeats himself: I do not know what remote ancestors may have sent down the seed that corrupted him, and I do not know through how many ancestors it may have passed before it reached Dickie Loeb. All I know is that it is true, and there is not a biologist in the world who will not say that I am right. If it did not come that way, then I know that if he was normal, if he had been understood, if he had been trained as he should have been it would not have happened. Not that anybody may not slip, but I know it and Your Honor knows it, and every schoolhouse and every church in the land is an evidence of it. Else why build them? Every effort to protect society is an effort toward training the youth to keep the path. Every bit of training in the world proves it, and it likewise proves that it sometimes fails. I know that if this boy had been understood and properly trainedʊproperly for himʊand the training that he got might have been the very best for someone; but if it had been the proper training for him he would not be in this courtroom today with the noose above his head. If there is responsibility anywhere, it is back of him; somewhere in the infinite number of his ancestors, or in his surroundings, or in both. And I submit, Your Honor, that under every principle of natural justice, under every principle of conscience, of right, and of law, he should not be made responsible for the acts of someone else. (Closing Argument 2012).

7

The wealth of the Loeb family.

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It is a courtroom tactic verging on chicanery, especially as Darrow tilts toward the deific by speaking outside of time. With “ancestral corruption” he effectively dismisses the notion of free will. In any event, it worked. The judge spared Leopold and Loeb8. The suggestion that certain seers of fate9 are outside of time appears in Greek and Nordic myth, and in the Arthurian stories with Merlin and Morgan le Fay. It is found in twentieth-century work such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, filmed in 1992 and with a postmodern treatment by the director Sally Potter. In the Woolf text, Orlando is “not yet seventeen” in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and “the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run (16). Early in the nineteenth century, she is “a year or two past thirty” and “the lines of her character were fixed” (1928, 244). She is rapidly moving through time without aging. Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, and to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probably that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that. . . . (Ibid.)

The text ends in 1928, with Orlando in her thirties (1928, 329). Sally Potter’s film adaptation covers 400 years, with Orlando at age 33. It is as if Orlando, with events of the world unfolding at high speed around her, were inside a black hole, peering out. From outside of time, she travels in to participate. In J. K. Rowling’s 2003 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and in the 2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the fearless trio along with friends and foes are able to move outside of time. In the 1998 film Dark City, the messianic hero Murdoch continues to function when time and motion, including people, are frozen for an interval at the stroke of midnight, this being done in order for the world to be rearranged by its invaders.

8

Loeb died in prison, Leopold was paroled in 1958 and worked in a leper colony for the rest of his life. 9 And certain demigods, sometimes known as daemons.

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The concept becomes more intricate in such twenty-first century films as the 2001 Donny Darko, with the protagonist making a choice between two lines of time after determining that one of them will lead to catastrophe. The choice is based on the utilitarian calculus of Greatest Good for the Greatest Number. A rather striking example is found in a film of Akira Kurosawa, his 1957 Macbeth adaptation Throne of Blood. Kurosawa set his story in Medieval Japan during a time of civil war, 1392–1568 and, as in other Kurosawa films, the characters are Samurai, the tradition Noh10. Throne of Blood opens with stark images of the slopes of Mount Fuji, as a male chorus intones a lamentation: Behold, within this place Now deserted stood Once a mighty fortress, Lived a proud warrior Murdered by ambition His spirit walking still Vain pride, then as now will Lead ambition to the kill

The warrior is the counterpart of Macbeth. True to the spirit of Shakespeare, Kurosawa coined a phrase that is original: Macbeth is “murdered by ambition.” The words are prophecy and serve as introduction to a prophetess who appears a few scenes later in a dark wood. Instead of three sisters, there is one11, more androgynous than female and recognizable by many Japanese as a forest spirit. She speaks with two voices, female dominant and male minor, and sits in a hut, spinning silken thread and lamenting the state of mankind. She begins with generalization and eventually narrows down to the Macbeth figure standing before her. A transcript from the film’s English subtitles follows, but in Japanese she utters the word omoshiroi, which can be translated as “amusing” or “fascinating,” suggesting what she has seen time and again, the entertaining fall of man:

10

The Noh Theatre dates to the 12th century and is a stylized composition that uses music, masks, dance, and narrative to recount traditional folk stories. The elements, particularly the masks and music, are recognizable to the audience, who extracts the tale’s underlying meaning. 11 The actress Chieko Naniwa.

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FOREST SPIRIT All men are mortal, men are vain And pride dies first within the grave For hair and nails are growing still When face and fame are gone Nothing in this world will save Or measure up man’s actions here Nor in the next, for there is none This life must end in fear Only evil may maintain And after life those who will Who love this world, who have no son12 To whom ambition calls Even so, this false fame falls Death will reign: Man dies in vain

Macbeth’s ambition makes inevitable what is to happen, she’s saying, but the implication is, he could take another path, could do better for himself—and be better. He asks, “Who are you? A human being or an evil spirit?” And then, “You can sing. You must be able to talk too.” As she tells him what is to come, she sees that he is perturbed, his anger growing as he rejects the prophecy. Her dialogue that follows turns conversational: “I thought you would be delighted. Do you not want to take command of the castle? You mortals! Your behaviour is very mystifying. You want something and you act as if you do not want it.” The two men rush toward the hut in anger, but as they reach out to break it apart, the frame disintegrates and the Forest Spirit rises and disappears into the treetops of the forest, laughing. Where the hut stood, human bones are revealed, with helmets of battle on the skulls. With this discovery of those who have gone before them, it is as if Macbeth and Banquo have crossed a boundary. From here, they cannot go back. Their freedom—their free will—went the way of the prophetess. Free will is an issue in another of Kurosawa’s films, the 19-minute “Blizzard,” one of eight episodes in his 1990 Dreams. Here, mountain climbers are trying to retreat to their camp as a violent blizzard forms. Their movements seem to be in slow motion, and finally 12

Macbeth and his wife will be childless.

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they halt. One shouts, “Someone’s coming,” and another answers, “No one’s coming, it’s an illusion.” The men collapse in the snow and the leader warns them, “Don’t fall asleep. If you do, you’ll die.” Then he too goes down, drifting off as the shriek of the blizzard abruptly stops, suggesting that he is elsewhere— outside of time or that time has stopped. Something rouses him, someone over him, in white, a beautiful yukionna, a snow spirit from folklore who entered time to carry out a mission. She covers him with a sparkling blanket and says, “The snow is warm. The ice is hot.” He struggles to get up, and she pushes him down. He fights back, and the noise of the storm returns full blast. She rises above him, her face revealed again, this time not attractive but twisted and scowling. Like Kurosawa’s Forest Spirit, she rises in a swirl of wind and white robes. Back on his feet now, the leader revives each of his companions, and at that moment the blizzard begins to pass. The sky clears, and their flapping tent comes into view. The intentions13 of the yuki-onna are ambiguous. What is she? Satanic or angelic? How the mountaineers manage to survive is the riddle of the story: did the leader save himself and his men or was it the yuki-onna? Because she is seen for an instant trying to hold him down, first with words and then with her hands, one would think of her as malevolent, and that the leader is rejecting her and an inevitable death. The man has free will. But this is not clear. She could be an angel, materializing before the leader to make him save himself and the others. Her face contorted in torment as she rises into the sky suggests malevolence, but this is from the point of view of the leader. Either way, she is an external force controlling events, and this is fatalism, the essence of Greek tragedy. “A man’s character is his fate,” the troubling declaration of Heraclitus, is worked out—and worked over—in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. If Heraclitus were correct, Ecclesiastes 8:15— “A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry”ʊ could be the modus operandi of humankind. Not so in ancient Egypt, however. In another version of The Book of the Dead (Ellis 1998, 55) this declaration is found.

13

Misstated sometimes in the popular press.

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We are made of god stuff, the explosion of stars, particles of light molded in the presence of gods. The gods are with us.

These words attributed to the god Thoth are believed to date from about 2400 BCE. The Book of the Dead, first published in 1842 by German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, is more a celebration of life with many of its texts expressing our potential in our human form, being “made of god stuff.” The title sometimes used by the ancient Egyptians, The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, reflects the substance and spirit of the writings. A chapter in the Ani papyrus entitled “Coming Forth by Day,” begins with a vivid, outside-of-time moment: The forepaw of a lion, the forearm of a man, the primal ray of sun. I wake in the dark to the stirring of birds, a murmur in the trees, a flutter of wings. It is the morning of my birth, the first of many. The past lies knotted in its sheets asleep. Winds blow, flags above the temple ripple. Out of darkness the earth spins toward light. I feel a change coming. My thoughts flicker, glow a moment and catch fire. I come forth by day singing. (Ibid. 59)

The speaker is undergoing change, moving into a new and better state of being and leaving the past “knotted in its sheets asleep.” The transition, “It is the morning of my birth, the first of many,” is his incarnation and the words “I come forth by day singing” leaves little doubt as to an elevated state of being. From the chapter, called “Entering Truth”: I stand before the mirror looking back in time. I was born a man. Before that I was a god. I was with you when time began. I’ve not denied you. To do so would be to deny myself. Because I delight in fresh bread, the smell of clover and the thighs of women, I live; therefore, you live with me. We are the same—more than brothers. We are one heart, one fire. (Ibid. 189)

Pyramid art establishes that long before others the ancient Egyptians were expressing belief in the human soul and an afterlife. These concepts were already old when the predecessors of Socrates, the Milesian philosophers, started their studies about 585 BCE. Miletus, across the Aegean from Athens, is the “birthplace of philosophy,” says Samuel Enoch Stumpf (1999, 5). Their ideas and at least some of Egyptian cosmology must have been known to Socrates (470399 BCE), who changed the emphasis of philosophy

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from scientific explanations of the physical world to analysis of our lives, the effect of proper conduct or otherwise on our soul. Socrates, stonecutter’s son who himself worked in this vocation for some of his long life, argued that knowledge and numerous ideas are present in the soul’s consciousness before birth—and after death. In Plato’s “Phaedo” Socrates says, If the soul is really immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, but of eternity! And the danger of neglecting her from this point of view does indeed appear to be awful. If death had only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in dying, for they would have been happily quit not only of their body, but of their own evil together with their souls. But now, as the soul plainly appears to be immortal, there is no release of salvation from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom. For the soul when on her progress to the world below takes nothing with her but nurture and education; which are indeed said greatly to benefit or greatly to injure the departed, at the very beginning of its pilgrimage in the other world. (Cooper 1997, 103)

Fig. 3–3. Socrates, Athens, 2006

References Augustine. 1998. Confessions. New York: Oxford University Press. Bronowski, J. 1976. “The Harvest of the Seasons.” The Ascent of Man. London: Book Club Associates. Closing Argument. 2012. The State of Illinois v. Nathan Leopold & Richard Loeb. Accessed September 2, 2012. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/darrowclosing.html

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Cooper, John M., ed. 1997. Plato Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Dark City. DVD. Directed by Alex Proyas. 1998; Los Angeles: Mystery Clock Cinema, 1998. Donnie Darko. DVD. Directed by Richard Kelly. 2001; Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2001. Dreams. DVD. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1990; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1990. Durant, Will. 1954. Our Oriental Heritage. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ellis, Normandi. 1998. Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, DVD. Directed by Allfonso Cuaròn. 2004; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Directed by David Yates 2007; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007. The Maxims of Ptahhotep. 2012. Sofiatopia. Accessed August 30, 2012. www.sofiatopia.org/maat/Ancient_Egyptian_Wisdom_Readings.pdf Orlando. DVD. Directed by Sally Potter. 1992. Los Angeles, CA: Adventure Pictures, 2010. Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. 1999. Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy. East Syracuse, New York: McGraw-Hill. Throne of Blood. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1957: Tokyo: Toho Company. Wasserman, James, ed. 1994. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day. Translated by Raymond O. Faulkner. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Woolf, Virgina. 1928. Orlando. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

CHAPTER FOUR TIME AND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

One of the great epics of Hinduism, the Mahabharata, speaks of time’s destructiveness: “Time ripens the creatures, Time rots them.” The Second Law of Thermodynamics could be viewed as confirmation of this, stating that entropy, a measure of disorder, increases with time. Disorder can mean rearrangement rather than destruction. The creatures ripened and rotted by time become energy, and, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, “energy is never created or destroyed.” Might this mean that energy is eternal? Stephen Hawking, in the first pages of A Brief History of Time invokes St. Augustine: As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn’t reply [that] He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. (1988, 8)

In 1929 Edwin Hubble made the discovery that the universe is expanding, that the galaxies we see in the night sky are moving away from us. Hawking says, This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time, about ten or twenty thousand million years ago, when they were all at exactly the same place and when, therefore, the density of the universe was infinite. This discovery finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science. (Ibid.)

