Apollo

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version told in the hymn has Apollo engage in combat with a female dragon--elsewhere male and called Python--who is ravaging the territory around Delphi. Since oracles of Gaea (Earth) are sometimes described as guarded by dragons, the hymn may reflect the tradition that before Apollo's arrival the oracle at Delphi belonged to Earth. This prior possession of the oracle is explicit in the very different account the Pythia provides at the beginning of Aeschylus' Eumenides; here Apollo receives the oracle peacefully as a birthday present from his grandmother, the titanness Phoebe, who received it from her sister Themis, who received it from her mother Gaea. In either version the myth charters the shift from an oracle that owes its power to intimacy with the depths of earth, the Mother of all that is, to one that owes its power to possession by a god who is sired by the Father of Heaven. The transfer may be resisted and achieved by combat (as in the Homeric hymn), or it may be ...

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soundness, and order.

In connection with #1) above, Apollo appears to be the patron of young people, esp. males, entering adulthood. His choirs are composed of boys and girls. His long hair signals the appearance of young men on the eve of initiation rites. Some would derive the name Apollo from annual tribal gatherings (called Apellai) in which Dorian Greeks in the Northwest and in the Peloponnesus initiated youth into full adult membership. Ritualists describe such rituals as involving a) separation from home and mother; b) survival of ordeals experienced in isolation from community and in marginal territories; c) connection with father and reintegration into the adult male ...

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