Cracking the Case of The Missing Cracks: The Oracle by William J. Broad

I’ve always been fascinated by the Oracle of Delphi. It seems like the Pythia (as she was known) was one of the few authentically supernatural things in the universe – certainly the classical world considered her so. Along with the equally compelling rites at Eleusis, my fascination has been heightened by the mystery, the secrecy that still surrounds these two most famous centers of ancient religion. In this unfortunate age of instant, total exposure and the gossipy trivialization of any kind of truth, I can only look with envious nostalgia at mysteries that were able to remain mysterious.

Though the ancients wrote quite a bit about the succession of Oracles (certainly there’s a lot more historical documentation of the Pythia than there is about, say, that fellow Jesus Christ), there’s not that much modern work about her/them (many different women serving one voice), so when I saw the book The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi by William J. Broad in the Penguin catalog I ordered it. The book (like Gaul) is divided into three parts. The first is an overview of the history of Delphi, then a look at the modern world’s interpretation of it and an account of the efforts of several contemporary scientists to "unlock its secret" and reverse the accepted verities.

These revelations are followed by a brief final section that examines how these new discoveries question reductive science and the dominant status quo materialist world view.

Sadly, I found the sum of the parts to be less compelling than they sound. Don’t get me wrong, The Oracle is an interesting and fun read, but, Mr. Broad’s background being journalistic, it reads more like a long New York Times article than the truly profound or groundbreaking book it could have been. The opening history of the Oracle was somewhat thin – although Broad gives a real sense of the ubiquitous and unique position Delphi held in the ancient world, the portrait is sketchy, omitting the possible matriarchal origins of the site, the origin of the Omphalos (a black rock the Greeks believed represented the center of the earth) and even giving short shrift to many fascinating classical commentaries on the Oracle.

Clearly ancient history is not where his expertise lies. He’s more of a science writer, and the second section shows him more sure of himself and his material. It’s a rather standard scientific "detective story" about two dedicated, colorful scientific sleuths, geologist Jelle de Boer and archeologist John Hale, who follow the clues and crack the case of the missing cracks. For years Oracle-ologists have been puzzled by the contradiction between the certainty of the Classical commentators that the Pythia received inspiration from the sweet smelling effluvia which wafted up from a crack beneath her feet and the equally rock solid certainty of the French archeologists who first excavated Delphi that, well, the rock was solid, with no possible fissures or intoxicating gasses. The ever intellectually arrogant French were, of course, not geologists, and when an actual member of the profession looked at the site he discovered that it was situated at the intersection of two seismic faults that would have certainly produced a lot of cracks, as well as subterranean strata that would have released the euphoria producing, naturally occurring gas ethylene. This section allows Broad to explain faults, rocks, gasses and many other matters scientific, which although they are all interesting enough, fail to bring the reader any closer to the Oracle. Similarly the profiles of those dogged savants de Boer and Hale are more on the level of good journalism than great literature.

The final summation also treats a compelling subject in not quite enough depth. Broad uses the oracle as a stick with which to flog the reductive (i.e. the belief that all things may be reduced to basic component parts) wing of contemporary science. He pussyfoots around the central revelation of the book – the fact that the Oracle of Delphi achieved her fantastic results and acclaim with the aid of consciousness altering agents. It’s odd to me how our culture has so quickly gone from the Romantic idea that nothing great can be achieved without some heightened or altered state to the contemporary, conservative concept that nothing but nonsense can be achieved in such a state. The dismissive reception of Daniel Pinchbeck’s fascinating, provocative book 2012 or the sneering reviews of the recent spate of books about Timothy Leary, which present him as a hedonistic charlatan, simply because no one could really believe than any benefit could come from hallucinogens.

This is part of the materialistic reductionism Broad excoriates, although he doesn’t engage it, perhaps for fear of being marginalized himself. [We all know UBU has no such fear – he was pushed beyond the margins long ago!] Ever since that font and apologist for so much bad philosophy Ronald Reagan, our culture has been conditioned to see drugs as a criminal and social problem, a potentially dangerous fault line in the Uber American world view. Even today’s stoner adherents see drugs more as just another recreation and consumer product than as agent of revelation. Like so much of conservatism, this view relies on an extreme ignorance of history, a view through the make believe lens of Hollywood. Is it really a shock that the Oracle relied on consciousness altering agents when the Shamanic origins of religion places them at the very dawn of human spirituality, and even, some postulate, the genesis of consciousness itself?

Certainly many of the major architect of modern culture – Poe, Coleridge, Freud, even, as Broad points out William James, were no strangers to drugs, not to mention the last great literary generation of America, Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg, and almost virtually every major rock musician of the sixties. The signal philosophical insight of the twentieth century, call it Relativity, The Uncertainty Principle or just plain Subjectivity, is apparent to anyone who has stepped away from not only the consensually perceived world view but in some way themselves by the use of consciousness altering agents. But it wasn’t just the ethylene that made the Oracle holy, it was the framework she operated in, her seriousness of purpose, her set and setting, that all contributed to her visionary successes, the very elements that are so sadly lacking in our reductive, degraded, materialistic world. Broad should be commended for raising these questions and summoning this disconcerting ghost of the past, even though he does so with disappointing superficiality. I guess we all get The Oracle we deserve, and it should come as no surprise that today Oracle is just another highly revered tech stock.

Yrs Delphicly,

UBU (King Numa)