IN THE MOUNTAINS at Delphi stands a shrine that for many centuries was of great importance to ancient Greece. The Greeks had a genius for locating their shrines in lovely places, but Delphi is especially magnificent with a long valley stretching between massive ranges on one side and on the other the deep blue-green of the Bay of Cornith. It is a place where one immediately feels the awe and the sense of grandeur which befits the nature of the shrine. Here the Greeks found help in meeting their anxiety. In this temple, from the chaotic archaic age down through classical times, Apollo gave counsel through his priestesses. Socrates was even to find there inscribed on the wall of the entrance hall to the temple his famous dictum “Know thyself,” which has become the central touchstone for psychotherapy ever since.
The sensitive Greek, anxious about himself, his family, and his future in those upset times, could find guidance here, for Apollo knew the meaning of “the complicated games the gods play with humanity,” writes Prof. E. R. Dodds. In his excellent study of the irrational in ancient Greek culture, he continues:
Without Delphi, Greek society could scarcely have endured the tensions to which it was subjected in the Archaic Age. The crushing sense of human ignorance and human insecurity, the dread of divine phthonos, the dread of miasma—the accumulated burden of these things would have been unendurable without the assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give, the assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and purpose.1
The anxiety that Apollo helped people meet was the apprehension that accompanies a formative, fermenting, creative, powerfully expanding period. It is important to see that it was not neurotic anxiety, characterized by withdrawal, inhibition, and the blocking off of vitality. The archaic period in ancient Greece was the time of emergence and vital growth fraught with distress that resulted from the chaos of expanding outer and inner limits. The Greeks were experiencing the anxiety of new possibilities—psychologically, politically, aesthetically, and spiritually. These new possibilities, and the anxiety that always accompanies such challenges, were forced upon them whether they wished it or not.
The shrine at Delphi rose to prominence at a time when the old stability and order of the family were crumbling and the individual soon would have to be responsible for himself. In Homeric Greece, Odysseus’ wife Penelope and son Telemachus could oversee the estate whether Odysseus was there or at the wars in Troy or tossed for ten years on the “wine-dark sea.” But now, in the archaic period, families must be welded into cities. Each young Telemachus felt himself standing on the brink of the time when he would have to choose his own future and find his own place as part of a new city. How fertile the myth of the young Telemachus has been for modern writers who are searching for their own identity. James Joyce presents one aspect of it in Ulysses. Thomas Wolfe refers often to Telemachus as the myth of the search for the father, which was Wolfe’s search as truly as it was the ancient Greek’s. Wolfe, like any modern Telemachus, found that the hard, cold truth was “you can’t go home again.”
The city-states were struggling in anarchy, tyrant following tyrant (a term that in Greek does not have the usual destructive connotation it carries in English).2 The upsurging leaders tried to weld the new power into some order. New forms of governing the city-states, new laws, and new interpretations of the gods were emerging, all of which gave the individual new psychological powers. In such a period of change and growth, emergence is often experienced by the individual as emergency with all its attendant stress.
Into this ferment came the symbol of Apollo and his shrine at Delphi and the rich myths on which they were based.
It is important to remember that Apollo is the god of form, the god of reason and logic. Thus it is no accident that his shrine became the important one in this chaotic time and that through this god of proportion and balance the citizens sought assurance that there was meaning and purpose behind the seeming chaos. Form and proportion and the golden mean were essential if these men and women were to control their deep passions, not in order to tame these passions but to turn to constructive use the daimonic powers that the Greeks knew so well in nature and in themselves. Apollo is also the god of art since form—elegance—is an essential characteristic of beauty. Indeed, Parnassus, the mountain at Delphi on whose flank Apollo’s shrine stood, has become a symbol in all Western languages for devotion to the virtues of the mind.
We appreciate more of the rich meaning of such a myth when we note that Apollo is the god of light—not only the light of the sun, but the light of the mind, the light of reason, the light of insight. He is often called Helios, the word in Greek for “sun,” and Phoebus Apollo, the god of brightness and radiance. Finally, we note the most cogent point of all: Apollo is the god of healing and well-being, and his son Asclepius is the god of medicine.
