First violence: language, which distances beings in their being only to reclaim them in an idealised form. Then this question: could the gods speak? Was Olympus silent? The Delphic oracle, placed at the centre of Hellas, and perhaps at the centre of the inhabited world, is like the lips of a cave which reached into the depths of the earth.
Who spoke through these lips? The gods? Or the priestess whom the gods appointed so they could hear the peculiar violence of naming belongs to human beings alone? Or was it the depths themselves, reverberating in the songs of those who would sing in the competitions held at Delphi? Already in the song there was a violence beyond that which would separate human beings from the world. Already there was a language beyond language which spoke of a horror from a time before humans and gods.
Lars Iyer's Blog 