  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 Pyhthian 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 the Hyperborean priests Pagasus and Agyieus established His worship there. 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. Aechylus, Eumenides I-19 Mother Earth's shrine at Delphi was founded by 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 and as Dove; 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 the Goddess Daphoene. The shrine of bronze engulfed by the Earth marks 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 the underground thalos, 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 intoduced 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.II and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales. Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms and rain-inducers, is disputable. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths  Copyright © 1999 - 2003 CyberSybils.com. All rights reserved. |