The Secret Ancient Ritual to Talk to the Gods

For over a thousand years, the most powerful voice in the ancient world belonged to a priestess, in a temple on a mountain who could predict the future and answer your deepest questions, because she talked to the gods. This is a true story, and they call her the Oracle of Delphi. Kings would literally cross the sea to ask her questions about battle strategy cities, abandoned their homes on her word and fled for survival. She even helped launch wars, found empires, and set a wise man on a path that would eventually give birth to philosophy as we know it. But the Oracle never gave a symbol answer. Her words were wrapped in hidden messages and double meanings that revealed your fate only if you were clever enough and humble enough to interpret them correctly. Missing her hidden knowledge could mean death and destruction, so today we are climbing that mountain. We are going into the temple and we are going to figure out what the Oracle of Delphi actually was. Not a fortune teller, but a real institution that helped run an entire civilization for centuries. We will follow it from a myth about a dead serpent through the kings of philosophers who staked their lives on the word of this priestess, all the way to Christianity and the Roman Empire who tried to shut it down. But the secret of Delphi was never about how to talk to the gods or even what your question actually was. The real question is who is asking. Well, what does that mean? Let's find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up people? Welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we try to explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent. So try to figure out everything that has ever happened. Yeah, it's insane undertaking. It's quite daunting to be honest. Like some people focus on like Roman history, Egyptian history, modern history, no, no, no, no, no, all history ever. Yeah, we're on our way. And every single day there's new history getting made. So we have no time to waste. We're talking about the Oracle of Delphi. It's a pretty awesome story. You want to talk about pulling up to a wise priestess that talks to the gods and you ask a question and then she tells you the answer and it's a riddle and you got to go home and tell your boys, you're like, yeah, she gave me a riddle and people are like, that's not good. You know what this real means? It's a crazy story. It's a real thing that happened. It not only did it happen, it ran an entire empire for centuries for a really long time. Now, before we jump into the story, I want to say thanks to you, dude. I want to say thanks for tuning in. Every time you click on an episode or comment like anything like that, you help keep my dream alive. You help keep the fire burning here that campsite and you help keep the lights on in the tent. Now, it's also not possible without my good pal. Christos Baccadopinus, the Greek freak, himself, the man who, you know, his culture is very, very close to the Oracle of Delphi. Let the record show. It's true. Christos, I didn't even ask you how you're doing, dude. How are you? Doing great, my mind. Christos, all right. See, I got you on that one. Now, Christos is my little Oracle of Delphi. Sometimes I'll ask him questions and he answers me and these insane riddles like, I'm sad. What does that mean? I'm depressed. I'm angry. What is the answer to all of this? Like, what could possibly be behind these statements? What do you think it is? Cryptic messages. I can tell. Now, somewhere around like two and a half thousand years ago, if you were a king and you had a big decision to make, like, do I kill my wife? Do I invade this land of impoverished people? All these questions that kings have to deal with. There was one place on earth you could go for an answer. You couldn't go to a wise man because wise men are mistil men. You know, they can be wrong. You couldn't go to a general because generals have their own ambitions. They'd be like, yeah, go on the front lines and invade that nation. Like, yeah, you for sure will do it and the general takes your job. You need something higher than human judgment. You got to go talk to God. Okay. Now, the Greeks believe that there was only one place where God would answer back and it wasn't just a temple. It was the center of the earth to them. That was, you know, part of what made it so significant and sacred and they had a story about how to find it. So they said a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a guy named Zeus and Zeus wasn't a guy. He was actually the king of the gods and Zeus wanted to find the true center of the world. So he took two eagles and he released them from opposite ends of creation and let them fly towards one another. And wherever the two eagles met, that was the mark of the middle of everything. Now, as the story goes, it's hard to find an archaeological record of this, but the eagles flew and they flew and they finally crossed paths in the sky that just so happen to be above a rocky mountain slope in Greece. Leave it to the Greeks to be like, hey, you're not going to believe this. Our God actually decided where the center of the world. Pretty convenient and true. That spot was marked forever after with a sacred stone that the Greeks called the naval. It's literally Greek word. That means umphalus. Did I pronounce that correctly? Umphalus. Umphalus. Umphalus. That means belly button. Umphalus. Umphalus. I like how you say like that. So literally the Greeks were like, turns out we're the center of the world and this is the naval of everything. This is the belly button of the world. And that spot, the sacred center of the earth, happened to be a place that they called Delphi. Now, if you went through yourself, you would understand instantly why the Greeks felt the way they did about it because it feels sacred. Delphi sits high on the slopes of a mountain. Mount Parnassus. And it's folded into like this beautiful landscape of like cliffs and ravines. It's stunning. There's a whole valley of like, you know, green olive trees tumbling down toward the sea below. And you can't really just like walk in there. You got to climb. It's a long, hard journey up a steep winding path. And by the time you finally arrive, you are dusty and you are exhausted and you are so small against these