Pythia

The Pythian Order, whose individual holders of the line of succession were each, in turn, known as "the Pythia", were the matriarchal leaders of Gallifrey and the Gallifreyan Empire in the age before the Time Lords. The Pythias possessed precognition and other powerful psychic powers. Under the rule of the Pythia, Gallifrey was governed by mystery and superstition, which later histories contrasted with the reason and science that followed in the Rassilon Era. The war between Rassilon and the female priesthood of the Pythia led to the Great Schism.

Reign
The Age of the Pythias began approximately 5200 years before the age of Rassilon, with the Pythian Order thought to be investitured by the Menti Celesti. Mystical sites such as the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be were in use since the first Pythia. Under the Pythias, Gallifrey had a time of expansion across space, conquering and colonising many planets.

"Only the tallest of the ruins were visible now, the snows covered the rest. Not that there had been much to see before the ice had come, merely the ancient temples and amphitheatres, the last evidence of a race that had ruled by the sword and built an empire planet by planet until it had spread across the universe. When the temples had been built, the future had been an open sea. Gallifrey had been ruled by seers who remembered the future as they remembered the past. Destiny was manifest, the bountiful cargo that filled the holds of a thousand thousand starships. The prophecies had been bound and bound up to be the charts used to circumnavigate infinity. Explorers travelled ever outward, apprised of the marvels they would find, aware of the dangers. Prospectors rushed to the stars, knowing where to look for gold. Heroes took great risks, certain of the outcome. The future had shone as bright as the moon, and had been just as incorruptible."

- Description of the Pythian empire.

The epiphany scrolls of Soneuramos were entrusted to the 217th Pythia in the sacred firelake of Rag-Finish.

The 389th Pythia was given a jewelled periapt by the legendary hero Ao.(PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

Fall of the Pythia
Near the end of her reign, the 508th Pythia was unable to see into the future. She recruited Vael, a Gallifreyan skilled in psychic powers, as her successor and spy on Rassilon and his Neo-Technologists. As the Pythia awaited Vael's return, she was visited and taunted by Rassilon, who predicted an end to her empire of superstition. When she could no longer see the future clearly, she retreated into a world of her own, waiting for Vael to return; however, as she withdrew from public life, support for Rassilon and his followers grew.

The Pythia sent her loyal followers to steal the eye of a Sphinx, a foreseer killed by the hero Prydonius, in the hope that it would restore her power to see the future. Desperate to find Vael, she gouged out her own eye and put that of the Sphinx in its place. The Pythia invaded Vael's mind, demanding to know what was happening with him, but he resisted her. The Seventh Doctor sensed someone looking out at him from Vael's mind. Despite the risk, he agreed to an exchange of questions and learned that he was speaking to the Pythia, matriarch of Gallifrey, and was forced to tell her that she would be the last of her kind.

Pythia sent her followers to the planet Karn, issued her curse of sterility, and threw herself into the abyss below her temple. Her exiled followers would adopt the title of the Sisterhood of Karn. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) The curse sent massive repercussions through the meta-reality of the space-time continuum, such that Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart met the Pythia in a dream. (PROSE: Transit)

As astral scavengers
While the Pythia died in the physical world, leaving behind a legacy of magic, they continued to exist on the astral plane. The Cavern of Prophecy in which the 508th Pythia died was a conduit to the Gate of the Past or Future in the astral realm, meaning that she joined her predecessors at the Gate upon death. However, Rassilon shut the Gate on the past, trapping the Pythia and transforming them into vulture-bodied harpies. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) These carrion birds which nested on the Gate had been seen by the Pythia before her death, but she did not suspect their nature. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

Denied their prior domain, the Pythia came to embody the spirit of scavenging. As part of Time's movement, the astral harpies fed on carrion which continually flowed through the Gate from the future into the past, with the 508th Pythia once telling the Seventh Doctor that she fed daily on the death he caused. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) The Fourth Doctor once noted that scavenging permeated his adventures, from Rat Kaisers to Coffin-Loaders to the No-Thing. (AUDIO: Night of the Stormcrow) The Pythia were also echoed in the thorns of Time's roses, which could tear with the intensity of carrion beaks. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)

Legacy
The Pythias' most prominent legacy was the curse of sterility laid on Gallifreyans, which caused the necessity of looms. Versions of history written under Rassilonian rule would emphasize the cruelty of the Old Order for this lasting mark. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) Some accounts even suggested that the sterility was actually imposed by the new ruling order (PROSE: The Book of the War) and that the "Pythia's Curse" had actually been a virus of their own making. (PROSE: The Pit)

The biology of Gallifreyans changed after the end of the Pythian Order. While in the Pythias' time telepathy was common and women were taller than men, both these aspects were dampened in the era of the Time Lords with only a few traces remaining. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) For example, Innocet was very tall in an incarnation with higher-than-average telekinetic ability. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) Romana had the potential to regenerate into a very tall woman. (TV: Destiny of the Daleks)

After the creation of the Moment, Rassilon was reminded of a line from an old Pythian text which went, "In my duty to defend existence I became mortality itself, the slayer of spheres." (PROSE: Pandoric's Box)

The Sisterhood of Karn and Lady Peinforte possessed the remnants of the Pythia's power. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) A Brief History of Time Lords noted that some "forbidden accounts" placed the Sisterhood of Karn as having been at the apex of Gallifrey's earliest hierarchies. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Other universes
In a parallel universe where the Doctor never left Gallifrey, through the Possibility Tree he could see a Gallifrey where "sorcery ruled instead of science", implying a world in which Pythia's rule never ended. (AUDIO: Auld Mortality)

In another parallel universe where the Sixth Doctor led the Time Lords in the War in Heaven, a time dreadnought was named the Blind Visage of the Pythia. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)

Behind the scenes

 * Marc Platt devised the Pythian backstory to explain why Gallifrey appeared to have few women and no children in the classic series. He also viewed the matriarch as being, in some sense, the personification of the planet, remarking in a 2001 interview: "The Pythia was the Gallifreyan equivalent of the Delphi Oracle - she was 'Mother Gallifrey', as opposed to Mother Earth." (DWM 305)
 * Lance Parkin's Executive Action, published in the 2001 charity anthology Walking in Eternity, further clarified the conflict between the Womb-born and the Loomed Time Lords seen in Cold Fusion and mentioned in The Infinity Doctors, strongly implying that Rassilon merely used the Pythia's curse to force societal change upon the Gallifreyans.
 * An early draft of Neverland involved a war between the beginning of Time Lord history and the end. It would have seen the Eighth Doctor wind up in a hospital in the distant past, nursed back to health by a Pythia. (The Audio Scripts)
 * The Pythia was originally to have featured in Zagreus, in the role later filled by the Great Mother. She was removed from the script upon Gary Russell's realization that the story's use of the multiverse meant that Big Finish's continuity didn't need to align with what came before it. (The Audio Scripts: Volume Four) Instruments of Darkness, written by Russell a few years before the release of Zagreus, evokes this earlier draft by casually mentioning the Pythia alongside Zagreus.

Pythia