Book of the Week: Delphi by Clare Pollard

Oracles come to life in Clare Pollard’s new novel

I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don’t want anything to do with it; don’t want it near me.

No one used to have to deal with this much future. I mean, the future, so far as they could imagine, would have been fairly like the past: harvest, solstice, snow, trees coming into bud. They would get older and die, but the cycle would begin again. We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we’re in the future, already – that dystopian future of surveillance, videocalls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalisation, and the 24-hour news saying AI extinction event gene-modification the collapse of civilisation.

So it is that, somehow, one winter night, I find myself standing in my kitchen, hissing shrilly at my husband: I don’t know if my son will even live to middle age.

—

Something can be melodramatic and true at the same time.

In Delphi, Gods spoke through oracles. Delphi is in Greece, on multiple plateaux along the slope of Mount Parnassus. The myth says that Zeus wanted to find the centre of Gaia – the Greek personification of the Earth, our primordial mother – so sent two eagles soaring from the east and west. The spot where their flightpaths crossed over Delphi was declared the navel of Gaia, sometimes also known as the Omphalos.

Delphi belonged to Gaia, then, but Apollo slayed the dragon who guarded it, the Python (from the verb pythō, ‘to rot’), and stole the land from her. To legitimise his theft, a sanctuary was built for him above the deep, zigzagged chasm into which he had pushed the Python’s dying body. There they later installed the Pythia, a priestess named after that rotting-dragon smell. The famous Oracle of Delphi. By custom, she was an older woman – what we might call middle-aged – and often poor. Someone who had led an ordinary life, but who was willing to sever ties with her husband or children completely and erase herself. To become a blank; become instrument.

Before the Oracle could begin there was a ritual: priests sprinkled a goat with cool water. If it didn’t shiver there would be another month’s wait; if it shivered, they could proceed, sacrificing it and burning the flesh. Rising smoke signalled the Oracle was open.

Next, the Pythia was purified by fasting and bathing in a spring. They seem to have burned laurel leaves to cleanse her, or else she chewed them. Purple veiled, she was taken down into a dark, enclosed inner sanctum and placed on a gilded tripod that teetered over the fissure. I wonder if her heart was panting? I wonder if she was afraid? The room was low and dim, she trembled as fumes rose from the decomposing dragon; sly sweet lifting vapours that lurched her into a blood-thumping blur or violent trance, her limbs loosened from her own control.

She jangled above the pit, enlarging. Apollo moved the bones of her jaw, her clump of tongue, to speak through her mouth – a male voice issuing furious barks, a roar.

The historian and essayist Plutarch, who worked as a priest at Delphi, attributed her ecstasies to the pneuma: the breath of the fault in the rock. He wrote rather memorably that she looked like a wind-swept ship.

It was probably anaesthetic, the rock’s breath – sugared ethylene or ethane, a heavy, crawling asphyxiant. The sanctuary lacked oxygen. And therefore, lo: the future spilt from her mouth –

This is an extract from Clare’s new book, Delphi. You can buy a copy here.

Clare will be joining us on A Drink with the Idler at 6pm on Thursday 13 October. Book your tickets here. Free for subscribers.

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