massive looming cliffs around you that you already feel like you left ordinary reality behind and you're now in a new place, the place of the gods, the place, the literary of the center of the world. I mean, take a look at this picture. It's just gorgeous. I imagine you're like a, you're a king. You're a wealthy merchant. You're trying to get an answer and you go and you land nearby and you hike all the way up and you get to the very top. And now you're in front of the Oracle. But the Greeks actually had a much older, darker story about how this place really first became holy. And it started long before there was any temple there. So in the beginning, according to the ancient Greeks, this ground belonged to the most ancient power imaginable. This power is called Gaia. This is the great earth goddess, the primordial mother of everything. And her sacred site was guarded by a monster. This is a enormous serpent called Python. It's not a snake. It's a dragon that coiled around the slopes of the mountain, protecting the secret heart of the earth. And then one day a new god came and tried to claim it. His name was Apollo. Now, if you've never heard of Apollo, he's young and golden and radiant. He's the god of light, music, and above everything else, prophecy. So Apollo came to that mountain and faced this great serpent dragon Python thing and killed it. Now with the monster dead, he claimed this sanctuary was his own and from that day on, the Greeks said that this became Apollo's sacred ground. And it would become the one place on earth where God's own voice could be heard by mere mortals, literally mortals could go there and listen to the gods. And the archaeology of that place tells its own remarkable story too. Apparently people were coming to worship at Delphi as far back as like the early Iron Age, like 3000 years ago. And over the following centuries, especially like the eighth through the sixth century BC, the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi grew from a remote holy site into one of the single most important religious centers in the entire Greek world and by default, like the known world and the whole world and its entirety. And that phrase, the Greek world is the thing that matters more than anything else for this story because Delphi, this sacred spot at the center of the earth belonged to no one and kind of at the same time to everyone. And we're going to see that's exactly what made it powerful enough to move kings and in a way like topple empires. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? That's a power move. Do you got a buddy that has like a backup generator and a bunch of canned food and somehow knows that a blackout's coming before the power company does? That's a power move. And do you have a friend that hired Morgan and Morgan? Well, guess what? That's a power move. Yep. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm with over 100 offices nationwide and over 1,000 lawyers. They've recovered over 30 billion dollars for more than 500,000 clients. 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So I'm going to go to Delphi. Now what actually happens when you get there? Well, Delphi wasn't going up to the Wild West. It was an institution. It was a huge organized operation with priests and staff and procedures and a sacred calendar and. a treasury and generations of accumulated tradition up until this point, which is why you're even interested in going there. Picture something closer to the most exclusive, most intimidating office of the ancient world. This is an office that literally can schedule you in for an appointment with God. At the center of that operation was one person, a priestess, who was the person who actually spoke Apollo's words to the human. Remember the serpent, the python who used to protect the ancient ground when it belonged to Gaia? Well, she didn't really go away. Like I know that Apollo killed the python in order to claim them out and all that stuff, but they call the priestess the Pythia. Her name is drawn straight from this python. So in a way, where she used to protect and defend the mountains, she still kind of does or at least like the namesake of this priestess, this Pythia is still there. So she transformed from being a guardian to being an oracle, being the receiver of God's word. Just to be clear, the word oracle can be used kind of in two ways. Sometimes it means the place, like the whole sacred institution at Delphi where you go to hear from God. And sometimes it just means the person, literally the Pythia herself, a woman through whom Apollo was believed to speak. And also the Pythia wasn't a single legendary figure who lived forever. Pythia was an office. It was like the Pope, right, like the Pope has existed forever, but there's been many different popes that have taken over. It's like a title that was held by a long succession of real women over hundreds of years. One would serve as the priestess, as this Pythia, and then she would die. And then another would take her seat on the, you know, what they call the sacred tripod. Now, I wonder what it takes to become Apollo's priestess and kind of the requirements that are needed for that. And there's some stuff that I've found on the research that's pretty interesting. But we'll save that for an episode at another time. Anyway, imagine you make the journey. All right, you get all the way to Delphi. You can't just march up and be like, I have a question, there's a journey in and of itself, and it often takes days or even weeks of like legit, difficult travel. There's no Uber you can take. You basically have to go all the way up on foot, which means by the time you get there, you're exhausted. And then you get there, there's going to be rituals. You're going to bring offerings. You're going to pay. You can't simply just be like, I need a question to the deepest, you know, like answers of all the universe. But there's an order. There's consultations that only happen on certain days of the sacred calendar, which made every session way more precious. So the Pythia herself underwent her own preparations connected to the ancient accounts to the sacred Castilian spring, where she purified herself to Laurel, the plant sacred to Apollo, and of course to the tripod. This is the three-legged seat where she sat to deliver God's words. This