It all comes down to time and not-time. And not-time is outside of time. Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict

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Chapter Four the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. (Ibid. 89)

A beginning as well as a direction, thus bringing the discussion back to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Disorder increasing with time, according to Hawking, is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting. (Ibid.145)

In the shadow of the arrows one and two, however, there is the troublesome concept of eternity, infinite time. But this is oxymoron because if there is no beginning and no end, eternity is immeasurable and therefore it is timeless. Being timeless, how can eternity be time? Plato has one answer: time comes into being only after phenomena are produced. Not until things, real or not, are perceived can there be time. Prior to perception, Plato says, whatever is, is eternal. Therefore, eternity is unchanging, while time is not (1997, 98). They are not opposites, according to Plato, who says the cosmos contains the element of eternity, that it consists of temporary combinations of surfaces, and because of this, it contains the element of change and time. He goes further and considers the nature of cosmic change: it is uniform, the motion of the stars and planets being so regular that a person can tell time (Ibid. 119). Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time, Hawking says, and people held to this until the beginning of the twentieth century. That is, they believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of time between two events, and that this time would be the same whoever measured it, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separate from and independent of space. This is what most people would take to be the commonsense view. (1988, 18)

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No longer were time and space independent of each other, and we had to change our ideas about space and time. Although our apparently commonsense notions work well when dealing with things like apples, or planets that travel comparatively slowly, they don’t work at all for things moving at or near the speed of light. (Ibid.) The situation is quite different in the general theory of relativity. Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time— and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe. (Ibid. 33)

Fig. 4–1. Time and the Wheel, 2010

“Newton’s laws of motion,” Hawking adds, “put an end to the idea of absolute position in space. The theory of relativity gets rid of absolute time” (Ibid.). Bronowski has a good characterization of the two men, “who stride like gods. Of the two, Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure” (1976, 256). Newton, Bronowski says,

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Chapter Four had conceived the idea of a universal gravitation in the Plague year of 1666 and had used it, very successfully, to describe the motion of the moon round the earth. (Ibid. 229) As a system of the world, of course, it was sensational from the moment it was published. It is a marvellous description of the world subsumed under a single set of laws. But much more, it is also a landmark in scientific method. We think of the presentation of science as a series of propositions, one after another, as deriving from the mathematics of Euclid. And so it goes. But it is not until Newton turned this into a physical system, by changing mathematics from a static to a dynamic account, that modern scientific method begins to be rigorous. (Ibid. 233)

In a mere lifetime, Bronowski says, Einstein joined light to time, and time to space; energy to matter, matter to space, and space to gravitation. At the end of his life, he was still working to seek a unity between gravitation and the forces of electricity and magnetism. (Ibid. 256)

Hawking invokes Einstein’s paradox of twins aging at different rates according to where they live. [T]he difference in ages would be very small, but it would be much larger if one of the twins went for a long trip in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light. When he returned, he would be much younger than the one who stayed on Earth. This is known as the twins paradox, but it is a paradox only if one has the idea of absolute time at the back of one’s mind. In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving. (1988, 33)

In 1972, a taxi driver in the Renaissance town of Guanajuato, Mexico, about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City, enlightened the author as to why there was no clock in the town square: “People here don’t need a clock. They know what time it is; they know when to work, when to go home, when to take a meal and tequila.” An enviable stand against that old slaveholder time, but our species has always wanted to know the hour and minute, beginning with the shadow clock, the sandglass, the candle clock with six candles lasting four hours, the water clock in Egypt, and the incense clock in China. The word clock is from the Middle English clokke—“bell,” German glocke, terms that refer to sound, not to a clock face with hands. These came later, evolving as more people learned to read. The time-keeping sound mechanisms of the early Middle Ages called people to prayer and were no more than

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weight-driven alarms to mark the seven canonical hours: matins at first light, hora prima at sunrise, hora tertia midmorning, hora sexta for noon, hora nona for midafternoon, vespers at sunset and compline at nightfall (Boorstin 1983, 36–37). The earliest mechanism was a chamber-sized alarm placed in the cell of the monk assigned to bell duty. When he heard the chime—four times at sunrise, once at noon, four at nightfall—he would go and strike the main bell, set high in a tower so as to be heard for several miles. Later in the early Middle Ages, turret mechanisms placed in the tower rang the big bell automatically (Ibid. 37). Borstin explains that consciousness of time was increasing. Church towers were originally built as a salutation to God and as a sign of mankind’s aspirations to heaven. But they became clock towers—the torre became the campanile. As early as 1335, the campanile of the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin in Milan was admired for its wonderful clock with many bells. (Ibid. 39)

And the evolution continued with more divisions added to the dial, giving increasingly finer calibration, as those in the population centers developed time-consciousness and began living by the clock, which gave them absolute time (Ibid. 40–41). The second arrow of time mentioned by Hawking is “the psychological arrow of time,” the direction in which we feel the passage of time, the direction which causes us to “remember the past but not the future” (1988, 145). In the late 19th century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson began a redefinition of time in his 1889 Time and Free Will, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, working with the idea that the individual moments of our experience are like small, imperfect photographs of the flow of duration (1910, 90–91, 110, 128). This is flow without measurement, without the calibration of a clock face. Time is not a unit of measurement but an interval of life experience, the passage of time within the mind. Modernist writers Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce worked with this idea. Woolf wanted to show human existence in the cosmos, in an orderly, harmonious whole rising out of disorder. In her Orlando text, she gives a rather remarkable explanation of time racing all around Orlando as she herself barely ages: Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no simple effect upon the mind of man.

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Chapter Four The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, maybe be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. (1928, 98)

The middle section of Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, entitled “Time Passes,” divides the book with the first and last sections told in linear time— the lives of a family, beginning with a summer vacation at their island house and ending with the return of the surviving members years later. “Time Passes” is told from outside of time. The gradation of time is a sequence of events, deathsʊmother by cancer, daughter by childbirth, son by war—as their summer house in the Hebrides progressively decays over a 10-year span, disorder increasing with time (1927, 125–43). These excerpts chart the course followed by Woolf: The nights are now full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain-pipes and scatter damp paths. (Ibid. 128)

Woolf encloses human events in the square brackets of an editor: [Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.] (Ibid.128) [Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!] (Ibid. 131) [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.] (Ibid. 132)

And the brother, on a World War I battlefield: [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.] (Ibid. 133)

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Meanwhile, at the Hebrides house, disorder increases with time: The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-room; the floor was strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane. Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among roses; a fringed carnation flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at the window had become, on winters’ nights, a drumming from sturdy trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer. (Ibid. 137–38 )

In this novel and in other works by Woolf, there is the assumption of destiny purified. She has laid out a path of time leading to this terminus, as seen in the paragraph above. Something similar is found in Hemingway, in his nearly perfect opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms (1929): In the later summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. (Ibid. 3)

The destiny of the two main characters is here, in this moment outside of time, after their lives: a moment of destiny purified. The unstated emotion in the paragraph, like much of Hemingway when he writes of love, loss, and fear, is unstated. The last paragraph of A Farewell to Arms links to this first paragraph. James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” is extraordinary for its seamless treatment of time. The story opens in medias res amidst the commotion of guests arriving for the annual Christmas dinner at the house of the Morkan sisters and

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centers on their favorite nephew, Gabriel Conroy, accompanied by his spouse Gretta. She is the story’s catalyst and will bring about a momentous change in her husband, whose selfishness makes him less than likable. In the end, he undergoes a genuine transformation. Like the string quartets that gave Joyce so much pleasure in his life, “The Dead” divides into four movements: small talk and schmoozing, dinner, toasts, and, finally, the vision. Each section is separated by indeterminate time, with successive segments containing more episodes while covering less time. From the first movement to the third, the scope narrows almost equally. The first movement has the view of a roving camera, stopping and framing up on diverse individuals. The disorder in this section, with its singing, dancing, conversing and drinking, reflects Gabriel’s mind and his difficulty with assimilating what he is seeing. In second movement, his separation from the other guests grows extensively. Gretta and Gabriel leave the party and go to a hotel. In the room, the third movement, Gretta’s distance, bordering on what he sees as indifference, increases his frustration. But she is distracted because of something that happened at the party, a song being sung upstairs as the guests were leaving. The music is painful for Gretta, because it summons the memory of a person she knew long ago, and as Gabriel begins making tentative advances at lovemaking, she reveals this to him. She breaks away and collapses on the bed, hiding her face, just as he, moving toward her and then turning away, catches his reflection in a mirror. What he sees is a loathsome image. She tells the story of her young man, long dead, who once sang the same song she had heard at the party. Gabriel is initially angry, then bewildered and remorseful. Gabriel felt humiliated by the . . . evocation of this figure from the dead . . . . While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure . . . a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. (1990, 179)

The question Gabriel asks next is inevitable, and not without compassion:

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“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said. “I was great with him at that time,” she said. Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly: “And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?” “I think he died for me,” she answered.

With these six single–syllable words, among the greatest single lines in the English language, Joyce’s story reaches its epiphany. A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. (Ibid.)

Gabriel withdraws to the window, and there is an inestimable break in time. Gretta is asleep, and Joyce’s story has reached its final movement, achieving purification of destiny. The story’s focus, which has narrowed successively through three movements down to Gretta, broadens in the closing two paragraphs. No longer is Gabriel looking only within himself, he has turned to Gretta and finally to the whole of humanity. Here, Gabriel stands outside of time. Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was facing out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. (182)

In the last paragraph, time is measured by the snow: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where

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Chapter Four Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Ibid.)

References Bergson, Henri. 1910. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., Boorstin, Daniel J. 1983. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know his World and Himself. New York: Vintage. Bronowski, Jacob. 1976. The Ascent of Man. London: Book Club Associates. Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto: Bantam. Hemingway, Ernest. 1929. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s. Joyce, James. 1990. “The Dead.” Dubliners. New York: Bantam. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato .Translated by Francis MacDonald Cornford. 1997. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.. Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. —. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

PART II AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER FIVE SOCRATES AND THE ORACLE AT DELPHI

Walking the paths of Delphi today brings a shadow of sadness with the realization that so much is missing. No wonder this is so. An earthquake in AD 373 destroyed the temple, and it was rebuilt and used for another twenty years. In the fourth century AD, Christians dismantled all of the edifices and used the materials for small churches. A town named Kastri formed on top of what had been Delphi. Finally, in the 1890s French archeologists literally moved Kastri and excavated Delphi, leaving it as it appears today. Greek speakers, the author discovered during a visit there in early spring of 2006, pronounce it Del’-fee. The late morning and afternoon hours spent there were typically dreary and misty, with Mount Parnassus drawing from low-hanging clouds moisture that darkened masonry and foundation stones and the columns that still stood. Sprigs of early season grass grew in the cracks of the flagstone steps leading up Parnassus to the temple, and there was other new growth between the seats of the amphitheatre1.

Fig. 5–1. Sanctuary, or Adyton, is at center right, 2006 1

An amphitheater with 33 tiers that seated 5,000 people is above the Temple of Apollo. A nearby stadium with 7,000 seats was used for the Pythian Games.

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Fig. 5–2. Ascending Mount Parnassus to the temple, 2006

Fig. 5–3. The site was reassembled with materials that could be retrieved, 2006.

Though Delphi seems lost in time, it is only about a hundred miles from Athens and is much closer to the Peloponnese and Gulf of Corinth. The mountain itself is massive. When the sun finally came out, it brought the realization that this is in every way a Greek place, with glades and dells and flowing water. There are shepherds with flocks of sheep and goats, maybe the ancestors of those animals sacrificed long ago. It is a mystical place, with powers ascribed in ancient times to Gaia, the goddess of the Earth and mother of the Titans. Gaia brings to mind Erda, the Germanic mother of Earth.

