Possession Greece

8/18/2019 Possession Greece

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APOLLO, POSSESSION, AND PROPHECY

Fritz GrafThe Ohio State University

Il s’est formé sur les phénomènes qui provoquaient ou accompagnaient, à Delphes, ladivination de la Pythie une espèce d’opinion courante, qui présente d’ailleurs aussi lescaractères de ce genre d’opinion: la ténacité et l’imprécision.

Édouard Will1

i.

Details of how the Pythia communicated with her god and with her clients havealways been highly debated, and opinions have diverged widely over time.2 Togive a sample, I cite three voices spaced over almost a century:

1907: The Pythoness must carefully prepare herself by certain acts ofritualistic significance. It seems that she chewed some leaves of thesacred laurel, and then in the adyton drank water possessing a mantic in-fluence from a fount which Pausanias calls Kassotis. . . . But all thiscame to be considered merely as accessory, leading up to the great mo-ment when the Pythoness ascended the tripod, and, filled with the divineafflatus which at least the later ages believed to ascend from a fissure inthe ground, burst forth into wild utterances, which was probably some

kind of articulate speech, and which the Hosioi, the ‘holy ones,’ whowith the prophet sat around the tripod, knew well how to interpret. . . .What was essential to Delphic divination, then, was the frenzy of the Py-thoness and the sounds which she uttered in this state which were inter- preted by the Hosioi, and the ‘prophet’ according to some conventionalcode of their own.3

1951: At Delphi, and apparently at most of his oracles, Apollo relied, noton visions like those of Theoclymenus, but on “enthusiasm” in its origi-

1 Will 161.2 An overview in Nilsson 172–74; fundamental is Amandry, with the immediate

protest of Flacelière 1950; more in Maurizio 1995.3 Farnell 188–89. He is candid enough to confess that (189 n. b) “This theory of therelations between the Hosioi and the Pythia rests on no direct authority, but on general probabilities.”


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nal and literal sense. The Pythia became entheos, plena deo: the god en-tered into her and used her vocal organs as if they were his own, exactlyas the so-called ‘control’ does in modern spirit-mediumship.4

2001: Wenn die Pythia Lorbeer kaut, so wird sie damit vom Gott erfüllt,ähnlich wie—für uns allerdings wesentlich leichter nachvollziehbar—dieBachantinnen mit dem Wein den Gott Dionysus selbst aufnehmen.5

At a first glance, these citations could be read as a collection of mostly refutedopinions. Although the idea of gaseous or mephitic emanations as a stimulant forthe Pythia’s mantic condition has usually reliable ancient sources, it was rejectedafter the French excavations under the adyton of the temple in Delphi: there

simply was no visible fissure in the solid rock.6

Thus, some scholars did not wantto simply discard the ancient testimonies as fictions or to explain them as theoriesonly about how Delphic divination worked,7 and they had recourse to the idea of priestly machinations , Priestertrug , an idea that was once a weapon in anti-clerical debates and has never appealed to historians of religion. 8 The analogywith Dionysian frenzy, dear to nineteenth-century scholars, especially to ErwinRohde, and the discordia concors of Apollo and Dionysus made famous by Nietzsche,9 was challenged and finally refuted by several scholars, starting fromthe Austrian archaeologist F. Hauser to Joseph Fontenrose, Christopher Forbesand Lisa Maurizio, the latter two without knowing of each other’s work.10 The

4 Dodds 1951: 73.5

Rosenberger 54.6 “On n’a mis à jour que la surface irrégulière du terrain naturel, sans aucune trace dela fissure par où auraient passé les vapeurs qui, dit-on, inspiraient la prophétesse:” thus amember of the French team, Émile Bourguet, in his short guide with its beautiful photo-graphs by Frédéric Boissonas, Delphes (Paris 1925) 22. On Émile Bourguet (1867–1939),“l’un des plus actifs participants de la ‘grande fouille’ de Delphes,” see the necrology byPierre de la Coste Messelière, RA 1939, 257–59. See also Courby 66: “Il n’y a jamais eude fissure en cette partie,” and, before the final publication of the French excavations,Oppé.

7 Stoic theory according to Will 173–75; explained by Amandry 222–25.8 Elaborately expressed by Holland, and Littleton; more discreetly Jean Bousquet,

BCH 64–65 (1940–41) 228 (“mise en scène”).9 Rohde 2.21 and elsewhere. The parallelism has ancient roots; see Ov. Pont . 2.5.67;

Verg. Aen. 6.77 says of the Sibyl bacchatur , on which Servius comments idem est enim Apollo, qui Liber pater, qui Sol. 10 Hauser 33–57, esp. 43 (summary in Amandry 9); Latte 9–18, esp. 12; Amandry 42

(“l’extase se manifest aussi bien sous la forme d’une immobilité totale, d’une insensibi-


