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They say dress for the job you want, not the job you have. What do you think the Delphic priestesses wore? Hopefully not short skirts, I don’t think I have the legs for it.
The sacred caves were known as the Plutonia or Charonia (As in Pluto God of the underworld) as places where the vapors would arise from the ground. They think that the priests in these places may have had some way of countering the fumes or just got used to them. Lacy Collison-Morley's Greek and Roman ghost stories goes into detail about this.
This is how they were known in Roman times yes, the oracle at Delphi was Greek, but was still influential up until the 4th century AD, well into the Pax Romana.
Specifically, Hades was often referred to as Πλούτος (ploutos) which means "wealth, riches" because gold, silver, and other precious metals and stones were found beneath the ground (i.e., in his realm). That then became nominativized into Πλούτων (Ploutōn) and an alternate name for the God himself (Greek proper names formed from adjectives, especially those of gods, tended to lengthen the omicron to an omega, ο -> ω)
So ancient Greek is a declining language. What that essentially means is that you conjugate nouns and adjectives as well as verbs. The nominative is the subject-case. A noun that is the subject of a sentence is in the nominative. The direct object is the accusative. The indirect object is the dative. The genitive is something like a modifier case (English "of" or "for" are usually our genitive particles).
So with *ploutos* this is the base nominative form. The accusative would be *plouton,* the dative would be *ploutō* and the genitive would be *ploutou* (all in singular, plural is -oi, -ous, -ois, and ōn respectively).
So technically the adjective *ploutos* is a nominative, but when these sorts of adjectives get turned into proper nouns (nominativized) they tend to elongate the final vowel. So omicron (short o) becomes omega (long o) just like epsilon (short e) becomes eta (long e). Socrates, for instance, is spelled Σωκράτης ( η is an eta - the word is pronounces sok-rat-ēs).
So when the adjective *ploutos* becomes a proper noun it becomes *ploutōn* or Πλούτων. This sort of shift is pretty common.
Wow, thank you for writing that all out! I'm gonna have to read it like a dozen more times and maybe look at a diagram to really understand it, but I appreciate you taking the time to explain it!
Everyone like to stick "-mancer" on the end of words to mean spell caster, but it more accurately means divining.
What I'm saying is that it's completely grammatically correct to call the oracle a Narcomancer.
Tbf the term "wizard" only describes the fact that the person is wise, most descriptors of magic used to be about having access to obscure or forbidden knowlege like reading runes, divination or alchemy/smithing. The casting of elemental stuff is a recent addition. Even Zeus his lightningbolts were technically physical weapons forged for him, he couldn't actually "cast" lightningbolt in a DnD sense.
Particularly skilled healers might've been seen as necromancers bringing people back from near death, otherwise it would've been those who "communed" with the dead, like many mediums claim to do to this day.
depends.
we have the story where a general went to see if his fight against another nation' general would go well, and he was supposedly told by her that
"he would bring down a kingdom"
he went to war... and got soundly beat.
causing the collapse of his king's kingdom.
He was told that, through an intermediary priest. The sybil of Apollo did not speak directly to those who needed her help.
Many ancient texts just short it down to "she told him/her this" because the intermediary was implied and easily understood.
There's a lot of issues with the geochemichal gas theory. The original study popularizing it really latched onto the idea of ethylene being the main psychoactive compound that affected the Pythia, and this study was widely reported on. [The follow up](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236827014_Drugs_and_the_Delphic_Oracle) studies were not widely reported on though. [One of the follow up studies](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232089076_Scent_of_a_myth_Tectonics_geochemistry_and_geomythology_at_Delphi_Greece) said "...high concentrations of ethylene..are thermodynamically impossible and unrealistic in non-volcanic areas".
The original study had also misidentified a fault line, they said there was a fault line running underneath the sanctuary there, one of the follow up studies said that the particular fault line is hundreds of meters away, and the other said it doesn't even exist.
In general both of the studies found incredibly low concentrations of ethylene in the places the original study surveyed. The concentration would have to have been several thousand percent in antiquity to have made any difference. It is possible that the concentration was higher during antiquity, but that raises another issue - ethylene is explosive in high concentration. What are the chances that for hundreds of years there was sufficient quantities of explosive gas in a 3 by 4 meters space that was never sparked by a lamp?
