Dodona

Oak tree at Dodona, the oldest oracular site in Greece.

"They used to say, my friend,

that the words of the oak in the holy place of

Zeus at Dodona were the first prophetic utterances.

The people of that time, not being so 'wise' as

you young folks, were content in their simplicity to

listen to an oak or a rock, provided only it spoke the 

truth."

-Socrates to Phaedrus, the dialogue Phaedrus by Plato

In the history of one place in Greece you can learn fairly much the whole tale of the 'advancement' of religion from archaic times to the present day. There are probably a few places like that, but the place I am talking about here is Dodona, the oldest oracular site in Greece, dating back to at least 1100 BCE and more like 2000 BCE according to Herodotus.

First though, a word about the Socratic dialogue Phaedrus. It is quite possibly the most singular of all the dialogues, and the one in which Plato seems for a moment to be meeting opposing viewpoints halfway. First of all, it is the only Dialogue which takes place outside the city, in the countryside, a place for which Socrates himself says he has no interest in. It takes place in the realm of nature spirits, not the haunts of men as would be Socrates' custom. Secondly, it is a flirtation of sorts between Socrates and Phaedrus, although Phaedrus appears to be in love with Lysias the orator. At that time, two men flirting with each other would have been unremarkable so long as one was notably younger which Phaedrus was. Socrates himself seems stuck between roles, taking myths, gods and omens seriously and speaking of the benefits of divinely inspired madness one minute, speaking in the more skeptical dialectic style for which Plato made him famous the next. In this Dialogue alone really is there a sign of a Socrates beyond the near-infallible social and logical irritant and beyond the genial Symposium attendee, friend and dispenser of wisdom. A sign perhaps of the real Socrates.

The core of the Dialogue concerns the transcript of a speech about love from a then-famous orator Lysias which Phaedrus possesses and Socrates wants Phaedrus to read to him. Socrates is initially not keen to hear Phaedrus recite it, which Phaedrus is keen to do, but wants to read the text. Behind this difference is a relatively recent upheaval as ancient Greece transformed from a completely oral culture to a literate culture, and this transformation is seeped through everything Plato wrote. Plato wants to distance himself from the cadences of sound, from the sweet enchantments of spoken rhetoric. In many ways, to Plato and perhaps his mentor Socrates, only the logical and conceptual is real and trustworthy, and the experienced and the sensual is untrustworthy. Here, in the countryside, in the guise of a mildly flirtatious exchange under a plane tree, Plato is attempting to take on the ghosts of the past on their own turf, the turf of the nymphs and gods: the natural world.

Phaedrus: "For you really do seem exactly like

a stranger who is being guided about, and not like a

native. You don't go away from the city

out over the border, and it seems to me

you don't go outside the walls at all."

Socrates: "Forgive me, my dear friend. You see,

I am fond of learning. Now the country places and

the trees won't teach me anything, and the people

in the city do.

The phonetic alphabet gets its name from the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, and their relatives the Hebrews had the first "religion of the Book" in human history. However, literacy evolved organically among the Hebrews and there was always in their use of the written word a certain ambivalence, an evenhanded approach between the conceptual and the sensory, between the literal and that which cannot be expressed literally. The Hebrew alphabet had no vowels, which does not mean that they did not speak them, but rather that the vowels symbolized the breath, the organic living sensory breath of the spoken word, and the consonants only represented the place and way which that breath stopped. It is somewhat in the manner in which God was supposed to have instilled life in the clay Adam through his breath: in this context, the breath is the vowel, the clay the consonant. Consonants only represented the mode of stopping the breath, not the breath itself. And breath to the ancient Hebrews as to many people represented life itself. Hebrew was always meant to be read aloud, in sensory sound, not as words in the mind. The fact that the name of God, YHWH, was never to be spoken, ties into this, and now we do not know what vowels were originally intended.

For the Greeks on the other hand, the phonetic alphabet came as a sort of cultural conquest, albeit one which they seemed to embrace with open arms. It did not evolve naturally among them, it came from without, and when they understood the use of concepts divorced from sensory reality it took them over to the extent that Plato could assert that nothing in sensory reality at all was truly real, that the only real things were essentially grasped through concepts alone. This history is what this dialogue is set against in many ways.

However I have gone far afield from my original topic, so we will take our leave from Phaedrus momentarily. Phaedrus is remarkable though for a couple reasons. The first is that Plato here takes honest aim at his true enemy, which is nothing more or less than the real world. The world of the senses that you and I and everyone else lives in. In this way, the philosophy of Socrates (or at least Plato) is a sort of spiritual ancestor to Pauline Christianity. The second reason the dialogue is remarkable, and the reason which more closely relates to the topic at hand, is that preserved in it are all sorts of passing references to much earlier ways of viewing the world. Indeed these ways were ancient even in Plato's day. People conversing with trees and stones, Socrates even says that the locusts in the trees above his head are talking to each other about the behavior of the two men. While in Plato's time the job of listening to the trees at Dodona was likely delegated to professional priests or priestesses, they remember a time when ordinary people also listened to them directly.

You can read the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus yourself online:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus

However, in Plato's time (circa late 300's to early 400's BCE), the sanctuary at Dodona was dedicated to Zeus, a paternal male sky god. Originally Dodona was dedicated to an alternate version of Gaia, the Earth Mother. Now there is nothing wrong with male gods per se, but generally the ascendancy of male gods to primacy is correlated to a change in the religion of the people from a nature-centered religion to a human-centered one. Dodona was also originally a very local holy place for the tribes who lived in the area, and was transformed into a pan-Hellenic holy place. This again is a trend that tends to happen as a religion changes from the archaic, nature-centered gods to gods whose appearance is human and whose primary function is within the human world. Either a local holy place is incorporated into the network of a larger culture, in this case Hellenism, or it is destroyed. 

Let us imagine Dodona as it was originally. A grove of sacred oak trees. It was connected with a Mother Earth goddess, but it wasn't the Mother Earth goddess as named in for instance Athens. She was however the Mother Earth goddess, Gaia by another name. The people had their own version of the gods and their own names for the gods, somewhat different from those of Athens or Sparta or Corinth, and there weren't official priestesses but rather ordinary people came to the sacred grove to listen to the trees themselves.

At some point the territory around Dodona passed into different hands (perhaps through warfare), and it may well have been at this time that the worship of Zeus was inserted into the picture. The two events are hardly coincidental. The Earth Mother is a goddess for those who live; who eat and sleep, live and die - she is primarily a goddess of ordinary life. Zeus is a god for warriors and rulers, he has the chariot (a vehicle of war) and the thunderbolts, he is the boss of the gods. Warriors and kings are fundamentally the same sort of thing, kings are the brigands who have stayed to live in the place they are robbing. While Zeus originally might have been a minor feature at Dodona, he predictably took over almost the whole show and sure enough the oaks were called Zeus' oaks by Plato's time, with no mention by Socrates/Plato that the Earth Mother was the original inhabitant. The decay of religion is fundamentally a function of power: kings appropriate or destroy religious sites that are potentially a focus of local sentiments, and then they hand over control of those sites they keep to official functionaries who will keep the worship there in line with the ruling powers. Wherever you see full-time warriors, rulers, hierarchies; there you will inevitably see spirituality perverted. Kings are interested in human power and are very jealous of keeping control of it. Where once ordinary people communed with the trees directly, now that was delegated to professional seers. It was however only around the time of Plato's birth that they worked up the moxie to actually put a temple of Zeus at Dodona, but long before that, the worship of Zeus had taken over. 

Later, King Pyrrhus made Dodona the spiritual capital of his kingdom and put in a much grander temple of Zeus... and put a wall around the holy trees. If people didn't get the message before then, they got it now: "you peons aren't allowed to talk to god." The trees aren't part of the community of ordinary people anymore, they are the province of professionals. Pyrrhus also built plenty of other swell buildings, including a theater, and instituted a festival including sporting events, music competitions and various other carryings-on. Over the next couple centuries the site was ravaged by various wars and by 200 BCE the holy grove was down to a single oak tree. 