All of these attributes of Apollo, created as they were by collective unconscious processes in the mythology of the dark pre-Homeric centuries, are interwoven with fantastic literal as well as figurative significance. How consistent and meaningful it is that this is the god of good counsel, of psychological and spiritual insight, who will give guidance to a highly vital, formative age! An Athenian setting out on the trip to Delphi to consult Apollo would be turning over in his imagination at almost every moment in the journey this figure of the god of light and healing. Spinoza adjured us to fix our attention on a desired virtue, and we would thus tend to acquire it. Our Greek would be doing this on his trip, and the psychological processes of anticipation, hope, and faith would already be at work. Thus he would be proleptically participating in his own “cure.” His conscious intentions and his deeper intentionality would be already committed to the event about to take place. For the one who participates in them, symbols and myths carry their own healing power.
This chapter is thus an essay on the creating of one’s self. The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming. Despite the obvious determinism in human life—especially in the physical aspect of one’s self in such simple things as color of eyes, height, relative length of life, and so on—there is also, clearly, this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.
This continuous influencing of the direction of a person’s development goes on in the ancient Greek or the modern American, deny it as we wish. Spinoza’s counsel, mentioned above, is one way this piloting function can be actualized. The mass of myths dealing with the reincarnation of an individual into one or another life form, its status dependent on how this person has lived his or her life, attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Sartre’s argument that we invent ourselves by virtue of the multitude of our choices may be overstated, but its partial truth must nevertheless be admitted.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
We are concerned here with how the oracle at Delphi furthers this process of self-creation. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. The summary terms for this process are symbols and myths. And the shrine of Apollo at Delphi was a concrete expression of these symbols and myths, and it was where they were embodied in ritual.
We can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time—the archaic figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight “knowing” smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of a living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness. What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century head of Hermes by Praxiteles.
These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension. They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the “looking about” on all sides lest something unknown might happen—that goes with living in a fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance. Almost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they appear at first glance, have, on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a telltale sign of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that is typical of apprehension.
The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “… his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues,
… But
his torso still glows like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, only turned low,
holds and gleams. Else could not the curve
of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn
of the loins could a smile be running
to that middle, which carried procreation.
Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
under the shoulders’ translucent plunge
nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
nor breaking out of all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.3
In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives. What a far cry is Rilke’s interpretation from Victorian inhibition and repression of drives. These early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest, gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in therapy nowadays, considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) But the Greeks knew also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he choose his passions rather than be chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the daimonic, as modern Western man does.
The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not at all moralistic (the call has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we take into our own lives this new harmonious form.
How the oracle of Apollo functioned and where the advice it gave came from are, of course, fascinating questions. But unfortunately little seems to be known on this subject. The shrine was veiled in secrecy; those who directed it could not only give counsel to others but could also keep their own. Plato tells us that a “prophetic madness” overcame the Pythia, the priestess who served in the temple as mouthpiece for Apollo. From this “madness” there emerged some “creative insight,” so Plato believed, which represented deeper-than-normal levels of consciousness. “It is to their madness,” he writes in his Phaedrus, “that we owe the many benefits that the Pythia of Delphi and the priestesses of Dodona were able to bestow upon Greece both privately and in public life, for when they were in their right minds their achievements amounted to little or nothing.”4 This is a clear statement of one side of a controversy that has raged through human history about the source of inspiration—to what extent does creativity come from madness?
Apollo spoke in the first person through the Pythia. Her voice changed and became husky, throaty, and quavering like that of a modern medium. The god was said to enter her at the very moment of her seizure, or enthusiasm, as the root of that term, en-theo (“in god”), literally suggests.
Before the “seance” the priestess went through several ritualistic acts, such as special bathing and perhaps drinking from a sacred spring, presumedly with the customary autosuggestive effects. But the oft-repeated statement that she breathed vapors issuing from a fissure in the rocks of the shrine which induced a hypnotic effect is disposed of summarily by Professor Dodds:
As for the famous “vapours” to which the Pythia’s inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention…. Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulties of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation.5
Dodds goes on to remark pithily that “less has been heard of this theory since the French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no ‘chasm’ from which vapours could once have come.”6 Obviously such explanations are needless in view of the present-day evidence of anthropology and abnormal psychology.