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little information about the actual mantic session that we possess repeats theserenity and clear language of the Pythia, and the one session that ended with aPythia in frenzy was an accident that led to the poor woman’s death a few dayslater.11 For the same reason, Dodds’ comparison of the Pythia with a nineteenth-century spirit medium such as Madame Blavatsky is rather difficult to follow, asagain Forbes and Maurizio showed. Already Plutarch insisted on the Pythia’s ac-tive presence: “Neither the sound nor the inflection nor the vocabulary nor themetrics are the god’s, but the woman’s; he grants only the inspiration ( phantasía)and kindles a light in her soul towards the future; such is her enthousiasmós.”12 Or, as Tom Callan put it: the Pythia’s “thoughts are like any others except fortheir source which must then be expressed by same means available to the mantis for the expression of any other thoughts,” i.e. in her own voice and her own lan-

guage.13

And Plutarch is not the only author to insist on this. His contemporary,Dio Chrysostom, pointed out that Apollo would speak neither Dorian nor Atticnor any other human language, but that it were the medium’s language one wouldhear. His corollary, that the Pythia was not much more than a translator, needsmore emphasis than it received in the past: “That is why oracles are often unclearand deceive humans.”14 Thus, the Pythia is neither frenzied and talking in glosso-lalia nor a passive medium for the god’s epiphany, but a translator who is asmuch traduttore as traditore, in the famous Italian saying. There might have beenyet another level of translation, when the Pythia did not speak in verse herself:Strabo and Plutarch know about specialists (Plutarch only for earlier times) whowere versifying the Pythia’s words, should they be in prose. 15 This second “trans-lation,” if it really existed, is far from the elaborate transformation of the Pythia’s

utterances that took place according to many past scholars and that according tothem gave the male elite of the sanctuary the occasion to address diplomatic and political issues. That is not to say that the parallelism of female medium and male prophet which is certain in Didyma would not have some significance;16 but it is

lité physique, d’un assoupissement que par des danses orgiastiques ou des mouvementsdéesordonnés”); Fontenrose 204–12; Forbes 259–261; Maurizio 1995 and 1998.

11 Accident: Plutarch, De def. or. 51.438B.12 Plut. Pyth. or. 7.397C–D.13 Callan 130.14 D. Chr. Or . 10.23.15 Strab. 9.3.5 p. 419; Plut. De Pyth. or . 397B–C: in the past “men with gift for

prophecy were sitting close to the shrine” and produced poetic versions.16 See esp. Amandry 118–23 (with a measured conclusion: “Tenter de déterminer la part respective du prophète et de la Pythie dans l’élaboration des réponses de l’oracle estune entreprise actuellement vaine,” 122), and Fontenrose 212, who again is too radical.


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less simple than one thought. Anthropology knows at least one interesting paral-lel: among the Muslim Laujé of Sulawesi (Indonesia), possessed female media ofcommon social status (boliang ) transmit the spirits’ voices that then are trans-lated to the audience by healers ( sando) “who are almost exclusively men ofinfluence and authority.”17 The arrangement is rationalized by the fact that thespirits (and thus the media) speak in “old Laujé” which the audience claims notto understand, an assertion contradicted by actual fact. The reason for the ar-rangement seems to be not linguistic but social, the enactment and legitimation ofstandard female roles even in possession cults.18

The chewing of laurel, finally, has almost as often been rejected asasserted. Parke and Wormell, in a level-headed chapter, came to no certain con-clusion, and scholars more than once insisted that “laurel is quite harmless.”19

But the laurel-chewing Pythia is still with us. Even the self-test of Traugott K.Oesterreich, the pioneering scholar of religious possession and trance, had nogreat impact. He chewed “fresh laurel-leaves, but without results of any inter-est.”20 Ancient documentation is vague. There is no Greek or Roman text thatwould clearly say that the Pythia was chewing laurel leafs. Some poetical texts,starting with Lycophron, explain the frenzy of female seers such as Cassandra orthe Sibyl from eating laurel,21 and the anonymous commentator on Lycophron

17 Nourse 425–42 (the citation on 426).18 This contradicts the common assumption that possession is a compensatory

response to disempowerment, see e.g. Lewis, who is heavily used in a feminist reading of possession.

19

Ogle 287–311, esp. 300–303 (somewhat rash); Kirby Flower Smith, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (New York 1913) 463 f. (“perfectly harmless”); Parke and Wormell 26.The chewing appears even in the otherwise sound entry on “Lorbeer” in Der Neue Pauly,vol. 7 (1999) col. 441. Even Holland and Littleton (n. 8 above) agreed on the harmlessnature of laurel, but thought that the Delphians, in addition to laurel, burned hemp(Cannabis sativa) to help with the Pythia’s ecstasy.

20 Oesterreich 319 n. 3; see also Dodds 1951: 73. On Traugott KonstantinOesterreich (1880–1949), philosopher, psychologist, and pioneer of parapsychology, seeMatthias Wolfes in Biographisch- Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 18 (Nordhausen2001) cols. 1101–10; a short account also in Anita Kohsen Gregory’s introduction to thereprint of Possession (Secaucus, N.J. 1966).

