Oedipus: the Discovery of the Future

What do we know of that obscure realm where Gods and Daimones roam?

The story of how Oedipus killed his father and married his mother looks alien, even silly, to us. Yet, it resonates deeply with something profound in our modern souls. It is not just interesting for human psychology, but it is a reminder of how our ancestors discovered the future for the first time and with it concepts such as predestination, free will, and more.

I know the grains of sand on the beach and measure the sea;

I understand the speech of the dumb and hear the voiceless.

The Pythoness of the Oracle of Delphi to King Croesus.

__________________________________________________________________

Honestly, what do you make of Oedipus’s story? Seen in modern terms, it is a weird patch-up of elements that go from the silly to the incomprehensible. Do you know of anyone so careless that he married his mother and didn’t even realize it? And what should be made of the riddle of the Sphinx, supposed to be so difficult that no one in the whole city of Thebes could solve it? (“what creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs at night?”) You can try it with an 8-year-old child, and she will probably solve it immediately.

Yet, the deep meaning of the myth is not silly, and it reverberates with something still present in our modern souls. So much that people such as Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, James Frazer, and Robert Graves discuss it at length in their works. But there is a point that I think hasn’t been discussed so often so far. Oedipus marks the turning point in history when our ancestors first started thinking about the future. To be sure, the first written instances of omens, divination, and prophecies are older (I discussed that in a previous post and in a video clip.). But it was in the 5th century BCE that Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex,” appears, telling us Oedipus’s story complete with all the details we know today.

It was a startling new development in the human way of thinking. Oedipus is mentioned in both the Odyssey and the Iliad, both probably created some four centuries before Sophocles. But in these early versions, there is no trace of the prophecies; the oracle is not mentioned, and not even the Sphinx. The real break, the turning point, is with Sophocles’s tragedy that introduces an element never seen before in a myth: predestination.

All over the Oedipus Rex play, there is no doubt that, no matter what the characters do, the Oracle is always right. In fact, the Oracle dominates the plot, and Oedipus is not the only one who is entangled by the Phytoness’s prophecies. Even his real father, King Laius, was the victim of a similar and symmetric thread of events. He was told by the Phytoness that his son would kill him, and he had him abandoned in the woods as a precaution. But just as Oedipus couldn’t avoid killing his father, Laius couldn’t avoid being killed by his son. The oracle ruled.

We tend to see the ancients as naive and sometimes silly, but no. They were neither naive nor silly. Just read “Oedipus Rex” to see how it was created by a sophisticated mind on a par with the best we can do today. And yet, it is clear that from the time of Sophocles (probably earlier than that) up to the early age of Christianity, people believed in oracles. Deeply, completely, absolutely.

Maybe there are ancient authors who disparaged oracles, but I couldn’t locate one. For all of them, it was obvious that oracles spoke the truth, even though their words were sometimes misunderstood. Think of Herodotus, “The Father of History” (5th century BCE). Modern commenters tend to be somewhat ashamed of how he embeds prophecies in his works. But, for Herodotus, prophecies were nothing like the modern horoscopes you read in Sunday’s newspapers — they were an integral part of how history unfolded. Some of Heraclitus’s texts can be seen as true treatises about divination and theology. Among many other things, he reports how Croesus, the King of Lydia, lost his reign because of excessive trust in the Oracle of Delphi, a mistake similar to Oedipus’ one.

Some four centuries later; Cicero wrote his “De Divinatione” (44 BCE), where he discusses divination at length, never casting any doubt on the possibility of using oracles to predict the future. Even Plutarch, who wrote a text titled “De Defectu Oraculorum” (“the Failure of Oracles”) during the 1st century CE, doesn’t say that oracles didn’t tell the truth, only that they were not as popular as they had been in earlier times. He was, after all, a priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.

Plutarch’s notes tell us something about the cycle that the Pagan oracles underwent in ancient times. Starting with expressing absolute truths at the time of Oedipus, even being subversive in predicting the downfall of powerful kings, they gradually became mostly a support for the dominance of the Roman Empire. Cicero says that clearly in his De Divinatione: oracles are necessary for social stability. Indeed, oracles were supposed to tell the words of the gods — Cicero also says that “if the kinds of divination which we have inherited from our forefathers and now practise are trustworthy, then there are gods and, conversely, if there are gods then there are men who have the power of divination.”

So, no oracles without gods, and the Roman Empire itself was based on the idea that its success was the result of the goodwill of the gods. It is not surprising that, with the decline of the empire, the belief in gods declined, and with that, in oracles as well. With the rule of Christianity, sacking Pagan temples became a major source of revenue for the last Roman Emperors. The temple of Apollo in Delphi was closed by Theodosius 1st in 390 CE and sacked shortly afterward. With that, oracles faded into nothingness. Nowadays, they are reduced to horoscopes, tarots, and reading tea leaves.

The religions that came afterward, Christianity and Islam, didn’t ignore prophecies, but they had different approaches. Just like for the older Hebrew religion, prophets overtaken by theia mania (divine madness) were always at risk of saying something that was in contrast with the written canons and had to be kept under strict control.

You can hardly miss the parallel of the cycle of oracles and that of our modern science. As Thomas Huxley said, things that start as heresies are destined to die as superstitions. Our Science started as a dispenser of absolute truth, even being subversive when needed. Now, it has reached the stage of mere support for the powers that be, even though nearly everyone still claims to believe in it. It is not yet the time when a new generation of troubled emperors will sack the temples of science, but that might happen sooner than we can imagine.

From the remote time of oracles, there remains that special moment, a few centuries before our era, when our ancestors really thought they could understand something of those obscure powers that govern the universe. Powers that are beyond our understanding but whose language could be somehow deciphered and translated by a peasant girl who took the role of the “Pythoness” for her brief life as a servant of the Gods.

What made our ancestors believe so deeply and completely in prophecy? Could they see something we cannot see anymore? Is there a way to pierce the veil that shields the future from our site? Can we translate the language of the Gods into sentences that we can understand? How vast is the realm of the unknown, where Gods and Daimones roam?

Maybe, one day, we’ll discover new ways to understand the future. But, for the time being, we keep stumbling on toward the unknown. All of us have become Oedipus, blind as he blinded himself when he discovered how he had been cheated by the oracle he had trusted so much. We are just human.

Know thyself

Nothing to excess

Surety brings ruin

(Maxims said to have been inscribed on a column of the temple of Apollo in Delphi, where the Pythoness, or Phytia, performed her divinations)