New Delphic Maxims: Revenge of the Pythia

(a set of 147 instead of 10, because that's just how this weird thing went)

New Maxims

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Have you read the Delphic Maxims?
When I did, they pissed me off so much I rewrote them all.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND RIGHTEOUS SPITE.

Why? Because this:

The Delphic Maxims are 147 short phrases of life advice,
(contradictory, repetitive, ageist, sexist, violent, paranoid, pithy) that have been interpreted and repeated and followed across millennia.

They are attributed to the 7 Sages of Greece: Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Priene, Cleobulus of Lindos, Pittacus of Lesvos, and Periander of Corinth.

They were carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the home and stage of the Oracle, the feminine Pythia, eons ago, when Greece was still a patchwork of city-states, and belligerent masculinity was the overriding philosophy.

THE MAXIMS WENT AGAINST THE VERY IDEA OF A FEMININE ORACLE AND THAT IS JUST SO OBTUSELY GROSS.

Imagine building a monument to Rosa Parks and carving Strom Thurmond’s most unspeakably racist quotes all over it. That’s the tone-deafness of the Delphic Maxims being carved into the Temple of Apollo.

So it is time, well past it, really, to:
Rework them. Rewrite them. Replace them.

To transform that ancient advice which has aged into ruin, with words that hold more potency in our ever-changing times.

Because advice is never truly timeless, and the beauty of it changes just as the beauty of faces does.

Because we live in a far more cooperative, equitable, and inclusive world—or, at least, we’re trying to—than those sages could have ever imagined or hallucinated.

And because those maxims, as they were written, no longer suit our times, or our morals, or our needs.

So I crossed them out and wrote in what rings more true—for now, at least.

The link to the whole, book-length PDF is in this newsletter. Feel free to change and reinterpret them as you like. I sure as heck did.