The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (41 page)

5
. Apollo cursed the crow, burned Coronis to death for her illegitimate love affair with Ischys, and claimed Asclepius as his own son; then Cheiron and he taught him the art of healing. In other words: Apollo’s Hellenic priests were helped by their Magnesian allies the Centaurs, who were hereditary enemies of the Lapiths, to take over a Thessalian crow-oracle, hero and all, expelling the college of Moon-priestesses and suppressing the worship of the goddess. Apollo retained the stolen crow, or raven, as an emblem of divination, but his priests found dream-interpretation a simpler and more effective means of diagnosing their patients’ ailments than the birds’ enigmatic croaking. At the same time, the sacral use of mistletoe was discontinued in Arcadia, Messenia, Thessaly, and Athens; and Ischys became a son of the pine-tree (Elatus), not of the oak – hence the pistachio-cone in the hands of Asclepius’s image at Sicyon. There was another Lapith princess named Coronis whom Butes, the ancestor of the Athenian Butadae, violated (see
47.
4
).

6
. Asclepius’s serpent form, like that of Erichthonius – whom Athene also empowered to raise the dead with Gorgon-blood – shows that he was an oracular hero; but several tame serpents were kept in his temple at Epidaurus (Pausanias: ii. 28. 1) as a symbol of renovation: because serpents cast their slough every year (see 160.
11
). The bitch who suckled Asclepius, when the goatherd hailed him as the new-born king, must be Hecate, or Hecabe (see
31.
3
;
38.
7
; 134.
1
; 168.
n
and
1
); and it is perhaps to account for this bitch, with whom he is always pictured, that Cheiron has been made to tutor him in hunting. His other foster-mother, the she-goat, must be the Goat-Athene, in whose aegis Erichthonius took refuge (see
25.
2
); indeed, if Asclepius originally had a twin – as Pelias was suckled by a mare, and Neleus by a bitch (see
68.
d
) – this will have been Erichthonius.

7
. Athene, when reborn as a loyal virgin-daughter of Olympian Zeus, had to follow Apollo’s example and curse the crow, her former familiar (see
25.
e
).

8
. The willow was a tree of powerful moon-magic (see
28.
5
;
44.
1
and 116.
4
); and the bitter drug prepared from its bark is still a specific against rheumatism – to which the Spartans in their damp valleys will have been much subject. But branches of the particular variety of willow with which the Spartan Asclepius was associated, namely the
agnus castus
, were strewn on the beds of matrons at the Athenian Thesmophoria, a fertility festival (see
48.
1
), supposedly to keep off serpents (Arrian:
History of Animals
ix. 26), though really to encourage serpent-shaped ghosts; and Asclepius’s priests may therefore have specialized in the cure of barrenness.

51

THE ORACLES

T
HE
Oracles of Greece and Greater Greece are many; but the eldest is that of Dodonian Zeus. In ages past, two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes: one to Libyan Ammon, the other to Dodona, and each alighted on an oak-tree, which they proclaimed to be an oracle of Zeus. At Dodona, Zeus’s priestesses listen to the cooing of doves, or to the rustling of oak-leaves, or to the clanking of brazen vessels suspended from the branches. Zeus has another famous oracle at Olympia, where his priests reply to questions after inspecting the entrails of sacrificial victims.
¹

b
. The Delphic Oracle first belonged to Mother Earth, who appointed Daphnis as her prophetess; and Daphnis, seated on a tripod, drank in the fumes of prophecy, as the Pythian priestess still does. Some say that Mother Earth later resigned her rights to the Titaness Phoebe, or Themis; and that she ceded them to Apollo, who built himself a shrine of laurel-boughs brought from Tempe. But others say that Apollo robbed the oracle from Mother Earth, after killing Python, and that his Hyperborean priests Pagasus and Agyieus established his worship there.

c
. At Delphi it is said that the first shrine was made of bees’ wax and feathers; the second, of fern-stalks twisted together; the third, of laurel-boughs; that Hephaestus built the fourth of bronze, with golden song-birds perched on the roof, but one day the earth engulfed it; and that the fifth, built of dressed stone, burned down in the year of the
fifty-eighth Olympiad [489
B
.
C
.], and was replaced by the present shrine.
²

d
. Apollo owns numerous other oracular shines: such as those in the Lycaeum and on the Acropolis at Argos, both presided over by a priestess. But at Boeotian Ismenium, his oracles are given by priests, after the inspection of entrails; at Clarus, near Colophon, his seer drinks the water of a secret well and pronounces an oracle in verse; while at Telmessus and elsewhere, dreams are interpreted.
³

e
. Demeter’s priestesses give oracles to the sick at Patrae, from a mirror lowered into her well by a rope. At Pharae, in return for a copper coin, the sick who consult Hermes are granted their oracular responses in the first chance words that they hear on leaving the market place.
⁴

f
. Hera has a venerable oracle near Pagae; and Mother Earth is still consulted at Aegeira in Achaea, which means ‘The Place of Black Poplars’, where her priestess drinks bull’s blood, deadly poison to all other mortals.
⁵

g
. Besides these, there are many other oracles of heroes, the oracle of Heracles, at Achaean Bura, where the answer is given by a throw of four dice;
⁶
and numerous oracles of Asclepius, where the sick flock for consultation and for cure, and are told the remedy in their dreams after a fast.
⁷
The oracles of Theban Amphiaraus and Mallian Amphilochus – with Mopsus, the most infallible extant – follow the Asclepian procedure.
⁸

h
. Moreover, Pasiphaë has an oracle at Laconian Thalamae, patronized by the Kings of Sparta, where answers are also given in dreams.
⁹

i
. Some oracles are not so easily consulted as others. For instance, at Lebadeia there is an oracle of Trophonius, son of Erginus the Argonaut, where the suppliant must purify himself several days beforehand, and lodge in a building dedicated to Good Fortune and a certain Good Genius, bathing only in the river Hercyna and sacrificing to Trophonius, to his nurse Demeter Europe, and to other deities. There he feeds on sacred flesh, especially that of a ram which has been sacrificed to the shade of Agamedes, the brother of Trophonius, who helped him to build Apollo’s temple at Delphi.

