Oracular Cave Trance at the Dawn of the Sky-Cult
Pythagoras lived in a cave. Him of the famous Pythagorean Theorem. “Throw a hypotenuse on it!” my first carpentry boss would yell at me back when I was seventeen and needed to square up a framing wall. “The Pythagoras Theorem!” my boss would scream. He yelled at me a lot. He shouted and swore and screamed. Sometimes he would weep. The theorem goes a² + b² = c² and makes the fundamental relation in Euclidian geometry. With this equation you can make a perfectly square 90 degree angle in the air. This, by the way, is what normal means in its original Latin: norma: a carpenter’s square. It’s a line perpendicular to a hanging plumb-bob; that is: square to the world (if that world were made out of rectangles). Curves, radii, tangents and parabolas are not normal by strict definition. Today being straight and square is a beatnik euphemism for a law-abiding heterosexual with no imagination.
It is likely—although by no means conclusive—that Pythagoras dreamed up the math of his famous theorem while living in a cave on the island of Samos. The first western proposal of a spherical earth is likewise attributed to his visionary wizardry. In those days there was no difference between math and magic (is there any today?). Pythagoras was a shamanic magician and cult leader of his own mystery cult and that also happened to formulate the foundations of geometry. That he allegedly did so from deep inside of a cave is one of those details that gives off the true aura of the weird.
As the historian Yulia Ustinova has recently claimed, in the archaic Greek world the subterranean is the principle vector of the mystical and the oracular trance. Ustinova finds that caves are everywhere in the archaic imagination. A variety of Greek oracles practiced out of caves for some thousands of yearsa. The old-testament prophet Elijah retreated into the caves of the Carmel mountains, and that weirdest book of the Bible, The Revelation of St. John, was written in a cave on the island of Patmos. The cave is at once a literal cave, remote site of silence, darkness, and solitude, where one withdraws from the world in order to enter the trance; and the entrance to the underworld; an intermediary zone between waking thought and all of the powers of chthonic night.
From what we know today, due in part to the work of the psychoanalyst and psychonaut John C. Lilly, inventor of the isolation tank, even a short duration of sensory deprivation induces a waking-dream state, where the limiting confines of “reality” fall away and one begins to project all manner of visions onto the sensory field—and which causes me to wonder: what visions do babies have in the womb? According to Ustinova, for the archaic Greeks these visions, when they happened to special persons residing in caves, were visionary, a non-ordinary state of rapture or mania due to possession by a god: enthousiasmos, having a god within; from which our contemporary word enthusiasm derives.
“The bright god that dwells in the cave,” is how Aeschylus put it, describing Apollo who, though a god of the sky, would typically appear to his followers underground. The most famous of ancient Greek oracles, the Pythia, oracle at Delphi, mediated between Apollo and the public. Beneath the temple at Delphi was a grotto containing the omphalos, the umbilical midpoint of the universe. There the priestess oracle, clutching hallucinogenic laurel leaves, would inhale mephitic vapors—the breath, or pneuma, of the earth, according to Plutarch, who witnessed this spectacle as a priest. Falling into the oracular trance she would thereafter offer a rapt audience cryptic pronouncements on the incipient future. Scholarship had been skeptical of Plutarch’s prophetic-vapors account, until recent geological studies revealed that the temple of Apollo sits smack-dab on the conjunction of multiple fault-lines from which emit hydrocarbon gasses, that, when inhaled in limited doses, can bring about psychoactive effects. The oracle at Delphi was huffing the pneuma.
But the most famous cave in the ancient Greek imagination is, of course, the allegory of the cave as told in Plato’s Republic. In that cave sits an audience entranced by shadows projected on the wall, convinced that the shadows are reality. While this cunning allegory may be applied to our overly mediated world by the cryptic pronouncement that all media is propaganda, we may likewise read Plato’s cave less as allegory than as a reactionary exhortation to leave the literal cave behind; the oracular trance of the chthonic night is discarded in favor of daylight and the insomniac rationality of discursive philosophy.
So Plato inaugurates the dawn of the sky-cult. Truth no longer comes from the bowels of the mysterious earth, but now proceeds from heaven and the sky, as an ideal algorithm—much like today’s ChatGPT, as if Plato’s realm of the forms were a acloud-computing server bank in Nevada. The right-angle triangle, once dreamed up in a cave, is now eternal and resides in heaven, as does the man/wife normative gender binary. Just quiz a conservative Christian on the topic of marriage to witness the platonic structure of this belief in real-time.
William James, who also huffed plenty of pneuma (in the form of nitrous oxide), named that peculiar knowing afforded by mystical experience as “the noetic.” This is a form of knowledge, or truth, a felt sense that one knows immediately in the trance, but that hitherto had been impossible to think of. Epiphany, special revelation, epistemic break, and the eureka moment of the scientist are all species of the noetic. That Pythagoras may have imagined a spherical earth, while tripping in a cave, is a speculative example of the noetic in action. If the knowledge produced by the non-ordinary oracular trance is, as Yulia Ustinova claims, noetic, then it precisely cannot be got at by discursive philosophy, nor by ChatGPT for that matter, for it resides on no server bank.
it’s party time
Priestess of Delphi, 1891, John Collier