is like a literal object that would become the single most famous symbol of Delphi in the whole ancient world. Like when I said tripod earlier, I meant literally, it's like a stool, like a three-legged stool thing. And then finally, you've done all the rituals, all the purifications, the precesses that don't hurt the purification, you've come on the right day, finally you can ask. And out of that charged, sacred space, thick with ritual and incense and centuries of awe and mystique and you're also exhausted, comes your answer. You can through the Pythia in the words of God himself, but this is the most important part of the whole thing. The answer you got was never a simple instruction, right? Like the Pythia is talking to Apollo, and Apollo doesn't just come back and say, yeah, attack on a Tuesday. He usually would tell you something that you'd have to interpret. It would be cryptic. It would be double edged. It was like, you know, like something that handed you the raw material of a decision but left, like ultimately the really hard part, like figuring out what it means up to you. So now we've reached a question that has haunted people for thousands of years. What is going on? Like truly, like what's actually happening to the Pythia when she speaks? Like how does a woman become the mouthpiece of God? Right? Like is she just making it up? Is she like actually talking to God? Is she talking to some other type of entity? Is she talking to the devil? Like what's going on here? Well, this is the most fascinating theory, I think. One famous theory says that the answer is literally in the ground. Like this place is sacred for a literal reason. And the idea is that the Pythia, that the actual priestess, breathed in intoxicating fumes rising up through a crack in the floor of the temple, and that those literal vapors would put her into a trance and then, you know, put her in touch with God. So for most of the last century scholars had thrown this idea out completely because when French archaeologists actually excavated the temple in the 1890s, they went looking for this legendary chasm, like this sacred crack in the earth that was releasing these vapors. And they didn't really find one. So they declared the whole like vapor story just like kind of a myth and urban legend. And for about a hundred years, that was kind of the settled verdict from most scholars. But now the theory might actually be on the right track. Because in the 1980s, a Dutch geologist named Yella de Bohr came to that region, not even to study the Oracle, but to survey the area's geological fault lines. And he noticed something that the earlier archaeologists had missed. There were active fault lines running directly beneath the temple. And the local spring water carried traces of what was described as light hydrocarbon gases. One of them was ethylene. This is a gas that in small doses can produce exactly the kind of floating euphoric, translike state that the ancient sources described. And interestingly, ethylene has like a sweet smell, which matches something written by Plutarch and ancient priests who actually served at Delphi. And he described a mysterious sweet breath that would sometimes fill the sacred inner chamber. It's a fascinating, exciting piece of detective work spanning two thousand years. But it's not the closed case that dramatic headlines would probably make you believe. Other geologists have pushed back on this a lot, questioning whether those fault lines could have ever released enough gas in a high enough concentration to affect anyone in an open temple. And plenty of serious scholars argue that the trance had little to do with chemistry at all, and that it came from ritual and rhythmic preparation and from breathwork and from the sheer psychological weight of being the woman through whom a god was about to speak with the whole world waiting on your word. So which is it? Honestly, we can't fully know. I know it's kind of annoying. But for two and a half thousand years, people have been trying to find the one-simile explanation that cracks open the mysteries of Delphi and no pun intended. And yet the secret knowledge that was accessed at Delphi still remains a secret. So maybe it's the case that there were fumes and vapors of ethylene going up into the chamber, maybe from the water that they were drinking, from one specific well, and it was causing them to all just hallucinate, or maybe just the priestess was hallucinating. But there's actually a bigger mystery here than how one woman entered a trance. And the question is basically, how did the cryptic words of a single woman on a remote mountain come to steer the fate of an entire civilization? Like how does she wind up controlling the biggest decisions for the most powerful empires in the world? Well, first off, back then, there was no single grease, right? Like in this time, like the Greek world is more like a bunch of scattered, separate, independent communities. Many city states, these like colonies and alliances that formed and shattered and formed again. And they were spread across the mainland and the islands and all across the coast of the Mediterranean. So sure, they shared a language and they shared their gods, but they didn't have a single king over all of them, right? Like you have the Spartans and the Athenians and the Cretans and all these different groups. There was no capital, no central government, no referee to settle all the different rival reason disputes, except in a strange way, they sort of did and it is this priestess at Delphi. Remember, Delphi belonged to no single city. It sat above all the squabbles, all the human meanderings and the debates, which meant that every Greek city could turn to it and accept its authority without feeling like they surrendered to arrival. This is what people mean when they call Delphi pan-holenic, that it belonged to all Greeks. It was a part of the entire Hellenic world, not just one faction or one city. And it's actually the neutrality that made Delphi something that no army or king could ever be. It was a spiritual authority that everyone everywhere kind of agreed to respect and that might lead you to think that the sacred oracles stood apart from politics, but that's actually not true. Delphi wasn't an escape from politics, it was actually one of the most powerful