Omphalos - Literature

Literature

The literary term "omphalos" has been used periodically throughout history. Authors such as Homer, Pausanias, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Jacques Derrida have incorporated different uses within their work. However, the vast majority of literary uses do not denote the stone from within the Temple of Delphi. Due to the rare, disparate, and allusive nature of omphalos usages in literature, the book by Joseph R. Shafer, entitled Literary Identity in the Omphalos Periplus, has been both revealing and informational when confronting the literary term. Shafer begins by showing how Karl Kerenyi and Mircea Eliade implemented Delphi's omphalos as a representation of the centeredness of man's collective unconscious. Yet, Shafer returns to the earliest texts to explain the term's literary emphasis. Literary Identity in the Omphalos Periplus studies Homeric uses of the Greek word "omphalos" within the Odyssey and the Iliad, which are translated within as either "navel" or "boss". The boss, in Homeric times, was the center bulge upon a warrior's shield. Shafer then reveals how the literary term "boss", deriving from omphalos, has been portrayed in the works by such authors as Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman. The following chapter, "The Gaze", performs close readings of James Joyce's Ulysses, which uses the "omphalos" in numerous passages while also relying on Hellenic motifs and tropes. Shafer concludes by explicating Sigmund Freud's use of the term Navel ("gleichsam einen Nabel") within his Dream of Irma in The Interpretation of Dreams and also Jacques Derrida's work which labels Freud's navel as the "omphalos" and uses the term several times in works such as Resistances of Psychoanalysis, The Ear of the Other, and All Ears: Nietzsche's Otobiography. Shafer is able to show, for the first time, the recurrent usage, literary base, and theoretical significance of the term "omphalos" throughout a literary history.

Examples of other uses:

In chapter 1 of James Joyce's Ulysses Buck Mulligan describes his home in a Martello tower as an omphalos:

Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the OMPHALOS.

In chapter 14, Mulligan proposes:

... to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named OMPHALOS with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural.

The word also appears in chapter 3, amongst complex imagery of religion, creation and death:

One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos.

There are a number of omphalos allusions elsewhere in literature, especially fantasy:

• The first of the Indiana Jones books, Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi, features the Omphalos as the MacGuffin. In the novel, the omphalos is described as a small smooth black cone with a knotted net covering its surface. The netting is described as being petrified rather than carved as it is on the actual omphalos at Delphi. When one holds the omphalos they can see into the near and distant future.
• In the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story "Thieves' House" by Fritz Leiber, Omphal is the name of a set of jeweled bones. It is soon revealed to be one of the long-dead master thieves once revered as gods by the Thieves' Guild... but not before being desecrated by the latest guild master. The Thieves' not-exactly-dead gods don't take this lightly, and at midnight the guild regains a very fervent reverence for its ancestral origins.
• Omphalos is the name of a ship in The Unteleported Man (later republished as Lies, Inc.) by Philip K. Dick.
• Glastonbury Abbey is described as an omphalos by the character Mansur in Ariana Franklin's book Grave Goods.
• In the novel Dead Sky, Black Sun by Graham McNeill, set in the fantasy world of Warhammer 40,000, the Omphalos Daemonium is a daemon trapped in Chaos armour who captures the heroic Ultramarine Captain, Uriel Ventris, after he becomes caught up in a parallel universe.