Delphi is arguably the Oecumene’s most important centre. The city was the seat of Amphictyonic League - a religious alliance of the poleis in what is currently Greece, Turkey and beyond. Delphi, apart of being sacred from polytheistic perspective, also played incremental role in political and epistemological history. Archaic mythology of the city originates from the Chasm, the origin of everything in Hesiod’s Theogony, out of which the first primordial deities-natural forces were born, including Gaia, the Earth herself. Her navel is represented there as omphalos, the stone that signifies the centre of the planet. The mythography of the city was changed and appropriated to the political evolutions of the Ancient World, eventually replacing the Earth gods with the Sky gods with Zeus at their helm, establishing and naturalising patriarchy, imperialism and misogyny.

In this lecture, we dechiper the thingness of Delphi as the site of the world’s first think tank, queering the mythological history of the site and critically evaluating limitations of its richness and multiplicity by the modern Greek state for nation building.