tools in all of politics. I mean, think of what it did for a leader. If your city is facing a decisive decision, something that half your people are against and the other half are for, and you make a call on your own authority, and it winds up being the wrong one, well, now you bear all the consequence, like you are in charge of the Spartans and you decide to invade someone and there's a whole thing and it goes sideways for you. Well, now your head is on the line and the people are angry and they have no one to blame except you, but suppose you can climb that mountain and you pose the question to Apollo. And then Apollo comes back and says, like, hey, you should do this. And then the God himself approves it. Now, suddenly, you head your bed. You say, look, I just listen to God. This is the will of God. So maybe there's a deeper lesson here, sure we got defeated and crushed by our enemies, but we got to just leave it up to the big man. You know what I mean? That's on him. Take it up, but go revolt against Apollo. I did nothing wrong. I'm just doing the will of Lord. Now Delphi could be used to transform a controversial human choice into a sacred command that no one can really argue with. And that is extremely powerful for a politician trying to retain power. So as you climb the path to Apollo's temple and trying to speak with this oracle at Delphi, you take a route known as the Savior. sacred way. You weren't walking through like green, beautiful, peaceful gardens. You are walking through a showcase of pride and power. So, Greek cities were known to build rows of small ornate buildings along the way that they called treasuries. Think of them as like trophy cases, and they packed them with gold and statues and spoils of war, and they are all on permanent display for every other Greek to see. One of them was the Athenian treasury built, of course, by the city of Athens. And what's wild is that it still partly stands to this day. And these weren't just like humble gifts to Apollo. These were deliberate. These were flexes. They were trying to display wealth and victory to every single person that took this path up to the Oracle. Like to walk the sacred path was to walk through this like public scoreboard of who was currently winning as being the greekist. Right? Like this holy place was so tangled up in power and ego and city state pride that the Greeks actually went to war over it, and they did it more than once, and they called them, quite obviously, the sacred wars. It's kind of hilarious, but they fought for control over Delphi and its sanctuary, because if you can control Delphi, you can control the will of Apollo. Now all of a sudden you can control and have all the access to God, and you can control who goes there and who doesn't. The site was usually managed through a religious league, known as the Emphic Tyony, which is an association of Greek communities bound to this specific sanctuary, and control of it kind of pass between different powers across the century. So we see just how valuable Delphi was to these people, but so far we've kind of talked about it from a distance. Let's just go a little closer and step into the room at three separate moments in history, where three very different people asked the Oracle a very deliberate question and how those three answers completely changed their fate. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about one of the sponsors of this show, and that's perplexity. 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I can also use it to help me with flights. I can say, "Hey, what is the best flight and what is the best time to take it so I don't spend so much money?" And it even helps me do a little bit of research on podcast guests, and I can understand what other shows they've been on, and gives me the actual information so I can dive in to the research. It's amazing, and that is what I love about it. I don't have to become an expert in every AI model for all my different needs. I can explain what I need done and then let computer handle the tools and I can focus on being creative. So for limited time, our listeners can try perplexity computer for free. All you got to do is head to pplx.ai/camp, that is pplx.ai/camp, and try computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions, but perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now, let's get back to the show. So the first story we're going to go through is of the richest man in the world. Literally. Imagine Elon Musk or Bezos or Bill Gates. So whoever walking up to this Oracle, they hike all the way and they go to ask a question. So this story centers around a man named Cresus, and he was the king of Lydia. This is a wealthy kingdom in what is now modern day Turkey. His riches were so staggering and so famous that people still use his name today. Like it's a part of speech. People say like, oh yeah, it's rich as Cresus. Like it's just like a thing that people say literally 25 centuries later. He had everything a king could want, but he also had a growing fear. To his east, there was a new power that was rising. These are the Persians. They are led by this ambitious young king. You probably heard of King Cyrus. And Cresus was weighing whether to strike first. Should I do kind of a, you know, like a premeditated strike against the Persians before the Persians grow too strong and they take me over? It's a massive decision, right? If you go and strike the Persians and it goes sideways and you guys get beat, a bunch of your armies destroyed, your people are pissed, mothers lose kids, they revolt against you. Now all of a sudden the richest guy in the world has a, you know, a rebellion. But if you do nothing, all of a sudden the Persians rise up, Cyrus or his kids take out you or your kids and now all of a sudden you lost everything anyway. So what do you do? It's a big decision. So Cresus decides to talk to the Oracle, but Cresus is also a very careful man and he didn't fully trust these things. So before he would stake his kingdom on just a random prophecy, he decided to run a test. Now everything we know about what happens next in the story comes from a Greek writer named Herodotus. You probably heard of him. He is the father of history. That's kind of the nickname that was dubbed onto him and he basically set the story down roughly a