fn29 The name ‘Delphi’ is thought to derive from delphys, meaning ‘womb’. Of course it might be from adelphi, which means ‘siblings’ (because they come from the same womb). So perhaps the sacred place is named after Apollo the twin, perhaps after the womb of Gaia. There is another theory that suggests Apollo arrived at Pytho on a dolphin, delphis in Greek. A dolphin is, after all, a fish with a womb. But how he could have travelled so far over land on a dolphin I can’t quite say.
fn30 When the Pythia prophesied she was possessed by the god Apollo, the Titaness Themis or the goddess Gaia. Or perhaps all three. The Greek for ‘divine possession’ is enthusiasmos – enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be ‘engodded’, to be divinely inspired.
fn31 Some say that steam hissed out from the subterranean Castalian spring, which delighted the local goats, apparently. Perhaps this reminded people of a dolphin’s blowhole, offering yet another explanation for the change of the name from Pytho to Delphi. Castalia, incidentally, is the name of the future world in Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game.
fn32 Today’s Mount Kyllini.
fn33 Hermes’ natty headgear is known as the petasus. His staff, the kerykeion – or caduceus to the Romans – often appears as a worldwide symbol of medicine and ambulances, either as an alternative to or a confusion with the staff of ASCLEPIUS (of whom, more later).
fn34 Medieval and Renaissance alchemists called him Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Majestic). Since he is said to have been able magically to seal glass tubes, chests and boxes, a seventeenth-century invention called the Magdeburg Hemispheres (which employed the power of atmospheric pressure and a vacuum to create an incredibly strong seal) was described as ‘hermetically sealed’, a phrase still much in use today.
fn35 This is its modern name – meaning literally ‘large kettles’ and to this day a rewarding sight for mountaineers who dare scale the heights of Olympus.
fn36 It was either the action of the Hecatonchires or of glacial moraines. No one can say for absolute certain. Megala kazania literally means ‘large kettles’, and to this day is a rewarding sight for mountaineers who dare to scale the heights of Olympus.
PROMETHEUS
fn1 The Greek for ‘between rivers’ is Mesopotamia, which is how that area was always known to the Greeks.
fn2 See Appendix here.
fn3 That is one theory as to the origin of the word anthropos, which does strictly mean ‘man’. It is unfortunate that many words for our species seem to refer only to the male. ‘Human’, for example, is cognate with homo, the Latin for ‘man’. Thus ‘humanity’ rudely leaves out half the species. ‘Folk’ and ‘people’ aren’t so specific. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that ‘man’ is actually connected to mens (mind) and manus (hand), and was in fact gender neutral until perhaps a thousand years ago.
THE PUNISHMENTS
fn1 It is a subtler name than that, for pan-dora can mean ‘all-giving’ as well as ‘all-given’.
fn2 It is said to have been Erasmus of all people, the great sixteenth-century scholar and Prince of Humanists, who misread Pandora’s pithos (jar) into pyxis (box).
fn3 See Appendix, here.
fn4 Foresight, but not prophecy …
fn5 Another English word for a werewolf is lycanthrope, Greek for ‘wolf-man’.
fn6 According to Ovid at least. Other sources suggest Mount Etna or Mount Athos. Round about the same time Noah was landing on Mount Ararat. Archaeology confirms, it seems, that there really was a Great Flood.
fn7 See Appendix here.
fn8 Charon was also happy to receive a danake or danace, the Persian equivalent, later incorporated into ancient Greek currency.
fn9 Virgil’s description of Aeneas’s visit to the underworld tells of the colour of Charon’s boat.
fn10 The story of how Zeus seduced Europa will be told a little later on.
fn11 The Canaries were Byron’s candidate for the Isles of the Blessed in his Don Juan.
fn12 But not in France, despite the name of Paris’s grand thoroughfare, the Champs Elysées.
PERSEPHONE AND THE CHARIOT
fn1 She features prominently in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
fn2 Helios could be as dull and slow in the wits as he was bright and swift in the sun-chariot. How he came to take over these duties from Apollo will be revealed later.
fn3 Although some say this, I tend to believe that Pan (FAUNUS to the Romans) was older than the Olympians. Perhaps as old as nature itself. We will encounter him from time to time as we move forward.
fn4 There were two Mount Idas – the Cretan one, Zeus’s birthplace, and another in Phrygia, Asia Minor – today’s Turkish Anatolia. This was the one from which Hermaphroditus hailed.
fn5 The great museums of the world have hidden away treasures that represent intersex figures like Hermaphroditus. Many of these have only recently come to light, with exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and other leading institutions setting a trend for rediscovery of this neglected area. It coincides with a greater, society-wide understanding of the fluidity of gender.
fn6 Or possibly Pan.
CUPID AND PSYCHE
fn1 The well-known aluminium statue by Alfred Gilbert that forms the focus of the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, is actually not of Eros but of Anteros, deliberately chosen to celebrate the selfless love that demands no return. This was considered an appropriate commemoration of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury’s great philanthropic achievements in hastening the abolition of child labour, reforming lunacy laws, and so on.
fn2 Cupid draw back your bow
And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover’s heart for me, for me …
© Sam Cooke
fn3 The King James Bible renders the conclusion of the thirteenth chapter of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (written in Greek of course) as: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.’ In modern translations ‘charity’ is rendered simply as ‘love’.
fn4 You might notice strong resemblances to Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, for instance.
fn5 Apuleius, who flourished in the second century AD, was from North Africa but wrote in Latin and so used the names Cupid (interchangeably with Amor) for Eros, Venus for Aphrodite and Anima for Psyche, a translation that conveys the word’s sense not just of ‘soul’ but of ‘breath of life’ – ‘that which animates’. If you were to translate Apuleius literally you would get a very allegorical tale indeed. ‘Love said to Soul, you must not look at me’, ‘Soul fled from Love’, etc.