Top image: Wikimedia commons (link).
The attempt by the hero Heracles to abscond with the tripod of the Temple of Delphi is a favorite subject of artists on ancient pottery.
According to surviving ancient sources, after Heracles completed his arduous Twelve Labors, which had been ordered by the Oracle at Delphi as expiation for the murder of his wife and children by the great hero in a fit of madness, he learned that the ruler of Oechalia -- the famous archer descended from Apollo himself, King Eurytus -- was offering the hand of his gorgeous daughter, Iole, to any many who could defeat Eurytus and his sons in a contest of archery.
The offering of a beautiful bride in an archery contest is a pattern found in numerous myths, including in both the ancient Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana of ancient India, and echoes of this same pattern are also found in the great archery contest described near the climax of the Odyssey. Indeed, the great bow which Odysseus must string in that famous episode in Books 21 and 22 of the Odyssey once belonged to Eurytus, after whose death it passed to the son of Eurytus, Iphitus, who later gave it to Odysseus (this lineage of the bow is stated in Odyssey Book 21, lines 35 and following).
In the archery contest for the hand of Iole, although able warriors from all over Achaea came to vie for the chance to marry the beautiful maiden, Heracles easily defeated all challengers, as well as the sons of Eurytus and even King Eurytus himself, who had once instructed young Heracles in archery and introduced him to the art.
But upon his defeat by the powerful hero in the contest, King Eurytus changed his mind and declared that Iole would not marry Heracles after all. The fit of madness in which Heracles had killed his previous wife, Megara, and their children was by now well-known, and Eurytus did not wish his daughter to become the bride of such a terrifying hero as Heracles. The sons of the king agreed with their father, all except Iphitus (or Iphitos), who sided with Heracles and said that it was wrong for his father to break his word.
Furious, Heracles left -- but not long after that, twelve valuable mares were stolen from the king's stables. Some say they were stolen by Heracles himself, while others say they were taken by Autolycus (or Autolykos), the son of Hermes and an accomplished thief, and then given by Autolycus to Heracles. Either way, Eurytus immediately blamed Heracles.
Note that the theft of either horses or cattle when a father who has promised the hand of his daughter goes back on that promise is another recurring pattern in ancient myth, found in the stories surrounding the death of Castor in the legends of Castor and Polydeuces, for example (discussed in my most-recent book, Myth and Trauma).
Standing up for the hero against his father, Iphitus said that Heracles had been the party who had been wronged, and set out to find Heracles and search for the horses. According to most versions, he found the hero at Tiryns, and Heracles received Iphitus in a friendly fashion and with hospitality. However, upon ascending the walls of Tiryns to scan the countryside for clues in the theft of the mares, Heracles either became angry with Iphitus or was overcome once again with madness, and he hurled Iphitus headlong from the walls to his death.
Once again, Heracles had committed a grave crime, and this time he was smitten with a terrible disease as punishment. Filled with remorse, Heracles sought out the Oracle of Delphi, as he had done so many years before after the murder of his family. This time, however the priestess at the Temple was silent in response to his pleas for guidance from the Oracle.
In a rage, Heracles seized the tripod, upon which the priestess would sit when she entered the trance state and consulted with the deity. According to some accounts, he wanted to carry it off and establish a new Oracle of his own at some other location.
But at this insult to the sacred site of Delphi, the god Apollo himself intervened, and seized the tripod as well. A sort of tug-of-war ensued, with Heracles and Apollo each pulling on the tripod, which is shown in between them in many pieces of ancient artwork.
The scene of the struggle between Apollo and Heracles as Heracles tries to run off with the tripod of Delphi is depicted in numerous pieces of surviving artwork from the ancient times. Above is a close-up of one example, located today in the Louvre in Paris.
This episode can be shown to be based on the stars, as I mentioned in my recent conversation with Graham and Darren of the Grimerica Show podcast, and as I will explore a bit further below.
I have labeled the scene with the constellations that -- in my analysis -- this episode of ancient myth is based upon. It is quite clear that the hero Heracles corresponds to the constellation which even today bears his name, the constellation Hercules. Note the distinctive posture characteristic of artistic depictions of Heracles or Hercules: the extended rear leg with heel raised, the deep knee-bend of the forward leg (in some depictions this deep lunge posture is even more pronounced), the square head with full beard and lion-skin head-gear, the tufted tail of the lion-skin trailing behind the hero's hip. All of these characteristics match directly to the outline of the constellation Hercules in the heavens, which has a distinctive square-shaped head, a deep lunging posture (with rear heel raised), and many other characteristics which indicate beyond any doubt that the hero Heracles is associated with this constellation.
