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Chapter 1
The Oracle of Delphi Was Huffing Fumes
You've heard of the Oracle of Delphi, right? The all-knowing seer of the future who channeled the wisdom of the gods and advised Greek kings on their most momentous decisions? Yeah, she was on drugs.When the ancient Greeks had important decisions to make, they wanted advice from the gods, so they'd travel all the way to the Oracle of Delphi. It was quite a schlep. The oracle was located a hundred miles away from Athens, on a high mountain surrounded by treachero's cliffs. Getting there required either a long trek over mountaintops or a perilous sea voyage. Either way, the trip would take days, or even weeks.
So why'd they go to all that muss and fuss? After all, the ancient Greeks had developed all sorts of highly scientific methods to determine what the gods were thinking, such as drawing lots, rolling dice, studying the cracks in chicken bones, and-this is my personal favorite-massaging the entrails of a dead animal, especially the liver, which was considered to be the ripest organ for purposes of prophetic prognostication.
Yet they chose to visit the oracle for one simple and compelling reason: the oracle was never wrong. Palpating a sheep's liver was fine for the mundane decisions of everyday life, such as which crops to plant that year, but when it came to making crucial decisions that would potentially determine whether an empire would rise or fall, you couldn't half-ass it. You had to seek out the oracle.
You see, the Oracle of Delphi was no ordinary priest. The oracle was the handpicked messenger of Apollo, a human conduit to the all-seeing gods. Apollo's words flowed through the oracle, transforming her into a perfect vessel of wisdom, insight, and knowledge of future events.That's right, "her." The oracle was a woman-which is shocking when you consider that ancient Greece was an immensely patriarchal society in which girls were not allowed to go to school and were typically married off by the time they reached age fourteen. Yet when the alpha males who ruled over ancient Greece needed advice on their most vital matters of state, they sought the counsel of a woman-and not always the same woman. The Oracle of Delphi was an institution that lasted over a thousand years, from 1400 BCE to 400 BCE, so, obviously, no one woman was around the entire time. There was a high priestess known as the Pythia, and over the years, when one Pythia expired, the gods would "divinely" select another woman to become the new Pythia.
But here's the twist: all of these women were on drugs. It wasn't an individual choice; it was a geographical imperative. You need to understand a bit about the topography of Delphi. People seeking the oracle's wisdom would line up at dawn and ascend a steep, winding path known as "the Sacred Way." From there, robed attendants would guide them, one at a time, into a sunken chamber hidden deep in the bowels of a remote cave, where the Pythia would be waiting for them. According to ancient scholars who actually witnessed the Pythia deliver a prophecy, there was a three-legged stool located directly above a fissure in the floor of the cave, and weird vapors were rising from the fissure. The Pythia would sit down on the three-legged stool, inhale the mysterious fumes rising from the ground, and enter into a dreamlike trance. Her body would begin to quiver and writhe (thereby "confirming" she'd entered into a state of divine possession), her voice would change, she'd make a bunch of crazy noises, and then, finally, she'd deliver a cryptic prophecy that was often only a few words long.
If that description sounds to you like someone who's experiencing an intense drug trip, you are absolutely correct. Because it turns out those mysterious fumes she was inhaling were more than eerie set dressing; they were psychoactive vapors. Historians have long suspected the oracle was high as a kite, and now modern science has proven it. A team of scientists comprising a geologist, an archaeologist, and a chemist traveled to Delphi between 1995 and 2000 to study rock samples near the site. They discovered the oracle chamber was built over a geological fault that released a naturally occurring substance called ethylene. It's a sweet-smelling petrochemical gas that produces disembodied euphoria, an altered mental state, and other intoxicating effects-or, as they described it, the feeling you get from huffing glue. Basically, the Oracle of Delphi was tripping balls.
But wait, it gets better: these psychoactive vapors weren't the only thing she was tripping on. Remember, her temple was located on a remote mountainside. This meant she was forced to subsist on a narrow range of foods that were capable of being locally sourced. Plus, she was a religious ascetic who didn't necessarily feel it was appropriate to luxuriate in her food, so she was willing to eat things that were unappetizing or sometimes even dangerous. One of the staples of her diet was oleander leaves, which grew near the temple-and they are highly toxic. You heard me right: the oracle was munching on poison.