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Fig. 5–4. The Temple of Athena, 2006.

From February to November, on the seventh day of each month, 7 being Apollo’s number, the priestess, titled Pythia, would have been in the sanctuaryʊthe adyton, a word that means inaccessible, stay out. Delphi in its season must have been glorious to behold, colours vivid. A petitioner would have his name officially recorded and pay a fee. Just before the time of his session with the priestess, he would purify himself in the Castalian Spring and make the trek up the flagstones of the Sacred Way. On the terrace outside the temple were the inscriptions Know Thyself and Nothing in Excess. Before entering, he would sacrifice an animal, usually a goat, and wait for a priest to inspect the innards for omens. After this, the petitioner was shown into the temple. An aroma of burning pinewood hung in the air. He then stepped down into the Adyton where, through diaphanous panels of fabric, he could see the woman seated on a tripod over the cleft in the rock. Another scent reached his nostrilsʊpleasing, sweet like citrus fruit. If the petitioner were a man of ordinary means, he would have to wait; his session would likely not come until late afternoon (Greece 1999). Early morning at the site would be nothing short of magnificent, perhaps following the description of Euripides (1973) in “Ion Dedicates Himself To Apollo.”

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See, already over the earth The Sun lights up his four-horsed team; His flames put the stars to flight from sky Into holy night. Parnassus’ untrodden mountain-peaks Are lit with his fires, and welcome for men The chariot-wheels of day. Smoke of rainless frankincense Spreads over Apollo’s roof;

Fig. 5–5. Parnassus, 2006 The Delphian woman2 is taking her seat On the holy tripod and sings to the Greeks The dooms that ring from Apollo. Come, Apollo’s Delphian servants. Come to Castalia’s whirling waters3 2 3

A priestess The spring

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Silver-shining. Wash yourselves In the pure spring and come to the shrine. Seal your lips in reverent silence; To all who would question the oracle Nothing unseal But holy words from your lips. And I, who from my childhood days Have done this task, will sanctify With laurel branches and holy crowns Apollo’s doorway and cleanse the floor With splash of water. Flocks of birds, Who spoil the sacred offerings, My bow and arrow shall put to flight. For, since I have neither mother nor father, I give my service To Apollo’s house which has nursed me.

As to the Delphian Woman: it was one her sisters, a priestess, who set Socrates on his quest for wisdom some 35 years before his trial. He was charged with beingʊin his wordsʊa “villainous misleader of youth” (Plato 1909). Impiety was the second charge. Socrates was 70 when the jury found him guilty by a vote of 281 to 220 and sentenced him to death. In Apology (Ibid.), he addresses his judges and jury: I will refer you to a witness who is worthy of credit, and will tell you about my wisdom ʊwhether I have any, and of what sortʊand that witness shall be the god of Delphi.4

This, Stumpf says, set Socrates on the path he would follow for the rest of his life. Her reply was the decisive event that confirmed his mission as a moral philosopher. . . . When Chaerophon asked the Oracle whether there was any living person who was wiser than Socrates, the Oracle replied that there was not. Socrates interpreted this reply to mean that he was the wisest because he realized and admitted his own ignorance. In this mood, Socrates set out on his quest for abiding truth and wisdom. (1999, 36) 4

Apollo, speaking through Pythia.

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Chaerophon was a friend, and by some accounts, a student. He had gone to Delphi, as Socrates said to his jury, and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether . . . there was anyone wiser than I was, and the Pythian prophetess answered that there was no man wiser. (Plato 1909, 8–9)

The declaration is the basis of Socrates’ defense. He wants the jury to know everything about it for this reason: Because I am going to explain to you why I have such an evil name. When I heard the answer, I said to myself, what can the god mean? and what is the interpretation of this riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great.

Socrates asks, what can Apollo mean when he says that I am the wisest of men? And yet he is a god and cannot lie; that would be against his nature. After a long consideration, I at last thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand (Ibid., 9).

He tells of questioning a politician, known to be wise but whose answers are inadequate. Socrates concludes that the man knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. (Ibid.)

He is altogether serious in this endeavor. He questions others relentlessly, being not unconscious of the enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this: but necessity was laid upon me ʊ the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered first. And I said to myself, Go, I must to all who appear to know, and find out the meaning of the oracle. (Ibid.)

Finally, he declares his search for a wiser man to be a failure: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better. [He speaks of his] “Herculean” labors, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. (Ibid., 10)

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This quest is more than Socratic irony. Parke and Wormell view the oracle’s pronouncement as genuine and, with Stumpf, assert that because it was such an inspiration to Socrates to pursue wisdom for the rest of his life, it therefore contributed to Western thought (1956, 402–3). True to form, Socrates denies his wisdom. I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name as an illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. (Plato 1909, 11)

With this out of the way, he continues his quest, probably infuriating many of those he questions: And so I go my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god. (Plato 1909, 11)

The following statement must have kept many of his jurors from voting for acquittal: [I]f you say to me, Socrates, this time we . . . will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing this again you shall die ʊif this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvements of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this? (Ibid. 18)

Therefore, anyone he encounters, he will question, and if I think he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less (Ibid.)

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Socrates insists that he is commanded to do this by Apollo, and I believe that to this day no greater good has ever happened in the State than my service to the God.

Young and old alike he implores not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.

Virtue is paramount, and from it comes “every good of man.” If his teaching is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed. . . . Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you . . . either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times (Ibid., 18–19)

He famously describes himself as a sort of gadfly, given to the State by the God, and the State is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. (Ibid., 19)

When the occasion arises, he is sure to appear, always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Here, he makes a characteristically dry statement about himself: And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me. (Ibid.)

In the indictment, Meletus has alleged that Socrates invents new gods while denying the old ones. To this charge, he answers, Someone may wonder why I go about . . .giving advice and busying myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in public and advise the State. I will tell you the reason of this. You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and this is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. (Ibid.)

The revelation opens one door and then another.

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The sign of which he speaks is elsewhere identified as a daimon5, a demigod, an attending spirit inhabiting a middle layer between gods and men. Stumpf’s explanation of this: Socrates was capable of intense and sustained concentration. On one occasion during a military campaign, he stood in deep contemplation for a day and night, “till dawn came and the sun rose: then walked away after offering a prayer to the sun.” This may have been the occasion on which he experienced what he considered a mandate to pursue the mission of prophetic concern over the moral life of Athenians. He had frequently received messages or warnings from a mysterious “voice” he called his daimon. Although this “supernatural sign” invaded his thoughts from early childhood, it suggests more than anything else Socrates’ sensitivity as a “visionary,” particularly his sensitivity to the moral qualities of human actions that make life worth living. He must have been familiar with the natural science of the earlier Ionian philosophers and Anaxagoras, although he does say in Apology that “the simple truth is, O Athenians, that I have nothing to do with physical speculations.” For him, such speculations had to give way to more urgent questions about human nature, about truth, and about goodness. (Ibid. 36)

Near the end of Apology, Socrates addresses the 220 jurors who have voted to acquit him and again brings up the daimon. You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me.

He calls them his true “judges,” as opposed to those who voted for execution, and he says he would like to apprise them of “a wonderful circumstance”: Hitherto the familiar oracle6 within me has constantly been in the habit of opposing me even about trifles, if I was going to make a slip or error about anything; and now as you see there has come upon me that which may be thought, and is generally believed to be, the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either as I was leaving my house and going out in the morning, or when I was going up into this court, or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in the middle of a speech; but now in nothing I either said or did touching this matter has the oracle opposed me. What do I take to be 5 6

Daemon, in many texts. His daimon.

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Chapter Five the explanation of this? I will tell you. I regard this as a proof that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error. This is a great proof to me of what I am saying, for the customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good. (Ibid., 28)

Hesiod, in Works and Days, calls daimons “wandering spirits clothed in finest air” (1973, 125) and “our kind guardians, walking here their rounds” (Ibid., 123).

References Euripides. 1973. “Ion Dedicates Himself To Apollo.” Edited by. Michael Grant. Translated by C. M. Bowra. Greek Literature in Translation. Baltimore: Penguin. Greece Taxi. 1999. “Oracle of Delphi.” Accessed August 4, 2010. http://www.greecetaxi.gr/Index/delphi_oracle.html Hesiod. 1973. “Works and Days: Strife” Greek Literature in Translation. Edited by.Michael Grant. Middlesex, England: Penguin. Parke, H. W. and D. E. W. Wormell. 1956. The Delphic Oracle, Vol. 1, The History. Oxford: Blackwell. Plato. 1909. The Apology, Phaedo and Crito of Plato. Aurelius. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Harvard Classics. New York: P. F Collier & Son. Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. 1999. Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy. East Syracuse, New York: McGraw-Hill.

CHAPTER SIX PLUTARCH ON DAIMONS

Plutarch’s official name as a Roman citizen was Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus. He held Greek citizenship as well and was Greek to the core.

Fig. 6–1. Plutarch, Athens, 2006

He was born between AD 45 and 50, during the reign of Claudius I1, and studied in Athens under Ammonius the philosopher, who appears in 1

Immortalized by Robert Graves in I Claudius as “Claudius the Stammerer.”

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the fictionalized dialogues, Plutarch’s Morals and Moralia. Plutarch was married, with five children or more, and at least two sons who survived to adulthood (Preface). His writings reveal a social being and, even on occasion, a reveler. In a time when morals and ethics were the concern of philosophy, he believed it should be delivered not only in literature but in uplifting conversation over food and wine. For the good of all, he offers counsel, emphasizing day-to-day living. In Plutarch’s Lives, his parallel accounts of Greeks and Romans, he compares the finer qualities and the foibles of each subject, and through this indirectly instructs his readership on how they should conduct their lives (Preface). Though some writers have belittled him as mundane, his decades at Delphi as priest and then as chief priest should be considered along with his raisons d'être, that is, to remind us of the better angels of our nature. In a dialogue with Ammonius, Plutarch appears to be a young man as the two recall Nero’s visit2 to Greece in AD 66–67 (Moralia 203). The mention of this visit alludes to a prophecy by the Delphic Oracle that has continued to amuse Plutarch and others in the dialogues. The incident is nicely set down in a small poem, “Nero’s Term”, written in 1918 by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. Nero was not worried when he heard the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle. “Let him fear the seventy three years.” He still had ample time to enjoy himself. He is thirty. More than sufficient is the term the god allots him to prepare for future perils. Now he will return to Rome slightly tired, but delightfully tired from this journey, full of days of enjoymentʊ at the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia . . . evenings at cities of Achaia . . . Ah the delight of nude bodies, above all . . . Thus fared Nero. And in Spain Galba secretly assembles and drills his army, the old man of seventy three. 2 When Rome conquered Greece, Athens could no longer protect Delphi, and Nero looted 500 statues from the shrine.

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Nero needed a daimon to light his way, it appears. In the fourth volume3 of Plutarch’s Morals, a discussion between Demetrius of Tarsus and Cleombrotus describes “the genus of Daemons between that of Gods and men.” Homer has indifferently used these two names, terming sometimes the Gods Daemons, and other whiles Daemons Gods. But Hesiod was the first that did best and most distinctly lay down four reasonable4 natures, the Gods, the Daemons (being many in number, and good in their kind), heroes, and men; for the Demi-gods are reckoned amongst heroes. (1870, 14)

The four are obviously linked but stand separately on the continuum sometimes summoned in this study: [T]here is a transmutation of bodies as well as of souls; and that, just as we see of the earth is engendered water, of the water the air, and of the air fire, the nature of the substance still ascending higher, so good spirits always change for the best, being transformed from men into heroes, and from heroes into Daemons; and from Daemons, by degrees and in a long space of time, a few souls being refined and purified come to partake of the nature of the Divinity. But there are some that cannot contain themselves, but rove about till they be entangled into mortal bodies, where they live meanly and obscurely, like smoke. (Ibid.)