Indeed, the tuft of the tail of the lion-skin garment worn by Heracles matches roughly with the location of the bright star Vega, not far from the constellation Hercules in the night sky (this correspondence for figures associated with the constellation Hercules is even more pronounced in the artwork found on the incredible Pylos Combat Agate, discussed in this previous post with video).
The god Apollo can be confidently associated with the constellation Sagittarius, as discussed in my 2016 book Star Myths of the World, Volume Two: Myths of Ancient Greece. The constellation Sagittarius, of course, appears as a mighty archer -- and indeed the very name "Sagittarius" has to do with shooting arrows. Sagittarius can be seen to be pointing its bow at the constellation Scorpio, on the other side of the Milky Way's brightest and widest region: the constellation Scorpio no doubt plays the role of the great serpent, Python, slain by Apollo when he established his Oracle at Delphi.
The famous tripod of Delphi was said to be above the body of the Python -- and indeed we can see that the constellation Ophiuchus, which according to my analysis corresponds to the tripod in the heavens, is situated directly above the constellation Scorpio (the Python in this ancient myth).
This "tripod" of Ophiuchus, of course, can be seen in the above star-chart to be located in between Sagittarius (associated with the god Apollo) and Hercules (associated with the hero Heracles), and thus to be the centerpiece of a kind of "tug-of-war" between these two sons of Zeus.
Note also that the ancient myths tell us that the vapors arising from the body of the Python, deep beneath the Oracle, were responsible in part for the trance-state into which the priestess of Delphi (who was known by the title of the Pythia for this reason) would enter when receiving the messages from the Infinite Realm. We can see that the smoky column of the Milky Way itself ascends through the "body" of the serpent (Scorpio, with which constellation the Python is associated) and upwards past the "tripod" of Ophiuchus.
This juncture, in fact, where the Milky Way crosses the path of the sun through the ecliptic (and the zodiac) and rises alongside Ophiuchus upwards past the constellation Hercules, is imbued with tremendous significance in the ancient world-wide system underlying the myths given to the different cultures of humanity in remote antiquity, as discussed in many of my books (including the most-recent book). It relates to our re-connection with our own essential self, and through that re-connection, with the realm of the gods.
Of the importance of the Oracle at Delphi, Peter Kingsley writes in his essential 1999 book, In the Dark Places of Wisdom:
It's easy to assume that the Delphic myth of Apollo fighting the snake is a straightforward case of a battle between the opposites -- of Apollo as a celestial god overcoming the powers of earth and darkness. But something needs to be understood.
Alongside the intimacy of Apollo's links with the underworld, there's another aspect of him that also has been pushed into the dark. That's his connection with snakes. In ritual and in art snakes were sacred to him. Even in the case of the myth about the snake he fought and killed at Delphi, he didn't destroy it just to get it out of the way. On the contrary, its body was buried at the centre of his shrine. He killed it so he could absorb, appropriate, the prophetic powers that the snake represents. 133 - 134.
The respected scholar of ancient myth and ancient cultic practice, Walter Burkert (1931 - 2015) notes in his 1972 study Homo Necans that the "rationalists" who want to explain the myths as the products of natural phenomena argued that perhaps "vapors rising from the depths of the earth in the adyton would have induced the Pythia's trance and her prophetic powers" (122). He goes on to say: "But this theory has not stood up to archaeological examination: there is simply no trace of a chasm, or any volcanic activity whatsoever beneath the temple at Delphi" (122).
I would argue that these kinds of "rationalist" attempts to explain ancient myth in terms of natural phenomena were exposed as misguided thousands of years ago in the gentle sarcasm of Plato, in the famous dialogue known as Phaedrus, in which he pokes fun at the same tendency to try to explain myth by certain "clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied," in a passage which also refers to the Oracle at Delphi (and its famous inscription, "Know Thyself").
I would argue that Plato probably understood that the myths are not describing a literal or terrestrial landscape, but rather one which is reached through an interior landscape, as can be inferred by the injunction, "Know Thyself." The connection to the underworld described in the myths is not a physical connection, reached through a geographic location which is somehow physically connected to the chthonic realm.
And when we begin to understand that the myths are speaking to us through a language of celestial metaphor, as can be proven with so many examples (including this episode of the struggle between Heracles and Apollo), we can see beyond doubt that they are describing a landscape pertaining to the Infinite Realm -- using the signifiers in the heavens above, which themselves constitute a realm that is indeed infinite, employed by this incredible ancient system of myth to convey to us truths about our own condition.
The Oracle itself, then, can never be "closed down," no matter how hard literalists have tried in previous centuries. We can still see its heavenly original, wheeling across the infinite darkness over our heads, this very night. And we can still access the wisdom of the divine realm, described in the myths about the famous Oracle at Delphi -- not by going to any specific location on the terrestrial sphere, but rather by connecting with our own buried essence, through whom we find connection to a wider and indeed to an infinite world.