Fortunately, the human body is an amazing machine that can build up a tolerance to toxic substances by ingesting small amounts on a regular basis. Remember that line from The Princess Bride: "I spent the last few years developing an immunity to iocane powder"? It's the same basic principle behind vaccinations, injecting a small amount of a virus into your body to train your immune system to recognize and combat it. The Johns Hopkins University Press published an article in 2014 suggesting the Oracle of Delphi deliberately ingested oleander poison as a way to help inspire the divine frenzy that she exhibited when she bestowed her bizarre prophecies.
So, there wasn't just one geological feature of Delphi that inspired the oracle's drugged-out behavior, there were two: (1) psychoactive vapors that caused vivid hallucinations, and (2) a poisonous plant that provoked frenzied body tremors. The combination of these two substances caused the oracle to behave in ways so utterly bizarre and otherworldly that, to the ancient Greeks, divine inspiration was the only logical explanation.
But wait-if the oracle wasn't actually communicating with the gods, how is it possible that she was always right? After all, the accuracy of the oracle's prophecies is an indisputable part of Greek history, so doesn't that suggest she had some sort of supernatural ability?
No, not really. Much like Liam Neeson in Taken, the oracle had a very particular set of skills, but it wasn't supernatural. She was always right for the simple reason that she never gave a clear answer to the questions posed to her. She was notorious for delivering cryptic prophecies that were difficult to decipher and susceptible to multiple (often conflicting) interpretations.One of the most famous examples is the advice she gave to King Croesus in 550 BCE. The king asked the oracle to tell him whether he should wage war against the Persian Empire. The oracle replied, "If Croesus goes to war, a great empire shall fall." Croesus was pumped! He was convinced this meant his victory was guaranteed. He assembled his troops, formed the necessary alliances, and attacked the Persians with everything he had-only to be utterly defeated. The Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, took King Croesus prisoner and ordered him to be burned alive. The story goes that Croesus cried out to the gods, pleading to know why the Oracle of Delphi had betrayed him, and the gods answered, telling him the oracle had spoken the truth. You did destroy a great empire-but it was your own empire, not theirs. Twist!
Amazingly, all of the textbooks lay the blame on Croesus, not the oracle. Everywhere you look, the lesson of the story is that Croesus was a victim of his own ego for daring to believe he had properly interpreted the oracle's prophecy. You couldn't blame the gods for his hubris, nor could you blame their vapor-huffing priestess. It is historical canon that the oracle's prophecies were invariably accurate, so if something happened to go wrong (which it often did), it meant the person receiving the prophecy was not wise enough to decipher its true meaning. This was the ultimate secret of the oracle's success: it's impossible to be wrong if you never give a straight answer.
The real question is, did the oracle know she was lying to people? Maybe not. Between the hallucinogenic cave gases and the oleander poison, she was pretty much in a perpetual state of altered consciousness. Besides, she was a priestess, not a scientist, so maybe she genuinely believed that her interminable intoxication was due to a psychic link to the gods, not to taking drugs.That's the charitable view. The more cynical view is she knew full well she couldn't see the future, and she was deliberately lying to people. Worse, she was gaslighting them-making them believe that if her prophecies worked out badly for them (as one of them did for King Croesus) it was their own fault, not hers.Here's how I like to think about it: the Oracle of Delphi was straight-up trolling people, thousands of years before the internet was invented for the very same purpose.
