Pythia, the Priestess. Photo courtesy of Matt Baldwin-Ives.
The voice of Divine madness is one most cherished, most sought and also most feared. In that altered state of consciousness where insanity meets the Divine and the thoughts of the Gods are manifest, in this secret place lies great wisdom. Shamans of old sought it out with vengeance and when found, brought back the knowledge and shared it with their people.
“I count the grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea
I understand the speech of the mute and hear the voiceless”.
- Delphic Oracle {Herodotus, I, 47}
The Pythia of Delphi, an Oracle of the Gods, was such a woman in whom Divine madness was welcomed. The scholar Martin Litchfield West writes that the Pythia shows many traits of ancient shamanistic practices, likely inherited or influenced from central Asia, although there is no evidence of any central Asian association at this time. (1)
The name ‘Pythia’ is derived from Pytho, which in Greek myth was the original name of Delphi. The Greeks derived this name from the verb, pythein (“to rot”), which refers to the decomposition of the body of the monstrous Python (She-Dragon) after she was slain by Apollo. (2) Through this decomposition, gases were emitted from the ‘body’ of the slain Serpent. It was this vapour that the Pythia inhaled.
The Priestess would sit in a tripod chair, above a chasm in the Earth. As the hot gases rose, the Oracle would breathe in deeply and hold the fumes within. She would enter a trance and from this altered state, would chant prophesies, guidance and counsel to her querents. From her dark, underground chamber, her voice would echo, in songs and utterances sometimes unintelligible.
Plutarch, a priest at the Delphic Temple, recorded that as the Spirit’s breathed into the Pythia, she would give off a ‘sweet fragrance’, the breath and lust of the Gods. (3)
It was a great honour to be chosen as an Oracle. Typically, the Pythias were chosen from a guild of Temple priestesses. Even if married with maternal concerns, the priestess would leave all familial responsibilities behind. Her earthly family no longer took precedence. The women left the family home and did not return.
Plutarch records that the life span of an Oracle was shortened due to the exhaustive nature of housing the Gods. After each prophetic session, the Pythia would be feverish, flushed and weak. Due to the strain and untimely deaths of many of the Oracles, it became necessary to alternate them. Typically, there were three Oracles at any one time, with 2 alternating as Prophetess and one on reserve, in case of their deaths. (4)
In order to speak like a God, one must become like a God. Our mortal body, our ego, must be shoved aside. There is no room for self-doubt or humanistic limitations. We empty ourselves of our flawed humanity and become vessels for the Divine. We become the Chosen One, a mouthpiece for Deity.
People of our modern time lack the individual sacrifice and obsession for the Divine that many of our Ancients had. Perhaps that why the Gods sometime seem so silent. I believe it is not They who will not speak, but we who will not hear. To regain our lost selves, to find that God-like place within, we must die to self, we must empty our hearts and minds and partake of Death. We must become vessels. We must be empty to be filled. Let us all become Oracles.
References:
(1) West, Litchfield Martin. The Orphic Poems, p.147. “The Pythia resembles a shamaness at least to the extent that she communicates with her [deity] while in a state of trance, and conveys as much to those present by uttering unintelligible words. [cf. Spirit Language, Mircea Eliade]. It is particularly striking that she sits on a cauldron supported by a tripod, reiterating the triad of the great goddess. This eccentric perch can hardly be explained except as a symbolic boiling, and, as such, it looks very much like a reminiscence of the initiatory boiling of the shaman translated from hallucinatory experience into concrete visual terms. It was in this same cauldron, probably, that the Titans boiled Dionysus in the version of the story known to Callimachus and Euphorion, and his remains were interred close by”.
(2) Homeric Hymn to Apollo. 363-369.
(3) Plutarch. On the Decline of the Oracles (De Defectu Oraculorum) and On the Oracles of Pythia (De Pythiae Oraculis) in Moralia, Volume 5, Harvard University Press.
(4) Dashu, Max. The Pythias, Secret History of the Witches. 2009.
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