Prayer to Apollo
ApolloA modern text from the LABRYS manual (see greek-agathodaimon-001), for a rite of purification.
Its theological core is correct and important. "After the slaying of Python you fled to Carmanor, where you served yourself and were purified" — the tradition is genuine and comes from Pausanias: Apollo, having killed the serpent, was polluted by the killing and was purified in Crete at Carmanor's house.
The ancients understood the point strictly. Pollution is not guilt: killing stains regardless of whether it was justified, and even a god who acted lawfully must be cleansed. That is why Apollo became the god of purifications — he was the first to undergo one. The founder of the rite was its first patient.
What is modern in this hymn is the generalisation. "Strike with your unconquerable arrows the Pythons and Typhons": the monsters are put in the plural and turned into a class of evils at large. An ancient purification prayer would have named a specific pollution — whose killing, whose childbirth, whose death in the house — because one was purified of a particular case, not of evil as such.
The verdict is the same as on the other cards of this class: the learning is genuine, the rhetoric is of today.