To become immortal, these daimons have to become gods. Some do not. Hesiod imagines that the Daemons themselves, after certain revolutions of time, do at length die. For, introducing a Nymph speaking, he marks the time wherein they expire: Nine ages of men in their flower doth live The railing crow; four times the stags surmount 3

This 1870 Little, Brown edition lived most of its life in the George Sverdrup Library, Augsberg College of Minneapolis, before being withdrawn. Two index cards still remain in the back pocket, both devoid of names of patrons who might have enriched their lives by checking it out. 4 Moralia (379) uses the word rational. “Hesiod was the first to set forth clearly and distinctly four classes of rational beings: gods, demigods, heroes, in this order, and, last of all, men.”

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Chapter Six The life of crows; to ravens doth Nature give A threefold age of stags, by true account; One phoenix lives as long as ravens nine. But you, fair Nymphs, as the daughters verily Of mighty Jove and of Nature divine, The phoenix’s years tenfold do multiply.

Cleombrotus insists that the word age means one year; therefore, “the total sum makes but 9720 years, which is the space of the age of Daemons” (Ibid., 15). Daimons serve the gods as agents and ministers in human affairs, for the most part in matters of worship and religious ceremony: [L]et us not think there are any oracles or divinations without some divinity, or that the Gods are not pleased with sacrifices, and our services, and other ceremonies. And, on the other hand, let us not think that God is present in them, or employs himself personally about them; but rather believe that he does commit them to his officers, the Daemons, who are the spies and scouts of the Gods, wandering and circuiting about at their commands, ʊ some beholding and ordering the sacred ceremonies and oblations offered to the Gods, others being employed to revenge and punish the high misdemeanors and enormous injustices of men. There are, moreover, others, to whom Hesiod gives a very venerable name, calling them the distributors of riches and donors of largesses among mortals; for the Gods have allowed them the privilege, and granted them a royal commission to see them duly distributed. He informs us here, by the way, that to be beneficent and liberal of favors is the proper office of a king. For there is a difference in virtue between these Daemons, as much as between men. (Ibid., 18–19)

Hesiod’s “Strife” sets down opposites, sisters perhaps, that are highly suggestive of daimons (what else could they be?): It was never true that there was only one kind of strife. There have always been two on earth. There is one you could like when you understand her. The other is hateful. The two Strifes have separate natures. There is one Strife who builds up evil war, and slaughter. She is harsh; no man loves her, but under compulsion and by will of the immortals men promote this rough Strife. But the other one was born

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the elder daughter of black Night. The son of Kronos,5 who sits on high and dwells in the bright air, set her in the roots of the earth and among men; she is far kinder. She pushes the shiftless man to work, for all his laziness. A man who looks at his neighbour, who is rich: then he too wants work; for the rich man presses on with his ploughing and planting and the ordering of his state. So the neighbour envies the neighbour who presses on toward wealth. Such Strife is a good friend to mortals. (Hesiod 1973, 55–56)

Plutarch in Moralia says, Hesiod calls the worthy and good demigods “holy deities” and “guardians of morals” and “Givers of wealth, and having therein a reward that is kingly.” Plato calls this class of beings an interpretive and ministering class, midway between gods and men, in that they convey thither the prayers and petitions of men, and thence they bring hither the oracles and gifts of good things. (1935, 64–65)

There is a connection between daimons and the priestesses of Delphi. In the fourth volume of Plutarch’s Morals, a wandering discourse/dialogue entitled “Why the Oracles Cease To Give Answers”, deals with this. The speaker is Cleombrotus of Sparta: [W]hen the Daemons who are appointed for the government and superintendency of oracles do fail, the oracles must of necessity fail too; and when they depart elsewhere, the divining powers must likewise cease in those places.” If the daimons were to come back, “the places will begin again to speak, like musical instruments handled by those that know how to use them” (1870, 21–22).

That Daimons who are less than good (or no good at all) may exist is disputed by some of the others; however, Cleombrutus points out, It is not only Empedocles who affirms there are bad Daemons, but even Plato, Xenocrates, and Chrysippus; yea, and Democritus, when he prayed

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Chapter Six that he might meet with good spirits, which shows that he thought there were bad as well as good Daemons. (Ibid., 22–23).

Another of those present, Demetrius of Tarsus, had just returned from England, and told of seeing “many small and desolate islands, some of which were called the Isles of Daemons and Demi-gods.” Commanded by the Emperor Tiberius, he set sail for a nearby island “for curiosity’s sake,” where “he found few inhabitants; but . . . they were all esteemed by the Britains as sacred and divine.” A storm blew up, which at length ceasing, he says, the inhabitants told him that one of the Daemons or Demi-gods was deceased. For as a lamp, said he, while it is lighted, offends nobody with its scent, but when it is extinguished, it sends out such a scent as is nauseous to everybody. (Ibid.)

The source? [T]hese great souls, whilst they shine, are mild and gracious, without being troublesome to anybody; but when they draw to an end, they cause great storms and tempests, and not seldom infect the air with contagious distempers. (Ibid., 24)

The grammarian Demetrius of Tarsus appears ready to dispute what was said concerning the oracles remaining dumb and useless when the Daemons who presided over them were departed, even as musical instruments yield no harmony when the musician does not handle them [because it raises another question] namely touching the cause and power by which these Daemons use to make their prophets and prophetesses to be ravished with enthusiasm and filled with fantastical imaginations. (Ibid.)

It is not enough to say the oracles are silent as being forsaken by the Daemons. . . unless we be first shown how (when they are present and govern them) they set them at work and make them prophesy. (Ibid., 47)

The philosopher Ammonius of Lamptrae, who had been Plutarch’s teacher in Athens, asks the group if anyone believes, as Hesiod says, that daimons are anything more ‘than wandering spirits clothed in finest air.” As far as he is concerned,

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I think the same difference which there is between one man and another, when they act in a tragedy or comedy, is also to be found in this life in souls that are closed with bodies. (Ibid.) [Nothing here] is strange or contrary to reason, if souls meeting with other souls do imprint on them visions and apprehensions of future things, just as we show several things already done and come to pass, and prognosticate of those which have not yet happened . . . . (Ibid., 48)

Ammonius says that “it is very proper and suitable [to] ascribe the impulses of prophetical inspiration either to a God or a Daemon. . . .” (Ibid. 56–57), but there is something else to considerʊand it turns out to be something of the greatest significance: For the exhalation which springeth out of the ground, whether the beast tremble or not, will always, if it be present, cause a ravishment and transport of spirit, and dispose the soul alike, not only of Pythia6, but of any one else that first cometh or is presented. (Ibid.)

So why are things done as they are. It is absurd to set apart one woman for the delivery of these oracles, and to oblige her to virginity and chastity all her days, when the thing is referred to such a cause. (Ibid., 57)

A goatherd named Coretas, said by some to be the discoverer of the exhalation at the site was an ordinary man, Ammonius goes on to say. For as to that Coretas, whom the Delphians [claim] to be the first that happened to fall upon this chink or crevice of the ground, and gave the first proof of the virtue of the place,ʊhe, I say, seems to me not at all to differ from other herdsmen or shepherds, supposing what is reported of him to be true, as I believe it is not. (Ibid., 57)

That it could be apocryphal is entirely possible. William J. Broad, a senior science writer for the New York Times, has assembled the fragments into this account: Ancient descriptions of Delphi’s founding tell of a cleft in the side of Mount Parnassus where goats suddenly began crying and leaping about in a frenzy. Herdsmen marveled at the sight. They approached the fissure and 6

the priestess

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Chapter Six had the same experience. Goats and men acted like beings possessed. Some goatherds reported visions. Others foretold future events. A growing number of visitors came, and all, it was said, had convulsive ravings or fell into inspirational trances. The experience could be risky as well. Frenzied experimenters were said to disappear occasionally into the cleft, apparently overcome. Residents of the region, awed by the phenomenon and perhaps eager to set themselves apart from neighbors, decided that the vapors put mortals into contact with the gods. They built a shrine. To limit the dangers, and perhaps to keep out of harm’s way themselves, the local authorities designated one woman as the exclusive conduit for the divine madness. For her own safety, they made a tripod on which she could sit, physically supported if she should become light-headed or faint. Soon, the Oracle began to speak from the shrine on behalf of the gods7. (2006, 21)

References Broad, William J. 2006. The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. New York: Penguin Press. Cavafy, Constantine P. 1918. “Nero’s Term.” Accessed May 20, 2010. http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/constantine_p__cavafy/poems/ 6622 Hesiod. 1973. “Works and Days: Strife” Greek Literature in Translation. Ed. Michael Grant. Middlesex, England: Penguin. Plutarch. 1870. Plutarch’s Morals, Vol. IV. Trans. Robert Midgley et al.. Boston: Little, Brown. —. Moralia 1935.Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. “Isis and Osiris.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preface to Plutarch’s Lives. The Translation called Dryden’s.1906. Collected from the Greek and Revised by A. H. Clough in 5 volumes. Boston: Little Brown. The Forum at the Online Library of Liberty. Accessed October 6, 2012. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_ staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1771.

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Apollo.

CHAPTER SEVEN STRABO THE GEOGRAPHER

Treading paths that lead him to the foot of Mount Parnassus comes Strabo, c. 64 BCE–AD 25. Plutarch was born 20 to 25 years later. Strabo is every bit as meticulous a reporter as Marco Polo would be in AD 1295. Parnassus is situated on the western boundaries of Phocis. Of this mountain, then, the side towards the [south] is occupied by Delphi, a rocky place, theatre-like, having the oracle and the city on its summit, and filling a circuit of sixteen stadia. (1927, 349–51)

He includes eyewitness accounts in his record: They say that the seat of the oracle is a cave that is hollowed out deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which arises breath that inspires a divine frenzy; and that over the mouth is placed a high tripod, mounting which the Pythian priestess receives the breath and then utters oracles in both verse and prose, though the latter too are put into verse by poets who are in the service of the temple. They say that the first to become Pythian priestess was Phemonoê; and that both the prophetess and the city were so called from the word pythésthai1. . . . (Ibid. 353–55)

This passage reflects the camaraderie of the social circle that later included Plutarch: Now the following is the idea which leads to the founding of cities and to the holding of common sanctuaries in high esteem: men came together by cities and by tribes, because they naturally tend to hold things in common, and at the same time because of their need of one another; and they met at the sacred places that were common to them for the same reasons, holding festivals and general assemblies; for everything of this kind tends to 1

"To inquire of the oracle." Other mythologers more plausibly derived the two names from the verb pޭthesthai, "to rot" (note the length of the vowel), because the serpent Python, slain by Apollo, "rotted" at the place.

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Chapter Seven friendship, beginning with eating at the same table, drinking libations together, and lodging under the same roof; and the greater the number of the sojourners and the greater the number of the places whence they came, the greater was thought to be the use of their coming together. (Ibid., 355)

He appears effusive in his praise but probably is reflecting the sentiment of the time. Now although the greatest share of honour was paid to this temple because of its oracle, since of all oracles in the world it had the repute of being the most truthful, yet the position of the place added something. For it is almost in the centre of Greece taken as a whole, between the country inside the Isthmus and that outside it; and it was also believed to be in the centre of the inhabited world, and people called it the navel of the earth, in addition fabricating a myth, which is told by Pindar, that the two eagles (some say crows) which had been set free by Zeus met there, one coming from the west and the other from the east. There is also a kind of navel to be seen in the temple; it is draped with fillets, and on it are the two likenesses of the birds of the myth. (Ibid., 355)

The word omphalos is Greek for “navel,” and the egg-shaped marble object Strabo describes was believed to designate the sanctuary, the Adyton, as the center of the world. Ancient coins sometimes show Apollo seated atop the omphalos.

Fig. 7–1. Omphalos among the Delphi ruins, 2006

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Here, Strabo describes the Amphictyonia, a 12-member federation that unified several small city-states, including Delphi, and protected them from thievery. Tribal entities from central Greece and Thessaly were represented. The alliance was in effect from the 7th century BCE until the 4th century BCE. .

