Omphalos – Mysterious Ancient Sacred Object And Its Meaning

MessageToEagle.com – Standing in the center of the archaeological complex of Delphi, few people pay attention to this sacred object of rather insignificant structure.

It is constructed out of a pile of circular disks, each one somewhat smaller than the one underneath.

For the ancient Greeks this object was known as the Omphalos of Delphi represented a symbol for the ‘Navel of the World’.

Much later, the Greeks adopted the conical shaped stone as a sacred dwelling of Apollo, their Sun God Apollo – the residence of the Sun God. The most sacred device – Omphalos – was used at every oracular site.

The sacred stone ‘Omphalos’ had also a geodetic meaning – as a geodetic point of a master grid.

In his fascinating book ‘Gateways to the Otherworld: The Secrets Beyond the Final Journey, from the Egyptian Underworld to the Gates in the Sky‘ Philip Gardiner presents the strange object:

‘The superstition of the omphalos was widespread, similar to the serpent belief, from India to Greece. It is a boss or orb with spiral lines thought to represent serpents coiled or the electromagnetic energy encircling the globe.

There are similar markings on ancient stone monuments across the world – especially at Newgrange in Ireland. Quintus Curtius also pointed out that in Africa there were such stones with spiral lines drawn, said to be a symbol of the serpent deity.

According to Herodotus, a sacred serpent was fed honey cakes once a month at the Acropolis in Athens. These honey cakes were marked with the Omphalos…”

According to the mythological story, Zeus, the supreme Greek god sent two eagles from both ends of the world. These two birds began their flight at the same time, and kept flying until they met each other in the middle of the way, which was at the Omphalos.

The site that would later become known as Delphi, was a sacred place, which was inhabited by the Earth Goddess Gaia (or Gaea), the great mother of all, and guarded by her child, the serpent Python.

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More Ancient Mysteries

The Omphalos – probably a replica built in the 4th century BC – is a curious object and many theories have been proposed to explain the purpose of it.
Some have explained it as a funnel for the fumes that caused the Oracle at Delphi to get visions, some others suggest that the stone, given to Cronus by the goddess Rhea in order to thwart him from eating Zeus, their newborn son.

The word ‘omphalos’ or ‘baetylus’ is of Semitic origin (-bethel). Many of these stones existed in antiquity. They were considered sacred and mainly related to the cult of some particular god and looked upon as his abiding place or symbol.

Sometimes these stones had a more regular shape; they were formed into pillars or into groups of three pillars.

Such columns were sometimes placed before a shrine; others were used as mileposts and often shaped into human form.

The baetylus (Bethel or Betyl) became the parent form for altars and iconic statuary. It was one of  sacred stones that once fell from heaven and contained the power of life, and thereafter such heavely treasures were used for ritual and worship.

More evidence of the stone being taken from Bethel, a city described in the Hebrew Bible, of which location,  between Benjamin and Ephraim, was also confirmed by Jacob.

“And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first….”(Genesis 28:19)

George Andrew Reisner, an American archaeologist of Ancient Egypt and Palestine, who discovered the  Omphalos at the Amun/Zeus temple said:

“… in the front there is an opening. Inside a cavity with a depression, reminiscent of a seat, can be detected. I could imagine that this was the seat for a small deity figurine… Around the sculpture runs a band with sculptures of figures moving towards the opening of these figures, four people are features with wings.”

However, the remarkable object in Delphi is not the only Omphalos that has been discovered. Omphalos was also found at the ancient Greek oracle site of Ptoion and is connected with the Egyptian oasis of Siwas, in a temple where the gods Amun and Zeus were worshipped.

To the Etruscans, the Omphalos symbolized a route to the Underworld.

First version of this article was originally published on January 06, 2015

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