10 - The Temple of Apollo

The myths tell us that Apollo killed Python, the largest snake known to man, in Delphi, overthrowing the reign of Gaia for ever in the zone.  This myth, as all myths, represents humanity's state of development at the moment it was invented. For as long as it was told, which is an entire millennium before our common era, there was a war between the female natural order and the male intellectual and physical powers.  Gaia was the most powerful figure in the local myths of that region for thousand of  years, as the various Cycladic statuettes prevalent during these era demonstrate. This explains why Pythia, the priestess who received the oracle from the earth, was always female.  Which I find very unusual, specially during the last centuries of ancient Greece, when women couldn't even attend the theater or vote at all.

Gaia may be understood as Mother Earth, and as demonstrated by the 20,000 years of art production all over Europe preceding the Greeks show. The female in nature governed the world, the Goddess Mother, the Life Giver.  Eventually, she had to be defeated by Apollo, the male god that represented the new intelligent warrior the Greeks saw themselves as. Gaia, the female with her earthy tendencies and dangerous instincts, had to be overpowered. This happened at Delphi, and Apollo became its god and Delphi his official home on Earth.  Its great temple was, of course, dedicated to him. 

Apollo is the Greek, and Roman, god of music, healing, prophecy, and enlightenment.  All of it seems to have been embodied in Delphi, which was a large complex where games, exchanges and special encounters took place. 

On each wall of Apollo's temple a phrase was carved:

"Know Thyself."  "Nothing in Excess."  "Make a Pledge and Mischief is Nigh."

Two of these phrases give advice, which, reduced to four words, was the most important the Oracle could give. I love how succinct they are; two strong words each:

"Know Thyself."    "Nothing in Excess."

"Know thyself" was Socrates's favorite advice, whom undoubtedly learnt it from the Oracle's walls. It has been a motto in our cultures ever since. By now we all seem to know how valuable it is to know ourselves, although very few of us actually know what that truly means.

In the Old Testament,  to know some-one meant to have laid with that person. To know, is to be or have been with the other, to become one with the entirety of the other. To know, in reality, is to comprehend.
Today, we do know so much, but how little we comprehend! To comprehend is to contain, to grasp, to make the other our own, which is not equal to the knowledge of the other. Comprehension is apprehension of that other thing or self one wants to know. It requires depth of thought and feeling, empathy and intuition, and an honest openness and willingness to learn of our own existences. 

Know Thyself doesn't mean think about yourself and have an understanding of who you are. It means comprehend EVERYTHING you are, physically, mentally, and spiritually. It means bring all the words, the rhetoric of the mind, into a present awareness in the body. It means comprehend with all the senses involved, understand as the physical animal we are, and the spiritual beings in these bodies we borrow from the earth.

Few of us know ourselves because most of us are rarely in the moment, in our body, in the here and now, with all that we are, not just the disembodied mind and the erratic emotions we have grown accustomed to being.

Can you imagine?  To really know everything about your self, the entire organism that you are?  How much more will then you'll know others as well? Our choices will surely be very different. 

"Nothing in Excess," on the other hand, is something we rarely hear. But what an advice it really is!

The word Nothing is absolute, and Excess is universal. Everything that we do or don't do, have or not have, can be done or had in excess. Eating. Drinking. Talking. Thinking. Building. Loving. Hating. Using. Having. Doing. Resting. Sleeping. Writing. Driving. Shopping. Learning.  Everything can be done in excess!

The advice doesn't tell us to not do any of those things; we could do them all if we want or need to, as long as in each case it is done or had moderately. Not doing can also be done in excess. Omission. Inertia. Apathy. Egotism. Egocentrism. Absence. Detachment. Stagnation. Boredom. Depression. Isolation.  We can indulge in them as well.

If we pay more attention to this advice, we would be more conscious of the negative effects that overdoing or overindulging have in us. Imagine the world's wealth attained by all humans, at various levels but all, if excess in accumulating by a few fortunate ones was not existent, if our personal desire was not to have the most but to be the best humans we could be. The social effects would be amazing.

In our own personal lives, if we don't allow excess, there will be no alcoholism, obesity, bulimia, depression, sickness, drug addiction, neurosis, hatred, loneliness, anguish, madness.

Imagine, if we all lived without excess and learn to know ourselves, what kind of world would this be? Two solid advices, four words, which, if we followed, could make us great, and could make the world a much more wonderful place.

The third phrase is the one we tend to simply dismiss today:

"Make a Pledge and Mischief is Nigh."

Why a pledge? A pledge could be a promise, an offering, or a vow. I think the oracle meant all of these. You promise to go to the Oracle one day in your life, and promise to take it seriously. You bring an offering to show how much the Oracle means to you. The offering comes in many forms, like the walk up the mountain after a long travel in itself, or the prescribed sexual abstinence and fast before entering the site. It could come in the form of a personal sacrifice, or a valued possession. For over a thousand years, the Oracle required all, the sacrifice and the material donation.

The museum in Delphi has some of the best sculptures in the world for that reason. For the Oracle to take the question seriously, an equally serious offering had to be given.

Why Mischief? Pythia, the priestess who received the Oracle and gave it as a riddle, entered into a state of trance to do so. The message came from within the Earth, the whisper of Python. This, even for ancient Greeks, was out of the ordinary, and in order to do it, one had to suspend thought and go ahead like a child, with a faithful and thoughtless innocence. The whole act of asking and responding seems to enter dangerous ground, but whatever the results there was no malice. All innocent, with suspended thought, but real.  It's just mischief.

Why Nigh? Because if there was an answer, it was going to be given right there, on the side of Parnassus, inside Apollo's temple.  That's the beauty of it. One asks the Earth, the place, Python, and only there and then the answer takes place. Not like a prayer that may be answered later or somewhere else. The response is right there and right then; which is why the a priori sacrifice is needed, to seal the deal.

On the forth wall of the temple, an epsilon (E) was also written, and not many good explanations for it have been given.

I'd just say, look at the symbol for epsilon and that for the sixth and seventh chakras, which represent the highest levels of understanding and consciousness. Could it be a common ancient form seen from the other side of the wall, as if what it represents comes through it onto your space?  Or simply a formal shift or flip of the letter in time and culture?