Now you see it… Now you don’t: the Delphic maxims.
Nature of Oracle, part 7.
Imagine you know how to sail. Even if you don’t, imagine you do — and you’re good at it.
Are you with me?
So, you’re a sailor. On your own. Navigating the waters of an alien planet. You don’t know how you ended up there, all you know is somehow there’s water, there’s your boat, and there are stars in the sky.
The thing is… They won’t be the same stars we see from Earth, because this isn’t Earth, this is another planet. And you can’t know what kinds of creatures lurk beneath the water. You need to find an island, but all you see for now is the vastness of this alien ocean.
Just a quick note here: don’t be a smartass. (Or a sophist). The purpose of this metaphor is getting you to think about the vast unknown. Replace “alien planet” with “fantasy Narnia-like dimension” if you’re an Astrophysicist. The caveats I have to write sometimes… tsk tsk.
The question is:
What would you do to stay afloat?
Think very carefully. There isn’t only one answer, and there isn’t only one way to get it wrong. Perhaps I can help you come up with your own answer, by taking a look at some ancient wisdom:
The first three Delphic maxims.
Right… I bet you guys know them by heart at this point (and if you don’t, go check out the rest of this series! Click here for the index).
Today we’re exploring the vastness of their meanings. We can meditate on each individual maxim in depth, but that’s an exercise to practise without my help. Vastness of meaning is something different, it implies staying on the surface to some extent so that the full breadth of scope for each and every maxim can be seen.
Ya know, just like a sailor considers the panorama of what’s around the boat, and not just the straight line ahead. Otherwise, that’s asking for trouble.
Hence, I used the metaphor of sailing! I mean, sure, water gets deep, and we can’t deny that, but if we dive, we’re no longer sailing (or it can be an understatement for whatever happened to Titanic. *wink*). Sailing implies staying afloat. There’s nothing wrong or shallow with staying afloat. It gives you a better vantage point to look for the firm ground you’ll eventually need.
In other words, here’s what we are not going to do: Selecting ONE context for a maxim (for example, “know yourself” = know your emotions), and refining this into “emotions, oh, ok, I’ll focus on sadness ONLY”, then “sadness, oh, ok, I’ll focus on the grief that makes me sad ONLY”, then “grief, oh, ok, I’ll focus on my father who passed away ONLY”, then “oh, my father, ok, I’ll focus on this one memory with him ONLY”, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, until you’re laser-focused on one teeny tiny spot very deep down in your personal “ocean floor”, so to speak… That’s diving. That’s going down towards the very bottom. That’s what we do in therapy. Do I look like a therapist to you? No. I’m an oracle. Let’s not mix things up.
Instead, let’s do something new which you probably haven’t tried. Let’s sail.
So, with the same example above: in order to sail (NOT dive), let’s say you’re meditating on “know yourself”, and you go like, “oh, know yourself… Hmm… This reminds me of getting in touch with my emotions”. Next up, instead of deepening this emotion thing, try thinking “okay, noted. What else? Where else, other than emotions, can this take me? Know my biases about the world, perhaps”. Then, “Ok, noted too. Is there a third object of introspection that doesn’t fall within the previous 2 categories? What about knowing my memories and what they can teach me about the things I latch onto vs the things I allow myself to forget?” Do all these categories connect in the end? Why, of course they do! They’re like an ocean! The waters are all mixed together. But in order to connect the dots, we must first find the dots. If the only thing you ever do is dive deep, you won’t ever allow yourself to consider more than one possibility at the same time. This bad habit (of thinking that “diving” is the only valid activity for our introspection) can lead to stubbornness, close-mindedness, excessive caution, and fear of listening to the “outsiders”.
Now, too much of the other activity (too much sailing, and completely neglecting the depths) can be bad too. Hold your horses there, we haven’t gotten to the second maxim yet, lol. One thing at a time though.
Let’s go back to the initial enigma: what would you do to stay afloat, if you’re not familiar with the external world (or, more literally, “the things that are still up in the air, still undecided, yet to come”)?
Well, one key element in tackling that is “knowing the ropes”, so to speak. The outside is very alien, but your boat isn’t. You know what happens when you speed up or slow down, you know what happens when you anchor or launch or turn either way, etc. Hence, when navigating the unknown (such as the future, in consulting oracles), know yourself.
This doesn’t only mean that knowing yourself is a good objective. It also means that “yourself” is the only knowable variable in this scenario. You can make more assumptions about yourself than about this vast unknown you’re navigating (or this separate person you’re dealing with, or this unvisited place you’re going, or whatever is your external unknown).
