Cruise Continued

We visited Delphi yesterday. Delphi is where the temple of Apollo is and the oracle resided. It is a fantastic site with many old ruins and we were able to develop a good picture of how the city must have looked. It is an old city, 300- 500 years before Christ. It has many buildings, many which were to hold the riches of the city that it earned through the oracle.

The Oracle was apparently a person who imbibed the fumes emanating from some fissure in the earth and has visions. The temple was build over this fissure so that the oracle would have the fumes available only to him or her. Maureen, I was never clear if the oracle was male or female. People would come to the temple and pose a question to one of the priests. The priest would then go into the temple and ask the oracle and return with the answer.

You can imagine a scenario like this; “oh great oracle, what will happen to the war in Iraq?” The Oracle would reply, “Great armies rise and fall.” Bush would go back to congress and tell them that his intelligence services were telling him we were winning. The democrats would say that they went to the mid east and found that we were loosing. Of course what will happen will happen.

By the way the fumes mysteriously stopped after the Christians came, around 400 years after Christ.

I wonder why the oracle needed fumes. I wonder why the biblical prophets of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths needed wine and or starvations. I wonder why the Indian medicine man needed peyote. Jesus had visions after 40 days in the desert without food….The Mayan leaders used the coca leaf. It is no wonder that religion is so fucked up. Perhaps we should just start using our minds.
I wonder what they use in the White House?

Today we visited the island of Corfu. We had a special tour put on by our booking agent. It was pretty lame. I would rather have walked around the town. The one good part was the lunch;. The setting was in the mountains, outside with a creek band in the background. A place where you might find Zorba dancing with the band. I even danced a bit, but everyone stared so I quit. Now we are back on the boat headed back to Croatia. Tomorrow, I signed the Duchess and myself up for sea kayaking. That will be interesting.