08 Jan The Shrine of Gaia and Python at Delphi
Joyful Mysteries
In the beginning there was Chaos – the void – the gaping vulva of primordial darkness. From the expectant womb of creation, matter and ether separated with a great orgasmic shudder and sigh. Gaia – the Earth – was born into form.
“[Her] body is the body of the world, and your body is one with that body.” Gaia’s was the first body. She is the first Mother – the Parthenos – who created all life, in some cases without a consort. “And Gaia first gave birth to starry Ouranos (sky), equal to herself, to cover her on every side”
The Sanctuary of Mother Earth was established at Delphi as early as 1,400 B.C.E. in theMycenaean era. Delphi, the ancients believed, was Gaia’s navel and the center of the world. They monumentalized Her with the ompholos, a conical ‘navel’ stone that may have been a baetyl meteorite and must have represented Gaia’s umbilical tether to the darkness of origination, as well humanity’s umbilical connection to the Primordial Mother.
Perched on Mount Parnassus, Delphi is situated between two breast-like cliffs, the ‘shining’ Phaedriades of “wide-bosomed Gaia.” The site was developed in an area with regular seismic activity; living, unstable ground which quakes with the Great Mother’s contractions. Legends abound of sacred subterranean springs and mysterious, intoxicating pneuma, ‘the breath of spirit,’ which exhaled from limestone chasms and brought Gaia’s oracles into trances from which they communed with the Goddess.
The name Delphi comes from Delphyne, a she-serpent of legend who protected the oracular fountain of her mother, Gaia. The older name for the site was Pytho, after mythological Python who dwelt in Gaia’s underground dragon lair. In the oldest tales, there were two dragon consorts living below the earth, Python and Delphyne. The mythological imagery of the serpents recalls Kundalini Shakti, which literally means ‘coiled snake of the Goddess,’ who dwells dormant in the earth chakra of the body until She is awakened through spiritual and kinesthetic practices. The form of the snake also embodies the cord of the umbilicus, another connection to the Dark Mother’s womb. In ancient vessel paintings, Gaia was rendered as chthonic, often with a truncated form, emerging from below ground holding up her child.
The famed historical Oracle of Delphi, called Pythia, took her name from Python, who was originally thought to be the diviner of Gaia. For nearly two-thousand years a succession of high priestesses provided prophesies under divine possession until the 4th century C.E. Christian imperial eradication of polytheism. Pindar wrote of the Pythia, “That word spoken from tree-clad mother Gaia’s navel-stone.”
In the Archaic period women’s sovereignty began to erode. By Classical times women had no legal personhood, had limited rights to acquire property and were therefore not considered full citizens. Through the ages, the Pythia – the prolocutor of the Great Goddess, endured as the most influential voice in the ancient western world. Individuals and delegations of leaders made pilgrimages to Delphi to seek her counsel in all of life’s affairs, from seed planting and marriage to war and establishing proto-democratic constitutions. Those guilty of crimes and murder went to seek her absolution. Breaking with the tradition of blood-for-blood retributory justice of the times, the Pythia advised a form of restorative justice which included atonement and self-responsibility. Indeed, her timeless wisdom was inscribed into the Temple’s façade, Gnothi Seauton, “Know Thyself.”
Sorrowful Mysteries
After centuries of devotion to the Great Mother at Delphi, in the Archaic period the site was colonized by the cult of Apollo. According to legend, the conversion in popular devotion occurred when Apollo, the Olympian solar deity of order, rationality, and enlightenment (and Gaia’s great-grandson), slayed Python the serpent-avatar of the Goddess. Thereafter the mysteries of the Mother’s umbilical and Her oracle were under his command.
The legend of Apollo and Gaia echoes that of the older Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat. According to Mesopotamian mythology, Tiamat was the primordial Creatrix, goddess of the sea, who came from chaos and who, through sacred marriage with Abzu the god of freshwater, created the cosmos. After several generations of gods were born, a great battle for power ensued. She transformed herself and her kin into monsters, snakes, and sea dragons to defend the old race of elemental gods. Marduk, the young solar god (and her grandson), become the hero by slaying Tiamat in dragon form and dismembering her body to configure the earth. Her ribs became the vault of the earth’s atmosphere; her tears became the rivers; her tail became the Milky Way.
The mythos of Marduk’s victory over the primordial dragon was developed during the historic transition of Babylon from city-state to the center of an empire. Likewise, the story of Apollo’s vanquishment of Python at Delphi historically coincides with the Greek conquest of the Mediterranean Basin. Both stories are example of chaoskampf, a ubiquitous theme from mythology about order triumphing over chaos; masculine subverting the feminine; light beating back darkness. Encoded in these stories are fear and hatred of the wild, the untamable and the feminine. The tragedy of Gaia’s mythos is matricide.
