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.'"

Comments

The Simpson's knew it all along!

[wickidpisa]

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.

Already published in Discover

[thebabelfish]

This was already published in the November 2001 issue of Discover Magazine.

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."

old myth, new study

[bgins]

The article mentions reports to this effect dating back to at least Plutarch. Modern scholarship, however, found no scientific evidence for it. (The article mentions 1892 French excavations, 1904 A. P. Oppe, 1948 Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1950 Pierre Amandry).

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:

As to the famous "vapours" to which the Pythia's inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention, as Wilamowitz was, I think, the first to point out [65]. Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulty of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation. French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no chasm from which vapours could once have come [66]. Explanations of this type are really quite needless; if one or two living scholars still cling to them [67], it is only because they ignore the evidence of anthropology and abnormal psychology.

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, III: The Blessings of Madness, pp.73-4

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.

And the fruit ripened faster too

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Go Science!

[hether]

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?