Testing both the travertine (itself a product found only in active fault areas) and the water beneath the temple at Delphi, they found ethane, methane, and ethylene, which had been used as an anaesthesia in the 1920s, thanks to its ability to produce a pleasant, disembodied, trancelike state. They postulated that the geology of Delphi could thus have produced enough of these potent gases to, within an enclosed space like the adyton, put the Pythia into a trancelike state.45 The ancients may not have been lying after all.