Such being the advantages of the site of Delphi, the people easily came together there, and especially those who lived near it. And indeed the Amphictyonic League was organised from the latter, both to deliberate concerning common affairs and to keep the superintendence of the temple more in common, because much money and many votive offerings were deposited there, requiring great vigilance and holiness. Now the facts of olden times are unknown, but among the names recorded Acrisius is reputed to have been the first to administer the Amphictyony and to determine the cities that were to have a part in the council and to give a vote to each city, to one city separately or to another jointly with a second or with several, and also to proclaim the Amphictyonic Rights — all the rights that cities have in their dealings with cities. . . . Now the first cities which came together are said to have been twelve, and each sent a Pylagoras2, the assembly convening twice a year, in spring and in late autumn; but later still more cities were added. They called the assembly Pylaea, both that of spring and that of late autumn, since they convened at Pylae, which is also called Thermopylae; and the Pylagorae sacrificed to Demeter. Now although at the outset only the people who lived near by had a share both in these things and in the oracle, later the people living at a distance also came and consulted the oracle and sent gifts and built treasure-houses, as, for instance, Croesus, and his father Alyattes, and some of the Italiotes3, and the Sicilians. (Ibid., 355–57)

It is difficult to believe that the temple would ever be short on funds. But wealth inspires envy, and is therefore difficult to guard, even if it is sacred. At present, certainly, the temple at Delphi is very poor, at least so far as money is concerned; but as for the votive offerings, although some of them have been carried off, most of them still remain. In earlier times the temple was very wealthy, as Homer states: "nor yet all the things which the stone threshold of the archer Phoebus Apollo enclosed in rocky Pytho4." The treasure-houses clearly indicate its wealth, and also the plundering done by the Phocians, which kindled the Phocian War, or Sacred

2

An assemblyman. Greeks living in Italy. 4 Iliad 9.404. 3

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Fig. 7–2. One of several depositories at Delphi, 2006 War, as it is called. Now this plundering took place in the time of Philip5, the son of Amyntas, although writers have a notion of another and earlier plundering, in ancient times, in which the wealth mentioned by Homer was carried out of the temple. For, they add, not so much as a trace of it was saved down to those later times in which Onomarchus and his army, and Phaÿllus6 and his army, robbed the temple; but the wealth then carried away was more recent than that mentioned by Homer; for there were deposited in treasure-houses offerings dedicated from spoils of war, preserving inscriptions on which were included the names of those who dedicated them; for instance, Gyges, Croesus, the Sybarites, and the Spinetae who lived near the Adriatic, and so with the rest . . . . Some, however, taking "aphetor7" to mean "treasure-house," and "threshold of the aphetor" to mean "underground repository of the treasure-house," say that that wealth was buried in the temple, and that Onomarchus and his army 5

Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. 352 B.C. Both were Phocian generals. 7 The word is correctly translated as “archer.” 6

Strabo the Geographer attempted to dig it up by night, but since great earthquakes took place they fled outside the temple and stopped their digging, and that their experience inspired all others with fear of making a similar attempt. (Ibid., 357–361)

Here, Strabo discusses the origins of the Oracle: Ephorus, whom I am using more than any other authority because . . . he exercises great care . . . . [A]fter censuring those who love to insert myths in the text of their histories, and after praising the truth, he adds to his account of this oracle a kind of solemn promise, saying that he regards the truth as best in all cases . . . . [H]e adds forthwith that historians take it for granted that Apollo, with Themis, devised the oracle because he wished to help our race; and then, speaking of the helpfulness of it, he says that Apollo challenged men to gentleness and inculcated self control by giving out oracles to some, commanding them to do certain things and forbidding them to do other things, and by absolutely refusing admittance to other consultants. Men believe that Apollo directs all this, he says, some believing that the god himself assumes a bodily form, others that he transmits to human beings a knowledge of his own will. (Ibid., 363–65)

More history from Ephorus follows. A little further on, when discussing who the Delphians were, he says that in olden times certain Parnassians who were called indigenous inhabited Parnassus; and that at this time Apollo, visiting the land, civilised the people by introducing cultivated fruits and cultured modes of life; and that when he set out from Athens to Delphi he went by the road which the Athenians now take when they conduct the Pythias8; and that when he arrived at the land of the Panopaeans he destroyed Tityus, a violent and lawless man who ruled there; and that the Parnassians joined him and informed him of another cruel man named Python and known as the Dragon, and that when Apollo shot at him with his arrows the Parnassians shouted "Hie Paean"9 to encourage him (the origin, Ephorus adds, of the singing of the Paean which has been handed down as a custom for armies just before the clash of battle); and that the tent of Python was burnt by the Delphians at that time, just as they still burn it to this day in remembrance of what took place at that time. But what could be more mythical than Apollo shooting with arrows and punishing Tityuses and Pythons, and travelling from Athens to Delphi and visiting the whole earth? But if Ephorus did not take these stories for myths, by what right did he call the mythological Themis a woman, and the mythological Dragon a human being — unless he wished to confound the two types, history and myth? (Ibid., 365–369). 8 9

A sacred mission despatched from Athens to Pytho (Delphi) A shout addressed to Apollo in his capacity as Paean (Healer).

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In Plutarch’s Moralia, Ammonius says of the dragonʊor serpent: And regarding the oracle here at Delphi, the most ancient in time and the most famous in repute, men record that for a long time it was made desolate and unapproachable by a fierce creature, a serpent; they do not, however, put the correct interpretation upon its lying idle, but quite the reverse; for it was the desolation that attracted the creature rather than that the creature caused the desolation. (Ibid., 371)

References Plutarch Moralia. 1935. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. “Isis and Osiris.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strabo. 1927. The Geography of Strabo. Book IX, Chapter 3, published in Vol. IV of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1927. Accessed on August 4, 2010. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Strabo/9C*.html

CHAPTER EIGHT THE VAPOR WHICH SPRINGETH FROM THE GROUND

The knack of divining, Ammonius explains in Plutarch’s Morals, “like blank paper, is void of any reason or determination of itself.” Divining is, however, susceptible of fantasies and presentiments; and without any . . . discourse of reason, it touches on that which is to come, when it has withdrawn itself farthest from the present. And from this it withdraws by means of a certain disposition of body, by which that state is produced that we call inspiration or enthusiasm (1870, 50). This state, “this disposition” he calls it, can come from within or from without, perhaps from the earth itself, which casts forth to men the sources and causes of several other powers and faculties, some of which carry men beside themselves into ecstasy and phrensy, and produce maladies and mortalities; others again are good, gentle, and profitable, as appears by those who have had the experience of them. [The difference is] this spring, or wind, or spirit of divination is most holy and divine, whether it comes by itself through the air, or through the water of some spring. (Ibid., 51)

He probably is referring to the Kerna Spring that in ancient times flowed down the rocky slope of Delphic site and into branches near the temple. In any event, the exhalation from the earth, being infused and mixed with the body, it produceth an odd temperature and strange disposition in the soul, which a man cannot exactly express, though he may resemble or compare it to several things.

The vapor by heat and dilation . . . seems to open certain pores that make a discovery of future things; like wine, which, causing fumes to ascend up into the head, puts the spirits into many unusual motions, and reveals things that were laid up in secret.

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Euripides, the Athenian tragic poet, had said, For drunkenness and phrensy . . . have a near approach to the nature of divination, when the soul, being hot and fiery, banishes those fears to which prudence and sobriety are subject, and which extinguish and quench the spirit of divination.

It is possible, he points out, that by some refrigeration and condensation of this spirit, like the tincture and hardening of iron, this part of the soul which does prognosticate may become more intense and get a perfect edge.

He compares the process to alloying, causing the metal to look more bright and resplendent; so I cannot see any reason, why this prophetical exhalation, having some congruence and affinity with souls, may not fill up that which is lax and empty, and drive it more close together.

Numerous substances from the earth have a reference and congruity one with another; as the bean is useful in dyeing purple, and soda in dyeing saffron, if they be mixed herewith; and as Empedocles says, ‘Linen is dyed with the bright saffron’s flower.’ (Ibid., 51–52)

Another factor to be considered, he says, is place. [O]nly the river Cydnus cleaneth the knife consecrated to Apollo, in the city of Tarsus in Cilicia, and there is no other water which can scour and cleanse it. So in the town of Olympia, they temper ashes with the water of the river Alpheus, with which they make a mortar wherewith they plaster the altar there. [Were these procedures] attempted to be done by the water of any other river, it is all to no purpose. (Ibid., 52)

Since many vapors spring from the ground, It is no wonder . . . only those of this sort transport the soul with a divine fury, and give it a faculty of foretelling future things. . . . [I]t is here where this faculty of divining first showed itself, by means of a certain shepherd, who chanced to fall down and began to utter enthusiastic speeches concerning future events.

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The shepherd’s neighbors dismissed all this at first, but when they saw what he foretold came to pass, they had him in admiration; and the most learned among the Delphians, speaking of this man, are used to call him by the name of Coretas.

Ammonius compares this to the eye, affected with the light. For the eye, which has a natural property and faculty of seeing, would be wholly useless without the light; so the soul, having this faculty and property of foreseeing future things, as an eye, has need of a proper object which may enlighten and sharpen it. (Ibid., 52–53)

It is well known, he says, [that] the ancients took the sun and Apollo to be the same God; and those who understand the beauty and wisdom of analogy . . . do tell us, that as the body is to the soul, the sight to the mind, and light to truth, so is the sun with reference to Apollo; affirming the sun to be the offspring proceeding perpetually from Apollo. . . .

Divination is intrinsic in humankind, he says. For as the sun enlightens and excites the visive powers of the senses, so Apollo does excite the prophetic virtue in the soul. (Ibid., 53)

The earth, of course, is subject to change. In some countries we see lakes and whole rivers and not a few fountains and springs of hot waters have sometimes failed and been entirely lost, and at others have fled and absconded themselves, being hidden and concealed under the earth; but perhaps some years after do appear again in the same place . . . .

And metal mines as well: [S]ome have been quite exhausted, as the silver ones about Attica; and the same has happened to the veins of brass ore in Euboea, of which the best blades were made and hardened in cold water. . . .

Aristotle and those who follow him, he says, affirm that all this proceeds from an exhalation within the earth, and when this fails . . . or revives and recovers itself again, the phenomena proceeding

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Chapter Eight from them do so too. The same must we say of the prophetical exhalations which spring from the earth, that their virtue also is not immortal, but may wax old and decay. . . . (Ibid., 54)

There are significant differences in the vapors, Lamprias1 tells Ammonius and the others, “being at one time slack, and at another strong and vigorous,” according to people associated with the temple at Delphi. His description of the exhalation is vivid and somewhat surprising: For the room where those do wait who come for answers from the oracle is sometimes ʊthough not often and at certain stated times, but as it were by chanceʊ filled with such a fragrant odor and scent, that no perfumes in the world can exceed it, and this arises . . . out of a spring from the sanctuary of the temple. (Plutarch 1870, 61)

A credible argument that ethylene was the mysterious vapor is made by Broad and squares up with the accounts found in Plutarch. Broad details the efforts of geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and archeologist John R. Hale to show that the exhalations of the Delphi fault must have been ethylene. As he read and meditated, de Boer hit upon a potentially strong piece of evidence: the old springs, today mainly represented by the accumulations of travertine2. On the Delphi hillside, they lay in a straight line that ended just below the temple, implying, de Boer reasoned, that the waters arose along a common fault that passed beneath Apollo’s shrine. . . . He judged that the sanctuary region at one time or another had bubbled with at least five springs that ran in a straight line down the hillside, all now virtually dry or rerouted. (Broad 2006, 171)

The search for travertine led to the temple: Finally, the men did the easiest collecting of all, crawling through the bowels of the temple. The archeologist got down on hands and knees in an 1

Plutarch’s brother. Because of Plutarch’s official position at Delphi, he might have been speaking through his brother (Plutarch, Moralia 1935, 349). 2 Dense, banded rock composed of calcium carbonate, CaCO3. Formed by rapid chemical precipitation of calcium carbonate from solution in surface and ground waters, it is a variety of limestone that has a light colour and takes a good polish. It is often used for walls and interior decorations in public buildings and as a paving stone. Travertine is mined extensively in Italy; in the U.S., Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot Springs are actively depositing travertine. It also occurs in limestone caves in the form of stalactites and stalagmites (Britannica).