21 Cassandra: Lycophron 6 (daphn! phágos); the Cumaean Sibyl: Tib. 2.5.63.Transferred to the Roman vates, the inspired poet: at Ov. Pont . 2.5.65–68 both Ovid and

his addressee Salanus, Germanicus’ teacher of rhetoric, are inspired (distat opus nostrum, sed fontibus exit ab isdem: / artis et ingenuae cultor uterque sumus. / thyrsus abest a te gustata et laurea nobis; / sed tamen ambobus debet inesse calor ); Iuv. 7.18–19 nectitquicumque canoris / eloquium vocale modis laurumque momordit. The context of Soph.


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asserts: “Seers used to eat laurel beforehand.” But the same scholion (that is pieced together from different commentators) also offers a glimpse on a learneddebate between those who thought ancient seers chewed or ate laurel and thosewho thought that eating laurel was simply a literary metaphor for wearing alaurel wreath. No ancient commentator, it seems, had clear evidence for the useof laurel in divination.22 The closest we come to Delphi is in a text of Lucianwhere Zeus complains about the stressful life of the gods and describes Apollo’shectic life: “He has to be in Delphi, and soon he rushes to Colophon, from therehe changes to Xanthos and sprints again back to Claros, then to Delos or Didyma.Wherever the seer ( promántis) orders him to appear when she has been drinkingfrom the sacred spring, chewing laurel and shaking the tripod, there he has to be present on the spot.”23 Tripod and spring might be Delphic, as might the female

seer (although Lucian’s term for her , promántis, is not Delphic); but the passagefeeds on poetical images, not historical facts about Apolline divination. Modern pharmaceutical research, on the other hand, was unable to find any psychotropicsubstance in Laurus nobilis L., Apollo’s laurel; oleander that looked similar andcould, therefore, be confused with it contains a heart stimulant and not a psycho-tropic substance.24 The ecstatic property of the laurel is a symbolic construct thathad no foundation in reality. Whereas Ovid juxtaposes laurel and thyrsus asApollo’s and Dionysus’ ecstatic plants, Pliny states that laurel undoes the intox-icating effects of wine.25

ii.

frg. 897 Radt (!"#$%$ #&'($ )!*$+, -./0 +1 2+*3&, “when you eat bay, bite yourlips with your teeth”) is unclear, and talks about eating, not chewing laurel anyway. In itssource, Schol. Hes. Theog . 30, the title Kassandra is added secondarily, perhaps becauseof Lycophron. Radt himself wonders whether the fragment comes from a comedy.

22 Schol. Lyc. 6. It begins with the general assertion that “laurel-eating” would pointto the ritual preparation of ancient seers and explains: “the seers prophesied after havingeaten laurel in order that the god, rejoicing at the sight and smell, would reward themwith oracles.” Then the text narrates the Daphne myth, and finally adds, flatly contra-dicting the earlier source, that seers did not really eat laurel but that this was a meta-

phorical way of saying that they were wearing a laurel wreath.23 Lucian, Bis accusatus 1.24 See Holland 214.25 Plin. NH 17.239; cf. Martial 5.4; Ogle 301.


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All this—the absence of mephitic gases, the non-psychotropic qualities of laurel,the lack of any signs of ‘frenzy’ with the Pythia—does not mean that the Pythia,when prophesying, was in an ordinary state of mind, as most recently LisaMaurizio showed, against Fontenrose’s too rationalist conclusions.26 The Pythiacould quietly and lucidly answer the questions of her clients and nevertheless bein that altered state of consciousness that her own culture associated with being possessed. The expression of possession is as much culturally shaped as anyother mental or emotional expression of homo sapiens. Possession as a specificstate of mind might have biological and thus anthropologically universal reasons, but it takes not the universal forms of expression that Oesterreich had assumed inhis classical work.27 The common and already ancient assumption that, with thePythia (or, for that matter, the Sibyl), possession by the god would result in un-

controlled frenzy and “Dionysian” ecstasy, as had been assumed by most modernscholars, is contradicted by several texts, not the least by Plutarch, who knewDelphic ritual extremely well.

What exactly was the ‘possession’ the Pythia experienced? The Greeks,as we know, used two different terms, kátochos and éntheos, to denote thesestates of consciousness, and they were different not only in their etymology.kátochos is both an active and a passive adjective. In its active sense, ‘holdingdown,’ it can designate a drug that prevents the fetus from being extruded, or thegod Hermes who binds the tongue of a victim; as a noun in the Graeco-EgyptianMagical Papyri, it means ‘binding spell.’28 In its passive sense, it is a technicalterm to denote a person who is controlled by a divinity.29 A person ‘seized by thenymphs,’ nympholeptos, such as Archedamos of Thera, would be a kátochos,

someone seized and controlled by a divine force who, however, has not lost hisregular appearance altogether.30 éntheos, ‘having a theós inside,’ is possession in

26 Maurizio 1995; Fontenrose 206–12. Amandry is somewhat more ambiguous: heaccepts that not every altered state of consciousness (“extase”) had to be frenzy (42 f.), but later seems to reduce the Pythia’s enthousiasmos to nothing more than “un état degrâce resultant de l’accomplissement des rites” (234), which is uncomfortably close toFontenrose’s remark “she felt the meaning and sanctity of her office” (211).

