Thieves of the Honey Cave

A Tale of Dark Pilgrimage and the Mythic Thievery of Holy Honey

Deer Ryder

Feb 28, 2025

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-18:48

I strongly encourage listening to the audio for my narration and instrumental storytelling.

I captured this photo at the entrance of the Corcyian Cave in Delphi, Greece. Each time I look at this photo, I see the fur-laden entrance to a womb.

I am sitting outside the Corcyian Cave. I have not yet entered. I walked all morning up Mount Parnassus on the sacred pilgrim’s path from the town of Delphi. For almost a thousand years, people pilgrimed there to question that famous priestess who breathed the vapors of the deep earth; to hear her paradoxical, insightful, and portentous prophecies. The Oracle of Delphi.

That is not what brought me here on this simple pilgrimage, but a vision some months ago in Colorado. Signs and synchronicities guided me here with specific offerings to this cave that was worshipped before there were ever marbled monuments, before kings, generals, and common folk climbed the steps to hear the prophetess speak on the seventh day of each month. Only in those dark winters, when the land hushed, would she rest and leave her temple for the caves–leave Apollo for that wilder, more ancient god, Dionysus. Though some say they are just two faces of the same divinity.

A great python was said to once guard these lands. He was the son of Gaia, Earth Goddess, and Apollo killed him to establish his temple. Yet the serpent’s name remained for the famed priestess was also called the“Pythia of the Pythoness.” I have come to honor such old forces. Blessings to all who have come here in a holy way to this ancient altar of serpents, honey, bees, bones, beauty, and trees.

These words have been sourced from a recording in Greece, where much of my unscripted language was eaten by Mount Parnassus’ windy breath. Perhaps it was the mountain’s intention, for in many ancient cultures, to speak of certain sacred rites was punishable by death. It was just so in the ancient Greek and Mediterranean worlds, notably in the case of the secret initiatory rites known as the Eleusinian Mysteries that endured for nearly two thousand years. In homage to such holy intimacy, I will keep what happened with me in that cave a mystery.

"Priestess of **Delphi**" by John Collier, 1891.

The limestone Corcyian cave (Korkyion Antron) herself is magnificent. She is said to be home of the nymph Korykia, a divine baby mama of that god of sunlight, Apollo. The cave was sacred to nymphs, Pan, and a dwelling place of Dionysus. Dr. Edward Tick, in his book Soul Medicine, writes:

Thousands of artifacts have been recovered here, including rings, flutes, figurines, small statues, and knucklebones for casting prophecies. Its ceremonial use dates to the Neolithic era and the finds there confirm Earth Mother worship and oracular activity”(1).

These Neolithic oracles eventually evolved into and were eclipsed by the Oracle of Delphi. Confusingly, the Oracle of Delphi was not just one woman but a mystical line of carefully selected and trained women who were purported to inhale subterranean vapors unique to a wild chasm in Delphi; vapors called pneuma, a Greek word which translates roughly to “spirit,” “soul,” “wind” or “breath” (2). Interestingly, the Arabic term for soul is ruh, which also means “spirit” and “breath” (3). Modern scientists have since proven that such an alchemy of vapors did exist. These vapors contained a euphoric gas called ethylene (4), which was later used as a common anesthetic in the early 20th century but was said to help aid the oracles in channeling Apollo, who was also the god of prophecy. Whether or not you would believe such things personally, the influence of the Oracle of Delphi upon the ancient world for nearly a thousand years is uncontested by history and scholarship, even if the integrity of the Oracle’s prophecies are.

Imagine if the Catholic Pope today were a woman who breathed hallucinogenic earth smoke and spoke prophecies in a state of ecstasy. Then, we may have some insight into the socio-political and spiritual terrain of these ancient people.

Wandering amongst the beauty and cultural import of the temple ruins of this powerful priestess line, I realize that after years of travel in over two dozen countries and living in nine, I am long-tired of the adoration of our handiwork that draws most people here; sick of the sculptures revered as idols while the stones themselves, born from Earth’s masterfully slow hands, are offered no libation or even attention. Because of this obsessive adulation of human creation, I have cringed at offering more anthropocentric expression into this world.

Here, however, I have been moved at last in this forgotten homeland of my father’s line to be an imperfect vessel of the old places and forces. I seek some small restitution of reverence for the ancient ones and their wisdom, particularly the dark chasms that so many storied traditions and ancient imagery like the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in France–amongst many others–say birthed the first humans (5).

We shall begin there, then, in the caves. Descend to a very old birth story of the gods themselves: dream with a cave that nursed the wee God of Gods and the four mortal thieves who sought divine honey.

Myth of the Honey Thieves

Please listen to the oral telling of this story in the audio. Written below is a transcription of the telling, and in the recorded version, I am trying my hand at a traditional Greek aulos reed flute and toubeleki drum purchased in Athens.

This myth comes to us from the island of Crete, an ancient culture of snake-worshiping priestesses and goddesses and sacred caves—a culture and a land that deeply influenced the ancient world, the ancient Mediterranean. Now this is an old myth that begins when the goddess of the earth, Rhea, is going to birth a son. But in fear, fear that her son's father Cronus might devour him, she takes refuge in a sacred cave of bees, and there in that cave of sacred bees, she gives birth to Zeus, who will be the father, the sky god, of all gods, in the Olympic pantheon. And there, a religious commandment is made called a Hosion, that decrees that no one, neither god nor man, may enter. Now the people that lived outside of this cave over the years saw that at a certain time each year a great fiery glow is seen to emerge from the cave. And this occurs when the blood, the Ichor, this amniotic translucent fluid that they believed was the blood of the god, runs over.