j
. When fit to consult the oracle, the suppliant is led down to the river by two boys, thirteen years of age, and there bathed and anointed. Next, he drinks from a spring called the Water of Lethe, which will help him to forget his past; and also from another, close by, called the
Water of Memory, which will help him to remember what he has seen and heard. Dressed in country boots and a linen tunic, and wearing fillets like a sacrificial victim, he then approaches the oracular chasm. This resembles a huge bread-baking pot eight yards deep, and after descending by a ladder, he finds a narrow opening at the bottom through which he thrusts his legs, holding in either hand a barley-cake mixed with honey. A sudden tug at his ankles, and he is pulled through as if by the swirl of a swift river, and in the darkness a blow falls on his skull, so that he seems to die, and an invisible speaker then reveals the future to him, besides many mysterious secrets. As soon as the voice has finished, he loses all sense and understanding, and is presently returned, feet foremost, to the bottom of the chasm, but without the honey-cakes; after which he is enthroned on the so-called Chair of Memory and asked to repeat what he has heard. Finally, still in a dazed condition, he returns to the house of the Good Genius, where he regains his senses and the power to laugh.

k
. The invisible speaker is one of the Good Genii, belonging to the Golden Age of Cronus, who have descended from the moon to take charge of oracles and initiatory rites, and act as chasteners, watchers, and saviours everywhere; he consults the ghost of Trophonius who is in serpent form and gives the required oracle as payment for the suppliant’s honey-cake.
¹⁰

1
. Herodotus: ii. 55 and viii. 134; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 15; Homer:
Odyssey
xiv. 328; Aeschylus:
Prometheus Bound
832; Suidas
sub
Dodona; Sophocles:
Oedipus Tyrannus
900.

2
. Aeschylus:
Eumenides
1–19; Pausanias: x. 5. 3–5.

3
. Pausanias: ii. 24. 1; Plutarch:
Pyrrhus
31; Herodotus, viii. 134 and i. 78; Tacitus:
Annals
ii. 54.

4
. Pausanias: vii. 21. 5 and 22. 2.

5
. Strabo : viii. 6. 22; Pliny:
Natural History
xxviii. 41; Apollodorus: i. 9. 27.

6
. Pausanias: vii. 25. 6.

7
.
Ibid
.: ii. 27. 2.

8
.
Ibid
.: i. 34. 2; Herodotus: viii. 134.

9
. Plutarch:
Cleomenes
7; Pausanias: iii. 26. 1.

10
. Pausanias: ix. 39. 1–5; Plutarch:
On Socrates’s Demon
xxii. and
The Face on the Orb of the Moon
xxx.

1
. All oracles were originally delivered by the Earth-goddess, whose authority was so great that patriarchal invaders made a practice of seizing her shrines and either appointing priests or retaining the priestesses in
their own service. Thus Zeus at Dodona, and Ammon in the Oasis of Siwwa, took over the cult of the oracular oak, sacred to Dia or Dione (see
7.
1
) – as the Hebrew Jehovah did that of Ishtar’s oracular acacia (1
Chronicles
xiv. 15) – and Apollo captured the shrines of Delphi and Argos. At Argos, the prophetess was allowed full freedom; at Delphi, a priest intervened between prophetess and votary, translating her incoherent utterances into hexameters; at Dodona, both the Dove-priestesses and Zeus’s male prophets deliver oracles.

2
. Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the Cretans, who left their sacred music, ritual, dances, and calendar as a legacy to the Hellenes. Her Cretan sceptre, the
labrys
, or double-axe, named the priestly corporation at Delphi, the Labryadae, which was still extant in Classical times. The temple made from bees’ wax and feathers refers to the goddess as Bee (see
7.
3
;
18.
3
and
47.
1
) and as Dove (see
1.
b
and
62.
a
); the temple of fern recalls the magical properties attributed to fern-seed at the summer and winter solstices (Sir James Frazer devotes several pages to the subject in his
Golden Bough
); the shrine of laurel recalls the laurel-leaf chewed by the prophetess and her companions in their orgies – Daphnis is a shortened form of Daphoenissa (‘the bloody one’), as Daphne is of Daphoene (see
21.
6
and
46.
2
). The shrine of bronze engulfed by the earth may merely mark the fourth stage of a Delphic song that, like ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’, told of the various unsuitable materials with which the shrine was successively built; but it may also refer to an underground
tholos
, the tomb of a hero who was incarnate in the python. The tholos, a beehive-shaped ghost-house, appears to be of African origin, and introduced into Greece by way of Palestine. The Witch of Endor presided at a similar shrine, and the ghost of Adam gave oracles at Hebron. Philostratus refers to the golden birds in his
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
vi. 11 and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales (
Fragment
quoted by Athenaeus 290e). Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms (see 152.
a
) and rain-inducers (Marinus on Proclus 28), is disputable.