What happens when the Primordial Mother is defeated by the solar hero?
At Delphi, the space of contemplation and communion with the Great Goddess was covered by a monumental temple complex. Over time, the ritual offerings made by pilgrims changed from traditional pelanon honey cakes to excessive riches which packed numerous treasuries built below the temple. Large statuary donations of heroes and gods overflowed the streets of Delphi. The Sacred Way, as it was called, became a theater of faith, opulence, and power.
Glorious Mysteries
Within the adyton, the small inner chamber where the Pythia sat, were a few alluring objects written about by pilgrims and attendants of the Oracle. Where the Pythia sat perched on her tripod, above a crevasse which emitted mysterious vapors, at her feet was the ompholos naval stone,which some ancient accounts claim was also the grave of Python, containing the teeth and skin of the slayed serpent. An ancient painting from Pompeii shows Python’s hide coiled around the navel stone. Marcus Terentius Varro, Roman scholar from the 2nd century C.E., claimed the ompholos was the symbolic grave of Dionysus who was also worshiped at the temple. He described the monument to Apollo’s youngest brother as appearing like a model of a Mycenaean tholos, or beehive-shaped tomb, which would visually match the description of the conical ompholos. The Mother’s womb is also the tomb.
In the mythos of Dionysus, the “thrice-born,” he is first the child of Persephone, a product of incestuous rape by her own father, Zeus, who transformed into a snake and abducted her into the underworld. Son of Persephone, Dionysus Chthonios (of the underworld), was called Zagreus. As a child he was captured by two of the old gods, Titans, then dismembered, boiled, and partially consumed by them. First century scholar, Diodorus Siculus, wrote that the Dionysian sacrifice was an allegory for the winemaking process, which involves the maceration of fruit, fermentation, and consumption.
When Zeus retrieved the remains of Zagreus he gave them to Apollo who brought them to Delphi and placed them by the Pythia’s tripod. Subsequent stories tell us that Dionysus was resurrected through his second birth by mortal Semele and then born a third time from Zeus’s thigh (a metaphor for his genitals). Dionysus Thrice-Born, a deity of death and resurrection, begotten by a snake appears to have an association with Python who dwells in the underworld and embodies cycles of renewal through brumation.
During Apollo’s reign at Delphi, it was believed that he departed from his temple during the three winter months and in his absence the cult of Dionysus was revived each year. Coinciding with the Mediterranean agricultural practice of pruning grape vines at the end of winter, in February, the Thyiades, Dinonysus’ priestesses, led a festival procession from the Temple of Apollo, seven miles up into the mountains to the Corycian Cave. Inside the earth vagina, surrounded by erect stalagmite phalli, the Maenads invoked their god with dithyrambs, enacted funerary dramas of his death and through orgiastic rites they celebrated the imminent resurrection of Zagreus – Dionysus Chthonios (Python).
The earliest mention of Zagreus is from a fragment from the 6th century B.C.E. epic, Alcmeonis, “Mistress Earth [Gaia], and Zagreus highest of all the gods.” In the pairing of Gaia and Zagreus we see the divine partnership of the Primordial Mother with her chthonic companion. Through the revelry of Dionysus’ annual resurrection, we know that the Python was never actually eradicated. The Goddess and her dragon’s eternal, cyclical partnership at Delphi brings back into balance the Apollonian – Dionysian dichotomy between order and chaos, rationality, and madness.
Ultimately, the chaos of the Great Goddess overcomes the structures of patriarchy. The Temple of Apollo, which was built directly on top of a fault line, was eventually toppled, bringing towering marble and limestone back down to the earth. Modern excavations have failed to locate under the ruins the legendary oracular springs and the source of the legendary pneuma.
But Gaia’s shrine was never destroyed. Her living geological temple is, and always has been, located in the sacred dark of the Mother’s womb-tomb, the Corycian Cave, which inhales and exhales “the breath of spirit.”
Bibliography: [Theogony, Hesiod (Trans. M.L. West); The Orphic Hymns (Trans. A.N. Athanassakis); The Homeric Hymns Trans. by A.N. Athanassakis; Delphi by I.K. Konstantinou; The Oracle by W.J. Broad; Greek Myths by R. Graves; The Gods of the Greeks by C. Kerényi; Python by J. Fontenrose]