Now, it is relayed that there were four foolish men who wished to gather the sacred honey of these sacred bees who had been the nurses of Zeus himself, but in order not to be destroyed by the bees these men put on bronze armor and entered and violated the Hosion into the cave. No doubt they must have been hearing all kinds of noises—the bees, wild buzzing—and they were able to gather some of the sacred honey. When they did, they saw the swaddling clothes of Zeus somewhere in that cave—ancient soft cloth that they would wrap newborn babies in, a kind of old diaper—and when they saw the swaddling clothes that were once wrapped around the God of Gods, their armor cracked and fell from their bodies, and they were naked, naked around a lot of wild bees. And not only were the bees angry, but Zeus himself realized what was happening and raised his thunderbolt against them. But the goddess of fate and Themis, the goddess that ruled over nature, restrained Zeus because it would have also violated the Hosion if anyone had died in this cave. So instead, instead, these four honey thieves, naked as the day they were born, were transformed into birds.

(Sources: 6-10)

Since I first read this story of these Greek honey hoodlums, it has seduced me into greater intimacy. This would not surprise those who know me. I love honey, caves, and stories. In caressing the deceptively simple curves of this story, questions emerge. Why did these four men violate the gods’ holy decree to steal this honey from the sacred bees?

Modern minds might move first to profit. No doubt, God-Honey would fetch a princely price, but no version I’ve read implies that. With greater research, I recognize that humans of many lands have gone to enormous lengths to steal honey. Honey has been food for mankind since the Old Stone Age, as evidenced by a roughly 8,000-year-old rock painting in the cave of Araña near Bicorp, Spain, which shows “honey thieves climbing tall trees to rob the bees” (6).

Cave painting found in “Las Cuevas de la Araña” (Spider Caves) in Bicorp Spain where a figure gathers honey from a hive on a cliff face. It is estimated to be about 8,000 year-olds.

“Bees,” said famed Greek scholar Carl Kerényi, “offered men the essential sweetness of pure existence; the existence of infants in the womb” (6).

Himalayan honey harvesters of the Nepalese Gurung people climb hundreds of feet off the ground in sketchy rope ladders to harvest the so-called “mad” psychedelic honey. One fall can mean death (10).

I began to wonder: Are bees and gods the same? Or at least of equal divinity?

To me, these four honey thieves are a kind of archetypal “sacred fool” wishing to steal back into the womb-cave, seeking what Plato called Theia Mania, “divine madness.” His teacher, that little-known philosopher named Socrates, said that the “greatest of blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods" (12). Hallucinogenic honey is still a thing, as evidenced by Nepalese Gurung honey harvesters (see photo caption above), so maybe these four guys sought to steal divine madness by ingesting madness-inducing honey.

I’d be down.

As we journey a layer deeper, as myth requires, I wonder about the armor they wore during their holy heist. We all wear armor in our waking lives to protect ourselves from the painful, sometimes deadly, stings of life. I cannot help but feel the violation of natural law, however, as these four men enter the birth cave of the goddess Rhea, Goddess of the Earth, for their armor is the antithesis of a babe’s vulnerability.

What are we violating when we walk into the sacred wombs of life so well-armored?

Many cosmologies have humans born from the subterranean. Some of those traditions still ritually revive this return to the primordial womb: Temezcal in Mesoamerican culture (13); sweat lodge in various Northern Native American tribes such as the Lakota and Diné; and early Finnish saunas were originally dug into the ground and functioned as ritual spaces (14). I have personally experienced diverse return-to-womb rituals with both indigenous peoples and Westerners. One common theme is to be ritually re-membered as the child of Mother Earth within her moist darkness.

In the thieves’ entrance into the mother cave, we scent something tantalizing in their witnessing of Zeus’ “swaddling clothes,” his ancient cloth diaper, which instantly cracks their armor. Not only are these dudes now physically exposed, but they are now exposed to the awareness of the gods. For it is at this precise moment that Zeus knows them and is wrathful. Is he angry because they have violated the cave’s hosion, or because they have bore witness to his vulnerable past? I cannot help but smell the patriarchal at play, the archetypal manly man furious that he has been exposed as once soft and dependent on the earthly feminine. In his fury, Zeus seeks to smite them with his phallic thunderbolt but is restrained. Restrained by the goddesses–the ones who govern fate and the laws of nature–for to kill in the birth cave is an unthinkable act, even for that “storm black son of Cronus,” father of gods, Zeus, who was first hidden in that cave because his own father wished to eat him (15).

Instead of “Death by the Divine,” the four thieves are transformed into birds. Birds? Why Birds? Why not lizards, flies, or mice?

In the ancient Mediterranean, a common form of divination was augury: the interpretation of the movements, behavior, and cries of birds (16). Birds have been and are still seen by some as messengers of the divine; their presence and behavior are viewed as omens that may portent, inform, or direct the actions of life. One source mentions that at least three of the four thieves were turned into a nightingale, a cuckoo, and an owl (17). All three of these birds have associations with Greek mythological feminine figures: the goddesses Athena and Hera, along with mortal Philomela, who was raped by a man, got her revenge, and was transformed into a bird to save herself from being murdered in turn (18).

Interesting that these four warrior-like men enter the Goddess’ birth cave and emerge as feminine birds.

In Part II, we will sink deeper into this rich, dark, wild honey and why it may actually matter to us moderns. For now, I wonder: Did the four thieves find the divine transformation they longed for, if not in the ways they expected? What secret do they carry from the cave gods in their transmogrified talons?

Here to me is what they say: