On my first morning in Delphi, I woke up just as the sun was rising. Stepping out onto my little terrace, I saw a ghostly moon hanging above the valley and rays of sunlight touching the hills and olive groves below. Everywhere birds were calling out and singing their morning songs.

The Sacred Way ©2009 Charlene Nevill

After breakfast at the hotel, I headed straight for the Sanctuary. I met few people along the way, but as I neared the site, I saw at least a half dozen tour buses and I knew it would be challenging to keep my focus in the midst of the crowds. I kept hearing ‘OMPHALOS, OMPHALOS’ in my head as I walked past the tour groups that had stopped along the Sacred Way to listen to lectures. Quickening my pace, I hoped they would be distracted long enough for me to have a few moments alone with the ancient stone.

Omphalos ©2009 Charlene Nevill

Standing with my back to the crowds, I held my hands about eight inches away from the stone’s surface, one on each side. Starting at the center, I felt an unmistakable throbbing sensation in both hands. Moving my hands up to the top, I felt nothing. Back toward the center, the pulsations began again. Then, squatting down, I held my hands near the bottom. Nothing.

I wanted to find a place nearby to sit and absorb these strange vibrations, but the crowds were advancing so I moved off and sat down on a rock where I could gaze at the pillars that once formed the entrance to the Temple of Apollo.

A group of seniors with an English-speaking tour guide stopped directly in front of me. Talking about the Temple as the place where the Oracle delivered her prophesies, she claimed that the Pythia, sequestered behind a curtain, did nothing more than moan and rant while the priests who had taken questions from the supplicants, would ‘interpret’ her hysterical incantations. According to the guide, the priests continually gathered knowledge of politics and worldly affairs from the pilgrims who passed through Delphi; she gave little, if any credit to the Oracle.

The Oracle at Delphi

I wondered where she had found her information. From my research, I understood that the priests at Delphi did, in fact, play a pivotal role in deciphering the Oracle’s prognostications. But from studying illustrations of the Oracle while in trance delivering her prophecies and from reading about these sessions, I hadn’t come across any indication of a screen or curtain separating her and her audience. And with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among the Pythia’s fans, it was hard to imagine that such a fraud could have been perpetuated successfully over the course of 1,200 years.

As the group moved on, my attention was drawn back to the Omphalos. I thought how strange it was to feel such a connection with this other-worldly object. But maybe it wasn’t so strange. In her book Messages from Spirit: The Extraordinary Power of Oracles, Omens, and Signs, spiritual intuitive Colette Baron-Reid talks about rocks as sacred sign-bearers. According to Reid, rocks and stones have life-force energy even though they’re inanimate. And as part of the metaphorical language of Spirit, they represent looking into the past for knowledge.

Well, that pretty much summed up my goal for this journey. The problem was that as hard as I looked, I didn’t seem to be any closer to finding my past. Maybe trying harder wasn’t going to elicit a response from Source after all.

Mount Parnassus ©2009 Charlene Nevill

Or is she? As I approached the sanctuary later that first afternoon, dark clouds framed the mountains as the sun cast the last rays of daylight over the ruins. Feeling a familiar clutching in my heart and my gut as I gazed at that mountain, I knew I’d been here before.

There were scores of people at the site from all over the world. I wondered if the news about the site’s closure had been as disappointing to them as it had to me, but I thought it unlikely that more than a handful had made the trip expressly to commune with the Oracle.

The Roman Agora ©2009 Charlene Nevill

As I walked along the Sacred Way, I focused intently on every stone, every pedestal, and every column hoping to find some connections with the past. I continued to feel overwhelmed by the mountains that towered over the site; I knew they had something to tell me, but I had no idea what it might be nor how to find out.

Below the Treasury of the Athenians, I got my first glimpse of the Omphalos. Tears welled up and my heart ached with an unidentifiable sadness. I couldn’t ‘see’ anything, and I didn’t ‘know’ anything that I didn’t already know, but I was certain that this large, egg-shaped stone and I had a history.

Omphalos ©2009 Charlene Nevill

Created to symbolize the center, or navel of the earth, the original Omphalos was kept in the Adyton, the inner sanctum in the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle made her prophesies. Delphic authorities had placed several replicas around the sanctuary to remind pilgrims of the site’s holiness. Judging from the appearance of this stone, it was very, very old, and assuming it hadn’t been moved, a multitude of supplicants had passed it as they made their way to the Temple with their queries.

Because I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get close to the Adyton, I vowed to spend time with this strange artifact during the next few days and ‘feel’ its energy. Maybe it, too, had something to tell me.