The Pythian priestesses themselves seemed to be simple, uneducated women (Plutarch tells of one who was the daughter of a peasant). But modern scholars have a high respect for the intelligence system of the oracle. The decisions of Delphi showed sufficient signs of a consistent policy to convince scholars that human intelligence, intuition, and insight did play a decisive role in the process. Although Apollo committed some notorious blunders in his predictions and advice, especially during the Persian wars, the Greeks, with an attitude like many people in psychotherapy have toward their therapist today, forgave him evidently because of the useful advice and help he had given at other times.
The point that interests us most is the function of the shrine as a communal symbol that had the power to draw out the preconscious and unconscious collective insights of the Greeks. Delphi’s communal, collective aspect had a sound foundation: the shrine was originally devoted to the earth goddesses before being dedicated to Apollo. Also it is collective in the sense that Dionysus, Apollo’s opposite, was also a strong influence at Delphi. Greek vases show Apollo, presumably at Delphi, grasping Dionysus’ hand. Plutarch does not exaggerate much when he writes, “as regards the Delphic oracle the part played by Dionysus was no less than Apollo’s.”7
Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the mirror that reflects insights, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights often—and, we could even say, typically—would frighten us too much were we to take full and lonely responsibility for them. In an age of ferment such insights may come frequently, and they require more psychological and spiritual responsibility than most individuals are prepared to bear. In dreams people can let themselves do things—such as killing their parent or their child, or thinking “my mother hated me,” for instance–that would normally be too horrible to think or say in ordinary speech. We hesitate to think these and similar things even in daydreams since such fantasies are felt to carry more individual responsibility than night dreams. But if we can have a dream say it, or have Apollo through his oracle say it, we can be much more frank about our new truth.
The second reason is we escape hubris. Socrates could assert that Apollo at Delphi had pronounced him the wisest man then living, a claim—whether it be Socratic wit or not—he could never have made on his own.
How did one interpret the counsel of the priestesses? This is the same as asking: How does one interpret a symbol? The divinations of the priestess were generally couched in poetry and often were uttered “in wild, onomatopoeic cries as well as articulate speech, and this ‘raw material’ certainly had to be interpreted and worked over.”8 Like mediumistic statements of all ages, these were sufficiently cryptic not only to leave the way open for interpretation, but to require it. And often they were susceptible to two or many different interpretations.
The process was like the interpretation of a dream. Harry Stack Sullivan used to teach young analysts-in-training not to enterpret a dream as if it were the law of the Medes and the Persians, but to suggest two different meanings to the person being analyzed, thus requiring him or her to choose between them. The value of dreams, like these divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to “live” themselves into the message.
During the Persian wars, for example, when the anxious Athenians had petitioned Apollo to give them guidance, word came from the oracle adjuring them to trust in “the wooden wall.” The meaning of this enigma was hotly debated. As Herodotus tells the story, “Certain of the old men were of opinion that the god meant to tell them the acropolis would escape, for this was anciently defended by a wooden palisade. Others maintained that the god referred to wooden ships, which had best be at once got ready.” Thereupon another part of the oracle caused debate, for some thought they should sail away without a fight and establish themselves in a new land. But The mistocles convinced the people that they were intended to engage in a sea fight near Salamis, which they did, destroying Xerxes’ fleet in one of the decisive battles of history.9
Whatever the intention of the Delphic priests, the effect of ambiguous prophecies was to force the suppliants to think out their situation anew, to reconsider their plans, and to conceive of new possibilities.
Apollo, indeed, was nicknamed the “ambiguous one.” Lest some budding therapists take this as an excuse for their own ambiguity, let us here note a difference between modern therapy and the divinations of the oracle. The utterances of the priestess are on a level closer to the recipients’ unconscious, closer to actual dreams, in contrast to the interpretation of dreams in a therapeutic hour. Apollo speaks from deeper dimensions of consciousness in the citizen and the collective group (i.e., the city). Thus there can be a creative ambiguity, which occurs both in the original saying (or dream) and in the citizen’s (or patient’s) interpretation of it. The oracle hence has an advantage over the contemporary therapist. In any case, I believe a therapist ought to be as succinct as possible, and leave the inescapable ambiguity to the patient!
