Delphic oracle and geology: a science that confirms the myth

The town of Delphi in Greece is now a tourist center, but two thousand years ago it was not tourists who came here, but numerous pilgrims. They disembarked from the ships and climbed the mountains, where among the sacred olive grove stood a sanctuary dedicated to the sun god Apollo. According to legend, at this point the son of Zeus killed the dragon Python, who guarded the cleft, giving people the gift of prophecy. Since that time, special priestesses - named after the dragon Pythias - prophesied to people their fate and answered questions about the future. There were many such sanctuaries in the territory of Ancient Greece, but the most revered was the temple of Apollo in Delphi.

It is located at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Because the place was revered from the third millennium BC. Before the 4th century AD, there are many references to it and the order of prophecy in the oracle complex. All the chroniclers say that the temple of Apollo stood above the crevice, from where the underground gases rose. The priestesses were only girls who had the gift of prophecy. While they performed their functions as Pythia, they adhered to the vows of chastity, and only after leaving service, they got married.

The visitor brought a gift to the temple and asked his question, which was recorded on a wax plate. Found in huge numbers and belonging to different times, they indicate that the pilgrims were interested in the same dilemmas: does the spouse change, whether it is possible to rely on this or that person and whether this or that trading operation will bring profit. The Pythia, after having performed the ablution, descended into the aditon - the underground chamber under the base of the temple - and sat on the tripod. She inhaled the vapors and fell into a trance. Her incoherent speech was interpreted by the Delphic oracle - a special priest, guessing in the strange mumbling of the priestess the divination of the gods.

But archaeological excavations, which have been conducted in this place since the XIX century, did not find any cracks under the temple. Scientists Adolf Oppe and Pierre Amandry in their articles stated that the Pythia, the prophecy and the Delphic oracle are nothing more than a large scam that has lasted several centuries, as a result of which the priests of the temple profited from the simple-heartedness of pilgrims. However, in the case of the temple of Apollo in Delphi, a rare situation occurred when modern science did not refute, but confirmed the myth about miracles that occurred in the sanctuary.

In the 1980s, volcanological studies were carried out on strata lying at this site. It was found that the faults through which the products of magmatic activity could rise, run from the east and west straight to the place where the pythia was sitting, and where the Delphic oracon answered the questions. The room aditon was 2-3 meters below the ground, as if it was intended to catch and hold the gas coming from the crevice. But what kind of substance was it that stupefied the priestess and injected her into a trance?

Plutarch mentions that the "pneuma", which the pythia breathed, had a sweetish smell. As early as the 1920s, chemist Isabella Herb found that a 20% solution of ethylene leads to unconsciousness, and a weaker dose causes a trance state. Higgins archeologists in 1996 suggested that the voice of the gods, which proclaimed the Pythia and proclaimed the Delphic oracle, was inspired by ethylene vapor mixed with carbon dioxide. This conclusion was prompted by the study of another temple of Apollo in Hyerajolis (Asia Minor), where this mixture still penetrates from the seams of the earth to the surface. In Delphi, after several major earthquakes, the cleft was closed and the "source of revelation" dried up.