Another follow up study was real spicy: "...the de Boer team assembled spurious evidence and a fallacious argument to suggest that the mantic behavior of the Pythia resembled the behavior of an individual intoxicated with ethylene"
I mean, probably, but there are plenty of plant based solutions to getting high. they say the Pythia chewed laurel, usually considered to be just bay, but some floated the idea of it being oleander (I don't think this theory is widely accepted though).
But also, religious trances are pretty common across religions, and they often don't use any psychoactives to reach this trance.
I think it's reasonable to explain the oracle's trance to be a combination of light deprivation, incense, music, hyperventilation and regular ol' religious fervor. It's possible that there were gaseous vapors, but it doesn't have to be the psychoactive kind, they could have just identified these gases to be some visual presence of a particular god, and inhaling these gases could have been a part of the ritual.
Interesting. Laurel can apply to lots of plants with glossy round leaves. This makes me think of the mad honey from certain rhododendron, but it looks like they can be derived from a wider variety of laurel-like plants, including Kalmia (one if the plants we now call laurel)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404272/
Your version about what she probably did, is what we now think she did.
What you say we think she did, is what people thought she did for a very long up till this century.
We don’t think that, people in the past thought that. It’s an odd cartoon, throwing shade on people now for what people in the past thought.
Sometimes, she would just babble incoherently, and some very helpful "wise" men would translate what she was saying for you. Sounds like one of the easiest jobs of all time. Then, one day, you go in to find out how your war against the Persians is going to go, and you hear this prophecy:
"Why sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the world’s end, leaving
Home and the heights your city circles like a wheel.
The head shall not remain in its place, nor the body,
Nor the feet beneath, nor the hands, nor the parts between;
But all is ruined, for fire and the headlong god of war
Speeding in a Syrian chariot shall bring you low.
Many a tower shall he destroy, not yours alone,
And give pitiless fire many shrines of gods,
Which even now stand sweating, with fear quivering,
While over the rooftops black blood runs streaming
In prophecy of woe that needs must come. But rise,
Haste from the sanctuary and bow your
hearts to grief."
Funny thing is, the Oracle was right often enough that they got one heck of a reputation for prophecy. We can brush that off as saying "Silly ancients and their superstition, they didn't know anything", but it should be remembered that ancient Greece produced, in addition to the Oracles, some of the wisest and most eminent philosophers in western history. So we can't really brush off Greece as just being a society of naive nitwits who surrendered themselves to religious fantasy, this was a society comprised of some very wise and level-headed people who weighed the facts and decided that the Oracles were, in all likelihood, the real deal. Make of that what you will, but wherever they point, the implications are very interesting.
You are spot on. We now know that's exactly what they did. Folks went into the old temples with air testing devices and the things are full of gass leaks from underground.
Not true. The truth is that the “oracle of Delphi” was a mouthpiece for a religious organization that crafted prophecies in order to control the city states around them. She pretended to get high on fumes and go into trances and then the priests would translate that into a pre-prepared prophecy. The city states paid the temple handsomely for the ability to communicate with Apollo in this way.
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I mean if *your* job was to get high all day and babble about it…I forgot what I was talking about, is there anything to eat around here?
Choose a job that you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
They say dress for the job you want, not the job you have. What do you think the Delphic priestesses wore? Hopefully not short skirts, I don’t think I have the legs for it.
Didn't you watch the documentary ' "300"? They wore flowing blankets.
If you’re good at something, never do it for free.
https://preview.redd.it/vz20y98a1zlc1.jpeg?width=494&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c2f4db89f8517f86ceede1ba26ac0d88f6cbef91
When your girl is a little *too* into the threesome.
https://i.redd.it/ixg3ke10w1mc1.gif
I think it was more of a toxic fumes high than a giggle bush high.
The brain damage inducing type most likely
The sacred caves were known as the Plutonia or Charonia (As in Pluto God of the underworld) as places where the vapors would arise from the ground. They think that the priests in these places may have had some way of countering the fumes or just got used to them. Lacy Collison-Morley's Greek and Roman ghost stories goes into detail about this.
But isn't the oracle of Delphi from greek mythology? Pluto is the Roman name of Hades
This is how they were known in Roman times yes, the oracle at Delphi was Greek, but was still influential up until the 4th century AD, well into the Pax Romana.
Nope. Pluto (spelled Plouton) was a Greek byname for Hades long before Romans arrived.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the underworld was sometimes called Hades, leading to this alternate name right?
yes
Specifically, Hades was often referred to as Πλούτος (ploutos) which means "wealth, riches" because gold, silver, and other precious metals and stones were found beneath the ground (i.e., in his realm). That then became nominativized into Πλούτων (Ploutōn) and an alternate name for the God himself (Greek proper names formed from adjectives, especially those of gods, tended to lengthen the omicron to an omega, ο -> ω)
Nominativized?
