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Stoned Oracle at Delphi
nucal writes: "Acording to the NY Times (free registration required, etc.) the Oracles at Delphi were under the influence of ethylene gas when they made their prophecies. Archeologists and geologists teamed up to discover the 'mephitic vapours' that 'inspired divine frenzies.'"
What a load of hooey!
The Oracle in the Matrix was a bit like the Oracle at Delphi. She sat on a stool, she baked funny cookies ("I promise you that by the time you're finished eating it, you'll feel right as rain." You can say THAT again) and she foretold the future in ambiguous terms.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Hum, I thought it were the oracle of deli? Now i'm confused ...
Life sucks.
Helenic huffers? Grecian glue sniffers?
You could tell when you were in the seedy side of Crete when you started seeing people with paint on their beards and togas.
This is just like that episode of the Simpsons where Flanders builds the statue of Maude and there is a gas leak that makes everyone see visions.
My high school english teacher told us that back in the 80's. And high school english teachers aren't exactly the first people to find things out. So I'm sure they knew that before then. Why is the NYTimes running this now?
My favorite line from the Discover article is "To the ancient Greeks, the oracle at Delphi was the voice of Apollo. To Jelle de Boer, the oracle was more likely an ordinary woman high on hydrocarbons."
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
When I first read this, I thought Oracle (the company, funny that, there's and ad for them above) and was adopting Delphi (Borland's "Object Pascal") for use somehow. Maybe I'm just confused.
Your 1980 English teacher might possibly even have read E. R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) which, in addition to dismissing the vapor account as myth, gives a good statement of why it is irrelevant to trying to understand such phenomena:
The evidence supporting the "myth" is (relatively) new. Quite fascinating how geologist and author de Boer discovered the fissure in 1981 but, having read Plutarch, assumed it was already known and only in 1995 learned that it was not known to modern science while discussing it with archaeologist John R. Hale under the influence of some wine (which is when they resolved to team up and do a thourough investigation).
As an admirer of Dodds' scholarship, I also can't resist noting that of the 311 pages of the book, 129 comprise the 1099 annotations (three of which appeared in the citation above). Not quite hyperlinks, but enough in quantity and quality for me to judge him the Knuth of his field.
Ethylene is a part of a forward-feedback loop that causes fruit to ripen faster. That's why you put green tomatoes in a paper bag to ripen them - it concentrates the ethylene they outgas. It's also why "one bad apple spoils the bunch"
Apparently it "ripened" the ancients, too!
I need this for my cubicle.
I wrote a paper about the Oracle around five years ago and at the time research suggested a lot of people still thought the myth was credible.
Its always nice when scientists find hard proof of events that were previously considered myths. Who knows what legend they'll prove/disprove next?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I recently went to a Franciscan church just after mass where they had been burning mass quantities of (apparently) Frankincense and Myrrh.
Whatever it was, I met God that day.
I suppose in a few thousand years, media sources will be talking about what many influential people from our time were on. Like those 900-number Tarot reading Jamaicans. You know who I'm talking about. Of course, in the future, they won't have the tapes of the smoke rolling up behind her as their proof.