Didyma and Oracles: July, 2007

We were happy to find plenty of bottled water on the bus for this hot day in our port of Kusadasi.

The schedule called for us to go to lunch next, but apparently the guide wanted to get us through the Temple of Apollo at Didyma before it became any hotter.

Jacque, Kendra and Kelsey were already melting, and they chose to observe these ruins from a shady spot above the excavation where they could still hear the guide’s speech on their earphones.

This day in Turkey certainly was the hottest afternoon on the trip, but neither Amy nor I found it oppressive.

According to mythology, Apollo was the twin brother of the goddess Artemis.

As an aside, the Temple Of Artemis in Ephesus had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world until destroyed by a man looking to make a name for himself on the day Alexander the Great was born.

Apollo was the ideal of kouros, a beardless youth. He was the archer-god of medicine, healing and light, but he was also thought to bring the plague.

His temple in Didyma was known as an oracular temple, and priestesses drank from the “sacred spring” and fasted until they received visions of the future.

They would then make barely decipherable predictions from the distance, while the priest interpreter would “translate” those predictions to the worshipper who came for the oracle.

The predictions were generally vague and presented in a way that could be interpreted more than one way.

They often simply reinforced what the worshipper wanted to hear (played the hits like rock stars building a popular following).

“Your son will return safely from the war and live forever.”  A few years later, if the son was still missing, then he must have returned but decided to travel the world in search of other adventures. If he was known to be dead, then he lived forever among the honored gods.

How did they know what to say?

The priests would go out into the country and learn about the royal families, who were the ones with the time and money to ask about the future rather than devote their efforts to scratching out a minimal existence like commoners and slaves.

With what they learned from their spying expeditions, the oracle could first mention a few specifics about the lives of the royal customer to gain confidence and then make the ambiguous predictions.

To what purpose?

To get donations to complete the Temple of Apollo. After all, each column, according to an inscription, cost 40,000 drachmas at a time when the average worker made two drachmas per day.

This large open-roofed structure surrounded by 120 massive columns, the tallest of any Greek temple at over 64 feet high, was in operation for several hundred years, but like many good government programs even today, it was never completed.

If it was completed, how would the priests get more money to continue their work of completing it?

Completing the job would be bad for business. All in all, it was a solid scam operation.

The original temple at this spot had been destroyed by Persia in 494 BC.

The oracle said Alexander the Great was the son of Zeus in 331 BC, which helped retroactively justify his liberation of Ionia three years earlier, in 334 BC.

They obviously knew which side of the bread was buttered.

Under Alexander’s rule the construction project that went on for hundreds of years began.

How could these silly pagans support this scam?

It is human nature to want to believe in something greater than ourselves, and perhaps it can even be called a need.

Today, many people who may consider themselves "non-religious" have begun new pagan religions, often based on the worship of nature.

The largest of these cults rallies around global warming theory.

Their priests call themselves scientists or politicians, but like the oracles of old, they offer anecdotal evidence of a warming trend and “unusual” weather events and conclude this must be the fault of human production of “greenhouse gasses” like carbon dioxide.

Any contrary scientific evidence must be, according to the true believers, immediately discounted as heresy rather than factored into a rational, scientific debate.

Why?

Because, like with scammers of old, that’s how they can gather the most donations from the people with the time and wealth to support their scam.

If we don’t do something before “the tipping point,” we will be doomed. As evidence, we have Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, if we happen to be in a cycle of high tropical storm activity that comes every fifty years, that could be predicted regardless of global warming theory.

But wait, we had a mild hurricane season last year.

Further proof of global warming disrupting patterns! A cold day in Sydney Australia on Christmas? Proof of global warming. A hot day in Memphis? Obviously global warming.

We have had longer growing seasons over this warm period that started in the 1980s, which has helped produce abundant harvests. This proved to be exactly the opposite of what the ecologists of the 1970s, who believed our pollution caused global cooling, predicted in the big “Time” magazine articles of their day.

Does this mean that global warming could have positive results?

You don’t hear too much of that from the alarmist zealots.

Whether you believe the earth will warm 1 degree in the next hundred years as predicted or not, the interconnectedness of production of greenhouse gasses to global warming is tenuous at best.

In the real world, sometimes global temperatures rose when greenhouse gasses increased, but sometimes temperatures dropped, with the latter being the climate pattern for three decades up to the 1970s, when ecologists predicted an emerging ice age that should have long ago negatively impacted us.

If you want to combine trend lines and claim one causes the other, there is far more correlation between global warming and recycling, which started in earnest in the 1970s, than between production of greenhouse gasses and global warming. I know that it would be silly to claim recycling causes global warming. I know a scientific principal works in all cases, like gravity.

Back to Didyma, we went to lunch at a Turkish restaurant overlooking the Temple of Apollo. We were told that we would be served our choice of fish or chicken, but initially we loaded our plates with exotic looking dishes from a buffet.

I wasn’t sure what I would like, so I tried a little of lots of items, and it turned out all were delicious.

Best of all were the peaches. Fresh, juicy and sweet, they tasted as good as they looked when Amy and I passed the truck of peaches earlier in the day and the oracle predicted we would enjoy them if given the opportunity.

We still had one more stop on our long excursion: a Turkish rug merchant in Kusadasi. We saw the painstaking task of harvesting silk and spinning it into thread used by women who worked day after day weaving fine rugs.

Served refreshments of Turkish coffee, tea, beer or wine, the merchants laid out rug after rug in a dazzling show.

The combination of hospitality and showmanship earned these world-renowned salesmen some closes, but Amy and I slipped out saying my wife would never allow it.

I learned over dinner that my sister-in-law Jacque, upon seeing us leave, pointed to us and said she and her daughters had to find her husband. That saved us each a few hundred drachmas.

On the ship, we had another terrific evening including time in the pool patterned after the Roman Baths like the ones in Miletus, sugar-free Mojitos in the Crown Viking Lounge while cruising out of Kusadasi, laughs over a delicious family meal and, in the big show, a high energy Argentinean act, Los Pampas Gauchos, who were talented and entertaining. I watched half of the “Love & Marriage” game show before turning in, exhausted from my long, wonderful day in Turkey.