'I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don't want anything to do with it; don't want it near me.'
This is a story about now.
It's a story about a woman, and the family she has made for herself. It's about the dramas unfolding on our screens and behind the curtains of our homes in a world more turbulent than any of us could have imagined.
But it's also about before. And what comes next. It's about the flames that have burned for centuries beneath the cracks that are opening now. About the Ancient Greeks, who sacrificed and bargained with their Gods; about prophets and oracles, tarot cards and tea leaves, and how time and certainty and, sometimes, those we love can slip away.
It's about the questions we have always asked as we scroll and click and rage against our fates - and the answers that are coming for us whether we like them or not.
Extraordinary, electrifying, irreverent and heartbreaking, Delphi is a mesmerising story of our pasts, our presents and our futures, and how we keep on living in a world that is ever-more uncertain and absurd.
'Sexy, dark and dangerous, disturbed and disturbing in equal measure - I loved it' Anna Hope, author of Expectation
1. Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events Theomancy: Prophecy by Foretelling Events I am sick of the future. Up to here with the future. I don’t want anything to do with it; don’t want it near me.
No one used to have to deal with this much future. I mean, the future, so far as they could imagine, would have been fairly like the past: harvest, solstice, snow, trees coming into bud. They would get older and die, but the cycle would begin again. We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we’re in the future, already—that dystopian future of surveillance, video calls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalization, and the 24-hour news saying AI extinction event gene-modification the collapse of civilization.
So it is that, somehow, one winter night, I find myself standing in my kitchen, hissing shrilly at my husband: I don’t know if my son will even live to middle age.
Something can be melodramatic and true at the same time.
In Delphi, gods spoke through oracles. Delphi is in Greece, on multiple plateaux along the slope of Mount Parnassus. The myth says that Zeus wanted to find the centre of Gaia—the Greek personification of the Earth, our primordial mother—so sent two eagles soaring from the east and west. The spot where their flight paths crossed over Delphi was declared the navel of Gaia, sometimes also known as the Omphalos.
Delphi belonged to Gaia, then, but Apollo slayed the dragon who guarded it, the Python (from the verb pytho, “to rot”), and stole the land from her. To legitimize his theft, a sanctuary was built for him above the deep, zigzagged chasm into which he had pushed the Python’s dying body. There they later installed the Pythia, a priestess named after that rotting-dragon smell. The famous oracle of Delphi. By custom, she was an older woman—what we might call middle-aged—and often poor. Someone who had led an ordinary life but who was willing to sever ties with her husband or children completely and erase herself. To become a blank; become instrument.
Before the oracle could begin there was a ritual: priests sprinkled a goat with cool water. If it didn’t shiver there would be another month’s wait; if it shivered, they could proceed, sacrificing it and burning the flesh. Rising smoke signalled the oracle was open.
Next, the Pythia was purified by fasting and bathing in a spring. They seem to have burned laurel leaves to cleanse her, or else she chewed them. Purple veiled, she was taken down into a dark, enclosed inner sanctum and placed on a gilded tripod that teetered over the fissure. I wonder if her heart was panting? I wonder if she was afraid? The room was low and dim; she trembled as fumes rose from the decomposing dragon, sly, sweet, lifting vapours that lurched her into a blood-thumping blur or violent trance, her limbs loosened from her own control.
She jangled above the pit, enlarging. Apollo moved the bones of her jaw, her clump of tongue, to speak through her mouth—a male voice issuing furious barks, a roar.
The historian and essayist Plutarch, who worked as a priest at Delphi, attributed her ecstasies to the pneuma: the breath of the fault in the rock. He wrote rather memorably that she looked like a windswept ship.
It was probably anaesthetic, the rock’s breath—sugared ethylene or ethane, a heavy, crawling asphyxiant. The sanctuary lacked oxygen. And therefore, lo: the future spilt from her mouth—
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