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open space below the foundations, finding several chunks of travertine just lying there, waiting to be picked up. The temple sampling, if hard on hands and knees, was quite pleasant visually. The periphery of the foundation acted like a greenhouse to block the winds and concentrate the sun, making the dirt inside explode with a profusion of spring plants and wildflowers. (Ibid., 191)

The aroma described in Plutarch led de Boer to the solution: Inspired by [this], de Boer looked for something with a sweet odor, like the fragrance of an exotic perfume. He found it in ethylene. Surgeons around the turn of the century had used the powerful, aromatic gas for anesthesia. Even in extremely light doses, it produced feelings of aloof euphoria, a kind of pleasant disembodied high. . . . A cocktail of ethylene and a few of the other gases appeared to possess all the needed attributes, with ethylene the strongest in terms of human intoxication. And its effects wore off quite quickly. Once inhalation stopped, a person would come down from the high in just a few minutes. The modern facts seemed to fit the ancient evidence. (Ibid., 172–73)

Hale enlisted the aid of a toxicologist and director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center, Henry A. Spiller, to determine the extent of intoxication the ethylene might have produced. Spiller’s investigations of the literature showed that, from the 1920s to the 1970s, ethylene became one of the world’s major anesthetic gases. As its popularity grew, scientists did numerous studies to explore its nature. One described how the gas worked extraordinarily fast, reaching concentrations in the brain sufficient for full anesthesia in less than two minutes. A 1964 report showed that, compared to nitrous oxide or ether, ethylene was nearly three times as potent. (Ibid., 211)

For one good reason, the use of ethylene ceased. By the 1970s, a half century after its introduction, ethylene had lost its following because of a constant, serious drawback: the reactive nature of the gas molecule meant that ethylene had a tendency to explode, especially when mixed with pure oxygen, which was a prerequisite for keeping patients alive. Despite great efforts to reduce the danger, the gas continued to maim and kill scores of people. By the 1970s, anesthetists had discovered new classes of anesthetic gases that were much safer, giving them the opportunity to give up their reliance on ethylene. (Ibid., 211)

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Henry A. Spiller, early in 2001, coauthored two papers with de Boer and Hale, one appearing in the Journal of Toxicology. The paper laid out what the authors called a multidisciplinary defense of the gaseousvent theory. Spiller . . . first reviewed how the ancient literature had consistently linked the Oracle’s powers to a fissure, a spring, and gaseous fumes. (Ibid., 212)

Accordingly, he stated his hypothesis: Spiller then argued that the Oracle’s reported behaviour resembled that of people under the influence of light doses of anesthetics in general and ethylene in particular. He noted that the Pythia’s intoxication came in two distinct formsʊbenign trances in which she heard questions and gave visitors coherent, if cryptic, replies in verse or ordinary speech, and less frequent occasions in which she fell into violent frenzies. Both states, he remarked, were consistent with degrees of intoxication by ethylene and the early stages of anesthesia.

Another noteworthy fact emerged, that the natural setting of the vent would most likely have precluded the strict regulation of the gas’s flow and that the Oracle would therefore have had little control over the depth of anesthesia” (Ibid., 213).

In the Plutarch text, Lamprias notes that the priestess Pythia is not always in the same mood and temper . . . . For there are several vexations and passions, which agitate bodies and slide into the soul, that she perceives, but more that she does not, in which case it would be better that she should tarry away and not present herself to this divine inspiration. . . . (1870, 61)

In such a state at that moment, he likens her to “an instrument of music exquisitely made, but at present in disorder and out of tune” (Ibid.). His analogy is redolent of the grape and intoxication: For wine does not at all times alike surprise the drunkard, neither does the sound of the flute always affect in the same manner him who dances to it. For the same persons are sometimes more and sometimes less transported beyond themselves, and more or less inebriated, according to the present disposition of their bodies.” (Ibid. 61–62)

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Spiller concluded that “adverse events” must have occurred at Delphi many times as priestesses inhaled the unregulated gas. A 1923 paper describing subjects experiencing confusion and combative behaviour suggested that the same effects would have been seen at Delphi and in fact were reported. The most detailed descriptions of the Oracle’s sessions from the ancient world tended to be the ones that went awry. That tendency, Spiller noted, resembled modern medical literature in which case reports of difficulties and adverse events got published in greater detail than pedestrian cases. Spiller quoted Plutarch’s story of the Oracle who was forced to prophesize for rich clients ʊher voice harsh, her actions nearly hysterical as she shrieked and threw herself down. That description, he said, jibed with the occasional effects of the early phases of anesthesia: confusion, agitation, delirium, and the loss of muscular coordination. In fact, it appeared that ethylene alone rather than some mix of gases could account for all the effects of the pneuma at Delphi, including the risk of death. (2006, 213)

One priestess, in fact, did die. Lamprias recounts the incident where an animal to be sacrificed did not react to water being poured on its head prior to decapitation. When something like this happens, he explains, there can be no prophetical inspiration, or only such as is as good as none; for then it is a forced fury, not a natural one, but violent and turbulent, such as we have seen to have happened in the prophetess Pythia who is lately deceased. (1870, 62)

Pilgrims had come to the site and were awaiting an answer from Pythia. The priests poured water on the head of the animal, and when it did not move, they poured on more out of an excess of zeal, to continue to pour on more, till the beast was almost drowned with cold water; but what happened hereupon to the prophetess Pythia? She went down into the hole against her will; but at the first words which she uttered, she plainly showed by the hoarseness of her voice that she was not able to bear up against so strong an inspiration. (like a ship under sail, oppressed with too much wind) but was possessed with a dumb and evil spirit. Finally, being horribly disordered and running with dreadful screeches towards the door to get out, she threw herself violently on the ground, so that not only the pilgrims fled for fear, but also the high priest Nicander and the other priests and religious which were there present; who entering within a while took her up, being out of her senses; and indeed she lived but a few days after. (Ibid., 62–63)

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Lamprias hints at why this might have happened. Pythia is obliged to keep her body pure and clean from the company of men, there being no stranger permitted to converse with her. And before she goes to the oracle, they are used by certain marks to examine whether she be fit or no, believing that the God certainly knows when her body is disposed and fit to receive, without endangering her person, this enthusiastical inspiration. (Ibid., 63)

Young women, in fact, were no longer chosen as priestesses because of an incident described in this account by Diodorus Siculus: People say that Echecrates the Thessalian, having arrived at the shrine and beheld the virgin who uttered the Oracle, became enamored of her because of her beauty, carried her away with him and violated her; and that the Delphians because of this deplorable occurrence passed a law that in the future a virgin should no longer prophesy but [instead] an elderly woman of fifty would declare the Oracles and that she would be dressed in the costume of a virgin, as a sort of reminder of the prophetess of olden times. (1954, 152)

In a revelatory passage, Lamprias discusses the effect of the ethylene. For the force and virtue of this exhalation does not move all sorts of persons, nor the same persons in like manner, nor as much at one time as at another; but it only gives beginning, and, as it were, kindles those spirits which are prepared and fitted to receive its influence. Now this exhalation is certainly divine and celestial, but yet not incorruptible and immortal, nor proof against the eternity of time, which subdues all things below the moon, as our doctrine teaches, ʊ and, as some say, all things above it, which, weary and in despair as regards eternity and infinity, are apt to be suddenly renewed and changed.” (Ibid.)

An earlier passage in the text sheds light on the animal sacrifices themselves. And when we offer victims before we come to the oracle, and crown them with garlands of flowers and pour wine on their heads, I see we do not any thing in all this that is absurd or repugnant to this opinion of ours. For the priests, who offer the sacrifices, and pour out the holy wine thereon, and observe their motions and tremblings, do this for no other reason besides that of learning whether they can receive an answer from the oracle. For the animal which is offered to the Gods must be pure, entire, and sound, both as to soul and body. Now it is not very hard to discover the marks of the body; and as to the soul, they make an experiment of it in setting meal

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before the bulls and presenting pease to the boars; for if they will not taste them, it is a certain sign they be not sound. As to goats, cold water is a trial for them; for if the beast does not seem to be moved and affected when the water is poured upon her, this is an evident sign that the soul is not right according to Nature. (Ibid., 60)

Whatever animal is used, conditions must be exactly right in order for the priestess to respond to a pilgrim’s question. And why do they return no answer at all, unless the sacrifice tremble all over, even from the very feet, whilst the wine is poured on its head? For it is not enough to wag the head, as other beasts do which are appointed for sacrifices; but this quaking and shivering must be universal throughout all parts of the body, and that with a trembling noise. (Ibid., 56)

Henry A. Spiller set up an experiment to prove his hypothesis by recreating the Delphi sanctuary in a low-ceilinged garden shed. Outside, a tank of ethylene was connected to a 20-foot length of garden hose terminating at an opening in a cement block. Serving as the high tripod stool used by the priestess, a lawn chair. The subject, middle-aged Maureen Capshew of Lanesville, Indiana, arrived at 10 AM and took her place inside. A small crowd milled about during the final preparations. The day was perfectʊbright sunshine, moderate temperatures, and virtually no wind. That helped. It seemed like Apollo’s endorsement. Maureen sat down in the shed, ready to go. It was dim, compared to the bright outdoors, a bit like a crypt. Spiller closed the doors. It grew darker. (Broad 2006, 219)

The valve on the tank was opened, and ethylene made its way through the hose. Maureen heard the hiss and tried to steady her breathing ʊin and out, in and out. She relaxed. It was nothing. In truth, it was sort of fun. Who ever got to play Oracle? The smell was uniquely sweet, a perfumy kind of fruitlike odor. She felt a tingling in her hands and feet, almost a numbness. Her head grew light and she could feel herself becoming giddy. How do you feel, Spiller called. Maureen laughed. The water’s fine. Come on in. (Ibid.)

Spiller could detect the ethylene odor as far as 25 feet away. A half hour later, he entered the enclosure and began to breathe in the gas.

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Chapter Eight Oooh, this feels good, Spiller thought as he started to breathe deeply. This is very pleasant. He couldn’t believe he was sucking gas, the director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center, the man who studied huffers, a national expert who ran programs that discouraged kids from messing around with drugs. It was so unlikely, so incongruous. Here he was doing a street thing, though as a scholar, Spiller reminded himself, a scholar. He was going to be clinical and skeptical and objective. He knew this stuff cold as a scientist and was not about to be swayed by subjectivity. Then he giggled. It caught, and [they] started giggling and laughing and slapping their legs . . . rocking on their lawn chairs, switching positions, jabbering happily, oblivious of most everything but their own bliss. . . . The experiment was clearly over. Forty-five minutes after turning on the gas, the experimenters judged that the ethylene was nearly gone. So was their composure. There was no question that what had started out as a solemn enterprise had ended up resembling a drunken party. In a minute or so, her head cleared, and Maureen felt as if she was back to normal. The experiment was a success, though silly beyond imagining. By dint of audacity, they had all become Oracles, or at least modern versions of them. Though, as they talked, they agreed that their recollections of the experience were already starting to fade. (Ibid., 219–20)

Anyone wanting to try something like this can purchase a tank of 98percent pure ethylene, but be aware of the threat caused by sparks or static electricity that might ignite the vapor. Better to play it safe and sample ethylene by sniffing certain ripening vegetables and fruit3 in the crisper bin of the refrigerator. Having a vision at the crisper, however, is a long shot.

References Broad, William J. 2006. The Oracle:The Lost secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. New York: Penguin. Diodorus Siculus. 1954. The Library of History, Books XV.20–XVI.65. Translated by Charles L. Sherman. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library. Plutarch. Moralia.1935. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. “The Obsolescence of Oracles.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 3

Packaging may thwart the effect. Food producers sometimes use a compound of zeolite and potassium permanganate to neutralize ethylene gas and prolong the life of their product.

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—. Plutarch’s Morals, Vol. IV. 1870. Trans. Robert Midgley et al. Boston: Little, Brown.

CHAPTER NINE THE ADYTON, WITHIN AND WITHOUT

Ethylene’s ability to intoxicate is apparent but could not have contributed, by itself, to the immense success of Delphi over a period of some 1,200 years, dating from the time of Homer in the eighth century BCE to the day when Pythia declared that prophecies had come to an end. Vapors emanating from the earth were of no great concern to Plato when he said, “Religious law universally should be fetched from Delphi, and this must be adhered to” (Hamilton and Cairns 1339). Just as one sips wine with moderation, Pythia presumably measured her inhalation. Her prophecies came from the intellect, based on intelligence gathering by temple priestsʊand her own as well. She and her sisters kept a close eye on the latest developments in the known world, political issues in particular. Delphi can be considered a communications medium, directed by Apollo. As to the god, a caveat in the Moralia text is issued by Ammonius: Certainly it is foolish and childish in the extreme to imagine that the god himself after the manner of ventriloquists . . . enters into the bodies of his prophets and prompts their utterances, employing their mouths and voices as instruments.

