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omphalos |
Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia, Hutchinson | 0.04 sec. |
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omphalos (ōm`fəlŏs), in Greek and Roman religion, navel-shaped stone used in the rites of many cults. The most famous omphalos was at Delphi; it was supposed to mark the center of the earth. |
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An archetypal reading posits wells as omphalos (umbilical cords) connecting the living people in the upper world with the "loving and terrible Mother" in the underworld, almost precisely Miranda's experience when she uncovers the well at the other place and hears "[c]ircles and circles of screaming" from two long-dead mothers, Sapphira and Ophelia, and one baby daughter, Peace, issuing from the depths of the well. Thus, Cook takes the omphalos (navel or center) orientation as definitive of the epic and shows how that orientation is questioned in the Iliad, revised in the Odyssey, and increasingly rendered more complex by succeeding epics: the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. Turning to my overworked, overwrought, and under-Catholicized (read Jewish) wife, I put a hand on her deflated belly, that omphalos of our little world. |
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omphalos
