Week 6--in which we follow scientists to Delphi and discover what they missed

Beautiful Ones,

Who was the greatest oracle of all time?

This is a question Cathy Stevens Pratt and I had to ponder before we could even begin to construct a plan for the upcoming ART 5 prayer intensive on Divination. It took us months to gather all the disparate components and weave them together explain and amplify our prophetic capabilities.

I guess you could say we were on a wild scavenger hunt. And one with no list! We had to construct the list. And connect the dots on our own. This is just the kind of mystical mystery Cathy and I, and everyone in The Witch Sequence intensives, loves.

But, I confess, there were moments when it felt like we might never really understand how to activate our own prophetic oracular divination gifts.

And that would be a problem, because the entire point of each of the ART intensives is to Awaken, Remember, and Trust our OWN sacred WitchArt gifts.

My first stop—and at first glance it may strike you as absurd—was the vast research P.M.H. Atwater compiled after interviewing 4.000 people including 400 children who had had Near Death Experiences. Atwater was the perfect researcher for this massive project because she has had 3 NDEs.

Several years ago my publisher recommended P.M.H. Atwater’s book Future Memory for my radio show. I used to devote the month of October to interviews about death. I loved October because I got to talk to mediums, death doulas, people who have received communication from the dead, and quite a few authors writing about NDEs.

Why not? Death is the great mystery of life, and one we will all experience, so why not look at it, study it, touch it, and befriend it.

But something happened when I read Future Memory.

In the book, Atwater delves into the science that explains what happens in an NDE. We’re going to talk about this at length in ART 5, but the quick summation is that you go through a colloidal condition. Visualize stirring a liquid, suddenly stopping and stirring the other way. I do this every morning when I stir my French Press. Massive confusion ensues. My hand feels big resistance. The coffee looks and feels different.

Atwater studied the physics of the colloid stop and applied that science to help her understand the radical shifts in the lives of near-death experiencers. They are different when they return.

And—this is the important piece for Divination—they have the uncanny ability to know and pre-live the future.

I devoured Atwater’s book. But when I put it down, I felt strange. It felt as if I’d dropped into mystical theta—a state I know and love after years of deep soul writing—but couldn’t quite return to normal functioning.

I asked PMH what had happened to me. She said, oh, it changed you, alright. Because the book is a labyrinth.

At the time, I had NO idea what she meant, but here I am, all these years later, madly in love with the mystical properties and ancient wisdom of the labyrinth. After creating four ART intensives on the labyrinth to activate our intuitive, mystic, prayer artist, and myrrhhophore selves, it’s very clear to me and to everyone who takes any of those intensives, that the labyrinth itself is a morphic field. That’s ground-breaking scientist Rupert Sheldrake’s terminology for the living presence of the past.

That means the oracles of the past are present on a labyrinth. We can ask them to help us remember our own oracular abilities.

So,

1. first stop on our scavenger hunt was the science of near-death experiences.
2. second was modern science that articulates the very different capabilities of the two hemispheres of our brain. I wrote about Iain McGilchrist’s exposition of our two brains two weeks ago.
3. third was the anthropology that shows we once lived in a matrilineal society without war. I touched on that last Sunday in a newsletter about activating your internal Voice
4. fourth stop on the scavenger hunt was a complete surprise. Turns out each one of us has unique oracular abilities hiding in plain sight in our natal charts. It’s a thrilling awareness I’ll write about next Sunday.

After months playing in the fields of brain science, colloid physics, anthropology, astrology, and more, Cathy and I felt ready to ask the big question:

Who was the greatest oracle of all time?
And what could we learn from her.
And yes, it’s a her.

The greatest oracle of all time was, of course, the Oracle of Delphi.

Everyone thinks they know who the Oracle was. But after years of intense scrutiny of, and rejection of, the stories patriarchy tells us about who we are as women and witches, mystics and myrrhhophores, I knew I needed to go on a hunt to find the real Oracle of Delphi.

So off I went. I was richly rewarded.

Turns out science can prove that the Oracle was a real person with a real name, Pythia, who prophesized at a real place, Delphi, for almost two thousand years. Kings and generals underwent long arduous journeys to ask for her guidance on battles and wars and state-building decisions.

The science was fun.

William J. Broad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, tells the story in The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden message of Ancient Delphi. We’re going to talk about the scientific discoveries in ART 5, but here’s the short version.

People have long wondered if there was a fault below the adyton, the lowest level of the temple where the Oracle was reported to sit on a tripod above the omphalos—the navel of the world, hold a bowl of water and a laurel branch, breathe sweet vapors, go into a semi-trance, and prophesize. Plutarch described all this in detail.

But in modern times, French archeologists “proved” there was no fault and no vapors and that ended further exploration.

But the plot was about to thicken.

Along came an American geologist who recognized that the striations in the cliffs above Delphi could only be formed by an earthquake. He partnered with a young American archeologist who had been obsessed with Delphi his entire life, and over a three-year period, these two men from two radically different disciplines—disciplines that, it’s important to note, had never worked or published together—proved that:

• there were not one but two earthquake faults forming a perfect X exactly below the adyton
• there were visible cracks leading up from the X through the travertine marble in the temple that led straight to the place where the omphalos would be
• an organic chemist found traces of ancient water in the travertine
• the chemist found footprints of ethylene, a sweet, state-altering compound in the water
• the archeologist and geologist went back to Delphi and measured the ethylene still flowing down the cliffs under the omphalos

The book is a page turner. But as it ended, my heart sank. These brilliant men proved that everything Plutarch wrote about the Oracle and her environment was true. But they couldn’t say one word about HOW this woman—and the Oracle was always a woman—was able to portend the future.

This bothered me. And I can tell it bothered Broad, who ends the book deflated by the inability of even the most adventurous and brilliant scientists to explain the mystery of the Oracle of Delphi.

I think I know why. And I bet you do too.

Science is a penultimate task of the left hemisphere of the brain.

But the Oracle sitting on her tripod was tuning into wisdom that flows through an expansive, brilliant, mystical right hemisphere. And that’s what we’re going to explore and attempt to replicate in ART 5.

What gave the Oracle—and each one of us—mystical oracular abilities is:

• presence of the elements
• breath patterns
• sacred chant
• touch that soothes the Vagus nerve
• invocation of oracles past and future
• prayers that contain prophetic wisdom
• guidance of Fortuna: Oracle of Oracles
• partnership with our personal oracular mentor
• loving support of community in the Theatre of the Miraculous
• access to the morphic field of the labyrinth
• deep exploration of the power of inquiry

And so much more.

In short, we will activate our oracular abilities by expanding our access to the liminal, the mystical, the threshold between worlds.

This is the playground of ART 5 and all the intensives in The Witch Sequence.

And you are invited, whether you've been in previous ART intensives or not.

The reality is the world desperately needs us to all show up standing in our mystic powers and doing what is ours to do to help heal the wasteland.

The Oracle would ask nothing less of us.

ART 5 opens March 2, the month all astrologers say will be the wildest most intense of the year and perhaps of years to come.

In other words, the timing is perfect!

Please visit the information and registration page. Be sure to watch the video. It has a bit about the Oracle of Delphi.

This is Mystos, the bird of Magic atop the shield for Mystica InnerVersity, our WitchArts mystery school. If you open your magic ears, you just might hear him caw you to come and play!

The A.R.T. of Becoming a Witch
How to Awaken, Remember, and Trust
Your Sacred Prophetic, Oracular, Divination WitchArt Gifts

to remembering our natural oracular abilities, 

Janet

website: janetconner.com

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