Chapter 1
The Multiplication of Centers
The Location of the Omphalos
Truths often fall from the sky, just like ideas, flowerpots, or glass bottles. Letâs take the case of a hunter bushman, a Sho, located in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, somewhere between Botswana and South Africa. Letâs imagine that he found a soda bottle in the sand that a scruples-less aviator threw out his window into the void, a concept that is eminently relative. The first lesson of this fable, which is important, would be that the name of Occidental products is not universal, because the Sho, whose name is Xixo, believed he had found a gift that the gods made to his people. The message of the second lesson would be even more important. Xixo hurried himself to take the âbottleâ to his own people, whose wisdom was put to the test. What purpose could this curious meteorite serve? How should they interpret this divine gift? As, in the end, doubt about the object created tensions at the heart of the Sho community, Xixo was asked by the council of his village to travel to the worldâs end in order to get rid of the encumbering thing: âWe donât want the thing. You should get rid of it yourself.â In short, Xixo was very disappointed. He felt that it was being disloyal to the gods to require him to throw the thing out of the world. As a result, he started to ask himself if the gods really existed. For Xixo, the worldâs end was not so far. Along the way, he had the chance to live some adventures, as told by Jamie Uys in The Gods Must Be Crazy, a South African film that, in 1980, flew Botswana flags in movie theaters around the world in order to circumvent restrictive apartheid laws. The portrait of the Sho as good savages living in a utopian space would have surprised the wisest of viewers. Xixo and his people did not live outside of the ârealâ world; they shared the nationality and the troubled period of the director, and his injustices as well. But in any event, the tale of Jamie Uys is inscribed in a tradition that the Occident contributed to establishing.
On the horizon in Greece, the vast Uranus, heavy as a thunderous sky, had the habit of weighing down on Gaia, the maternal earth, and pushing back into her entrails the children that she conceived from his works. So, reveals Hesiod in his Theogony, Gaia encouraged her son Cronus to castrate Uranus using a sickle of flint. With Uranusâs retreat, enough space was created between the earth and the sky for life to see the light of day. Cronus succeeded in his mission. Then he married Rhea, who was his sister. But Cronus became just as weary as Uranus, because his parents had confided in him a secret: he too would be dethroned by one of his offspring. He therefore undertook the act of eating his children. Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon were all ingurgitated before Rhea had the presence of mind to save Zeus, her sixth child, by giving his ogre of a father a stone wrapped in a tongue to eat. This tongue constituted the first draft of a language of fiction. The appearance and the essence of things had stopped coinciding. The tongue instituted a signifying and significant gap between the referent (the child) and its representation (the swaddled stone). This occurrence was the very first counterfeit. This original simulacrum enabled Zeus to find his place on the Earth. In order to protect the child from the revenge of Cronus, Rhea took the precaution of giving him over to Gaia. Gaia kept him in a cave at Mont Ida, in Crete, where he was raised by the Curetes. The rest of the story is well known and too long to retell here. I believe we would barely be stretching the link by putting together the prodigious rescue of the future master of Olympus from an ancient emergence with a ânarrative of the earth.â Zeus owes his life to Rheaâs invention, which had been suggested by Gaia, both of whom are mothers and earth, matrices of all imitation, of all representation. As for geĂŽ-graphia, it is the narrative that will describe the body of Gaia, identified at the surface of the world, at the original space.
