THE Oracles of Greece and Greater Greece are many; but the eldest is that of Dodonian Zeus. In ages past, two black doves flew from Egyptian Thebes: one to Libyan Ammon, the other to Dodona, and each alighted on an oak-tree, which they proclaimed to be an oracle of Zeus. At Dodona, Zeus’s priestesses listen to the cooing of doves, or to the rustling of oak- leaves, or to the clanking of brazen vessels suspended from the branches. Zeus has another famous oracle at Olympia, where his priests reply to questions after inspecting the entrails of sacrificial victims.
b. The Delphic Oracle first belonged to Mother Earth, who appointed Daphnis as her prophetess; and Daphnis, seated on a tripod, drank in the fumes of prophecy, as Pythian priestess still does. Some say that Mother Earth later resigned her rights to the Titaness Phoebe, or Themis; and that she ceded them to Apollo, who built himself a shrine of laurel- boughs brought from Tempe. But others say that Apollo robbed the oracle from Mother Earth, after killing Python, and that his Hyperborean priests Pagasus and Agyieus established his worship there.
c. At Delphi it is said that the first shrine was made of bees-wax and feathers; the second, of fern-stalks twisted together; the third, of laurel-boughs; that Hephaestus built the fourth of bronze, with golden song-birds perched on the roof, but one day the earth engulfed it; and that the fifth, built of dressed stone, burned down in the year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, and was replaced by the present shrine.
d. Apollo owns numerous other oracular shrines: such as those in the Lycaeum and on the Acropolis at Argos, both presided over by a priestess. But at Boeotian Ismenium, his oracles are given by priests, after the inspection of entrails; at Clarus, near Colophon, his seer drinks the water of a secret well and pronounces an oracle in verse; while at Telmessus and elsewhere, dreams are interpreted.
e. Demeter’s priestesses give oracles to the sick at Patrae, from a mirror lowered into her well by a rope. At Pharae, in return for a copper coin, the sick who consult Hermes are granted their oracular responses in the first chance words that they hear on leaving the market place.
f. Hera has a venerable oracle near Pagae; and Mother Earth is still consulted at Aegeira in Achaea, which means ‘The Place of Black Poplars’, where her priestess drinks bull’s blood, deadly poison to all other mortals.
g. Besides these, there are many other oracles of heroes, the oracle of Heracles, at Achaean Bura, where the answer is given by a throw of four dice; and numerous oracles of Asclepius, where the sick flock for consultation and for cure, and are told the remedy in their dreams after a fast. The oracles of Theban Amphiaraus and Mallian Amphilochus-with Mopsus, the most infallible extant-follow the Asclepian procedure.
h. Moreover, Pasiphaë has an oracle at Laconian Thalamae, patronized by the Kings of Sparta, where answers are also given in dreams.
i. Some oracles are not so easily consulted as others. For instance, at Lebadeia there is an oracle of Trophonius, son of Erginus the Argonaut, where the suppliant must purify himself several days beforehand, and lodge in a building dedicated to Good Fortune and a certain Good Genius, bathing only in the river Hercyna and sacrificing to Trophonius, to his nurse Demeter Europe, and to other deities. There he feeds on sacred flesh, especially that of a ram which has been sacrificed to the shade of Agamedes, the brother of Trophonius, who helped him to build Apollo’s temple at Delphi.
j. When fit to consult the oracle, the suppliant is led down to the river by two boys, thirteen years of age, and there bathed and anointed. Next, he drinks from a spring called the Water of Lethe, which will help him to forget his past; and also from another, close by, called the Water of Memory, which will help him to remember what he saw and heard. Dressed in country boots and a linen tunic, and with fillets like a sacrificial victim, he then approaches the oracular cave. This resembles a huge bread-baking pot eight yards deep, and descending by a ladder, he finds a narrow opening at the back through which he thrusts his legs, holding in either hand a barley cake mixed with honey. A sudden tug at his ankles, and he is pulled through as if by the swirl of a swift river, and in the darkness a blow falls skull, so that he seems to die, and an invisible speaker then reveals future to him, besides many mysterious secrets. As soon as the has finished, he loses all sense and understanding, and is returned, feet foremost, to the bottom of the chasm, but without honey-cakes; after which he is enthroned on the so-called Chair of Memory and asked to repeat what he has heard. Finally, still in a dizzy condition, he returns to the house of the Good Genius, where he regains his senses and the power to laugh.
k. The invisible speaker is one of the Good Genii, belonging to Golden Age of Cronus, who have descended from the moon to be in charge of oracles and initiatory rites, and act as chasteners, war and saviours everywhere; he consults the ghost of Trophonius in serpent form and gives the required oracle as payment for the suppliant’s honey-cakes.
