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Dec 21, 2004
The Navel Stone
The curious object shown here is a Hellenistic or early Roman marble
copy of the so-called omphalos or "navel", its surface covered with a
woolen mesh. It was originally located in the temple of Apollo at
Delphi, Greece. The travel writer, Pausanias, wrote the following
about this rock:

"What the Delphians call the NAVEL is made of white stone: the
Delphians maintain, and Pindar writes to the same effect in one of his
odes, that this is the center of the entire earth."

Countless other surviving reports identify this navel-stone or Delphi
as the center of the earth. But this deeply-rooted tradition raises a
number of questions. Why was Delphi regarded as the center of the
earth? And why did the centre have to be represented as a conical
stone rather than, for example, a navelstring? The German scholar
Wilhelm Roscher, who devoted no less than three books to this subject,
was probably right when he derived the identification of Delphi as the
center of the earth from the simple psychological tendency to place
one's own land in the centre. Even if that is granted, however, the
imagery itself still needs to be explained, especially because many
other ancient societies identified one or another rock as the "navel"
of the earth. In Petra, in modern Jordan, a "conic navel" was found,
two meters in height and diameter, which was evidently regarded as a
symbol of the cosmic center. The Israelites believed that the Holy of
Holies in Solomon's temple was built on the "foundation stone" of the
earth, which was the first object created by God, that he placed in
the center of the universe. Muslims regard the Ka`ba, the sacred black
stone at Mecca, as the mark of the cosmic center. Many more examples
could be adduced.

The key to the significance of such omphaloi is the connection to the
heavenly pole. It is not difficult to understand why the cosmic pole
would be singled out as the center of heaven par excellence,
particularly in early societies with no concept of heliocentricity.
The revolution of the stars around the pole and the constancy of the
pole star near the center could readily be taken to mean that the
polar region was the center of the cosmos. Earth navels such as the
omphalos at Delphi and the Ka`ba at Mecca must therefore have been
deliberately modeled after the cosmic pole, even if this involved the
erroneous conception that Delphi, Mecca, and other such places were
located directly underneath the heavenly pole or, in other words, at
the terrestrial poles.

So much was fully understood and elaborated by A.J. Wensinck, Mircea
Eliade, and other students of early religion. What these scholars
failed to notice, however, was that this cannot be the whole story.
Granted that cultic "earth navels" were modeled after the celestial
pole, the question remains just why the pole was so frequently
represented by pillars and conical stones? Other recurring aspects of
the iconography of the omphalos can be added. The Greek and the
Semitic omphaloi were both depicted with a serpent wound around them.
What could that have meant in connection with the pole of heaven? The
symbol of the winged sun disc used to be placed right above the
omphalos. Why? In order to make sense of this welter of confusing
ideas, it is of paramount importance to consider that the ancients
were looking at a different, more active sky than the one we presently
see. The available evidence strongly suggests that the ancients were
describing the axis mundi, the central axis connecting the poles of
heaven and earth, as a visible object.

Based on an extensive analysis of ancient rock art, plasma physicist
Anthony Peratt has recently proposed that a stupendous glowing plasma
column formed in the 4^th or 3^rd millennium BCE as a result of a
high-energy disturbance in the geomagnetic field. The known laboratory
sequence of phases in the development of such a plasma column matches
precisely the various aspects in the ancient mythological descriptions
of the axis mundi. The plasma column will at some point have looked
like a luminous cone; at another it will have been surrounded by a
bright helix not unlike a serpent; and at another it will have been
surmounted by two extensions resembling outstretched wings. This
elegant hypothesis accounts at once for the significance and the
complex morphology of the omphalos in ancient religion. Needless to
say, many more years of painstaking analysis will be needed before the
entire tangle is unraveled.

Contributed by Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs

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