century after the event. So keep that in mind. This is a masterfully told historical tale that was written a few decades after the fact, not a word for word, transcript of someone who was literally there. Anyway, here was Cresus's test. He sent messages to all the most famous Oracle's in the world. Again, there are many Oracle's around the world, Delphi, just being the most famous one. And he had a very specific question. He basically said on one specific day, each messenger is going to walk in and ask each different Oracle what the king of Lydia was doing at that exact moment. But it was a trap because the answer was something bizarre and unpredictable that only Cresus himself could possibly know. He wanted to see which Oracle, if any of them could see the truth. So all of his messages on the hundredth day go to all these different Oracle's and they all come back and they tell Cresus. They said, oh, this Oracle said you were drafting up a law. This Oracle said, oh, you were planning an invasion. This Oracle said that you were choosing another wife. But then the Oracle of Delphi, the messenger came back and said, well, the priestess of Delphi said that you were doing something bizarre. The Oracle of Delphi said that you were boiling together a lamb and a tortoise and a bronze pot. And Cresus drops his fork. He can't believe it. He looks at him and goes, that's exactly what I was doing. I chose something bizarre and strange and unusual and very specific. And now he trusts the Oracle at Delphi completely. So now Cresus goes, well, I got to go ask. So now he goes to the Oracle of Delphi and says, should I go to war against Persia? And the Oracle answers, if Cresus went to war and crossed the haeless river into Persian territory, the Oracle said he would destroy a great empire. Now, imagine those words landing on a proud, powerful and kind of paranoid king who desperately wanted to attack. He will destroy a great empire. Well, that obviously means Persia. What else could it possibly mean? So Cresus didn't hesitate. He didn't ask a single follow-up question. He said, great, that's all I needed. He gathered his army across the river and attacked the Persians. And the Oracle was correct. A great empire was destroyed, but it was not the Persians. It was his. Cresus lost, catastrophically. Cyrus and the Persians crushed him. His army was broken. His kingdom was overrun. His shining capital was captured. Cresus himself was taken prisoner. The great empire that the Oracle had promised would be destroyed was his own. It was the kingdom of Lydia. He had marched out to shatter an empire and he was right. And Herodotus tells us that the Oracle had given Cresus another warning that he should be where the day a mule becomes the king of the Persians. Cresus just kind of laughed. He was like a mule. He talked about a donkey horse, crossbreed, as the king. That's absurd. This literally doesn't make any sense. This Oracle's out to lunch. I mean, the Oracle was right about me destroying the Persians, but this mule thing is crazy. But Cyrus, the man who destroyed him was said to be of mixed blood. Literally two different peoples joined together in one man that was creating and building the Persian Empire a mule in human form. The warning had been sitting right there in front of him the entire time. And this is actually the perfect story to begin with because it shows us everything we need to know about Delphi. The Oracle wasn't actually wrong. It was never actually wrong. The failure wasn't in the prophecy. It was in the man's ability to interpret it. His certainty and his pride and his total blindness that a great empire could ever mean his own was just completely lost on him. And this isn't the only time someone misinterpreted the Oracle and it led to their demise. It actually happens over and over again. Here's another example. If you fast forward a couple of generations, we meet a new Persian king. His name is Xerxes. He was invading Greece with one of the largest armies in the ancient world and in its path stood the city of Athens. Now terrified, the Athenians sent a delegation up to Delphi to ask the only question that mattered to anyone at all, hey, what do we do? Xerxes is coming. And the first answer that the Oracle gave was pure horror. The priestess who delivered it was a pithia named Aristonacy, one of the very few whose actual name survives in the record. And this pithia basically told him that there's no hope. She said flee, flee to the ends of the earth. Your city is doomed. Ruin is coming. All is lost. And the delegates like heard this and they heard and they were like, what? They could barely stand, but they didn't leave in their desperation. They did something unusual. They came back a second time approaching as just humble mortals and begged the God for a better answer. And the second answer is the one that would echo through all of history. It is still great. but buried inside of it was a single, strange thread of hope. When everything else fails, the pithya told them, a wooden wall would remain unconquered and would save them. And with that, the Athenians basically erupted into an argument. What does that mean? The older, more conservative citizens thought that the answer was obvious. It's like, hey, she's talking about the sacred hill, the acropolis at the heart of the city. It had once been rigged with a wooden sort of like palisade, like an old defensive fence. And that was the wooden wall, the god was telling them to fortify the holy center of the city, hunker down inside the acropolis, and Apollo will protect us. But then one man stood up and told them that they were all wrong. That man is named thymistically. And he had a radical, dangerous interpretation of the message. He says that this wooden wall was not a fence at all. It was ships. Athens had recently built a large fleet of wooden warships. And thymistically insisted that the fleet was the wall Apollo meant to trust his plan would be very difficult and very sad. We have to abandon the city entirely. We cannot face zirxes on the Persians. We have to give up Athens and put every single citizen onto the fleet of ships and just send them out to sea and stake the entire survival of the city to a sea battle. And he had one clever piece of evidence to stand on this. That same prophecy had referred to the