Ophelia led Professor down the stone walk below the treasury and showed him a stone slab upon which rested a conical rock, about four feet tall, that looked a little like the top half of an egg or the nose cone of a jet.
“The Omphalos,” she said, with a magisterial flourish. “One of them anyway. There’s a better one in the museum.”
“That must be the one I’m thinking of,” Professor replied. “It looks sort of like a giant potato wrapped in a fishnet, right?”
“That’s not what I see when I look at it,” Ophelia replied, raising a playful eyebrow. Then her expression became more serious. “You know the significance of the Omphalos, right?”
He nodded. “The Greeks believed it marked the center of the earth — literally the navel of the Earth goddess Gaia. Of course, the exact location was subject to change. According to the myth, Zeus sent out two eagles from different places, and told them to meet at the center of the world. That turned out to be Delphi, so they marked the spot with an Omphalos stone.”
“That’s one story,” Ophelia replied. “Another is that Apollo slew the dragon Python, who was guarding the navel of Gaia. The vapors that rose from beneath the Temple of Apollo were believed to be the gases of Python’s body decomposing.
“There may actually be some truth to that story,” she went on as they headed back toward the museum. “The site was inhabited in the Bronze Age, by the Mycenaean Greeks, and it is believed that there was a temple to Gaia here, and a Sybil who prophesied the future, as early as the fourteenth century B.C.E. The Mycenaean civilization collapsed of course, and the site was abandoned for many centuries, until the rise of Classical Greek culture. So perhaps Apollo ‘slew’ Python in the sense that the worshippers of Apollo arrived and took over the site for their own religious practices.”
After touring the two thousand year old remains of an ancient civilization, the Archaeological Museum at Delphi was something of a surprise architecturally speaking. Instead of trying to mimic the Classical design, the building was modern looking, with plain geometric lines, and lots of windows to provide natural light. The reason for this became apparent as Professor stepped inside; the museum architects did not want their contribution to Delphi to overshadow the historical riches housed within.
They found the more famous Omphalos stone displayed near the entrance of the museum, an orange-colored, bullet-shaped stone, several feet high. The exterior was carved to resemble an elaborate rope net. The stone was hollow through the center, and had acted as a sort of nozzle, focusing and concentrating the mystical vapors that the oracle would have breathed in the innermost chambers of the Apollo sanctuary. This was the Omphalos that was reproduced on coins and artwork dating back to the Classical Greek era, but it was widely believed that this stone was a copy from early Roman times.
The Romans, Professor learned, had also venerated the site and consulted with the oracle, at least until the fourth century C.E. when Emperor Theodosius I had ordered the temple destroyed and forever silenced the prophetic voice of Pythia.
The museum contained numerous treasures brought from distant lands; spoils of war brought to honor the oracle who had guided kings and heroes on adventures abroad. One of the most spectacular pieces was the Sphinx of Naxos, a seven-foot tall marble structure with outstretched wings, dating back to the year 570 B.C.E. Once, it had stood atop a column and gazed out over the waters of the Gulf below. There were far fewer artifacts from the Mycenaean period, but a helpful English-speaking tour guide filled in some of the gaps in his knowledge.
“There was almost certainly a shrine here during the late Minoan and Mycenaean periods, but very few physical artifacts remain. On the way up to the Sanctuary of Apollo, you will see the Sybil Rock. That is where the ancient oracle, the one before Pythia, delivered her prophecies.”
Professor thanked the guide, but before the man could leave, Ophelia asked him, “What happened to the original Sybil?”
The man shrugged. “We know very little about the Bronze Age history of the site. There are many possible explanations for what happened to the Mycenaeans — war, internal conflicts, earthquakes — the answer is probably a combination of these factors. For many years, it was believed that the Mycenaeans were destroyed by invading Dorians, but it seems more likely that the invasion was more a cultural change than a military campaign.”
“Was there a Sybil or an oracle here during that time?”
The tour guide spread his hands apologetically. “That period is called the Greek Dark Ages for a reason. We just don’t know. The history of Delphi, to the best of our knowledge, begins when Apollo, in the form of a dolphin, brought priests here to establish his sanctuary.”
“I’m sorry, did you just say a ‘dolphin’?”
The guide nodded. “That’s how Delphi got its name. Apollo Delphinos — Apollo the Dolphin.”
As the man left to rejoin his tour group, Professor took Ophelia aside. “The sphere we found in Costa Rica also had a dolphin glyph. Dolphins were sacred to the Phoenicians, which we would expect from a sea faring people.
“During the same period when the Mycenaean civilization was collapsing,” he continued, “the rest of the Mediterranean region was under attack by a group of raiders called the Sea People. Some contemporary accounts mention the Sea People in connection with the destruction of Knossos and other Mycenaean cities.”
“Were the Sea People the Phoenicians?”
“You won’t find a serious historian who believes that, but it’s interesting that the Phoenician cities were left untouched by the Sea People. It’s been suggested that they were more of a loose confederation of pirates, so why not Phoenicians? Or maybe the Sea People plundered the Omphalos sphere, and sold it to a Phoenician trader who was headed east. Maybe the old myth got it backward. Maybe the ‘dolphin’ wasn’t Apollo bringing the priests here; maybe it was the Phoenicians taking the Ompahalos — the original Omphalos away. They sailed east, across the Pacific, and when they spotted the dolphins, they decided that was the place to establish a new temple, a new oracle.”
“Perhaps the theft of the Omphalos is what caused the fall of the Mycenaens,” suggested Ophelia, warming to the subject. “The Sibyl’s guidance is what protected them, and when the source of her visions was taken, they were unable to prepare for the disasters that followed.”
“There’s a problem though. If the original Omphalos was a dark matter sphere — and how it got here in the first place, I have no idea — but if it was, and the Phoenicians took it, then how was it that the Delphic oracle was able to continue making accurate predictions, a thousand years later?”
“Perhaps there is some residual effect, like the way a magnet can temporarily magnetize a piece of metal. Or maybe that sphere was part of a larger source of dark matter. You’ll recall that Paul said it might be possible for an object with a strong dark matter field to seed another. Or the sphere you found was just such a created Omphalos. Possibly, the original is still here.”
“Paul also said this was the first place he looked. If there is a dark matter field here, he would be the person most likely to find it.”
Ophelia spread her hands. “Have you ever lost something important — your keys or maybe your wallet — and you looked everywhere for it, and then you went back and looked again and found it in a place you had already checked two or three times? Maybe our search is like that?”
Professor chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you always find something in the last place you look. So if there is some lingering dark matter here, how do we find it?”
“Simple,” Ophelia said. “We look again.”
They made their way back outside, up the trail to the site where the Temple of Apollo had once stood, the place where the oracle had delivered her pronouncements. The tour guide that had answered their questions in the museum was now delivering his canned speech about the procedures that had been followed when Delphi had been, figuratively at least, the center of the ancient world.