27 On Oesterreich, see above n. 20. On the interaction between anthropologicallygiven and culturally determined factors, see Bourgignon 297–313 (“For analytical pur- poses, it is possible to separate psychobiological from sociocultural and personal ele-ments in a given sequence of trance behaviors,” 298).

28

Medicine: Aetius 16.23; magic: Hermes a defixio in IG III 86.2 (Athens, IVa); a binding spell in PGM VII 454.29 See LSJ s.v.30 On Archedamos see Connor.


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the sense that a superhuman (divine or demonic) personality has taken over the body of a human and is using it instead of his own divine body. While the firsttemplate of total control underlies such modern nightmares as Huxley’s Brave New World , the second template underlies Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

As to the Pythia, the new contemporary consensus would point to what I just called the “Control Template,” and it has many ancient sources on its side,not the least Plutarch or Dio. Already Aeschylus’ Delphic prophetess conforms toit when she defines her occupation as “I tell the future wherever the god leadsme.”31 As a mode of divination, though, it has its drawbacks, as Plutarch and Diowere well aware. The Pythia as a controlled medium possesses her own inertia.Thus, her own material characteristics are liable to distort the message, to renderit opaque and difficult to read. Dio, with a sophist’s keen sense for language,

expresses this in terms of translation, while the Platonist Plutarch is more materi-alistic:32 “Mantic inspiration, like erotic inspiration, uses the given material andmoves the recipient of its motion according to the individual nature of each.” Thegod, that is, has to move the Pythia’s soul that, being a human soul, is more inertthan his own, and the Pythia’s soul in turn has to move her vocal organs withtheir own bodily inertia, before Apollo’s answer reaches the ears of the recipientsin a double ‘mechanical’ distortion.

The Body Snatcher Template then, one would think, would be a betterway to conceptualize divination: the god who lacks a human form takes over ahuman body to express himself among mortals. Vergil’s description of the Sibylseems to conform to this, although the description is a complex fictional account;in bacchic frenzy, the Sibyl fights the god who wants to take her over. 33 The tem-

plate exists for the Pythia too, although we know it only through the words ofsomeone who rejects it. “It is utterly simplistic and childish,” says one of theinterlocutors in Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum, “to believe that the god him-self would slip into the bodies of the prophets (as in the case of the belly-talkerswho were formerly called Eyrykleis and are now called Pythones) and that hewould speak using their mouths and vocal chords as his instruments.” 34 The re-sistance to the template has theological reasons: the divine is too different and

31 Eumenides 33.

32 D. Chr. Or . 10.23; Plut. De def . orac. 23.406B; see for the entire discussionHolzhausen.

33 Verg. Aen. 6.77–79. Both the Sibyl’s resistance and the sexual metaphor that

might be seen in what Servius (on 6.79) sees as a riding image (excuti proprie de equis dicimus) have been read as reflecting ‘real’ possession; see Oesterreich 332–35 and thetexts cited below, n. 53.

34 De def . orac. 9.414 D–E.


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too incompatible with the human world in order simply to slip into human bodies.35 But even so the critic, the skeptical Boëthus, “un géomètre de tendancesépicuriennes,” in Flacelière’s words,36 has to agree that the template exists andthat Apollo is part of it, in Delphi as well as elsewhere. Why else would the reli-gious healers attacked by Hippocrates ascribe a specific form of seizure ascoming from Apollo Nomios,37 and why would the “belly-talkers” (engastri-m "thoi, ‘having speech in their bellies’) be called Pythones, at least from earlyimperial time onwards?38 Plutarch’s use of the term is close to its first use in thestory of Paul’s exorcism on a girl “with a pythôn as a spirit” near Thessaloniki.39 In the imperial East, Pythones were highly popular as informal and non-institutional sources of divination. The slave girl whom Paul healed was a con-siderable source of income for her owner who might have felt as bad about Paul’s

meddling as the Ephesian silversmiths did. Philo of Alexandria combined augurs, belly-talkers and interpreters of miracles into one group of religious specialistsand performers that were very popular in Alexandria,40 and a century later Clem-ent of Alexandria talks about “the belly-talkers that still are highly honored bythe crowd.”41

Plutarch himself has yet another reading of the Pythia’s enthousiasmós,as he usually calls her state of consciousness. In the fundamental passage in De Pythiae oraculis 21, he states that “the god makes use of the Pythia so that hemay be heard by us.” This can be read as following either of my two templates.Plutarch then adds: “What we call enthousiasmós results from two simultaneousmovements in the soul [of the Pythia]: one movement is imparted by the god, theother one stemming from the soul itself.” These two movements, as Plutarch

makes clear with an example from physics, result in one overall movement that is“a turbulent and irregular whirl.”42 In other words, the god does not fully controlthe Pythia’s soul but introduces his own movement into a soul that has its owninborn movement. The result of the two movements is not a neat new vector, but

35 A similar theological resistence already informed the Hippocratic doctor of De morbo sacro.

36 Flacelière 1947: 24.37 Hippocr. Morb. Sacr. 4. The other gods in his list are Cybele, Poseidon, Enodia,

Ares, and Hecate.38 On the belly–talkers see Amandry 64 f.; Dodds 1973: 199. They are attested since

the fifth century, with a growing body of evidence in imperial times.39

Acts 16.16.40 Philo, De somn. 1.220.41 Clem. Protr . 2.11.2.42 De Pyth. or. 21.404E–F; I follow the Loeb translation.