nearby island of Salamis as divine. Not cruel, not hateful. Would a god really use a warm, holy word like divine to describe a place where the Athenians were about to be slaughtered? No. Thymistically has argued that Salamis wasn't where they would die. It was where they would win. And what's crazy, according to the story, the Athenians believed him. They made the almost unthinkable choice to abandon their own city. And they watched from across the water as zirxes marched in and burned Athens to the ground. And it literally must have looked like the end of the world, like everything they had ever known, like the pride that they had in their cities now being completely destroyed by this foreign army. But then in the narrow streets beside that island of Salamis, the Athenian wooden wall of ships sprang the trap. The huge Persian fleet crammed into water far too tight to maneuver in was cut to pieces. And it became one of the most decisive naval victories in the totality of human history, a victory that basically saved Greek civilization as we know it. We did an entire episode on zirxes where we go more into this battle of Salamis. If you want to know more, it is fascinating. But again, the Oracle didn't hand Athens a battle plan. It didn't say like take to the sea and handed them this ambiguous riddle. And that phrase became the raw material for a furious debate about the city's whole future. Again, the Oracle didn't just replace human leadership, it didn't just like tell them the secrets of the universe. It gave the right person just enough of the information that they needed to make the right call. And as the legend goes, it ended up saving the city. Now on that note, there is one more story that I want to show you where Delphi literally changed the course of human history. This takes place some time in the 5th century BC. There's a man named Carafon, who climbed up to Delphi to ask the Oracle a very simple personal question about his friend, and that friend happened to be an Athenian. And his name was Socrates. Maybe you've heard his name before. Yeah, it is that Socrates, the famous philosopher. So back then, he was just kind of like this weird questioning dude who would like walk up to people in the streets and debate them. And he was a bit of a nuisance, you could say. And Carafon's question was this, is there anyone in the world wiser than Socrates? And the Oracle actually answered back this time in a pretty straight clear cut way and said, no, no one is wiser than Socrates. Now most people will take a divine compliment like that and feel pretty great about themselves and go celebrate. But when Carafon carried the answer home, Socrates was not flattered at all. He was kind of baffled and like according to the story, like disturbed by it. Because Socrates was genuinely convinced that he didn't know anything at all. And he was like, famously, he was like, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. So how could he possibly be the wisest man alive? It made no sense. It's like, I'm the dumbest dude here and you're telling me that I'm the wisest guy. This is literally BS. He was certain that God must have meant something deeper, something hidden. Maybe there's like a riddle here. And so as the philosopher Plato would later tell the story, Socrates set out to solve this riddle and ended up spending the rest of his life kind of deliberating on it. He walked all over Athens, seeking out everyone with a reputation for great wisdom. And you know, this was like respected politicians and poets and like master craftsmen and like architects like anyone he could find and he started to question them closely, trying to find someone wiser than himself so that he could prove that this oracle had no idea what she was talking about. But everywhere he went, he kind of found the same unsettling thing like these people believe that they knew a lot yet under his questions, a lot of their knowledge sort of fell apart. Like they all thought that they were wise. And slowly Socrates understood what Apollo had meant. He wasn't the wisest man because he knew the most. He was the wisest because he was the only one honest and humble enough to admit how much he didn't know. His wisdom was knowing the limits of his own knowledge and according to Socrates and Plato's, he describes it. That's the whole game. Right? Like that's the whole point is to realize we all know nothing. And it's interesting because in every one of these stories, the answer from Delphi was never the end of the conversation. It's the beginning of one. It is the start of a debate, a king that turned an oracle into permission and then destroyed himself and proved the oracle correct a city that turned an oracle into debate and then actually saved itself a philosopher that turned an oracle into a lifelong question and a search for meaning that helped produce much of the philosophy that we still know and study from this time period, maybe the birth of philosophy and its own right. And through every one of these world shaping moments, the voice that everyone was so desperate to hear it came from one place. It was a single woman seated on a tripod stool in a temple on a mountain that maybe was inhaling fumes that made everyone draw on drugs. So let's finally talk about this priestess, okay? In the world of the ancient Greeks, formal power was almost always in the hands of men, right? Men owned land, men held offices, men commanded armies, and stood up to argue in the assemblies. And the eyes of the law and public life and what it meant to really even be a citizen, like women were largely shut out of it. And yet the single most authoritative voice in the entire Greek world wasn't a man. It was a woman, a voice that kings would cross the sea to hear that, you know, the voice that cities like reshape their destiny around that helped launch colonies, like literally a trek that would take days or weeks to go up just to get the answers came from the mouth of a woman. The pithya sat at the very center of a world that otherwise refused woman like any kind of power entirely. And to be clear, this was unfortunately not some like ancient feminism as some people try to reframe it. It's not evidence that Greek women secretly had all the power and had all the equality and everything was great because the authority of the pithya