§ 3
But in spite of all attempts to moderate and civilize it outwardly, the cult of Dionysos retained as its most enduring feature a tendency to the ecstatic and the extravagant that was continually breaking out in threatening or alluring guise. So strong indeed was the ecstatic element in Dionysiac worship, that when the Apolline and Dionysiac forms of religion became united, as at Delphi, it was the Apolline worship—once so hostile to anything in the nature of ecstasy—that had to accept this entirely novel feature.
The “prophecy of inspiration”, deriving its knowledge of the unseen from an elevation of the human soul to the divine, was not always a part of Greek religion. Homer, of course, knows of the prophetic art in which specially instructed seers explained such signs of the gods’ will as occurred accidentally or were purposely sought out by men, and by this means claimed to discover the will of heaven both at the moment and for the future. This is, in fact, the sort of prophecy that Apollo bestowed upon his seers.[39] But the prophecy of which there was no “art” and which “no man could be taught”[40] (for it came in a moment by “inspiration”)—of this Homer shows no trace.[41] In addition to professional and independently working prophets the Odyssey, and even the Iliad, too, are aware of the enclosed oracular institutions belonging to the temple of Zeus at Dodona and that of Apollo at Pytho.[42] Both these used the names of the gods with whose service they were concerned to increase the effect and the credit of their utterances. In the Odyssey (but not the Iliad) there is a reference to the influence wielded by the oracle of Apollo in the more important circumstances of a people’s [290] life. But whether at that time it was an inspired prophetess who gave replies at Delphi we cannot be sure from the poet’s words. There must have been oracles of sortilege[43] at that place from an early period under the protection of the god and it is these we should naturally expect a poet to mean who nowhere[44] shows any knowledge of the striking phenomena of ecstatic mantikê.[45]
In any case this new mantikê of inspired prophets, which subsequently enjoyed such enormous development and gave the Delphic oracle such peculiar power, was a late-coming innovation in the Apolline cult. Over the chasm in the rock at Pytho, out of which arose a strange and potent vapour from the depths of the earth, there had once existed an oracle of Gaia at which perhaps inquirers had received their instruction through the means of premonitory dreams by night.[46] The earth-goddess was displaced by Apollo here as at many other oracular sites.[47] The accuracy of this tradition is confirmed by the Delphic temple legend which speaks of the overthrow of the oracular earth-spirit Python by Apollo.[48] The change may have been gradually brought about; in any case, where once the earth-divinity had spoken directly in dreams to the souls of men, there Apollo now prophesied—no longer indirectly through the intervening medium of signs and omens, but directly answering those who, in open-eyed wakefulness, inquired of him, and speaking to them out of the mouth of his ecstatically inspired prophetess.
This Delphic prophecy of inspiration is as far removed from the old Apolline art of interpreting omens as it is closely allied to the mantikê which we found attached from the earliest times to the Thracian cult of Dionysos.[49] It appears that in Greece Dionysos but rarely obtained an official priesthood that could have organized or maintained a permanent oracular institute attached to a particular place or temple. In the one Dionysiac oracle in Greece, however, of which we have certain knowledge a priest gave prophecies in a state of “enthusiasm” and “possession” by the god.[50] Enthusiasm and ecstasy are invariably the means of the Dionysiac prophecy just as they were the means of all Dionysiac religious experience. When we find Apollo in Delphi itself—the place where he most closely allied himself with Dionysos—deserting his old omen-interpretation and turning to the prophecy of ekstasis, we cannot have much doubt as to whence Apollo got this new thing.[51]
With the mantic ekstasis, Apollo received a Dionysiac element into his own religion. Henceforward, he, the cold, [291] aloof, sober deity of former times, can be addressed by titles that imply Bacchic excitement and self-abandonment. He is now the “enthusiastic”, the Bacchic god: Aeschylus strikingly calls him “ivy-crowned Apollo, the Bacchic-frenzied prophet” (fr. 341). It is now Apollo, who more than any other god, calls forth in men’s souls the madness[52] that makes them clairvoyant and enables them to know hidden things. At not a few places there are founded oracular sites at which priests or priestesses in frenzied ecstasy utter what Apollo puts into their mouths. But the Pythian oracle remained the pattern of them all. There, prophecy was uttered by the Pythia, the youthful priestess who sat upon the tripod over the earth-chasm and was inspired by the intoxicating vapour that arose from it, until she was filled with the god, and with his spirit.[53] The god, so ran the belief, entered into the earthly body; or else the soul of the priestess, “released” from her body, received the heavenly revelation with spiritual sense.[54] What she then “with frenzied mouth” proclaimed, that the god spoke out of her; when she said “I”, Apollo was speaking of himself and of what concerned him.[55] It is the god who lives, thinks, and speaks in her so long as the madness lasts.