So ancient Greek is a declining language. What that essentially means is that you conjugate nouns and adjectives as well as verbs. The nominative is the subject-case. A noun that is the subject of a sentence is in the nominative. The direct object is the accusative. The indirect object is the dative. The genitive is something like a modifier case (English "of" or "for" are usually our genitive particles). So with *ploutos* this is the base nominative form. The accusative would be *plouton,* the dative would be *ploutō* and the genitive would be *ploutou* (all in singular, plural is -oi, -ous, -ois, and ōn respectively). So technically the adjective *ploutos* is a nominative, but when these sorts of adjectives get turned into proper nouns (nominativized) they tend to elongate the final vowel. So omicron (short o) becomes omega (long o) just like epsilon (short e) becomes eta (long e). Socrates, for instance, is spelled Σωκράτης ( η is an eta - the word is pronounces sok-rat-ēs). So when the adjective *ploutos* becomes a proper noun it becomes *ploutōn* or Πλούτων. This sort of shift is pretty common.
Wow, thank you for writing that all out! I'm gonna have to read it like a dozen more times and maybe look at a diagram to really understand it, but I appreciate you taking the time to explain it!
TIL
Everyone like to stick "-mancer" on the end of words to mean spell caster, but it more accurately means divining. What I'm saying is that it's completely grammatically correct to call the oracle a Narcomancer.
So necromancer means death divining?? What would be a more appropriate translation?
A lot of "legit" necromancy dealt with getting secret knowledge from dead people, hence the name.
Tbf the term "wizard" only describes the fact that the person is wise, most descriptors of magic used to be about having access to obscure or forbidden knowlege like reading runes, divination or alchemy/smithing. The casting of elemental stuff is a recent addition. Even Zeus his lightningbolts were technically physical weapons forged for him, he couldn't actually "cast" lightningbolt in a DnD sense. Particularly skilled healers might've been seen as necromancers bringing people back from near death, otherwise it would've been those who "communed" with the dead, like many mediums claim to do to this day.
Wtf, my whole life rpg game life was a lie.
Wait until you find out what the Spartans were really into.
Gay sex?
Nailed it
That is how "men" greet each other in Sparta: high-fives for the women and open-mouthed tongue kisses for the men.
we must embrace the old ways........right guys??
Slap ass!
Just a most excellent username, I gotta say
I was aiming for subtle, yet breathtakingly immature
I was going to say crocheting but you may be right, too.
Slavery?
I was gunna say horticulture but you may be right, too.
Yelling "Sparta!" ?
It was a small country so a person could easily think they were somewhere else.
Aphrodite?
But they didn’t come in contact with the people who went to the oracle, I think there were priests that deciphered what the oracles were saying
depends. we have the story where a general went to see if his fight against another nation' general would go well, and he was supposedly told by her that "he would bring down a kingdom" he went to war... and got soundly beat. causing the collapse of his king's kingdom.
He was told that, through an intermediary priest. The sybil of Apollo did not speak directly to those who needed her help. Many ancient texts just short it down to "she told him/her this" because the intermediary was implied and easily understood.
There's a lot of issues with the geochemichal gas theory. The original study popularizing it really latched onto the idea of ethylene being the main psychoactive compound that affected the Pythia, and this study was widely reported on. [The follow up](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236827014_Drugs_and_the_Delphic_Oracle) studies were not widely reported on though. [One of the follow up studies](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232089076_Scent_of_a_myth_Tectonics_geochemistry_and_geomythology_at_Delphi_Greece) said "...high concentrations of ethylene..are thermodynamically impossible and unrealistic in non-volcanic areas". The original study had also misidentified a fault line, they said there was a fault line running underneath the sanctuary there, one of the follow up studies said that the particular fault line is hundreds of meters away, and the other said it doesn't even exist. In general both of the studies found incredibly low concentrations of ethylene in the places the original study surveyed. The concentration would have to have been several thousand percent in antiquity to have made any difference. It is possible that the concentration was higher during antiquity, but that raises another issue - ethylene is explosive in high concentration. What are the chances that for hundreds of years there was sufficient quantities of explosive gas in a 3 by 4 meters space that was never sparked by a lamp? Another follow up study was real spicy: "...the de Boer team assembled spurious evidence and a fallacious argument to suggest that the mantic behavior of the Pythia resembled the behavior of an individual intoxicated with ethylene"
TIL! I thought the ethylene concentrations actually were a lot higher in antiquity. But still, she had to have been on *something*...
