BOOKSHELF 



By Laurence A. Marschall 



The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and 

 Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi 

 by II illiam /. Broad 

 Penguin Press, 2006; $25.95 



Long before focus groups and com- 

 puter modeling came into vogue, 

 a woman (actually a succession of 

 women) known as the Oracle of Del- 

 phi was the arbiter of choice for politi- 

 cians and military planners in ancient 

 Greece. No carnival fortune-teller, she 

 was consulted on important matters of 

 state, from questions of inheritance and 

 taxation to issues of crime, government 

 and war. The Delphic Oracle and her 

 prophecies were extensively docu- 

 mented in classical texts, and so mod- 



Willu.nl. 

 winning 



Seeress of Delphi inhales the gas, or pneuma, that entrances her 

 (nineteenth-century image). 



ern scholars have a pretty good idea of 

 who she was and how she did her work. 



For nine months of the year, from 

 March through November, the Pythias, 

 a priestess of Apollo, conducted audi- 

 ences in the temple of the god in Del- 

 phi. Seated on a three-legged stool in 

 a holy chamber, she entertained the 

 questions of petitioners. Then, after 

 taking a few breaths of a sweet-smelling 

 gas. or pneuma, which rose from a fis- 

 sure below her, she would pronounce, 

 normally in verse. 



I ler words were sage, suggestive, and 

 invariably effective. "Love of money 

 and nothing else will ruin Sparta," she 

 warned, setting the agenda for a Spar- 

 tan policy of militarism, physical fitness, 



and frugality. "Sit in the middle of the 

 ship, guiding straight the helmsman's 

 task," she warned Solon, the Athenian 

 lawgiver, directing him toward a policy 

 of moderation and compromise that 

 served his city well. 



Yet as Greece declined and the cen- 

 turies passed, the temple, shrines, and 

 statues of Delphi fell into disrepair — 

 desecrated by Christian zealots, ran- 

 sacked by armies, tumbled by earth- 

 quakes, buried by landslides. By the late 

 nineteenth century, stories of the Ora- 

 cle had taken on the flavor of legend. 

 Then, in 1 892, archaeologists unearthed 

 the remains of Apollo's temple on the 

 hillsides of Mount Parnassus, under the 

 small village of Kastri. As the dig pro- 

 gressed, most of the ancient descriptions 

 were verified: the tem- 

 ple and its inner cham- 

 ber slowly emerged. Ar- 

 chaeologists even found 

 a marble slab on which 

 the Oracle's seat may 

 have rested, and a 

 rounded stone, called 

 the omphalos ("navel"), 

 which represented Del- 

 phi's place at the center 

 of the world. What was 

 missing, however, was 

 the cleft that emitted 

 pneuma, the mysterious 

 substance that made the 

 seeress see. That part of 

 the story, in the conventional wisdom 

 of the time, must have been malarkey. 



Broad, a Pulitzer-Prize- 

 lg science writer for The 

 New York Times, picks up the strands of 

 Oracle history with the story of the 

 missing cleft. His tale focuses on the 

 work of several scientists, notably Jelle 

 Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist at Wes- 

 leyan University in Middletown, Con- 

 necticut, and fohn R. Hale, an ar- 

 chaeologist at the University of Louis- 

 ville in Kentucky, who, against the 

 weight of scholarly opinion, set out to 

 show that a strange gas was indeed 

 seeping into the Oracle's holy of holies. 

 Sure enough, de Boer identified geo- 



logic faults running through the base- 

 ment of the temple that could readily 

 have channeled petrochemical gas dur- 

 ing the years the Oracle was holding 

 forth. What is more, an analysis of an- 

 cient gases trapped in porous rocks at 

 the Delphic spring, along with samples 

 of the water that flows there now, 

 showed that among the gases the Ora- 

 cle might have breathed was the sweet- 

 smelling and intoxicating gas ethylene. 

 De Boer and Hale even enlisted a tox- 

 icologist named Henry A. Spiller to ad- 

 minister low doses of ethylene to sev- 

 eral human subjects, to determine 

 whether it might induce the trancelike 

 behavior attributed to the Oracle. It did. 



So is that all there is? Was the great 

 Oracle "as much glue sniffer as guru," 

 as one journal has put it? Broad, usually 

 a hard-nosed reporter, thinks not. In the 

 penultimate chapter, he suggests that 

 ethylene just might be a gateway to a 

 world beyond scientific reductionism. 



Or maybe not. Like so much of what 

 scholars and supplicants have learned 

 from the Oracle in the past, the answer 

 is open to interpretation. 



Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit 

 of the Earth 's Last Dinosaur 



by Carl Safina 

 Henry Holt and Company, 2006; 

 $27.50 



The leatherback turtle, the heaviest 

 of all wild reptiles, is a nautical 

 jet-setter, a natural-born citizen of the 

 world. After rounds of breeding on 

 Trinidad's Caribbean coast, a leather- 

 back gourmand may head for Grand 

 Banks, thousands of miles to the north, 

 where abundant raw jellyfish can be 

 found. When the party crowd gets dull 

 in Japan, a leatherback lothario may 

 cross the Pacific Ocean to Baja Cali- 

 fornia, where leatherback females, in- 

 stinct tells him, are really going wild. 

 Powerful swimmers and uncanny nav- 

 igators, these giant sea turtles are ever 

 in motion, girdling the globe with ease. 



The central voyage in Carl Safina's 

 narrative, however, is the author's own. 



NATURAL HISTORY June 2006 



