Hopefully 2019's not a bloodbath! Happy New Year, Amiculi!
As sorry as I was on one level to see the most successful year in Amiculus Books history end (with one notable exception, *coughsugarcreekkickstartercough*), there's no room for sentiment in this game! New Year, new challenges, and new conquests are on the horizon!
Such as:
As sorry as I was on one level to see the most successful year in Amiculus Books history end (with one notable exception, *coughsugarcreekkickstartercough*), there's no room for sentiment in this game! New Year, new challenges, and new conquests are on the horizon!
Such as:
The Sugar Creek Horror Comic Debut (Projected Release: April)
Pythia: A Story of the Last Oracle Issue # 1-2 Campaign!
This planned series with Amiculus artist Giancarlo Caracuzzo is slated to begin its fundraising life this year! In case you are not familiar, Pythia will be a speculative historical fiction limited series in the same vein as Amiculus, set in ancient Greece at the twilight of the classical world and imagining one possibility for what the last prophecy of the Oracle of Delphi might have been, and how it might have doomed the Olympian gods. I plan to produce this story in 5-6 single issues, around 20 pages each, over 3-4 years, and the fun could begin as early as this summer!
No doubt many of you, my elite Amiculi, are fully acquainted with who the Oracle of Delphi was, and the outsize importance she held in the Greco-Roman world. If you don't, however, don't despair! This is an opportunity for you to find out in the best way possible, through a...
No doubt many of you, my elite Amiculi, are fully acquainted with who the Oracle of Delphi was, and the outsize importance she held in the Greco-Roman world. If you don't, however, don't despair! This is an opportunity for you to find out in the best way possible, through a...
(GRECO-)ROMAN DEBAUCHERY FUN FACT!
Was the Oracle of Delphi high on her own supply?
Were there really mystic vapors from the Earth feeding the Pythia's visions? The bulk of the research that I have done for Pythia includes numerous ancient sources: Herodotus, Strabo and, most crucially, Plutarch, who was an adherent to the Pythic cult and provided some great insider information.
I've relied on other modern sources, such as Joseph Fontenrose and this excellent book extensively detailing the discovery of a possible source for the elusive Delphic vapors that many archaeologists thought never existed. For a great shorthand on the facts in the previous book, you can also check out this article at biblicalarchaeology.org. For all of you TLDR types, here is the shorthand of the shorthand.
The basic image of the Oracle of Delphi is perfectly demonstrated in the picture by John Collier at left: a young (or middle-aged) woman seated on a tall tripod over a rift in the earth from which the sacred pneuma rises, mysterious vapors from the depths. She sits motionless, trance-like, when all at once she speaks in a voice that does not seem entirely her own. The god Apollo has entered her, and speaks prophecies of times yet to come. Sometimes these utterances are in verse, other times in plain prose, and very occasionally are expressed in delirium, shrieking and wild thrashing. In the last case, the Pythia dies within days.
Interestingly, few of the ancient sources agree on the source or even the existence of the vapors that provided the Pythia with her prophecies. Strabo's version provides most of the details above, but Plutarch, a servant of the Pythia, never saw any evidence of vapors. Some writers attribute the source of the Oracle's visions to the waters that bubbled up through a spring beneath the temple. Regardless, the lack of consistency in the story has been a source of some frustration to historians, classicists and archaeologists.
I've relied on other modern sources, such as Joseph Fontenrose and this excellent book extensively detailing the discovery of a possible source for the elusive Delphic vapors that many archaeologists thought never existed. For a great shorthand on the facts in the previous book, you can also check out this article at biblicalarchaeology.org. For all of you TLDR types, here is the shorthand of the shorthand.
The basic image of the Oracle of Delphi is perfectly demonstrated in the picture by John Collier at left: a young (or middle-aged) woman seated on a tall tripod over a rift in the earth from which the sacred pneuma rises, mysterious vapors from the depths. She sits motionless, trance-like, when all at once she speaks in a voice that does not seem entirely her own. The god Apollo has entered her, and speaks prophecies of times yet to come. Sometimes these utterances are in verse, other times in plain prose, and very occasionally are expressed in delirium, shrieking and wild thrashing. In the last case, the Pythia dies within days.
Interestingly, few of the ancient sources agree on the source or even the existence of the vapors that provided the Pythia with her prophecies. Strabo's version provides most of the details above, but Plutarch, a servant of the Pythia, never saw any evidence of vapors. Some writers attribute the source of the Oracle's visions to the waters that bubbled up through a spring beneath the temple. Regardless, the lack of consistency in the story has been a source of some frustration to historians, classicists and archaeologists.
