Today, the oracle speaks. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The ancient Oracle at Delphi,
we are told, transmitted prophesies that came up
from Earth's belly. The ancient Mycenaeans had
worshipped the Earth-goddess Gaia when they lived
there. The Dorians built the Oracle's shrine in the
eighth century BC, and, for them, Delphi was the
Earth's ompholos -- its navel, or its
center.
That holy place flourished for over a thousand
years. Occasional armies fought over it, and Apollo
replaced Gaia as the source of prophecy. During the
age of imperial Rome, the Oracle finally lost its
power, and the shrine became only a curiosity. But
how could something that was only superstition lose
the efficacy it never had? Now, New York
Times science writer William Broad offers an
answer.
First, let's see how the Oracle worked. The
prophecies were uttered by a woman called the
Pythia. She had to be over fifty and of
blameless character. The Pythia first descended
into a basement chamber and breathed the sacred
fumes of Apollo. Then she returned and sat upon a
stool. Holding a shallow basin of water in one hand
and an olive sprig in the other, she would cry out
her prophecy. Some scholars believe she was
incoherent -- that priests wrote her utterance into
verse form for the petitioner.
All this suggests that some sort of subterranean
vent brought up hallucinogenic vapors that put the
Pythia into a trance state. But Delphi sits at the
base of Mount Parnassus with a spectacular view of the Gulf of
Corinth. Despite occasional earthquakes, the
setting is pretty stable. Geologists could find no
large fault in the earth, and historians had long
since debunked the vapor idea.
At least they had until a geologist named de Boer
came in to assess the suitability of the region for
installing nuclear reactors. Like other
twentieth-century scientists, he found no evidence
of faults in the area. But, just then, a moment of
serendipity: crews were cutting into the hillside
along the road, creating a turnout for buses
bringing visitors to the old temple ruins.
De Boer noticed that they'd exposed a fissure,
which reached out under the ruins. There was a vent
after all. In fact, French archeologists had also
written about it. But they'd discounted it because
they expected a large fault. Then it
turned out that Roman historians Plutarch and
Strabo had both written about the fissure and the
fumes. Plutarch had even said the vapors had a
sweet smell.
De Boer and the archeologists who followed him
found that two narrow fissures, carved by spring
water, converged below the temple. Those fissures
tied into subterranean petrochemical deposits. It's
now pretty clear that the Delphic Pythia prepared
herself by inhaling the sweet-smelling light
hydrocarbon ethylene -- which, a scant
sixty years ago, served hospitals as a general
anesthetic.
That Delphic Oracle is a grim reminder of how
easily we shape belief around ambiguous
predictions. Like Macbeth, the moment we accept any
prediction, we take the first step toward making it
come true. We need to be very careful which fortune
cookie we read!
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Broad, W., For Delphic Oracle, Fumes and Visions.
New York Times, Science Times, Tuesday,
March 19, 2002. pp. D1, D4.
Harbur, J., The Atlas of Sacred Places: Meeting
Points of Heaven and Earth. New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1994, 194-201.
de Jongh, B., The Companion Guide to Mainland
Greece. Woodbridge, England: Boydell &
Brewer Ltd., 1996, Chapter 7, "Delphi."
Ethylene is the very light unsaturated hydrocarbon,
C2H4.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2002 by John H.
Lienhard.
