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Science

Stoned Oracle at Delphi 25

Posted by timothy from the insatiable-olive-cravings dept.
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.'"
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Stoned Oracle at Delphi More

Stoned Oracle at Delphi

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  • 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.

  • Delphi? (Score:1)

    by NWT ( 540003 )
    Hum, I thought it were the oracle of deli? Now i'm confused ...

  • The Simpson's knew it all along! (Score:3, Funny)

    by wickidpisa ( 41827 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @07:54PM (#3191064) Homepage
    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.

  • Old news (Score:2, Informative)

    by sdirector ( 300580 )
    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?

    • Re:Old news (Score:2, Informative)

      by impto ( 465496 )
      No kidding.

      I was in Greece two summers ago and the tour guide told us all about how the Oracles would breath in the noxious vapors from the then somewhat active volcano and then dance around as they spouted forth their 'great prophecies' to those who came seeking 'wisdom'.

      Also FYI, she also told us that real Greeks pronounce the name Delfee.

      Must be a slow news day.

    • old myth, new study (Score:4, Informative)

      by bgins ( 446545 ) <bginsNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday March 20, 2002 @08:28AM (#3193337)
      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 [amazon.com]) 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 [wesleyan.edu] and author [princeton.edu] 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 [louisville.edu] 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.

  • Already published in Discover (Score:3, Informative)

    by thebabelfish ( 213456 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @09:36PM (#3191536) Homepage
    This was already published [discover.com] in the November 2001 issue of Discover Magazine [discover.com].

    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."

  • 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.

  • And the fruit ripened faster too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20, 2002 @10:37AM (#3193819)
    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!

  • hmmm (Score:2, Funny)

    by Argnarf ( 256419 )
    I need this for my cubicle.

  • Go Science! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hether ( 101201 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2002 @01:54PM (#3194984)
    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?
    • Who knows what legend they'll prove/disprove next?

      I hope the whole Kraken thing is true. I wanna mount that sucka and ride the tsunami when the next asteroid hits.

  • 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.

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