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In the close kinship, moreover, between disease-possession and oracle-possession, where the body of the Pythia, or the medicine-man, is placed under the direct control of some great deity, we may see how by insensible transitions the conception of the human ghost passes into the conception of the spiritual numen, or divinity.
The king and the queen loved their daughter very dearly, for she was their only child; and for a long time they refused to do as the Pythia had told them. But day after day the monster laid waste the land, and threatened to destroy not only the farms, but the towns; and so they were forced in the end to give up Andromeda to save their country.
For a long time he wandered from one little town to another, always telling the story of his lost sister. One day an old man told Cadmus that if he would go to Delphi and ask the Pythia, perhaps she could tell him all about Europa. Cadmus had never heard of Delphi or of the Pythia, and he asked the old man what he meant. "I will tell you," said the man.
The prophetic influence was at first variously attributed to the goddess Earth, to Neptune, Themis, and others, but it was at length assigned to Apollo, and to him alone. A priestess was appointed whose office it was to inhale the hallowed air, and who was named the Pythia.
Pythia said: 'That which thou boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from thy keeping, And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust; Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts Stable foundations of stone, marble and natural rock. "You have chosen well girl. The oracle guaranteed you a safe road to tread through life.
We must not only astonish, but terrify such was the philosopher's opinion: not to fly shamefully away, but to take the offensive, was his advice; but he especially counselled his companion not to ponder too anxiously over the individual from whom, through a higher instinct, this aversion for the present barbarism proceeded, "Let it perish: the Pythian god had no difficulty in finding a new tripod, a second Pythia, so long, at least, as the mystic cold vapours rose from the earth."
That the religion of these several nations had one common origin, and that the priests and prophets of God's chosen people had many imitators among other nations, there is abundant proof. The story of the origin of the Pythia, for example, contains points not without resemblance to certain passages in our own early sacred history.
Pythia said: 'That which thou boldest most precious and dear shall be torn from thy keeping, And from the heights of Olympus, down shalt thou fall in the dust; Still the contemplative eye discerns under mutable sand-drifts Stable foundations of stone, marble and natural rock. "You have chosen well girl. The oracle guaranteed you a safe road to tread through life.
When it was finished, the king put the maiden, whose name was Danaë, into it; and with her he put her nurse and her toys and her pretty dresses and everything that he thought she would need to make her happy. "Now we shall see that the Pythia does not always tell the truth," he said. So Danaë was kept shut up in the prison of brass.
Alexander, however, chanced to find a guide in exact correspondence with what the Pythia had foretold when he was a child, that a lycus should conduct him into Persia. For by such an one, whose father was a Lycian, and his mother a Persian, and who spoke both languages, he was now led into the country, by a way something about, yet without fetching any considerable compass.
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