Omphalos stones were supposed to mark the centre of the world; the most famous of those was at the oracle in Delphi.
The Necklace of Harmonia
- Hephaestus, son of Hera, was lame and blacksmith to the Olympian gods
- Hephaestus was married to Aphrodite, but he discovered that she was having an affair with Ares and cursed any children resulting from the affair
- Aphrodite duly gave birth to the twins (Phobos – panic/fear – and Deimos – terror/dread) and later a daughter, Harmonia, who grew up and became betrothed to Cadmus
- Hephaestus presented Harmonia with an exquisite robe and necklace as wedding gifts
- The Necklace of Harmonia endowed any woman wearing it with eternal youth and beauty
- Harmonia and Cadmus were later both transformed into serpents (dragons in some versions) and ascended to the Paradise of the Elysian Fields
- The Necklace passed to Harmonia’s daughter Semele, who was wearing it when Hera visited her insinuating that her lover was not Zeus
- Semele was killed when she foolishly demanded that Zeus prove his identity by displaying himself in all his glory as the king of heaven
- Several generations later, Queen Jocasta inherited the Necklace, retaining her youth and beauty so that, after the death of her husband King Laius, she became enamoured with and thence married to her own son, Oedipus
- When the truth about Oedipus’s birth was later revealed, Jocasta committed suicide, Oedipus tore out his own eyes, and the tragedy unfolded as dsecribed in Sophocles’ Theban plays
- Oedipus’s son, Polynices, inherited the Necklace, gifting it to Eriphyle, so that she would persuade her husband, Amphiaraus, to join the ill-fated first expedition against Thebes (ultimately resulting in the deaths of Eriphyle herself, her son, Alcmaeon, and Phegeus and the latter’s sons)
- Through Alcmaeon, the son of Eriphyle, the Necklace passed into the hands of Phegeus’ daughter Arsinoe, then to the sons of Phegeus, Pronous and Agenor, and lastly to the sons of Alcmaeon, Amphoterus and Acarnan
- Amphoterus and Acarnan dedicated the Necklace to the Temple of Athena at Delphi, to prevent further disaster amongst human wearers
- The tyrant Phayllus, one of the Phocian leaders in the Third Sacred War (356 BC-346 BC), stole the necklace from the Temple and offered it to his mistress
- After she had worn it for a time, her son was seized with madness and set fire to the house, where she perished in the flames along with all her worldly treasures
- After the death of Phayllus’s mistress nothing more is heard of the Necklace of Harmonia in the mortal world
Mythographies
If my writing can be said to have a theme, it is the search for mythologies of various kinds, world views that interpret in some way the position of homo sapiens on planet Earth. It occurred to me once that if early humans saw something truly remarkable then they would have absorbed it into the stories that they told; the key question then would be how long it might survive in any recognisable form. Similar stories in different locations might point to a common origin. This seems as true of trips to stone circles or menhirs, as to visiting the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.
My fictional writing reflects this search for mythologies. I will record here a few of the extraordinary places this search has encompassed, from stone circles and chambered tombs to the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.
In the picturesque French town of Châtillon-sur-Seine, I found the Vix krater.
In her novel Realms of Gold, Terry Stanfill observes that Chrétien de Troyes, the late-12th-century French poet and trouvère who is credited with originating the character of Lancelot in the Arthurian saga was born and spent his early years in Troyes, only thirty miles from Vix. It does not seem outside the bounds of possibility that Chrétien had grown up with folk memories of the mysterious Greek krater (also, perhaps, the Celtic Cauldron of Plenty), transported up the local river systems to Vix and buried somewhere in the local countryside, and there found the inspiration for his version of the Grail legend.