But what do people insist in doing? The opposite. They insist in paying themselves no mind, and instead making assumptions about the message they received in an oracle. As if they could instantly “figure out” how an “alien planet” works before actually trying-and-testing it. Uh-huh. Sure.
Then, they “pull a Karen” and complain to the oracle instead of realising they’re causing their own problem. And we, oracles, have to deal with this kind of bullshit on a daily basis because people don’t bother taking the maxims seriously. Ahhhh the joys of customer service…
Guys, the external is unknowable.
You can’t follow the stars to see which way is North — these stars aren’t configured in the expected way. You can’t even know if you need to go North, or which direction instead!
You can’t predict weather events, or know which ones are possible or not. It’s an alien planet, for god’s sake.
All you can do is stay afloat and hope for the best until you reach the promised “island” (or what the oracle says), but the more you try to trace a fool-proof, set-in-stone, step-by-step process that takes you from A to B, the more you’ll frustrate yourself.
“Know yourself” is also about being aware of your limitations. Are you struggling too much with anxiety? Well, then maybe it’s best NOT to ask about the future. You can’t handle it. You’ll try to create a fictional narrative “from A to B” for peace of mind and fool yourself into believing it’s real when in fact it’s not.
Only the “decided” is predictable with oracles. Sometimes this only accounts for one teeny tiny island in the vastness of the ocean — because the rest of the ocean connects to your waters, to what you have the power to influence and decide. You just have to trust that you will reach this island which is out of your control (or trust that you will miss it, or will have an accident on it, or whatever was predicted — adapt the metaphor whichever way it works). So instead of trying to resist fate (or worse, fill yourself with hubris and “disagree”), why not prepare for the fate? Or plan what to do once it happens? Or decide how to eventually move on from it? Ya know, this decision-making is WHY we have oracles. Otherwise, it’d just be a game of determinism without a reason to be.
Some people can handle it better than others. This applies to different moments and stages in each person’s life, too. But until you introspect, you can’t know what answers you are able to handle or not.
Introspection is your job.
YOU know yourself. This homework is yours and yours alone. Knowing yourself is not something the oracle can do FOR you.
Next up, nothing in excess.
Can too much speed all the time cause problems? Aye. What about being too slow for too long and letting the waves take charge of where you’re going? Equally bad.
Not probing the depths because you’re too focused on sailing? That’s bad too, it can lead you to get stuck on a beach somewhere. Worrying too much about what’s underneath and forgetting to sail away? Guess what, this will bring problems just as well.
Maybe a storm is coming, and you need to navigate it as safely as you can… Or maybe nothing is coming (and the “nothings” in life can feel worse than storms!) and you just need to figure out a relaxing way to kill time while you await reaching your destination. But none of that will work if you make the pain of a storm bigger, or the uncertainty of nothingness bigger than it should be, by being “too into” one or the other.
Can you see how “nothing in excess” connects to knowing yourself (the first maxim?) In fact, you can’t have #2 without #1, hence the order in which these maxims were given and preserved to this day. Each and every person is unique and has different limits. Your “too much” can be my “just a little more”… Or maybe you THINK you’ve got balance but in fact you’re blindly allowing an excess to happen — always go back to maxim #1 if in doubt.
Nobody said it was easy. Nobody said it was even supposed to be easy. But nothing in life is a breeze. There’s always SOME work we need to put into living life. If you haven’t realised that, maybe you’re immature.
Even when we relax, we’re working. We’re working mentally to keep the anxiety about the future away, or the grief of the past under control as much as possible. We’re working to really take in and make the most of a moment of joy, without letting our minds get in the way. That’s work.
I’m not being bleak, I’m being real. We all go through that. We’re all in it together. Hence:
Maxim #3
Ahhhh, Delphic maxim #3. Everyone’s favourite, especially in Academia. Hands up if you ever got yourself into an argument about what it means.
Nobody? Oh, damnit. I keep overestimating how niche my audience is.
What if I told you this 3rd maxim is intentionally vague and poetic? This is something a lot of Ancient languages (or: languages with a long history. Pedantic linguists, no. Stop right there. Sit again. Yes, very good. Good boys) have… and English does not. I blame Protestantism!
(Kidding, not trying to start a fight here or anything…)
Anyway, languages like Greek, Irish, Chinese, among others, place a whole load more value on poetic double meanings than English does. That’s since the beginning of their existence. I’m talking about a cultural phenomenon here, so it applies to both Ancient and Modern variants of these languages (although, arguably, more so in the Ancient, but the point is we don’t obsess over “giving exactly this one meaning and one meaning only, and don’t you dare be ambiguous” as much as English speakers do. Native English speakers in particular).