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a spiral whose movements are unpredictable, such as happens when two objectsthat are turning each in its own tornado combine their movements. Apollo’scontrol is not exercised from outside, it becomes part of the Pythia’s inside but isinfluenced by her own inertia. We deal, so to speak, with a sophisticated Platonictransformation of the Body Snatcher template. The justification for calling thisenthousiasmós in a literal sense, I assume, comes from the fact that the first person singular in the Pythia’s oracles is always Apollo, quite unlike the Sibylwho speaks in her own first person.

Plutarch’s analysis has yet another consequence, besides attesting to the prominence of the Body Snatcher template even in the theologically sensitivePlutarch. It reintroduces what earlier scholars called frenzy into the discourseabout the Pythia, albeit in Plutarch’s philosophical transformation: the god’s

intervention creates, in the Pythia’s soul, “a turbulent and irregular whirl, ” that isit results in strong mental disturbances. In this passage, Plutarch does not tell ushow this is reflected in the Pythia’s behavior. There is no reason not to assumethat, as in his other descriptions, she stays outwardly serene and composed. But itshould give rise to rethink the topic of ‘frenzy’ in Delphi once again, both as tothe ancient ways of encoding the manía of the Pythia, and as to the moderninsistence on it.

iii.Once again, culture, not biology, determines the outward form that the world-wide psychological experience of possession takes. This form is always a culturalelaboration of psycho-physiological human possibilities. The Greek elaboration

took several forms, from the quiet possession of the Pythia to the vehemence ofmaenadism or Corybantic rites, or in the epileptic seizures described by theHippocratic doctor.43 As this example shows, culture also determines the border-line between illness and possession. Even the Platonist Philo can describe aclinical experience of mental problems “as if I were participating in Corybanticrites with overpowering possession, forgetting everything, the place and the people.”44 But things again may look hazier than this. Accounts of Delphic possession, at least, show not only quiet and control; some come very close to bacchic loss of control.

The main instance is the account of how Delphi’s mantic properties werefound. The story is repeated in several sources with only minor variations, from

43 Hippocr. Morb. Sacr. 4, to be precise, does not use the language of possession: thesymptoms point to a god “as the cause,” whatever the underlying mechanism is.

44 Philo, De migratione 35.3.


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Diodorus onwards.45

The central point is that is was a herd of goats that found theoracle. The goat is the animal whose preliminary sacrifice informs the priestswhether the god would be accessible. The story explains (as Diodorus confirms,if a confirmation were needed) why goats were used in this way. The goats weregrazing at the very spot where there was later the adyton of the sanctuary andwhere, from a slim chasm in the ground, some subterranean gas (atmós or pneûma) was rising. Goats that happened to breathe it started to prance around instrange ways and to utter unusual sounds, a sort of goatish glossolalia. The goat-herd became curious, inspected the place, got a whiff of the gas himself and promptly began the same sort of outlandish behavior.46 Whereas Plutarch as-cribes enthousiasmós to him, Pausanias makes him utter fully-fledged Apollineoracles. Whatever it was, the occurrence got known and attracted a crowd that, of

course, experienced all the same sort of mental dislocation. In order to containthe uncanny force and at the same time to profit from it, the inhabitants foundedan oracle and attributed it to Gaia, goddess of whatever there is in the earth.

Thus, it was the frenzy and the ‘glossolalia’ of the goats that started it all.Even if we should read the enthusiasm of the goatherd on a low key, his behaviorimpressed his fellow Delphians enough to found an oracle. Other cases of orac-ular frenzy in Apollo’s sanctuaries are less obvious. Neither Claros nor Didymagive a clear picture, beyond the fact that the priest or priestess spoke under thegod’s control. Tacitus expresses his surprise about why the Clarian priest, afterhaving drunk from the sacred spring, answered in well-crafted verses, althoughhe rarely had a formal literary training.47 The extant oracular texts are all hexam-etrical, with two exceptions: two texts from the later second century AD progress

from detached hexameters to excited anapaests and iambics. This seems to stagethe process of progressively more ecstatic prophecy, and it shows that at least onewriter of oracles could play with oracular frenzy at an Apolline oracle.48 In theArgive sanctuary of Apollon Pythaeus, some nights the priestess drank from the blood of a sacrificed sheep, “and she becomes possessed (kátochos) from thegod”49 —we lack information how this possession expressed itself. Literary textsgive only a bit more. Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon loses her serenity