Later, as told by Hesiod, Zeus married Metis of Oceanid, who told him how to get Cronus to give back his five brothers and sisters. Cronus vomited up Zeusâs siblings, and Zeus took advantage of this to recover Rheaâs stone, his own simulacrum. When Metis was pregnant, he got in a hurry to swallow her whole, because he too doubted his descendants. (Cannibalism often tints the beginnings of Greek culture with blood.) A little later, Zeus came down with a bad migraine. Hermes, who noticed it, sent Hephaestus to open up his cranium with a stroke of a mallet. Athena, all armed, came out through the crack. But we arenât going to follow her to Athens; we are rather going to take the path of Delphi, where the omphalos is located. When it came time to determine where the center of the universe that he reigned over was located, did Zeus remember the stone that saved him from Cronusâs gluttony? According to Pindar, he released two eagles from the two extremities of the horizon (Oriental and Occidental) to establish the geometric center. The two birds of prey crossed paths above Delphi, in Phocis. He concluded that it must be there that he should locate the navel of the world, the omphalos. This location was marked by a convex white stone that was wrapped in ribbons and covered in a large mesh netting. In memory of the first winged birds of prey, the omphalos was flanked by two golden eagles, as indicated by Pindar in his fourth Pythique.
The location of the omphalos has always been designated according to âscientificâ criteria, without regard for the sacred hierarchy of space. And itâs too bad if a skeptical (or shrewd) mind objects that itâs the choice of the place that determines, a posteriori, the pseudo-objectivity of the measure. Was it the same stone that was used by Rhea to trick Cronus? Or, was it a different one, as Pausanias thought? The opinions of Greek writers diverge on this point, as on many others. At the end of the nineteenth century, cutting to the heart of the matter, August BouchĂ©-Leclercq esteemed that the omphalos was a recent copy of Cronusâs stone that had replaced the original âwhen the tradition of the âomphalosâ became credible. The âsmallâ egg-shaped stone [Cronusâs stone] was first and foremost mobile: the geodesic center of the world needed to be indicated by a more robust marker, implanted in the soil.â1 All in all, the small mobile stone gave way to a large immobile stone, just like sedentary peoples superseded nomads and cities made of stone and marble replaced makeshift cities. The omphalos translated the desire that the Hellenic people had to have access to a uniform, stable space, which was a priori central. In short, Greece went about establishing a place. The omphalos was the center of a civilization that presumed itself to be the agent responsible for distinguishing the center of the world. On many different coins that have been found, the omphalos was a point indicating the center of a circle that occupied the surface of the piece. This vision was the result of a considerable evolution because, at the beginning, the omphalos, set within an exclusively sacred vertical perspective, corresponded to the spatial crystallization of a link between the sky and the earth. In many diverse cosmogonic narratives, like Genesis, this link is expressed in a language of stones, by towers or pyramids erected by architects, which were more or less real, more or less mythical, such as the tower of Babel, built in the image of Nimrod. If, at Delphi, the omphalos was at first included in the vertical vision (earth-sky), it ended up by being integrated in horizontal projections (earth-sea) that established the centrality of Delphi and, a fortiori, the Hellenic Ecumene, which was deployed around the Archipelagos, or in other words, the Aigaion Pelagos, the Aegean Sea, the Archi-Sea.
When looking through a dictionary of Greek mythology, there are two entries that follow each other closely: one is about Omphale and the other Omphalos. Omphale was queen of Lydia, famous for having enthralled Heracles. She did in fact reduce the half god to a slave, and then she married him after discovering his true identity. A curious inversion of roles took place next within the couple, at least in the later version of the myth, in the Roman era. While Heracles cross-dressed as a docile spouse tied to the domestic sphere, Omphale brandished a wooden club, the traditional attribute of her husband. This story is well known, because the arts have favored Omphale. In Heraclesâs company, she adorns an updated mosaic in the charming village of LlĂria, not far from Valencia. The couple also takes part in paintings by Cranach le Jeune, Rubens or de Tischbein, a symphonic poem of Saint-SaĂ«ns, and even Italian togas. We might ask what relationship the beautiful Omphale has to the Omphalos of Delphi. It may be a pure onomastic coincidence. To be honest, this easy answer is quite unlikely, because the Greek mythos is the archetypical text: it tirelessly weaves links between all histories of the world. Nothing is left to chance. Therefore, it is not surprising that Apollodorus suggested a plausible explanation. Prior to contracting a mysterious disease, Heracles killed Iphitos. He went to Delphi to purify himself of his crime and his illness, the latter being the consequence of the prior. Seeing his initiative fail, he pillaged the temple and stole the enigmatic Pythiaâs tripod, in an effort to create his own oracle. To avoid bloodshed between Apollo (who was enraged by this episode) and Heracles, Zeus ordered the half god to accept three years of slavery in Lydia, at the end of which he would be cured of his illness. The man with the wooden club obeyed. Maybe Omphale herself embodied a fleeting desire of sedentary lifestyle on the part of the impenitent nomad Heracles. Maybe, subjected to this seduction that turned him away from his frenetic wandering, from his permanent mobilization, Heracles decided to explore in Lydia (the land of Omphale, the alternative omphalos, the zero point of space and of the traditional sex) another type of sexuality in order to confer a different and new form to his visceral need for a quest.
