Omphaloskeptically. (Ryan).(thoughts on the belly button)

BROWSING, as occasionally I do, through old volumes of Who's Who in Australia, I chanced to flick over page 668 of the issue of 1980. There was the biography of my old friend Cyril Pearl, author and editor, journalist, historian and wit. His recreations were listed as: exploring social myths, discovering Australian wines, omphaloskepsis. Omphaloskepsis? I'd known Cyril pretty well over many years, but never suspected him of that (whatever it was).

The Shorter Oxford gave little help but, falling back on my own grasp of classical Greek (about fourteen words), I concluded that it must mean "sceptical contemplation of one's navel" or something like that. "Navel-gazing" is today a synonym for useless introspection. In the fourteenth century the Omphalopsychoi were a sect founded on Mount Athos by the mildly obscure Saint Gregory of Palamas, whose enemies said that he believed the navel to be the seat of the soul.

When and how did Cyril conduct this mysterious practice? In the bath? And if so, whether seated or lying on his back? Did he (in the warmer weather) strip nude on his bed, head propped on pillows to subtend a convenient angle of view? Did he perform in a secret and solitary way? Or did a Sydney Omphaloskeptical Society meet weekly in joint and joyful congress? And if so, was the exercise to contemplate one's own navel, or the belly-buttons of the other members?

With luck, we will never find out. On the other hand, it requires no soaring flight of fancy to imaging one of our thirty or so faculties of Arts condoning a thesis on the subject, and in due course awarding it a PhD.

The navel (Greek omphalos) seems to have been taken more seriously in ancient times although, as we shall see later, there may be signs of a contemporary comeback.

The Bible's Song of the reputed wisest man of his age, King Solomon, is (7:2) lyrical: "Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor." Was the Queen of Sheba in his mind?

To the ancient Greeks, the general notion of omphalos was fundamental. The psychic centre of their universe lay in the wild, lonely mountains at Delphi. Here were built the shrines and the "treasuries"; here through the foam-flecked ecstatic lips of the priestess poured the cunning ambiguities of the oracle, on matters of politics, diplomacy and battle; here, above all, was the round, dome-shaped lump of rock--"the midland navel-stone", as A.E. Housman put it--the precise centre of the world. Where it is today nobody knows.