45 Diod. 16.26.1–4 (whatever his source was); Plut. De def . or . 42.433C; Paus.10.5.7.

46 435,& -5,0/$ +5/6 7$8592,":592, ibid.; to utter #;$


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when seized by the god, but she breaks into what the chorus understand aslament, not as ecstatic behavior. Her metrics are somewhat disputed, but themany dochmiacs she uses certainly express mental disturbance.50 Vergil’s pre-sentation of the Sibyl’s prophecy in Aeneid 6 combines spirit possession withextravagant motoric behavior. The Sibyl suffers from Apollo’s presence and triesmagnum si pectore possit / excussisse deum (6.78–79). The god has taken herover, and it will not be easy to get rid of him again. The result is Dionysiacfrenzy (6.78 bacchatur vates) and a sort of rabies (6.80 os rabidum), not unlikewhat the Hippocratic doctor of On the Sacred Disease describes as the result ofdivine possession.51 The information the Sibyl imparts, however, is as lucid asanything Vergil wrote (everything else would contradict genre conventions any-way), but the somewhat convoluted and staccato syntax in the first two verses

can be understood as to paint an altered state of mind. Other Sibyls seem as lucidas this; otherwise the grave epigram of one could not insist on her quality as a“girl gifted with speech.”52 As a literary creation who is alive only in her hex-ameters, the Sibyl does not show a uniform picture of her possession. Manía,ascribed to her from Heraclitus onwards, is an ambiguous term.53

In Delphi, then, and perhaps in other Apolline oracles as well, there is atension between the ritual of the oracles and the stories told about them, between practice and ideology. For practical reasons, any divinatory system tries to keepthe line of communication between the divine source of information and the hu-man client as short as possible. Given the essential gap between god and human,some distance is unavoidable, and it is the medium that bridges the distance, be ita human medium such as the Pythia or a material one such as dice. The stories,

however, extrapolate from the ritual to the much larger distance between humansand gods. Being possessed by a god means losing a vital and central part of one’shumanity—losing control, memory, and identity. Both moves are necessary forthe function of the oracle where two such incompatible worlds, god and humans,come together, and they supplement each other. This explains why in the literaryand mythical discourse about Delphi, the ‘bacchic’ mood became the dominantmetaphor for talking about the Pythia’s experience. The spread of Dionysiacthemes due to the radiance of Athenian tragedy, comedy and dithyramb, with theDionysiac technitai as agents, and the parallel spread of Dionysiac mysteries all

50 Aesch. Ag. 1072 ff.; West’s metrical analysis still retains iambics.51 Hippocr. Morb. Sacr. 4.52

Epigram in Paus. 10.12.6.53 Heraclitus 22 B 92 D–K; on the Delphic Sybil, Paus. 10.12.3. On the Sibyl and hermania, see Stumfohl; Suárez de la Torre; Crippa; and Grotanelli. On mania, Maurizio1995: 77–79.


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over the ancient world must have reinforced this. Modern scholars in turn turnedinto a monolithic theory what in reality had been complimentary moods, and theydid so, I suspect, less under the influence of Dionysiac images than under that ofthe Christian way of reading possession, although the two need not contradicteach other—Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in Turin, as reported by his friendFranz Overbeck, combined the two.54 This Christian paradigm goes as far back asthe New Testament and the early Saints’ Lives. Possessed figures in the NewTestament such as the madman of Gadara can show violence, frenzy and lack ofrestraint.55 Possessed figures in the early Saints’ Lives are usually rather morecolorful than the Gospels’ relatively restrained stories.56 And storytelling, its lawsand its aims should not be underrated when dealing with accounts of possession,as already the differences between the Gospel versions of the Gadara episode

show.57

iv.There is yet another ideological story pattern: the tales that the altered state ofconsciousness of the medium was induced by a substance. If we leave asidelaurel as harmless, there are two sets of substances left, liquids and gas, amongwhich liquids are widespread while gas is extremely rare. There is a traditionalconnection between oracles and springs. In Claros and Didyma, prophecy wastriggered by water,58 and Delphi had two sources, the Castalia and the Cassotis—

54 Bernoulli 232–34.55 The description in Mark 5:2–11 somewhat more than the one in Luke 8:26–38 or

the rather restrained story in Matthew 8:28–34.56 Jerome’s seminal Life of Saint Hilarion is instructive. Chapter 10 describes an

extremely aggressive and violent young man: “possessed by a very evil daemon”(affectus pessimo daemone), he breaks legs and necks of others or bites off their ears andnoses, and neither chains nor doors can restrain him. Chapter 12 narrates about a virgo Dei who, possessed by an Egyptian love demon, “becomes insane, throws her veil away,shakes her hair, grinds her teeth and shouts the name of the young man” (insanire virgoet amictu capitis abiecto rotare crinem, stridere dentibus, inclamare nomen adulescentis;the details recall the description of a maenad). Chapter 13 presents a German in imperialservice whom his demons makes howl at night and grind his teeth; in the saint’s presence,

he “barely touches the ground with his feet,” roars and speaks in Syrian.57 Instructive is Brown 123–25.58 Claros: Plin. NH 2.232; Didyma: Iambl. Myst . 3.11. On both, see Parke 1985: 210–

