Book Two

Letter 2 (Part two) Plutarch – Oracles and Music

A few days later.

Here's my idea. Delphi was considered 'The Navel of the World', the wealthy centre of regional affairs, a situation directly connected to the Temple's trade in prophecy. The Priestesses, young women, (or old women depending on which era you are talking about...) apparently intoxicated from breathing vapours issuing forth from a crack in the earth, speaking in riddles and sometimes in tongues, gave prophetic advice about all manner of affairs, from the everyday concerns about harvests or winters, to major political and military decisions governing the lives of hundreds of thousands.

So Delphi was the most powerful city around, with its power centred on the temple, and that temple held a festival every eight years to celebrate the god Apollo, and in this festival there were music contests, the names of some of the winners of which have survived recorded for two and a half thousand years. The following words are engraved into a monument in Athens (from 335 BCE). “Lysikrates, son of Lysitheiedes of Kikyuna, was the dance leader when the boys chorus of the Phylé Akamantis won the prize. Theon was the piper, Lysiades of Athens had trained the chorus. Enaenetos was the mayor of Athens.”

My proposition is this: Music and Religion share a link through the experience of intoxication.

Music itself is intoxicating. Whether you are the performer or a member of the audience, it has the power to alter moods, transform thinking, and to burn memories deep into the mind's eye and ear.

From what I have read it seems that a common method of prophecy in ancient Greece was the observation of birds. There were also animal sacrifices, reading of entrails and burning of offerings upon an altar, and of course the hallucinating priestesses, but many prophecies were taken from observing the behaviour of birds. I don't really have to tell you any of this do I Plutarch? You lived and worked as a high priest in Delphi for decades as an Augur, a reader of signs. It sounds like quite a job, observing the weather and bird watching. Nice work if you can get it.

The people of the ancient world did not believe in prophecy with blind faith, there are plenty of examples of scepticism and even a sort of scientific testing of different prophets. Herodotus tells a great story about Croesus, the King of Lydia, who wished to test the powers of the different oracles in order to decide which was reliable and which were fraudulent. So I quote:

“The Lydians whom Croesus sent to make the test were given the following orders: on the hundredth day, reckoning from the day on which they left Sardis (the city where Croesus lived), they were to consult the oracles, and enquire what Croesus, son of Alyattes and king of Lydia was doing at that moment. The answer each oracle gave was to be taken down in writing and brought back to Sardis. No one has recorded the answer of any of the oracles except that of Delphi: here, however, immediately the Lydians entered the shrine for their consultation, and almost before the question they had been told to ask was out of their mouths, the Priestess gave them, in hexameter verse, the following reply:

I count the grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea;

I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.

The smell has come to my sense of a hard-shelled tortoise

Boiling and bubbling with lamb's flesh in a bronze pot:

The cauldron underneath is of bronze, and of bronze the lid.

The Lydians took down the Priestess' answer and returned with it to Sardis. When the other messengers came back with the answers they had received, Croesus opened all the scrolls and read what they contained. None had the least effect upon him except the one which contained the answer from Delphi. But no sooner had this one been read to him than he accepted it with profound reverence, declaring that the oracle at Delphi was the only genuine one in the world, because it has succeeded in finding out what he had been doing. And indeed it had, for after sending off the messengers, Croesus had thought of something which no one would be likely to guess, and with his own hands, keeping carefully to the prearranged date, had cut up a tortoise and a lamb and boiled them together in a bronze cauldron with a bronze lid.”

Some modern historians think that perhaps the general population did believe in prophecy, but that the leadership can be easily observed callously manipulating the people's faith, bribing the temples to give certain answers and censoring unfavourable prophecies. In your essay On why the oracles fail to give answers, Plutarch, you seem to offer rational arguments for the belief in prophecy. You in fact go so far as to accuse the natural scientists and the Epicureans of being irrational in their belief that the universe is not ordered by divine force, since divine force is so plainly observed.

But Cicero puts it rather succinctly,

“Who is there so mad that when he looks up to the heavens he does not acknowledge that there are gods, or dares to think that the things he sees have sprung from chance – things so wonderful that the most intelligent among us do not understand their motions?”

It's the reverse of the way my scientific, atheistic society views things, and it must be said that “the most intelligent” scientific thinkers of my day are a long way ahead of your own in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the machinations of the universe. It is fascinating to note however, that we no longer tend to ascribe divine power to things we don't understand. These days we believe, and have faith in the laws of physics and no longer believe that those laws are the workings of the gods. The unknown processes of the universe are no longer divine, they are merely undiscovered. Religious belief still has a staggering influence on the world, known and unknown but it is perhaps less dominant than it was in your time, Plutarch, perhaps.

But religion aside, I wonder, why people don't widely believe in prophecy any more? It's not because of a reduction of the influence of intoxication on society. I would say that the world is influenced more than ever by intoxication, across all levels of society, but no one goes down to their local church to have the future prophesied for them in exchange for gold, at least not around here. Plutarch, you offer a sort of answer to my questions in your essay:

“I entreat you to let me put a fit conclusion to my discourse (for now the time requires it), and to say what several have said before me, that when the Daemons who are appointed for the government and superintendency of oracles do fail, the oracles must of necessity fail too; and when they depart elsewhere, the divining powers must likewise cease in those places; but when they return again, after a long time, the places will begin again to speak, like musical instruments handled by those that know how to use them.”

So you're saying that the oracles no longer have power because the Daemons, (the spirits), of the oracles are no longer present in the temples. Thus the oracles no longer give prophecy, or their powers failing them, they grant only false prophecy.

I do not know if Daemons exist, or if the future can be known, but in the sky above me at work there often hovers a hunting bird, floating hollow boned on the gentle breeze, just watching me, sometimes for an hour or more. The sun casts the bird's shadow upon the earth and I am overcome by a peculiar feeling of time moving more slowly, or not at all, and there is a great silence that falls between us, between the bird and I.

In that silence...well, I don't know what is in that silence. I suppose that's what I'm asking you Plutarch.

What is this music? This silent orchestration of all nature that casts the shadow of a hunting bird across my path. This silence that follows me throughout the world and which reveals itself to me in beautiful moments that pass and linger with equal swiftness...

...I will write more soon....