A High Calling for Priestesses at Delphi
They warned Oedipus to stay away from his mother, told Orestes to go ahead and kill his, caused Croesus to lose to the Persians, then helped Athens defeat them. So what’s the story with the priestesses at Delphi? Did they really channel for Apollo, or were they just high on something?
Scientists don’t know about Apollo, but evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as Pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic that, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.
This is because the Temple of Apollo at Delphi sits on crisscrossing geological faults, according to a team of scientists led by archeologists John Hale of the University of Louisville and geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
In re-embracing the ancients’ view that intoxicants emanated from water bubbling from a rock fissure beneath the temple, Hale said, the team is challenging a century of research that held “that the priests and oracle were deceiving the public and inventing stories” to boost the shrine’s importance.
Instead, it appears the ancients were right. “I thought that if there is an active fault, there were most likely gases coming up through fissures,” Zeilinga de Boer said. And if that were true, traces would show up in the travertine that underpins the temple. Travertine is a type of limestone.
And so it proved. Reporting recently in the journal Geology, the team said that tests on the Delphi rock and the waters of a nearby spring showed the presence of methane and ethane, which can be intoxicating, as well as ethylene, widely used as an anesthetic in the first half of the 20th century.
“It was a great gas,” said toxicologist Henry Spiller, director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center in Louisville and another member of the Delphi team. “It produces a very rapid onset of effects and leaves the heart alone.” Unfortunately, “it is also explosive [and] dangerous for the surgeon,” Spiller added, which is why modern medicine eventually abandoned it.
Ethylene, Spiller explained, produces “stages” of anesthesia. Low doses induce “disembodied euphoria, with periods of excitation and amnesia,” he said. But at higher doses, “you get delirium, hysteria and a combative, agitated state,” he added. Further along come unconsciousness and, if one is not careful, death.
All of this squares nicely with historical accounts. As a high priest at the temple in the 1st century, the biographer Plutarch noted that the Pythia delivered oracles from a tripod in a small below-ground chamber bathed in gases carried up by underground springs.
Most of the time, the priestess was conscious, clever and chatty, but on occasion she flipped out, and things got nasty. The bad trips, including a death reported by Plutarch, had led past Delphi administrators to swap out the young maidens they used to put in the seat for more levelheaded matrons. Today the temple ruins, on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus, 100 miles northwest of Athens, are probably the most visited place in Greece after the Acropolis.
