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The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi
Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 2006
The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. By William J. Broad. The Penguin Press, New York, 2006. ISBN 1-59420-081-5.304 pp. Hardcover $25.95, The ancients said the Oracle of Delphi regularly inhaled sacred vapors streaming from the depths of her temple. But in 1892 French archaeologists unearthed the temple and found no evidence of a chasm from which the vapors might have emitted, and after that scholars denounced the Oracle as a fraud.
Now the accomplished New York Times science reporter Bill Broad chronicles the investigation by Wesleyan geologist Jelle deBoer and archaeologist John Hale, who eventually determined that the ancient fumes were petrochemical vapors containing a hallucinogenic gas--ethylene--emitted from natural faults hidden beneath the temple floor. Their paper, "New Evidence for the Geological Origins of the Ancient Delphic Oracle (Greece)," was published in Geology in August 2001. Broad entertainingly tells the story of their discovery, weaving in ancient findings and modern philosophical discussions about science and religion. The discovery solves the mystery of how the Oracle got high, yet Broad feels that the larger questions, "the surrounding layers of mystery," remain. He notes the need for skepticism about psychic powers but argues against overly narrow scientific reductionism that may blind scientists to larger mysteries.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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