ABSTRACT
The stories of Delphi and Themis as its oracle bring mythology into recorded human history and link both with the traces of human lives buried over millennia. So these stories can tell more about the universal and enduring human yearning for connection with the deep source of life and wisdom, and how this has been sought in the outer as well as the inner world. They can illuminate too, in microcosm, a collective setting in which individuals have been and still are embedded: they trace a movement of Western consciousness away from its connection with the deep wisdom of the earth, the realm of the heart-soul and Themis, towards the Apollonian heights of spirit-soul and intellect. And the story of Delphi itself, from the wealth of its glory to its corruption and decline, can perhaps tell too of what happens, in both individuals and in communities, when their connection with the blood-soul is lost.
