omphalos /AWM-fə-ləs/. noun. A sacred object, often a stone. The central point. The navel. Greek omphalos (navel).
Listener “Oedipa Maas” – probably not Pynchon’s like-named protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49 – wrote in with a request that I “set my inner word-nerd loose” and “do some useful navel-gazing” by exploring the word omphalos (O-M-P-H-A-L-O-S).
We can trace Omphalos back to two Ancient Greek myths.
In the first, the great god Cronus—fearing a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his offspring—had devoured his first five children: Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. After delivering his sixth child, Zeus, Cronus’s wife (and sister!) Rhea also conceived a plan: instead of giving Cronus baby Zeus to eat, she gave him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes—since called the omphalus stone—which Cronus promptly swallowed whole. Rhea then hid Zeus until together they could give Cronus his come-uppance.
According to the second myth—specifically one found in Plutarch’s On the Obsolescence of Oracles—a now older Zeus sought to find the center of the earth in a very Zeusian, and geometrically mystifying, manner: he sent two eagles, or possibly swans, out from the opposite ends of the earth and declared the spot where they met the center—the the omphalos, literally the navel—of the world. At that spot Zeus established the sanctuary of Delphi, home to Pythia, known as the Oracle of Delphi.
I have questions. But I probably shouldn’t ask them because, as the story continues:
Epimenides the Phaestian, willing to satisfy his curiosity, enquired of the oracle of Apollo with regard to this story, but received such an answer as made him never a jot the wiser; upon which he said:
No navel is there of the earth or sea:
’Tis known to Gods alone, if one there be.
In more recent times omphalos was used to reference both places and particular stones—such as the Delphi omphalus—placed there.
Many religious traditions feature omphalos stones (just one kind of many beatylus, or sacred stones) and other omphali, from the Islamic Ka’Aba in Mecca, the Christian Garden of Eden and the Hindu god Shiva him or herself, to a Navajo mountain somewhere in the Southwestern United States and Easter Island, known to the islanders there as Rapa-nui, said—with some poetic license—to mean “the navel of the world.” These stones and sacred places were believed to be conduits for communication with the gods and some myths extend the story by supposing an umbilical connection meeting there between the godly realms and our own.
Over time, omphalus has taken on various meanings based on both location and appearance. It is still used to refer to the stone at Delphi and sometimes the navel itself, figuratively or not. But omphalos is also used to refer to the boss, or stud, at the center of a shield or, more generally, the center of anything, though we should be careful: it might not convey the message we hope if we tell someone to aim for the omphalos of the target or meet for coffee at the campus student omphalos.
Omphalos has proven to be a seductive word for many fine wordsmiths and other creative, occasionally whackadoodle, souls.
In his 1857 book (published two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) science popularizer and virtual inventor of the saltwater aquarium Philip Henry Gosse published Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. In that book Gosse attempted to reconcile the difference between the geological and biblical estimates of the age of the earth by positing a creator who made everything appear ancient (the metrically tasty omphalos hypothesis) in the same way that Adam, of no mother born, nevertheless is sometimes depicted having a navel. Gosse leaves the provenance of male nipples to our imagination (I checked).
The implication of the physical and spiritual in this peculiar spot on our body feeds into a connotation that can make the word omphalos particularly apt.
Gosse would have taken issue with hyper-sensual surrealist Henry Miller on many things, not least Miller’s invocation of the omphalos. In Tropic of Cancer, ever-so-humble Henry writes:
…my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan. In short, to erect a world on the basis of the omphalos, not on an abstract idea nailed to a cross.
In her novel Eva Luna, Isabel Allende writes,
That’s how I learned my madrina had given birth to a monster. Specialists informed the public that the creature belonged to Tribe III – that is, it was characterized by a fused body with two heads: genus Xiphoid, meaning it had a single vertebral column; and class Omphalosian, one umbilicus for two bodies.
T. C. Boyle, known for his manic prose style, plays a bit on the undertone of secrecy and concealment inherent in the omphalos when he writes in his story “A Women’s Restaurant”:
An hour and a half later I was two sheets to the wind and getting cocky. Here I was, embosomed in the very nave, the very omphalos of furtive femininity—a prize patron of the women’s restaurant, a member, privy to its innermost secrets. ~~I sipped at my drink, taking it all in. There they were—women—chewing, drinking, digesting, chatting, giggling, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Shoes off, feet up. Smoking cigarettes, flashing silverware, tapping time to the music. Women among women. I bathed in their soft chatter, birdsong, the laughter like falling coils of hair.~~
While Anne Fadiman, in her cozy collection of essays At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist, plays on the combination of strangeness and necessity in typically amusing fashion when she tells us she is currently:
…attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, the omphalos of Americana.
Finally, on a more playful note, Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man has this happy bit of dialogue between Adam—no question that this contemporary Adam is appropriately belly-buttoned—and his friend Alex:
ADAM POPS HIS head round the door.
“Fruit or normal?”
“Normal.”
“Milk? Sugar?”
“Both. Lots.”
“You’ll get fat.”
Alex lifts his shirt and aims an exploratory poke into the fold of flesh where once he had a navel.
“Already happening.”
“Omphalos obfuscated.”
Though no longer common, omphalos is the source of some fun derived words.
In the Dictionary of Early English you’ll find
omphalomancy. Foretelling how many children a woman will have, by the number of knots in the umbilical cord of her first-born. […] Also, the gaining of mystical insight by steadily contemplating one’s navel.
and
anomphalous. Without a navel.
Anomphalous was commonly used to describe “Medieval pictures” that showed depictions of Adam and Eve that needed no Gossean omphalos hypothesis by virtue of being depicted as “equally smooth bellied.”
Along with these, thanks to the omphalos and the people who contemplate them, we have been gifted with a slew of synonyms for the act of navel-gazing that seem tailor-made for describing some social media citizens today including omphaloskepsis, omphaloscopy, and omphalopsychic. Try one out on your closest self-absorbed friend today!
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