During the Roman years the warfare situation at least stabilized, and Dodona remained a part of the spiritual life of Greece until about the year 391. At about that time, the hated (by me at least) Christian Emperor Theodosius closed all pagan temples, banned all pagan religious activities, and cut down the ancient oak tree at Dodona. This was part of an official persecution of Pagans by the Roman Imperium which almost matched the persecutions that Christians suffered at the hands of Pagan Emperors. Christianity had no tolerance for a multipolar world or multiple spiritual paths: all eyes must turn to Rome and all pagan trees cut down and you don't get to talk to God, you talk to priests. But long before this, the heart had been cut out of paganism and the pagan rulers and warriors of Greece and Rome were primarily the cause of it. The Hellenic world had no tradition of staunchly independent religious leaders like the ancient Celts had with their druids, and so political power warped the image of the gods more and more into their own image, and no one stopped them, and soon even pagans were pagan in name only, just apeing the old cults because they didn't know what else to do, and not because of a vital connection with the sacred. 

And now at the beginning of the 21st century AD after a long and often dark reign, the same sorts of things are happening to Christianity, except its perversion is happening at the hands of money and power-seeking ideologues and political action groups and not so much actual rulers anymore. But even if Christianity collapses (still a long way off yet) and there is a resurgence of nature religion, the same things will happen all over again because we have learned nothing. In fact, most people are completely unaware of the history of these things and most forms of paganism today are honestly of the degenerated disconnected sort that collapsed so easily when Christianity came around originally, or else botched reconstructions of a lost way that have more to do with Western Hermeticism and its own power fixations than the living spiritual world of those who first talked to oaks at Dodona. 

They are still speaking, I still hear them. Very very few listen.

Gaia handing off a child to Athena on a Greek pottery container,
circa 460 BCE.

ADDENDUM: I was not being very accurate when I portrayed Socrates as being interested in reading the speech of Lysias rather than hearing it from Phaedrus. In truth the issue was either listening to Phaedrus read the speech or hearing it from Lysias himself, which Socrates much preferred the latter. Socrates is generally a proponent of oral transmission as versus written transmission of information, but this is not because he thinks the speaking per se, the actual voice, is important but rather access to the understanding of the speaker is important. Dialogue with the actual proponent of the ideas is what he wants, coherent with the idea that wisdom is contained in souls not text, and he goes on later in the dialogue to disparage the written transmission of information as liable to be distorted to whatever the reader wants to think. However, Socrates is also a long-time adversary of the Sophists and their emphasis on rhetoric - beautiful words, beautifully spoken don't carry much weight with him, feeling itself doesn't carry much weight with him, only logic and reasoning matter in discussions. So Socrates really stands astride this division between the history of oral communication in Greek culture and the relatively new written word - he mistrusts the written word, but not because of any special regard for the spoken word but rather because he believes in debate, in contact with ideas in the persons of those who defend those ideas.

He really wants to have his cake and eat it too, believing that concepts and reason are the important thing while tacitly accepting that it is not reason itself that contains truth but rather the person, the soul, the reality of a living being that contains it. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical and comes from divine insight alone. He tacitly accepts the idea that reason is merely a crowbar that pries one's understanding of the world from one person to another, or rather pries both their understandings at the same time back towards the original and forgotten truth. This would be in keeping with his idea that all souls were exposed to truth originally and forgot it, and all that was really needed was to excavate that truth from within the soul, using reason as the trowel and the spade. So Socrates is a mystic despite himself, but what he or rather Plato started led to a denigration of the real and an elevation of the conceptual, an elevation of reason at the expense of intuition, literalism at the expense of realism. Socrates himself demonstrates intuition and sometimes outright mysticism on a number of occasions. 

In a sense, Socrates was a prophet in that the very thing he warned against in the Phaedrus seemed to happen to him. Without him being there to clarify his ideas, later thinkers paid little attention to Socrates the genuinely devout follower of the gods and Socrates the believer in many very unverifiable (slightly crackpot) mystical ideas, and almost exclusively focused on Socrates the proponent of reason and dialectic. What could be made literal was equated with the true, the conceptual became the real, but in the beginning it was not quite that cut and dried. In that way, the Socrates I often blame for being at the root of much evil in Western Civilization was not entirely to blame, but rather he fathered a way of thinking that others took in directions he could not have foreseen and likely would not have approved of. Without Socrates' belief that truth only lives buried in souls and that reason is merely a technique of digging up what is already there, he would not have seen any value in the whole exercise of dialogue since he patently did not believe that any truth lay in one's direct experience of the world. This alienation from the world of the senses however is a legacy that can be genuinely laid at Socrates' - or at least Plato's - feet, even if neither intended reason to supplant divine inspiration.