Ammonius goes on to say that if Apollo “allows himself to become entangled in men’s needs, he is prodigal with his majesty and he does not observe the dignity and greatness of his preeminence” (1935, 377). Explaining the sometimes ambiguous language of the priestesses, he says, Since . . . inquiry is the beginning of philosophy, and wonder and uncertainty the beginning of inquiry, it seems only natural that the greater part of what concerns the god should be concealed in riddles, and should call for some account of the wherefore and an explanation of its cause.” (Ibid. 203)

He gives as example anomalies in the adyton itself:

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Putting a face to Apollo is easy enough. In the National Museum of Athens2 sculptures and pottery images depict a young although commanding presence, straight in limb with facial features and demeanor showing dispassion save for the hint of a smile. The eyes of his sculptures, like many marbles of Greek and Roman figures, are dilated, giving an impression of alertness. Apollo is god of the sun and of light, and of the light of reason and logic. He is god of prophecy, of music, and of healing (his son Asclepius is the god of medicine). For this reason, 8,061-foot Mount Parnassus, rising in a long arc from the Gulf of Corinth with the Delphic shrine on its south slope, has come to suggest virtues of the intellect. According to Pindar, Apollo knows the end supreme of all things, and all the ways that lead thereto; the number of leaves that the earth putteth forth in the spring; the number of the sands that in the sea and the rivers are driven before the waves and the rushing winds; that which is to be, and whence it is to come. (Dempsey 1918, 71–72)

The philosopher Heracleon of Magnesia says, he is of a good and mild disposition. And towards mortal men he hath been judged the most gentle, as Pindar says. And whether he be the sun or the lord and father of the sun and of all that lies beyond our vision, it is not likely that he should deny his utterance to people of the present day because of their unworthiness. (Moralia 1935, 369 and 371)

Plutarch calls the priestesses “the inspired maidens of Delphi” (Ibid. 85), and the word inspiration is applicable here in its usual senses, including the definition that is usually last on the list, a drawing in, an inhalation into the lungs.

1 Only Birth and Death at Delphi; Elsewhere, Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who determines its length ; Atropos, who cuts it. Spinners all, like the Germanic Norns. 2 Try “Apollo Gallery” on the web search engines. In 2012, a good site was found at http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/ApolloGallery.html

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In the Plutarch’s Morals text, Ammonius tells the others that “we do not deprive divination either of God or of reason; seeing we allow it for its subject the soul of man, and for its instrument an enthusiastic exhalation” (Ibid., 59). Earlier in the text, the matter of the vapor functioning with the human soul comes up. The soul seems to me to mix and join itself with this prophetic exhalation, just as the eye is affected with the light. For the eye, which has a natural property and faculty of seeing, would be wholly useless without the light. . . . [T]he soul, having this faculty and property of foreseeing future things, as an eye, has need of a proper object which may enlighten and sharpen it. (Ibid., 52–53)

Earlier still, he says, For it is not, as Euripides saith, that he is the best prophet who guesses well; but he is the wisest man, not whose guess succeeds well in the event, but who, whatever the event be, takes reason and probability for his guide (Ibid., 50).

In Moralia, the Egyptian grammarian Theon refers to a statement in Heraclitus “to the effect that the Lord whose prophetic shrine is at Delphi neither tells or conceals, but indicates.” He adds, [T]he god of this place employs the prophetic priestess for men's eyes. For he makes known and reveals his own thoughts, but he makes them known through the associated medium of a mortal body and a soul. (Ibid., 315)

Broad points out that Pythia “called for such social innovations as reverence for oaths, respect for human life, and the importance of developing an inner sense of right and wrong” (2006, 47). At the time, some Delphi detractors were saying that the verse used by the priestesses was second-rate. In response to this, the mathematician Boëthius tells a story of Pauson the painter: It seems that he had received a commission to paint a horse rolling, and painted it galloping. His patron was indignant, whereupon Pauson laughed and turned the canvas upside down, and, when the lower part became the upper, the horse now appeared to be not galloping, but rolling. [This] happens to some arguments when they are inverted. So some people will say of the oracles also, not that they are excellently made because they are the god’s, but that they are not the god’s because they are poorly made! (Moralia 1935, 271)

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Theon weighs in on this: [E]ven if these verses be inferior to Homer’s, let us not believe that the god has composed them, but that he supplies the origin of the incitement, and then the prophetic priestesses are moved each in accordance with her natural faculties. Certainly, if it were necessary to write the oracles, instead of delivering them orally, I do not think that we should believe the handwriting to be the god’s, and find fault with it because in beauty it fell short of that of the royal scribes. 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 puts into her mind only the visions, and creates a light in her soul in regard to the future; for inspiration is precisely this. (Ibid., 275)

And looking around the Adyton itself, one would have to admire the maxims of the Wise Men3 inscribed here, ‘Know thyself,’ and ‘Avoid extremes,’ because of their conciseness especially, since this very conciseness contains in small compass a compact and firmly-forged sentiment, and yet he can impeach the oracles because they have given nearly all their communications in brief, simple, and straightforward language. Now such sayings as these of the Wise Men [Know thyself and Avoid extremes] are in the same case with streams forced into a narrow channel, for they do not keep the transparency or translucence of the sentiment, but if you investigate what has been written and said about them by men desirous of learning fully the why and wherefore of each, you will not easily find more extensive writings on any other subject. And as for the language of the prophetic priestess, just as the mathematicians call the shortest of lines between two points a straight line, so her language makes no bend nor curve nor doubling nor equivocation, but is straight in relation to the truth [and has] filled the oracular shrine with votive offerings and gifts from barbarians and Greeks, and has adorned it with beautiful buildings. . . . (Ibid., 339 and 341)

Theon says the priestess reflected her background. How could anyone who does not read poetry speak like a poet? The woman who now serves the god here was born of as lawful and honourable wedlock as anyone, and her life has been in all respects proper; but, having been brought up in the home of poor peasants, she brings nothing with her as the result of technical skill or of any other expertness or faculty, as she goes down into the shrine.

3

And women.

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He refers to the Athenian historian Xenophon, who believes that a bride should have seen as little and heard as little as possible before she proceeds to her husband’s house, so this girl, inexperienced and uninformed about practically everything, a pure, virgin soul, becomes the associate of the god.

Why is it, he says, that we insist that the voice and language of the prophetic priestess, like a choral song in the theatre, shall be presented, not without sweetness and embellishment, but also in verse of a grandiloquent and formal style with verbal metaphors and a flute to accompany delivery! (Ibid., 321)

The priestesses of old employed prose for nearly all of their prophecies. But, he says, that era produced personal temperaments and natures which had an easy fluency and a bent towards composing poetry, and to them were given also zest and eagerness and readiness of mind abundantly, thus creating an alertness which needed but a slight initial stimulus from without and a prompting of the imagination . . . . (Ibid., 321 and 323).

Times changed. Language, he says, put off its finery, history descended from its vehicle of versification, and went on foot in prose, whereby the truth was mostly sifted from the fabulous. Philosophy welcomed clearness and teachability in preference to creating amazement, and pursued its investigations through the medium of everyday language. The god [Apollo] put an end to having his prophetic priestess call her own citizens ‘fire-blazers,’ the Spartans ‘snake-devourers,’ men ‘mountain-roamers,’ and rivers ‘mountain-engorgers.’ When he had taken away from the oracles epic versification, strange words, circumlocutions, and vagueness, he had thus made them ready to talk to his consultants as the laws talk to States, or as kings meet with common people, or as pupils listen to teachers, since he adapted the language to what was intelligible and convincing. (Ibid., 329)

The principle of clarity was spreading across the land. The introduction of clearness was attended also by a revolution in belief, which underwent a change along with everything else. And this was the result: in days of old what was not familiar or common, but was expressed altogether indirectly and through circumlocution, the mass of people

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Chapter Nine imputed to an assumed manifestation of divine power, and held it in awe and reverence; but in later times, being well satisfied to apprehend all these various things clearly and easily without the attendant grandiloquence and artificiality, they blamed the poetic language with which the oracles were clothed, not only for obstructing the understanding of these in their true meaning and for combining vagueness and obscurity with the communication, but already they were coming to look with suspicion upon metaphors, riddles, and ambiguous statements, feeling that these were secluded nooks of refuge devised for furtive withdrawal and retreat for him that should err in his prophecy.” (Ibid., 329 and 331)

Change truly was afoot in the country. Tastes shifted toward straightforwardness and candor and away from the old ambiguity and, to use their word, grandiloquence. Numerous prophecies recorded in Greek literature were in hexameter verse, but prose became the norm (Ibid., 256). The introduction to “The Obsolescence of Oracles” in Moralia sets down yet another factor leading to the demise of Delphi: the population in Greece had diminished, and no longer was there a need for three priestesses, according to Plutarch. “[N]ow there is only one, and yet she is sufficient for every need” (348). In studies of Delphi by Parke and Wormell in 1956 and Broad in 2006, the priestesses are seen advocating a new morality, “an early manifestation of what we might call humanism” (Broad 2006, 47). Broad views it as radical for the time, “a reformulation of the unwritten codes of human affairs, seeking to improve all kinds of behaviour outside the bounds of state law and local custom” (Ibid.). The shedding of blood was a critical issue. Killing, whether accidental or premeditated, “was considered so serious that the playwright Aeschylus devoted a trilogy of grim tragedies to a royal family’s blood chain of murder and revenge. In general, ancient Greek custom was to consider any person who killed another, by accident or design, unclean” (Ibid.). But, Broad says, “The Pythia taught otherwise. She emphasized the importance of intention and making inner evaluations of guilt and innocence, of what came to be known as conscience” (Ibid.). Protection of life, development of potential to the highest level, and the instillment of values and responsibilities as to human developmentʊthese characterize the feminine principle. From Parke and Wormell, Broad sets down “a tale of uncertain date” that “illustrated her point and became much repeated over the centuries”: Bandits fell on three young men traveling to consult the Oracle. One ran toward Delphi. The two other men stayed to fight, one drawing out a sword. In the melee that followed, he accidentally stabbed his friend,

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killing him. When the two survivors reached Delphi, the Pythia curtly expelled the one who had fled, saying he had abandoned his friends in time of need. The other she praised as not only absolved of any guilt but actually elevated: “The blood has not stained you,” she said. “You are now purer in hands than you were before.” (Broad 2006, 47–48; Parke and Wormell 1956, 382)

Broad calls her response extraordinary because it forgives the killing and considers “good intentions and the struggle to do right.” Further, “She chose to respect honest poverty and disdain garish pomposity,” and declared “the dignity of human life, no matter how unimportant the person in terms of social status. She proclaimed that anyone who shed a slave’s blood was a murderer and had to undergo purification (unless, of course, the killing was accidental)” (Ibid., 48). Inscriptions on temple foundations are slave names of those set free in the name of Apollo (Greece). When King Croesus of Lydia received news that Cyrus II had destroyed the Median Empire and that the Persians were becoming more powerful by the day, he sent envoys to several oracles, in Greece to Delphi, Abae, Dodona, Amphiaraus, Trophonius, and Branchidae, and in Libya to the oracle of Ammon. The mission of the envoys was to determine the reliability of these oracles. According to Herodotus, The messengers who were despatched to make trial of the oracles were given the following instructions: they were to keep count of the days from the time of their leaving Sardis, and, reckoning from that date, on the hundredth day they were to consult the oracles, and to inquire of them what Croesus the son of Alyattes, king of Lydia, was doing at that moment. The answers given them were to be taken down in writing, and brought back to him. None of the replies remain on record except that of the oracle at Delphi. There, the moment that the Lydians entered the sanctuary, and before they put their questions, the Pythoness thus answered them in hexameter verse: I can count the sands, and I can measure the ocean; I have ears for the silent, and know what the dumb man meaneth; Lo! on my sense there striketh the smell of a shell-covered tortoise, Boiling now on a fire, with the flesh of a lamb, in a cauldronBrass is the vessel below, and brass the cover above it

The envoys returned from the several oracles with their respective answers.