The counsels of Delphi were not advice in the strict sense, but rather were stimulants to the individual and to the group to look inward, to consult their own intuition and wisdom. The oracles put the problem in a new context so that it could be seen in a different way, a way in which new and as yet unimagined possibilities would become evident. It is a common misconception that such shrines, as well as modern therapy, tend to make the individual more passive. This would be bad therapy and a misinterpretation of the oracles. Both should do exactly the opposite; they should require individuals to recognize their own possibilities, enlightening new aspects of themselves and their interpersonal relationships. This process taps the source of creativity in people. It turns them inward toward their own creative springs.
In the Apologia, Socrates tells us how he tried to puzzle out what the god meant by telling his friend Chaerephon that no one in the world was wiser than he (Socrates). The philosopher came to the conclusion that it meant he was wisest because he admitted his own ignorance. The god also counseled Socrates to “know thyself.” Ever since that time, thoughtful men like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have been trying to fathom the meaning of the god’s advice, and we are still stimulated to find new meanings in it. Nietzsche even interprets it as meaning just opposite to what one would conclude at first glance: “What did the god mean who proclaimed ‘Know thyself’ to Socrates? Did he perchance mean, ‘Cease to be concerned about thyself,’ ‘Be objective’?” Like the true symbols and/or myths they are, these utterances of the god yield unending richness as new and interesting meanings are unfolded.
There is another reason why an oracle can be significant as the embodiment of the unconscious collective insights of the group. A symbol or myth acts like a projective screen in drawing out the insight. Like Rorschach cards or Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test, the oracle and its ceremonies are a screen that stimulates wonder and calls imagination into action.
But I must hasten to insert a caution. The process going on at such a place and time may be called “projection,” but we must insist that it is not “projection” in any pejorative sense of the word, either in the psychoanalytical one in which an individual “projects” what is “sick” and therefore what he or she cannot face, nor in the empirical psychological sense in which it is implied that the process is simply subjective and that the cards or TAT pictures have nothing to do with the result. In my judgment, both of these pejorative uses of projection result from the common failure of Western man to understand the nature of symbol and myth.
The “screen” is not merely a blank mirror. It is, rather, the objective pole necessary for calling forth the subjective processes of consciousness. The Rorschach cards are definite and real forms of black and color, even though no one ever before has “seen” in them the things you or I may see in them. Such “projection” is in no sense a “regression” by definition or something less respectable than being able to say what you want to say in rational sentences without the cards. It is rather a legitimate and healthy exercise of imagination.
This process goes on all the time in art. Paint and canvas are objective things that have powerful and existential influences on the artist in bringing out his or her ideas and visions. Indeed, the artist is in a dialectical relation not only with paint and canvas, but with the shapes he or she sees in nature. The poet and the musician are in a similar relationship with their inherited language and musical notes. The artist, the poet, and the musician dare to bring forth new forms, new kinds of vitality and meaning. They are, at least partially, protected from “going crazy” in this process of radical emergence by the form given by the media—namely the paints, the marble, the words, the musical notes.
The shrine of Apollo at Delphi thus can most felicitously be seen as a communal symbol. We can postulate, then, that its insights come by a communal symbolic process involving both subjective and objective factors in a dialectical relation with each other. For anyone who authentically uses the oracle, new forms, new ideal possibilities, new ethical and religious structures may be born from levels of experience that underlie and transcend the individual’s customary waking consciousness. We have noted that Plato calls this process the ecstasy of “prophetic madness.” Ecstasy is a time-honored method of transcending our ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not attain otherwise. An element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or myth, we are for that moment taken “out of” and “beyond” ourselves.
The psychological approach to symbol and myth is only one of several possible avenues. In taking this approach I do not wish to “psychologize away” the myth’s religious meaning. From this religious aspect of myth we get the insight (revelation) that comes from the dialectical interplay of the subjective elements in the individual and the objective fact of the oracle. To the genuine believer, the myth is never purely psychological. It always includes an element of revelation, whether from the Greek Apollo, or the Hebrew Elohim, or the Oriental “Being.” If we completely psychologized away this religious element, we would be unable to appreciate the power with which Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote their dramas and even unable to understand what they are talking about. Aeschylus and Sophocles and the other dramatists could write great tragedies because of the religious dimensions of the myths, which gave a structural undergirding to their belief in the dignity of the race and the meaning of its destiny.