One thing seems sure: the omphalos, the object, the materialization of the center of the world, was located in the adytum of a temple that Apollo had erected in the memory of Python, whom he had killed. Pausanias claims, however, that the omphalos is located next to the temple. For him, it was as if the center of the world was slightly shifted. In any event, the omphalos could not be far from the tripod from which Pythia rendered her ambiguous oracles. The closer one got to the center, the less clear the words were, and the more fateful she was. But was the omphalos really the center of the world? In the Odyssey, a strange verse, the fiftieth of the initial song, instills a doubt. When it comes time to qualify Ogygia, Calypsoâs island, which is the furthest of those investigated by Ulysses, Homer notes that it is the omphĂ los thalĂĄssÄs, the ânavel of the sea.â So, like Varron (Caesarâs librarian) in La langue latine, there is a play on words, and we can say that the navel of the earth is not necessarily located at its middle; we could even add, just as he did, that âDelphi is not placed at the center of the Earth, and the navel is not placed either at the middle of the human body.â2 At the middle of the body, he reminds those who might have forgotten, there is that which is hidden: the genitals. All things considered, the omphalos of Delphi was the tomb of Python and nothing more. Varron was quite prosaic. I would like to think that for Homerâin any case for Ulyssesâthe center of the world was located at its outer limit. In this way, there would always remain a half for him to discover, the Other. Still, it would be necessary to conceive of this point âbeyondâ knowledge. Thatâs what the Homeric Ulysses undertook. Thatâs what the Dantean Ulysses continued to do. Thatâs what we try to do when we get it into our minds to cross the horizon line.
In the first lines of On the Cessation of Oracles, Plutarch narrates an intriguing anecdote. Epimenides of Phaistos, a wise man according to some, a prophet according to others, interrogated the oracle of Delphi on the validity of the myth and the reality of the flight of the eagles. Pythia, so the story goes, gave him an evasive and ambiguous answer. Epimenides then said, âThere is no umbril of the land or sea: God only knows, man knows not, if there be.â3 The Cretan Epimenides was just as imprudent as Danteâs Ulysses. He abstained from taking a boat to go verify the measurements, but his ideas reached Apollo who punished him for having asked Pythia such an offhanded question. For the god, it was understood that the omphalos could not be assessed âby the touch.â4 Many elements make it possible to envisage the hypothesis according to which the consecration of the central navel (which references the horizontal line of the world) was produced at the precise moment when the Greeks stopped having an absolute faith in their gods and in their myths.
