Pythia – The Delphic Oracle

Pythia – The Delphic Oracle

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 Pythian 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.  However, others say that Apollo robbed the oracle from Mother Earth, after killing Python, and that his 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.

At Delphi, a priest intervened between prophetess and votary, translating her incoherent utterances into hexameters.

Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the 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.