The adyton, the location of the Pythia's chamber in the Temple of Apollo, during excavation in 1893. In the late 19th century, a French archaeological team excavated the site of the Delphic sanctuary. While they reported that the bedrock beneath the Temple of Apollo was riddled with fissures, a single large, gas-emitting cleft in the earth could not be found. Based on this, it was declared that the lack of volcanic activity at Delphi meant that the area could not have produced the gases the ancients claimed were there, and that they were either mistaken, exaggerating or flat-out lying. This effectively killed the idea of the Pythic vapors for the next several decades.
Evidence that these French archaeologists could have been wrong started to surface in the early 1980s. A geologist noticed that a fault line ran from east to west through the region near Delphi, and later examination revealed that its path went directly beneath Apollo's sanctuary. The fault line could not be seen at the temple site due to landslides and construction. While it is true that no volcanic activity is present in the area, this fault line, later called the Delphi Fault, has been linked to one of Greece's most geologically active areas, a great rift filled by the Gulf of Corinth that formed a "mere" two million years ago. This rift continues to widen, triggering earthquakes along its length. (One of these earthquakes destroyed the temple of Apollo in 373 B.C.) .
Evidence that these French archaeologists could have been wrong started to surface in the early 1980s. A geologist noticed that a fault line ran from east to west through the region near Delphi, and later examination revealed that its path went directly beneath Apollo's sanctuary. The fault line could not be seen at the temple site due to landslides and construction. While it is true that no volcanic activity is present in the area, this fault line, later called the Delphi Fault, has been linked to one of Greece's most geologically active areas, a great rift filled by the Gulf of Corinth that formed a "mere" two million years ago. This rift continues to widen, triggering earthquakes along its length. (One of these earthquakes destroyed the temple of Apollo in 373 B.C.) .
Graphic courtesy of the aforementioned article at biblicalarchaeology.org. In the 1990s, a second fault line was discovered, running north-south and intersecting the Delphi Fault beneath the sanctuary. This was named the Kerna Fault.
Starting in 1996, a team comprised of a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist began surveying the area around Delphi and devised a scenario that could, in fact, explain the source of the Pythia's mysterious vapors.
Starting in 1996, a team comprised of a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist began surveying the area around Delphi and devised a scenario that could, in fact, explain the source of the Pythia's mysterious vapors.
A likely culprit? The place where the Delphi and Kerna Faults met would have been the focus of intense heat and pressure. The limestone bedrock at Delphi contained petrochemical deposits, which this heat and pressure would have vaporized into light hydrocarbon gases: methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants. Water and rock samples from the sanctuary revealed trace elements of these hydrocarbons.
A bad trip: the Oracle reacts poorly to the vapors. If any of these gases were responsible for the Oracle's visions, ethylene would be the one that most fit the bill. The side effects of breathing this intoxicant sound very much like the Pythia's different trance states described in antiquity. In low concentrations, ethylene can produce an "out-of-body" experience, causing an entranced individual to speak in an altered voice. In high concentrations it can cause unconsciousness. To a certain subset of people, it can cause a violent, even deadly reaction, potentially explaining the Oracles who lapsed into screaming, thrashing fits. The sweet scent of the gas also matches descriptions from Plutarch, even though he never professed to have smelled it himself.
So if these gases were present at Delphi, and the description of their effects tracks so closely to the Pythia's trances, why was there so much ancient discrepancy about the Delphic vapors? Plutarch offers a tantalizing explanation. He states that the vapors from the temple were strong and steady until the earthquake in 373 B.C. After this point, the gas became unpredictable and its strength steadily diminished, until by his own time, its emanations had virtually vanished. He suggests that either the quake had blocked their flow or the supply had exhausted itself. Either way, the fortunes of the Pythia declined with it.
 | Plutarch is careful to note that the Pythia's power of prognostication was not solely dependent on the vapors. While they may have triggered the visions, not everyone could have done what the Oracle did just by breathing them. They simply enhanced the Oracle's lifetime of training, mental preparation, and a certain je ne sais quoi that each chosen prophet had setting them apart from the rest. The loss of this training and a decline in the quality of candidates probably had as much to do with the decline of the Pythia as did the loss of the pneuma. |
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