âDid the Greeks believe in their myths?â asked Paul Veyne, in the title of a famous essay, which appeared in 1983. Yes, certainly, but before they made Delphi the center of the world. That is what, in any case, the discrete hesitations allow us to think, as, little by little, the different layers of the myth superimpose on themselves, introducing a spirit of play into the interpretation. Either one is just a little to the side of the center (Pausanias) or one downright deports its (Homer); one denies the validity of the metaphor of the center (Varron) or one even pushes to the side the possibility of such a myth (Plutarch). However, nobody incited Epimenides, as one day Xixo, to go throw away the omphalos in the great beyond of the world, or to throw it in the waters of the River Okeanos, which girded the known universe. Around Greece and the Mediterranean, reasoning continued to be based on the center of the world, the centrality of a point of view, of centrism, and soon eurocentrism. The West was already in the process of building itself. Plutarch, who had reported the episode, hurried himself to point out that in his time, the first century of our era and the beginning of the second century, the centrality of Delphi had been confirmed. Demetrius the grammarian left Britain where he had led an exploration mission to return to Tarsus, in Cilicia. For his part, Cleombrotus the Lacedaemonian had left the banks of the Red Sea, where he too was traveling, to return to Greece. The two men were coming back from the two extremities of the world, and they just happened to cross each other, by chance, in Delphi. Like the former eagles, they had recourse to a lapse of time equivalent to that necessary for covering the halfway distance that ran from the end of the world to its center. As for the sanctuary, it definitively ended its function at the end of the fourth century, when the Emperor Theodosius, a Christian, forbade âpaganâ cults. The gods had become demons to whom it was best to avoid listening.
The Omphalos Syndrome
Delphi marked, so one said, the point of departure for all the roads that crisscrossed Greece. Every city, and a fortiori, every country possesses today an analogous landmark. It was Rome that set the tone. If all roads led to the Eternal City, it was equally necessary that they departed from there as well. Around the year 20 BC, Augustus had a Milliarum Aureum, a Roman golden-stone mile marker, built near the temple of Saturn. In fair play, Saturn, the Roman version of Cronus, recovered that which Zeus/Jupiter made him vomit: a big stone. Rome had taken the place of Delphi. The position of an Umbilicus urbis Romae has been calculated, between the Ămilia and Julia basilicas, at the heart of the Forum. Today, this umbilicus has miserably survived inside brick turrets. Sic transit gloria mundi. . . A few years ago, on the night of the victory of his team against that of Lazio, Francesco Totti, star of the Roma team, sealed the fate of the ancient empireâs capital: âTo win the scudetto (the Italian soccer championship), we have to beat provincial teams like that of Lazio.â No more, no less. Rome, the capital of a provincial Latium? The charismatic soccer player of the Roma team wasnât even kidding.
A detailed study devoted to these symbolic landmarks would certainly attract attention. The zero point of Paris is located on the Notre-Dame parvis. It is also âthe kilometer zero for the roads of France,â as indicated by the plaque that marks it. The latter is, however, more recent than the Michelin maps, which, between 1911 and 1913, offered the first hierarchical numbering of the âroads of France.â In Spain, the choice of the center was based on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. In 2002, the plaque indicating the origen de las carreteras radiales (the origin of the big roads) had to be turned 180° because the map of Spain for which it served as an indicator had been wrongly orientedâit had been upside down. Maybe it is for this reason that in a Spanish comedy by Yolanda GarcĂa Serrano and de Juan Luis Iborra, Km.0 (2000), the 14 disoriented characters, who have a rendezvous at Puerta del Sol in Madrid, establish unexpected relationships and plan to set off on a new foot. And it is perhaps also this center that inspired the images of a refrain by Ismael Serrano: âKilometer zero, in the center of a city breathes the soul which distances itself and escapes. Kilometer zero, the beginning of days to come, of the calm which will bring the storm.â5 In India, the zero kilometer corresponds to the location of Mahatma Gandhiâs tomb in Delhi. In Budapest, however, several sculptures have succeeded each other over the course of the years and different styles: the brave socialist worker, built in 1953, was replaced in 1975 by a stone zero, evoking the form of an egg and moreover situated at the entry of the tunnel that runs the length of the SzĂ©chenyi chain bridge, on the River Buda. In the United Kingdom, itâs at Charing Cross, which is known for its bookstores, that the official Zero Milestone is located. This landmark has some serious competition, though: a stone sheltered behind a grill, in Cannon Street. According to the legend, it is the omphalos of London, the placing of which is attributed to the mythic founder of the city, Brutus of Troy.6 The niche where the stone has been conserved for a while has been overcome by a series of billboards, singing the praises of diverse brands of sports shoes.
Letâs take things a little farther. To ...