wasn't even really hers. It was Apollo's another man, God. Like she was just the channel, like the power that spoke through her was believed to belong entirely to God. And telling me at least most of the time for what we can find, the priestess's own name wasn't even written down or remembered at all. She was kind of just like the secretary of Apollo. But it is genuinely crazy that in a world run completely by men, it was a woman that was the voice that would sway everyone's decisions that despite her having no power of her own, kind of like in an ontological sense, she was still the vessel that conducted power and decisions. And entire civilization that would not let women near the levers of power would travel and even pray to hear this woman speak. And they believe that she alone held the secrets to the future. So for a very long time, it seemed like that voice on the mountain was always there. It would never fall silent. This is something that will just go on for eternity. And century after century delphys authority did exactly that. And that lasted the rise in the fall of the very Greek city states that first like made it powerful when Rome rose to rule over the entire Mediterranean world, Delphi endured even that, still drawing visitors and the attention of emperors. In fact, the temple ruins that you can walk through at Delphi today largely date to a rebuilding in the fourth century BC. And you can literally stand right there. Roman emperors consulted the oracle and tourists are still going to this very day to marvel at it. God, Apollo, so it seems went on and continued to prophesy. But the world that needed Delphi was kind of going away. Those independent, endlessly competing Greek city states are at this point basically gone. They're swallowed into sprawling empires that ran on their own power and had their own kind of way of making decisions and then came the change that really ended it for good. As the Roman Empire became Christian, the old gods were the first thing to get pushed out to the side. So the traditional cults, these temples, the sacrifices, all the oracles, all the mystics, the prophecies, they were increasingly restricted and slowly defunded and then finally at a certain point just outlawed altogether. So late in the fourth century AD, the emperor Theodosius moved hard against pagan worship. And it's actually his campaign that history usually marks as the end of the oracle that had spoken at Delphi for at this point thousands of years. There's actually a haunting legend about the very end of it too. The story goes like this, that one of the last emperors who still believed in the old gods sent a final question to Delphi. And the answer that came back was in effect the oracle kind of writing its own obituary. It said that the beautiful Hall had fallen that Apollo no longer had a home nor his laurel nor his sacred speaking spring. The God at the last was announcing his own silence and it's kind of beautiful and poetic but also like devastating in a weird way like this is coming from a Catholic where I'm like yeah we shouldn't do pagan worship but also like yeah it's kind of sad. Like whether or not those exact lines wherever spoken the thing that it's describing is in effect true like the voice on the mountain did go quiet the temple did empty out and in time an ordinary little village kind of like sprung up over these sacred ruins and for centuries the greatest oracle and history grew kind of worn down then just slowly forgotten until at last modern archaeologists actually really discovered it and dug it back up into the daylight and in a way letting tourists and people of the modern day take that sacred path once again. It's a pretty strange history right like the treasuries are broken and ruined and empty and the gold is all gone and the statues are toppled over and the spoils of war that were once in these magnificent buildings got you know looted or taken off to museums but today tourists can still climb their way up to where kings once climbed to hear from a god and the tripod is still empty and doesn't seem like Apollo is still speaking but honestly humanity just started looking for the voice in other places right like we still take decisions that are way too big and we look for guidance maybe we pray to god maybe we pray to you know a different version of god maybe we go to astrology or we do tarot cards or horoscopes like humanity's constantly chasing signs and looking for the secrets of the universe in many different ways and you know I don't think we've changed and there are words carved above the entrance to the sacred way and they've been there basically the whole time the words are literally know thyself that was the key to unlocking the hidden messages of the oracle that every answer was interpreted by you by your own insecurities by your own pride by your blind spots so you know creases heard victory because he couldn't imagine being defeated he couldn't imagine that his empire would be the one that would be destroyed socrates proved the oracle right by insisting the oracle was actually wrong delphi only ever told you kind of what you already were in a lot of ways and spoke in this cryptic riddle that every person kind of interpreted differently and in a weird way the answer was carved kind of on the you know the sacred path the whole time to know thyself and that ladies and gentlemen is a brief history of the oracle at delphi i mean what a fascinating thing i need to try this ethylene right how do you get her handle that who did you say or go to delphi we could have you been i haven't uh brother really want to we absolutely need to we need to hike the sacred way yeah how sick with that it'd be awesome i wonder how the hike is today i wonder if they like change it or like modify it i don't know anyone that's done it but it seems like you absolutely should just gotta be some kind of tourist trap on it too i know it definitely is it's just packed out with like you know a pack of Brazilian tourists holding up a flag i don't mind that do they do that in Brazil or do they do that in Greece what like the Brazilian tourists were like the flag i saw a lot of them at the acropolis yeah they're not Brazilian specifically but tourists i mean chinese tourists for sure with selfie stick they're like a ten of just guys just use one selfie