Among the oracles of ancient Greece, that of Trophonius at Lebadea, in Boeotia, had a particular reputation. One did not question an inspired priestess: it was the consultant himself who went down underground, into darkness, to receive the answer. The experience was so intense that it became proverbial. And we are fortunate to have a first-hand description of it.
A direct testimony
The geographer Pausanias, in the second century AD, wrote a Description of Greece in ten books. In the ninth, devoted to Boeotia, he relates that he consulted the oracle of Trophonius himself, and describes the procedure with the precision of someone who lived it. It is one of the rare cases in which an ancient author speaks to us of a rite of descent from the inside.
Who Trophonius was
In myth, Trophonius was an architect who, with his brother Agamedes, was said to have built the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Other stories tell of a treasury built for a king, with a movable stone that let the two brothers steal, and of the tragic end of Agamedes. Trophonius was then said to have vanished, swallowed by the earth near Lebadea, becoming an underground presence to be consulted.
The stages of consultation
Pausanias's account allows us to reconstruct a genuine ritual journey.
Preparation
Whoever wished to descend first spent some days in a building dedicated to the Good Daemon and Good Fortune. He lived in purity, bathed in the river Hercyna and offered sacrifices to various deities. Seers examined the entrails of the victims to establish whether Trophonius was willing to receive him. The decisive sacrifice was that of a ram, performed at night over a pit.
The two springs
If the signs were favourable, the consultant was washed and anointed by two local boys. Then he was led to two springs. First he drank the water of Lethe, to forget everything he had thought until then; then that of Mnemosyne, to remember what he would see during the descent.
The robing
He put on a linen tunic tied with ribbons and boots typical of the place. He was shown an ancient statue of the god, which the priests guarded with veneration.
The descent
The oracle lay on the mountain, inside an enclosure. It was a built cavity shaped like an oven, into which one went down by a light ladder. At the bottom a narrow opening appeared. The consultant lay on the ground, holding barley cakes kneaded with honey, and pushed his legs into the gap: he was then dragged inside rapidly, as if by a whirlpool.
There, Pausanias writes, the revelation was not the same for everyone: some saw, others heard.
The return
The exit was through the same opening, again feet first. The priests seated the consultant on the throne of Mnemosyne and asked him what he had seen and heard. Then they handed him over to his relatives, who carried him back to the building of the Good Daemon, still gripped by terror and hardly aware of himself. Only later, Pausanias notes, did he recover his wits and the ability to laugh.
The proverb
This last detail gave rise to a saying: of a gloomy, frowning person it was said that he seemed to have gone down into the cave of Trophonius. Aristophanes, in the Clouds, already plays on the fear of this descent.
The vision of Timarchus
Plutarch, in the dialogue On the Sign of Socrates, attributes to a young man named Timarchus a descent into the cave lasting two nights and a day, with a long cosmic vision of souls and heavenly spheres. It is a philosophical and literary text, not a chronicle, but it shows how the oracle was perceived: a place where the soul could contemplate the order of the world.
An initiatory reading
The consultation of Trophonius has all the features of a rite of passage:
- separation: days of purity, sacrifices, isolation;
- margin: forgetting of previous life, descent into darkness, experience of terror;
- aggregation: memory of what was revealed, sitting on the throne, gradual return to normality.
The water of Lethe and that of Mnemosyne closely recall the springs described in the Orphic gold tablets: forgetting in order to remember what matters.
In short
- The oracle of Trophonius at Lebadea required the consultant to descend underground.
- Pausanias consulted it in person and described every stage in the ninth book of his Description.
- The rite included purifications, the springs of Lethe and Mnemosyne, and a rapid descent into darkness.
- On returning, the consultant sat on the throne of Mnemosyne and reported what he had perceived.
- The structure of the experience fully matches that of rites of passage.