Chapter 2
Pharaoh Ramesses II Wanted Ganja
You're going to love what they found inside the mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses II, commonly known as Ramses the Great. As his nickname suggests, he was one of the greatest pharaohs of all time. He erected more statues and monuments than any other pharaoh, fathered more children than any other pharaoh (more than one hundred!), and nine subsequent pharaohs each chose to take his name when they ascended the throne, so it's safe to say he was a popular dude.But for thousands of years, his mummy was missing. He was originally buried in the prestigious Valley of the Kings, where only the greatest of the pharaohs were interred-but when archaeologists excavated his tomb, it was empty. It seems his loyal priests were afraid thieves would raid the tomb, so they repeatedly moved the mummy from one place to another like it was a highborn hot potato. Scholars weren't able to track down his final resting place until 1881, when they discovered the pharaoh's body had been tucked away in a large burial site known as the Royal Cache, which housed the mummies of more than fifty different kings, queens, and assorted family members-sort of a WeWork space for dead Egyptian royalty.
But the big reveal came more than a hundred years later, in 1985, when a French ethnobotanist named Arlette Leroi-Gourhan performed a full scientific examination of the mummy to see what she could learn about the pharaoh's lifestyle from the plant compounds buried deep within his royal body tissue. And can you guess what she found?
Cannabis!That's right, seven grains of cannabis pollen were hiding inside the pharaoh's abdominal cavity. While seven grains might not seem like an impressive number, bear in mind these were the few grains of pollen to survive the passage of thousands of years. Just imagine how many grains of pollen there must have been when Ramses died way back in 1213 BCE. Cannabis pollen must have been sprinkled over his mummy like powdered sugar on a donut.
Some people theorize that a large stash of cannabis was probably stored in containers near the tomb, although it's impossible to know for sure because, over the centuries, that portion of the Valley of the Kings has flooded no fewer than seven times. But we know it was customary to bury a pharaoh with all of the goodies and trinkets that he wanted to bring with him into the afterlife-everything from food and drink to jewelry and pets-and judging from the evidence in Ramses's belly, his most precious cargo might have been cannabis.
To understand why Ramses loved cannabis so much, you need to know something about the meaning of the word "pharaoh." While it is often translated as "king" or "ruler," that's a colossal understatement. "God in human form" is more accurate. The pharaoh was the ancient world's equivalent of a superhero, and he was expected to function as both the king and the most fearless warrior-sort of like King T'Challa in Black Panther. Ramses would never have earned the respect of his people if he had supervised military campaigns from the safety of the palace. No way; his subjects wanted him to be front and center on the battlefield, personally leading the charge against the enemy troops, with thousands of bloodthirsty soldiers lined up behind him.But guess what happens to pharaohs who go into battle. They get injured-and unlike their troops, they can't afford to let people know they've been injured because bleeding on the royal carpet tends to detract from the whole "god-king" image. This is probably why Ramses wanted access to plenty of cannabis, because even back then, cannabis was recognized as having important medicinal uses. Scholars have discovered an ancient papyrus medical textbook from 1550 BCE that prescribes the use of hemp (a.k.a. cannabis) to alleviate pain and inflammation. What better way to maintain your reputation as a god among men than to return from a weeks-long battle looking as hale and hearty as the day you left?
It must have proven effective at treating his injuries, because Ramses the Great was one of the longest-reigning pharaohs in history, ruling for sixty-seven years and living to be at least ninety years old. So, it shouldn't be too surprising that when it was finally time for him to check out, he decided to pack some of his highest-quality medical marijuana in a ceramic jar to bring along with him.
Of course, cannabis wasn't the only tool that Ramses used to establish his reputation as a badass god in human form. He also relied on an extensive public relations campaign. His PR blitz began with the Battle of Kadesh in 1275 BCE, when he attacked the Hittite army in what is today part of Syria. Ramses led a small force of twenty thousand men against a much larger force of fifty thousand men-and he didn't just win, he trounced them. He returned to Egypt a conquering hero.Except it was fake news. In reality, the battle ended in a draw and he never captured the city. The war raged on for fifteen long years, until both sides finally got sick of fighting and signed a peace treaty-actually, it was the first peace treaty in recorded history. But the people of Egypt didn't know any of that; they only knew what they were told, so he ordered poems to be written praising his victory and murals to be created depicting him as a military genius. But it was all propaganda. Ramses the Great understood at a young age that truth doesn't matter. History isn't written by the victors; it's written by the publicists.