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Chapter Nine Croesus undid the rolls, and read what was written in each. Only one approved itself to him, that of the Delphic oracle. This he had no sooner heard than he instantly made an act of adoration, and accepted it as true, declaring that the Delphic was the only really oracular shrine, the only one that had discovered in what way he was in fact employed. For on the departure of his messengers he had set himself to think what was most impossible for any one to conceive of his doing, and then, waiting till the day agreed on came, he acted as he had determined.

Croesus sent his envoys back to Delphi with offerings that appear to have been extravagant. And with them, his famous question: The messengers who had the charge of conveying these treasures to the shrines, received instructions to ask the oracles whether Croesus should go to war with the Persians and if so, whether he should strengthen himself by the forces of an ally. Accordingly, when they had reached their destinations and presented the gifts, they proceeded to consult the oracles in the following terms:—“Croesus, of Lydia and other countries, believing that these are the only real oracles in all the world, has sent you such presents as your discoveries deserved, and now inquires of you whether he shall go to war with the Persians, and if so, whether he shall strengthen himself by the forces of a confederate.” Both the oracles agreed in the tenor of their reply, which was in each case a prophecy that if Croesus attacked the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire, and a recommendation to him to look and see who were the most powerful of the Greeks, and to make alliance with them. (Herodotus)

Croesus was overjoyed and prepared to go head-to-head against the Persians. The battle, of course, ended badly for him, for the mighty empire was his own. For Delphi, inevitably, the end was at hand. Julian the Apostate, the mid fourth-century emperor who rejected Christianity and returned to the old gods, ordered that Delphi be restored as a part of his campaign to revive Greek culture. In Gore Vidal’s novel Julian, a finespun mix of scholarship and fiction, the emperor sends his envoy Orabasius on a fact-finding mission to Delphi. At the temple of Apollo, Oribasius called out, “Where is the priest?” No answer. He went inside. Part of the roof had fallen in: dust was everywhere. Just behind the pedestal where the god’s statue had been, he found a sleeping priest with a half-empty skin of wine behind him. It took Oribasius some minutes to wake the man. When told that Oribasius was the Emperor’s envoy, he became quite nervous. “It’s been a bad season for the temple, very bad. Our revenues are gone. We don’t even get the few

The Adyton, Within and Without visitors we had last year. But you must tell the Augustus that we still go about our holy tasks, even though there’s no money to fix the roof, or to pay for sacrifices.” He got to his feet, swaying from drink. Oribasius asked about the oracle. “Oh, we’re still functioning. We have an excellent Pythoness. She’s rather old but she gets good results. Apollo talks to her all the time, she says. We’re quite pleased with her work. I’m sure you’ll find her satisfactory. Naturally, you’ll want to talk to her. I’ll go ask when she can receive you. She has bad days, you know . . .” He gestured vaguely. Then he disappeared down a steep flight of steps. Oribasius has been to Apollo’s temple before, and he notes that all the statues are gone. Homer’s statue, once by the door, is now in Julian’s library. The priest comes back and tells Oribasius that Pythia will see him tomorrow. Next day, Oribasius and the priest sacrificed a goat on the altar outside the temple. As soon as the animal was dead, the priest sprinkled it with holy water and the legs trembled, supposedly a good sign. After this, they entered the temple and descended the steep steps to the crypt. . . . They sat in a sort of waiting room cut in rock. Opposite them was a door which led into the cell of the god. Here, from a fissure in the earth, steam rises; here, too, is the navel of the worldʊthe omphalosʊa round stone said to have been flung to earth by Zeus. The priestess entered from the temple. She looked at neither priest nor visitor . . . [and] was immensely old and shrunken and toothless. “She is now pure,” whispered the priest. “She has just bathed in the Kastalian spring.” The Pythoness threw a number of laurel leaves and barley meal on a brazier; the room filled with an acrid smoke. “Now she is making the air pure,” said the priest. Then Oribasius, eyes streaming with tears from the smoke, followed the Pythoness into the inner cell where, for a thousand years, Apollo has spoken to man. Just beside the omphalos was a tripod, on which the Pythoness sat, cross-legged, her face bent over the steam as it escaped from the earth below her. She muttered incantations. “All right,” whispered the priest. “She is ready to hear you.” In a loud voice Oribasius said: “I come from Flavius Claudius Julianus, Augustus and Pontifex Maximus. He does homage to the god Apollo, and to all the true gods.” The Pythoness sang softly to herself during this, her attention fixed on the steam at the foot of the tripod. “The August wishes guidance from the god Apollo. He will do whatever he is commanded.” “The question?” The voice was thin and indistinct. “Shall the Emperor restore the holy temple at Delphi?” For a long moment the only sound in the shrine was the faint hissing noise steam makes escaping rock. That sound is possibly the origin of the legend that the earth goddess Ge had a son who was a serpent called Python. The serpent controlled the oracle until Apollo killed him and threw

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Chapter Nine the body down a crevice. The steam is supposed to come from the corpse. The hissing sound is the serpent’s dying voice. At last the Pythoness stirred. She took several deep breaths of steam. She gasped; she coughed; she rolled her eyes; she clung with claw-like hands to the top of the tripod, rocking back and forth. Then she was motionless. When she finally spoke, her voice was firm and distinct despite the absence of teeth. “Tell the King: on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the watersprings that spoke are still. Nothing is left the god, no roof, no shelter, and in his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.” That was all. The Pythoness shut her eyes. She seemed to sleep. Oribasius and the priest departed. (1966, 301–3)

The last words of Pythia, according to Peter Hoyle in Delphi are: Tell the king, the fair-wrought house has fallen. No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves. The fountains now are silent; the voice is stilled. (1967, 142)

Michael Lahanas’ “Last Advice from the Oracle at Delphi” records Pythia’s final words as: Tell to the king that the carven hall is fallen in decay; Apollo has no chapel left, no prophesying bay, No talking spring. The stream is dry that had so much to say.

References Broad, William J. 2006.The Oracle: The Lost secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. New York: Penguin. Dempsey, T. 1918. The Delphic Oracle Its Early History, Influence, and Fall. Oxford: Blackwell. Greece Taxi. 1999. “Oracle of Delphi.” Accessed July 28, 2010. http://www.greecetaxi.gr/Index/delphi_oracle.html Hamilton and Cairns, 1961. Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Including the Letters, with Introduction and Prefatory Notes. New York: Pantheon Books / Bollingen Series. Herodotus. Book I, Clio. Accessed August 1, 2010. http://www.parstimes.com/history/herodotus/persian_wars/clio.html Hoyle, Peter. 1967. Delphi. London: Cassell & Co. Lahanas, Michael. “Last Advice from the Oracle of Delphi.” Accessed August 4, 2010. http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Oracle.htm

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Parke, H. W., and D. E. W. Wormell. 1956. The Delphic Oracle: Vol. 1, The History. Oxford: Blackwell. Plutarch’s Morals, Vol. IV. 1870. “Why the Oracles Cease To Give Answers.” Translated by Robert Midgley, M.D. and Coll. Med. Lond. Cand. Boston: Little, Brown. Plutarch Moralia. 1935. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. “The E at Delphi.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vidal, Gore. 1966. Julian. London: New English Library.

ENVOI

Events yet to occur in the lives of men are divined by Erda and the Norns, by the Holinshed-Shakespeare three wild women of the Blasted Heath, by the Japanese Forest Spirit and the Snow Spirit, and by the women of Delphi speaking for the god Apollo. Their descriptions of destinies come from outside of time. The fiber of destiny they spin can be explicit or, at Delphi, implicit. The big question is, could a Sister of Fate change destiny? The bigger question is, can we? Of course, we can. Consider this answer from Arlea Æðelwyrd Hunt-Anschütz of East Anglia in her year 2000 article “What is Wyrd?” Imagine a patterned piece of cloth being woven on a loom. The horizontal threads (the woof) are woven in layers along the vertical threads (the warp). The horizontal threads represent layers of past actions. The vertical threads represent a time line. The colour of each horizontal thread as it is woven in will add to the pattern that is already established and influence the pattern that emerges. The threads already woven in cannot be changed, but the overall pattern is never fixed. Existing designs can be expanded into new forms. New designs can be added. Everything we do adds one more layer to the pattern.

And so we continue, adding and adding.

Reference Hunt-Anschütz, Arlea Æðelwyrd. What is Wyrd? Accessed August 17, 2001. http://www.wyrdwords.vispa.com/heathenry/whatwyrd.html

INDEX A Farewell to Arms, 47 Abae, 95 adyton, 89 Adyton, 53 Alpheus, 78 Alyattes, 73 Ammon, 95 Ammonius, 63, 68, 77, 79, 91 Amphiaraus, 95 Amphictyonia, 73 Ani, 23, 37 Anubis, 23 Apollo, 3, 75, 79, 90 Apology, 57 Aristotle, 79 Asclepius, 90 Atropos, 3 Augustine, 21 Augustus, 97 Banquo, 3, 4 Bergson, 45 Boëthius, 91 Branchidae, 95 Bronowski, 28, 43 Capshew, Maureen, 85 Castalia, 56 Chaerophon, 57 Chaucer, 6 Chieko Naniwa, 34 Claudius I, 63 Cleombrotus, 65 Clotho, 3 Coretas, 69, 79 Croesus, 73, 74, 95 Cydnus, 78 daimon, 61 Darrow, 31 de Boer, Jelle Zeilinga, 80 Demetrius of Tarsus, 65, 68 Diodorus Siculus:, 84

Dodona, 95 Echecrates the Thessalian, 84 Empedocles, 67 Ephorus, 75 Erda, 11, 101 eternity, 42 Euripides, 55, 78, 91 forest spirit, 34 Frodo, 13 Galadriel, 13 Ge, 97 Globe, 5 Goebbels, 12 Götterdämmerung, 13 Guanajuato, Mexico, 44 Gyges, 74 Hale, John R., 80 Hawking, 41, 42 Hemingway, 45, 47 Heracleon, 90 Heraclitus, 36, 91 Hesio, 67 Hesiod, 62, 66 Hitler, 12 Holinshed, 5 Home, 65 Homer, 73, 74, 89 Horus, 25 Hubble, 41 Isis, 25 Italiotes, 73 Job, 22 Joyce, 45, 47 Julian the Apostate, 96 Kastri, 53 Kerna Spring, 77 Kurosawa, 14, 34, 35 Lachesis, 3 Lamprias, 82, 83, 84

104 Lévi-Strauss, 3, See Lévi-Strauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 3 Macbeth, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 21, 34, 35 Mahabharata, 41 Meletus, 60 Miletus, 37 Nero, 64 Newton, 42, 43 Nicander, 83 Norns, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 21, 90, 101 Olympia, 78 omphalos, 72, 97 Onomarchus, 74 Oribasius, 96 Orlando, 45 Osiris, 25 Paean, 75 Panopaeans, 75 Parnassus, 53, 54, 69, 71, 90 Pauson, 91 Phaedo, 38 Phaÿllu, 74 Phemonoê, 71 Philip, 74 Phocian War, 73 Pinda, 90 Pindar, 72, 90 Plato, 42, 89 Plutarch, 63 Plutarch’s L, 64 Pylaea, 73 Python, 75 Rowling, 33 Satan, 22

Index Shakespeare, 3 Sicilians, 73 Siegfried, 12 Skuld, 3, 15 snow spirit, 36 Socrates, 37, 57, 59, 60 Sophocles, 36 Spiller, Henry A., 81, 85 Strabo, 71 Sybarites, 74 Tarsus in Cilicia, 78 Temple of Athena, 55 The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, 25 The Last Judgment, 23 Themis, 75 Theon, 91, 92 Thermopylae, 73 Thoth, 23 Throne of Blood, 34 Tiberius, 68 Tityus, 75 To the Lighthouse, 46 Tolkien, 11 Trophonius, 95 twins paradox, 44 Urd, 3, 15 Verdandi, 3, 15 Vidal, Gore, 96 Wagner, 11 Walsungs, 13 weird sisters, 5 Woolf, 45 Wotan, 11, 16 Xenocrates, 67 Xenophon, 93