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according to some late sources, Pythia drank from either.59 While neither theDelphic nor the Didymean water was explicitly described as special, the Clarianwater had such power that it caused the early death of the prophet. 60 TodayClaros is submerged by groundwater, but there is no reason why this should bedifferent water from the one that flowed in the sacred spring. It is as innocuous asthe Delphian or the Didymean water. In some other oracular shrines, blood re- placed water as the stimulating drink, in Argos the blood of a goat, in Aegae inAchaea bull’s blood.61 We do not need to make experiments to realize thatneither is hallucinogenic in itself. Delphi is the only place where water is inter-changeable with the gaseous exhalation (atmós or pneûma) from the famouschasm, or rather where the exhalations were much more prominent than the wateras stimulating the Pythia. Ancient authors from Strabo, Diodorus, and Cicero

onwards were convinced of the chasm’s existence, and sometimes went to greatlengths in its description,62 and with the chasm went the pneûma from the earth.Its singularity when compared to the ubiquitous spring water deserves attention,even though Édouard Will and Pierre Amandry would anchor it in Aristotelianand Stoic physics.63 Why only in Delphi?

A possible answer has spectacularly resurfaced (in a literal sense) a fewyears ago. There was, after all, a natural phenomenon, a fissure and even the pos-sibility of “mephitic” gas.64 Geological research—the very research for whicharchaeologists have been asking for almost a century,65 but undertaken for dif-ferent reasons—found two fault lines in the Parnassus region, the “Delphi fault”running east-west and the “Kerna fault” running northwest-southeast; they inter-sect under the sanctuary of Apollo. Fault lines can emit gas, and another fault

line, visible under the temple of Apollo in Hierapolis/Pamukkale, emits toxiccarbon dioxide that has been connected with Strabo’s Plutoneion in this Phrygiancity that could kill sparrows as well as bulls.66 Although no gases were found in

59 Delphi: Lucian, Herm. 70 (source); Paus. 10.24.7 (Cassotis); Euseb. Praep. ev.5.28.9 (Castalia); see also Clem. Protr. 1.11.1, Greg. Naz. In Iulianum 2.32 and Delatte325 (Castalia). Amandry 135–39 has all the material.

60 Plin. NH 2.232.61 Argos: Paus. 2.24.1; Aegae: Plin. NH 28.147 (virginity ordeal according to Paus.

7.25.13).62 It was large enough that Nero could throw bodies into it in order to stop the oracle:

Lucian, Nero 10; Cassius Dio 68.14.2; Sopater, Proleg . in Aristid . p. 710 Dindorf.63

Will 171–75; Amandry 221–23.64 de Boer et al.; Spiller et al.; Hale et al.65 Oesterreich 319; Will 162.66 Strabo 13.4.14 p. 630.


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Delphi, water samples from springs in the region were found to contain traces ofmethane, ethane and ethylene. Ethylene has a sweet odor and was used in smalldoses as an anesthetic in nineteenth-century dentistry, but it can kill in higherdoses.

The geological analysis gives a material reason for the unique storiesabout chasm and exhalation at Delphi, and not being geologist, I am willing tosuspend my scepticism. But I need to point out that things are more complex thanthe geological reports suggest. The natural phenomenon of fault line and possiblegas is only one side; nature needs to be translated into culture. To take the sim- plest case: even if there were fissures in the rocks under the adyton that are not just the work of water (as the French excavators suspected) but rather of seisism,these fissures are by no means the chasm that Strabo describes, “a hollow and

deep grotto with a rather small entrance,”67

and that would be large enough toswallow the bodies of Nero’s victims. This is cultural translation and narrativeelaboration. The same is true for other details. The fumes, if there were fumes, donot contradict or refute the ancient pneûma theories. The assumption of pneûma was, as Amandry pointed out, the most widespread physical theory in antiquity toexplain natural phenomena, that is again the Greek and Roman cultural trans-lation not only of possible earth gas, but of the Delphic way of divination. Thesweet odor that ethylene is said to have, finally, would not undo the insight thatthe good smell (eu#día) of the Delphic pneûma, according to Plutarch, signals adivine presence which is usually, in ancient narratives and presumably ancientexperience, accompanied by good smell.68

As to the effect of the gas on the Pythia, it seems too simplistic to assume

that it was the anaesthetic effect chemistry pointed out (or any other chemical ef-fect of a petrochemical gas), and that by sheer luck the dosage was always lowenough not to harm her (with one possible exception), and always affected onlythe Pythia and never the others present with her in the adyton. But “the noblemen of Delphi”69 or the “foreigners and the servants of the sanctuary” perceivedthe sweet smell “that escapes from the adyton as if from its source,” according toPlutarch.70 They were close enough to the Pythia to hear her voice and to smellthe pneûma. Most probably they were separated from her through only a flight of

67 Strabo 9.3.5.68

For good smell and epiphany, see the passages collected by Bömer on Ov. Fasti 5.376, and Richardson 252; for Delphi, Amandry 222 and Rescigno 469 f.69 Eur. Ion 414–16; Amandry 119.70 Plut. De def. or. 50.437C.