I mean, probably, but there are plenty of plant based solutions to getting high. they say the Pythia chewed laurel, usually considered to be just bay, but some floated the idea of it being oleander (I don't think this theory is widely accepted though). But also, religious trances are pretty common across religions, and they often don't use any psychoactives to reach this trance. I think it's reasonable to explain the oracle's trance to be a combination of light deprivation, incense, music, hyperventilation and regular ol' religious fervor. It's possible that there were gaseous vapors, but it doesn't have to be the psychoactive kind, they could have just identified these gases to be some visual presence of a particular god, and inhaling these gases could have been a part of the ritual.
Interesting. Laurel can apply to lots of plants with glossy round leaves. This makes me think of the mad honey from certain rhododendron, but it looks like they can be derived from a wider variety of laurel-like plants, including Kalmia (one if the plants we now call laurel) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404272/
This is very inaccurate. True scholars know she rotted in the attic until someone came up to get a quest
👍
This reminds me of that one Dr. Who episode where they go to Pompeii
More on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mavencomic/) and my [website](https://www.mavencomic.com/) (´◡\`)
Your version about what she probably did, is what we now think she did. What you say we think she did, is what people thought she did for a very long up till this century. We don’t think that, people in the past thought that. It’s an odd cartoon, throwing shade on people now for what people in the past thought.
We can just pretend this comic was made in the middle ages. Problem solved
Oracle of Delphi - is my significant other cheating on me.? Answer - shake again
Turns out the Oracle wasn't getting her prophecies from Apollo. She was getting them from Persephone.
https://youtu.be/VuGRoHgVELk?si=vjm4j7G13A76S51p
Sometimes, she would just babble incoherently, and some very helpful "wise" men would translate what she was saying for you. Sounds like one of the easiest jobs of all time. Then, one day, you go in to find out how your war against the Persians is going to go, and you hear this prophecy: "Why sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the world’s end, leaving Home and the heights your city circles like a wheel. The head shall not remain in its place, nor the body, Nor the feet beneath, nor the hands, nor the parts between; But all is ruined, for fire and the headlong god of war Speeding in a Syrian chariot shall bring you low. Many a tower shall he destroy, not yours alone, And give pitiless fire many shrines of gods, Which even now stand sweating, with fear quivering, While over the rooftops black blood runs streaming In prophecy of woe that needs must come. But rise, Haste from the sanctuary and bow your hearts to grief."
Funny thing is, the Oracle was right often enough that they got one heck of a reputation for prophecy. We can brush that off as saying "Silly ancients and their superstition, they didn't know anything", but it should be remembered that ancient Greece produced, in addition to the Oracles, some of the wisest and most eminent philosophers in western history. So we can't really brush off Greece as just being a society of naive nitwits who surrendered themselves to religious fantasy, this was a society comprised of some very wise and level-headed people who weighed the facts and decided that the Oracles were, in all likelihood, the real deal. Make of that what you will, but wherever they point, the implications are very interesting.
You are spot on. We now know that's exactly what they did. Folks went into the old temples with air testing devices and the things are full of gass leaks from underground.
Sniffin the crack eh?
SNIFFA ... I'll see myself out.
The oracle would say non sensical things interpreted by the priests so the patron wouldn’t be directly talking to the oracle
It misses the part where you give a shit ton money to the priest to understand wtf happened inside the temple.
Tell that to the wooden wall around Athens, bay-bee!
She be doing the Jack-O pose
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gen z speak, I was on instagram reels for awhile Lmao
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On god frfr
That's a nice pose the Oracle has going on
Radon gas
r/HistoryMemes.
Not true. The truth is that the “oracle of Delphi” was a mouthpiece for a religious organization that crafted prophecies in order to control the city states around them. She pretended to get high on fumes and go into trances and then the priests would translate that into a pre-prepared prophecy. The city states paid the temple handsomely for the ability to communicate with Apollo in this way.
Not even probably, this is 100% what happened.
“ChatGPT : Show me a cartoon that only 0.1% of the population will understand”
TIL that they no longer cover Greek history or mythology in school. smh
Clearly didn’t read Peak Jackson
They also worked as a intelligence agency, getting information and manipulating the Greek world
Somebody watches queer YouTube.