stick yeah you can you can get all of you at least like ten of you in like one selfie stick i think it should be limited one selfie stick per ten you all don't need your own selfie sticks hot take sorry yep but i would be sick i would love to do it and i don't care what tourists are there it's gonna be a great time regardless i think we go we hike it and we bring our own ethylene and we just see what happens and then we go over to the zoos forest yeah i can speak yeah what is the name of that the zoos forest damn i forgot where you where the worst Greeks in the world you'll find it but it is an interesting question right so let's say the oracle is actually just getting this you know these these vapors from a fault line and it's going to the water because we've even heard one of the prophecies about the sacred spring is run dry so it's like what if that's the sacred spring what if it's found in the water and they're consuming the water and they're maybe mixing the water with some of their type of like psychedelic and they're maybe just the oracle or maybe all of them are entering this trance and they're feeling like this floating feeling they're feeling euphoric and all of a sudden they're like wow that's the answer it's interesting because on the one hand maybe hallucinogens are like informing the thing and you know people take mushrooms and ayahuasca and they have these like beautiful kind of uh you know like really sage sort of understandings about creation and humanity but what if and now I'm on my woo woo now mom I know I'm on my woo woo all right what if that is actually a way that you can communicate with a non-human intelligence that by consuming these chemicals you actually enter into a state of suspended consciousness where now you're no longer separated by reality and you're able to tap in with a non-human entity maybe it's god maybe it's another spirit maybe it's another dimension and you're able to actually get some type of prophetic information that exists outside of time and space as we know it crazy all these people doing drugs this whole time you could just take ethylene that's what I'm saying how do you get it out of the ground is zoos forest by the way the don't know the don't know that's the name of the zoos forest we did a whole episode on zoos you should absolutely check it out obviously you have like the temples to zoos and there's one main temple uh it's on Olympus right yep but you can also go to the forest and this is like almost the animistic version of zoos where you can go and experience zoos in the actual woods like feel him in the trees feel the wind feel the soil it's kind of like the hippie version of zoos I like that one allegedly allegedly what do you guys think do you think the Delphi like the Oracle at Delphi you think that she was just like making stuff up and she was just like a real like good interpreter and like gave like just general kind of like advice like horoscope type vibe do you think she was entering a trance and then because she was on these drugs she was able to like have better advice because she was connected to like the spiritual kind of like a shaman or do you think she was actually able to communicate with non-human intelligence because she was under the influence of these these chemicals enabled enter a trance or you know that kind of state let's give some percentages the odd she was actually communicating with some type of non-human intelligence perhaps Apollo or another one I'm gonna put that at 5% the odds that she was in a trance because she was hallucinating and like was giving good advice because of that I'm gonna put that at like 70% wow that's high what are you gonna put it out no one wants to hear from me what are the odds that she's just like a really good interpreter that's able to like give cool advice I'm gonna put that like 80% what are the odds that it's completely full of shit well that I think is kind of like the last option I gave that she's just like a good interpreter that gives good advice where she's lying but that's I mean what's the difference between giving someone advice and lying right like you're saying that God's talking to me but actually you're just giving good advice hmm I think it's two different things you think so yeah like again let's say I I'm telling you hey I can talk to God and you ask me for advice I can't talk to God or I can pray but like God's not literally talking to me and I'm like oh here's what I think you should do and by I mean this is what God thinks you should do right you're lying about the fact that God's telling you but what if my advice is still really good she's still lying I'm still lying so again she is she lying if she's like just giving good advice perhaps because she's saying that she's talking to Apollo but if the advice is still good like I still think that falls in like the the last bracket there's no hallucinogenic and there's no connection with you know God what do you put that I percentage wise no it wants to hear from me more 99 87 87 I think the hallucinogenic thing is still part of it and I'm not convinced that they're not getting it from the water a little bit I'm just saying just the device is different I mean yellow the bore went over there and found that there was ethylene in the water I'm just saying it makes a lot of sense and people have been there for a long time they all described a lot of the same things right yep Plutarch describes the sense and the feeling and the smell I'm just saying there's a lot of smoke at this fire what do you guys think yeah I don't know dude you tell me you read a comment let me know do you think that she was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs from the fault lines or do you think she was just making it up or do you think maybe there's a slight chance that she was actually talking to Apollo aka some other type of nonhuman intelligence drop a comment I read all of them you to Spotify I might not get back to you but I do read them all and if I don't get back to you I'm sure someone else will and will be productive for the conversation here at the history camp now with a few updates a couple camp announcements if I may if you like a religious content kind of like what we talked about today but instead of like ancient religions 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