I mean… Come on! Where else in the world do you see people go around saying “uh, ooga booga, I intended this pun”? WHERE? Languages other than English don’t even have a word for “pun”. Not even a concept for it! We, speakers of these languages that have more poetic freedom, simply take complexity of meaning for granted.
That’s because of something that usually is taught in school here in Ireland (as well as to outsiders, in Irish language courses) — in Irish, elegance doesn’t actually mean using complicated jargon (ie, super specific words that mean super specific things and do all the mental work in deciphering the message FOR you). An eloquent speaker is the one who “says more with less” and leaves you wondering how many secondary layers of meaning are there in what they just said. And judging by how my Greek learning is going, it’s similar over there.
In the English speaking world, however, the opposite seems to be the case: people actually look down on day-to-day communication that carries even the slightest hint of poetry, preferring literal and word-by-word, almost robotic, “dumbed down” uses of meaning in talking to each other.
English is not my cup of tea, but what can I do, I’m trapped here with all of you. Lol.
So, it’s no wonder that most of this fuss over the 3rd Delphic maxim comes from… You guessed it! Scholars who are native speakers of English. But if you try looking at it with a different cultural paradigm (aka, the paradigm where you start accepting and opening your mind to words and phrases that mean one thing on the surface and more things beneath the surface because that’s both useful and beautiful), you’ll see the 3rd maxim isn’t so hard to understand.
Well… within reason. I’m sure we need a starting point. Let’s look at a literal translation:
Ἐγγύα πάρα δ’ Ἄτα
This maxim, in Ancient Greek, usually translates to “giving a pledge will bring you trouble” (if you’re being literal). The word έγγύα can mean both a contract or a strong affirmation in a more general sense.
On its literal layer of meaning (which is as valid as any of the other layers!), the 3rd maxim implies that you should exercise caution when you make anything official. Hence, as Plutarch famously said, it “kept many from marrying, many from trusting, and some even from speaking”. But wait a second! Didn’t those guys speak Ancient Greek? How could they misunderstand this phrase to the point of denying themselves basic human rights? Well… Let’s just say we’re having (again!) a cultural disconnect here. This isn’t a case of understanding or misunderstanding. It’s just that English, the language of today’s empire (yes, I said what I said), doesn’t like poetic double meanings, so it dictates that they shouldn’t exist in any other language (because, duh, imperialism)… When in fact, speakers of other languages are aware that they have the freedom to choose which meaning to meditate on or take advice from out of their own free will, at each given period of their lives.
In other words: it isn’t that Greek people in the Ancient world looked at the maxim and went like “oh crap, I’m not allowed to [insert thing here] because religion said so”. Instead, it’s far more likely that some people — some very devout people — made a conscious decision to interpret the maxim in their own particular ways, to see what would happen if they followed that particular advice strictly.
But the above understanding can only happen when we decide (consciously!) to rethink our collective assumption, as speakers of the English language, that every single word we utter should be straightforward and leave no room for imagination (or, shall we say, magic).
If you’re following this series, you may have seen I translated the 3rd maxim as “avoid certainties”. Is it a literal translation? Absolutely not. My earlier articles make that clear. I’m simply doing the thing people [probably] did in Ancient Greece — choosing to interpret the maxim one way at a time, well aware that there is a plethora of interpretations to choose from. “Certainty”, after all, is only one thesaurus entry away from “pledge”. By focusing on this particular translation, I can use the maxim in my life to help me stay sceptical and have caution with assumptions… Much like Diogenes did.
We could also extrapolate “don’t settle” from the same maxim. That’s when you go by the interpretation where pledge is a marriage (which doesn’t have to be LITERALLY a bride-and-groom thing and could be, Idk, any partnership in business and life. I hope I haven’t blown any pedantic person’s mind to a dangerous extent. Quick! Grab the water bucket! We have an explosion here).
I like “don’t settle”, in fact. I might adopt it at some point. It takes you toward cooperation and community, doesn’t it? It implies that it’s unwise to rely only on one person’s words or company all the time; That it’s good and healthy to explore new horizons and learn with “the other” and keep your ego in check and not be so certain about the set-in-stone answers you found somewhere in the past…
All of that, and more, my friend.
Maybe the 3rd Delphic maxim carries the most important lesson of all: there’s more than one interpretation. Make of that what you will.
And with this, my series on Nature of Oracle is complete. Thanks for joining. I wish you all the best on your adventures!