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steps that led down from their level to her tripod.71 Given that any event involv-ing an altered state of consciousness (“possession,” “trance,” “ecstasy,” accord-ing to individual cultural definitions) is shaped by the intersection of psychobiological and sociocultural elements, there is no need to focus exclusively on the psychobiological element and look for a psychotropic substance as a trigger, be itfor the gas or perhaps for the laurel.

Two better known cases in Greek religion help to understand what is atstake. Altered states of consciousness (enthousiasmós) in Greece are mainlyassociated with maenadism.72 Maenadic ecstasy was triggered by a large bundleof stimuli. Some were psychobiological, such as the use of alcohol or of specific bodily movement that had a neurological effect, as is attested for the typicalrotation of the head. Others are clearly cultural: the costume of the maenads, their

specific music, perhaps the entire ritual setting outside a woman’s daily routine.Another case is the Eleusinian Mysteries where the presence of Dionysiac imag-ery points to the experience of trance after the arrival in Eleusis. 73 Explanationfocused on the kykeon, the ritual drink used to break the fast after the arrival inEleusis; but none of its ingredients has hallucinogenic properties, not even the

71 For the Pythia “going down” see Plut. Tim. 8; De def . or . 51; De Pyth. or. 22 and28 (Courby 64 f.). For the presence of a group of people around the Pythia, including theconsultant, see Parke and Wormell 28 (“there was some sort of inner building in whichthe inquirers sat, . . . the Pythia was either in the same room or in an adjacent room fromwhich her voice at least would be heard”) and Fontenrose 218, who is somewhat over-confident (“it is clear that priests and Hosioi attended the Pythia when she sat upon the

tripod”). The archaeological record seems to attest to two different spaces inside the cellaof the temple, a chapel towards its southwestern corner and, inside the chapel, a lowerlevel going down to the rock, i.e. the space where the consultants and the personnel were,and the ‘cave’ where the Pythia was (Courby 47–69). Literature gives more. The key passage is the description of the disastrous consultation in De def . or . 51.438B–C: thePythia “goes down”; her voice indicates her problems, that is her voice at least can beheard by the witnesses; finally, “rushing towards the exit with a terrible and unseemlyshout she threw herself down, so that not only the ambassadors but also the prophet andthose of the Hosioi who were present took to flight”; collecting their spirits, they come back and carry her out. Depending on what one understands the exit to be (the flight ofstairs that led upwards, a door between the stair and the oikos, or a door to the oikos intothe cella), the two spaces are separated only by their different levels, or by some sort of partition. I prefer the former: when the Pythia emerged at the top of the stairs, rushed

towards the exit but fell before having reached it, she started the stampede of everybodyelse.72 The bibliography is vast; for the stimuli, see esp. Bremmer 267–86, esp. 275–82.73 Graf 1974.


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mint, as Karl Kerényi once suspected.74

The only possible biological trigger isthe result of a fast of three days and the ensuing procession of about eighteenmiles from Athens to Eleusis in the warmth of a Greek September day. Thismight have generated enough endorphins to generate euphoria, as with long-distance runners. The rest was done by the culturally determined elements, thekykeon, the surroundings, the experience of a crowd of presumably severalthousand initiates.

Eleusis with its high incidence of cultural triggers, and maenadism withits equally high use of biophysiological ones are two possibilities for the combi-nation of these elements in Greece. I would situate them on opposite sides of aspectrum. In both cases, the individuals concerned were ordinary Greeks withoutany personal predisposition for altered states of consciousness, which is to say,

without any inbuilt psychobiological trigger beyond what we all have built intoour physiology. The Pythia, on the other hand, must have been selected forexactly this predisposition. Although we are rather ignorant as to the criteria ofselection, beyond her being female, a virgin, and of any social class, is seems alegitimate assumption that such a disposition was part of the criteria.75 In hercase, then, we would expect even less outside stimuli that would not be culturallydetermined. There is need neither for psychotropic gas nor for psychotropiclaurel leaves. The smell had no different function than the water drunk in Claros,the blood ingested in Aegae and Argos, the laurel that some prophets, includingthe Pythia, might have chewed, or the water which the Didymaean prophetesstouched with her bare feet.76 All these things were the culturally determinedtriggers that prompted the medium’s altered state of mind. Being highly suscep-

tible persons (which is, as I am aware, a pure guess), they could easily trainthemselves to snap into their special condition when drinking water down underthe Clarian temple or smelling that sweet smell of whatever it was when they hadseated themselves on the Delphic tripod, or even in the temporary absence of thatsmell.

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