1. All oracles were originally delivered by the Earth-goddess, whose authority was so great that patriarchal invaders made a practice of stealing her shrines and either appointing priests or retaining the priestesses in their own service. Thus Zeus at Dodona, and Ammon in the Oasis of Siwwa, took over the cult of the oracular oak, sacred to Dia or Dione-as the Hebrew Jehovah did that of Ishtar’s oracular acacia-and Apollo captured the shrines of Delphi and Argos. At Argos, the prophetess was allowed full freedom; at Delphi, a priest intervened between prophetess and votary, translating her incoherent utterances into hexameters; at Dodona, both the Dove-priestesses and Zeus’s male prophets delivered oracles.
2. Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the Cretans, who left their sacred music, ritual, dances, and calendar as a legacy to the Hellenes. Her Cretan sceptre, the labrys, or double-axe, named the priestly corporation at Delphi, the Labryadae, which was still extant in Classical times. The temple made from bees-wax and feathers refers to the goddess as Bee and as Dove; the temple of fern recalls the magical properties attributed to fern-seed at the summer and winter solstices (Sir James Frazer devotes several pages to the subject in his Golden Bough); the shrine of laurel recalls the laurel-leaf chewed by the prophetess and her companions in their orgies. Daphnis is a shortened form of Daphoenissa (‘the bloody one’), as Daphne is of Daphoene. The shrine of bronze engulfed by the earth may merely mark the fourth stage of a Delphic song that, like ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’, told of the various unsuitable materials with which the shrine was successively built; but it may also refer to an underground tholos, the tomb of a hero who was incarnate in the python. The tholos, a beehive-shaped ghost-house, appears to be of African origin, and introduced into Greece by way of Palestine. The Witch of Endor presided at a similar shrine, and the ghost of Adam gave oracles at Hebron. Philostratus refers to the golden birds in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales (Fragment quoted by Athenaeus). Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms and rain-inducers, is disputable.
3. Inspection of entrails seems to have been an Indo-European mantic device. Divination by the throw of four knucklebone dice was perhaps alphabetical in origin: since ‘signs’, not numbers, were said to be marked on the only four sides of each bone which could turn up. Twelve consonants and four vowels (as in the divinatory Irish Ogham called ‘O’Sullivan’s’) are the simplest form to which the Greek alphabet can be reduced. But, in Classical times, numbers only were marked-1, 3, 4, and 6 on each knucklebone-and the meanings of all their possible combinations had been codified. Prophecy from dreams is a universal practice.
4. Apollo’s priests exacted virginity from the Pythian priestesses at Delphi, who were regarded as Apollo’s brides; but when one of was scandalously seduced by a votary, they had thereafter to be about fifty years old on installation, though still dressing as brides. Bull’s blood was thought to be highly poisonous, because of its magical potency: the blood of sacred bulls, sometimes used to consecrate a tribe, as in Exodus, was mixed with great quantities of water before being sprinkled on the fields as a fertilizer. The Priestess of Earth however, could drink whatever Mother Earth herself drank.
5. Hera, Pasiphaë, and Ino were all titles of the Triple-goddess, interdependence of whose persons was symbolised by the tripod which her priestess sat.
6. The procedure at the oracle of Trophonius-which Pausanias self visited-recalls Aeneas’s descent, mistletoe in hand, to Tartarus, where he consulted his father Anchises, and Odysseus’s earlier consultation of Teiresias; it also shows the relevance of these myths to a common form of initiation rite in which the novice suffers a mock-death, receives mystical instruction from a pretending ghost, and is then reborn in new clan, or secret society. Plutarch remarks that the Trophoniads mystagogues in the dark den-belong to the pre-Olympian age of Cronus, and correctly couples them with the Idaean Dactyls who formed the Samothracian Mysteries.
7. Black poplar was sacred to the Death-goddess at Pagae, and Persephone had a black poplar grove in the Far West (Pausanias).
8. Amphilochus and Mopsus had killed each other, but their ghosts agreed to found a joint oracle.
c. At Delphi it is said that the first shrine was made of bees-wax and feathers; the second, of fern-stalks twisted together; the third, of laurel-boughs; that Hephaestus built the fourth of bronze, with golden song-birds perched on the roof, but one day the earth engulfed it; and that the fifth, built of dressed stone, burned down in the year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, and was replaced by the present shrine.
d. Apollo owns numerous other oracular shrines: such as those in the Lycaeum and on the Acropolis at Argos, both presided over by a priestess. But at Boeotian Ismenium, his oracles are given by priests, after the inspection of entrails; at Clarus, near Colophon, his seer drinks the water of a secret well and pronounces an oracle in verse; while at Telmessus and elsewhere, dreams are interpreted.
e. Demeter’s priestesses give oracles to the sick at Patrae, from a mirror lowered into her well by a rope. At Pharae, in return for a copper coin, the sick who consult Hermes are granted their oracular responses in the first chance words that they hear on leaving the market place.
f. Hera has a venerable oracle near Pagae; and Mother Earth is still consulted at Aegeira in Achaea, which means ‘The Place of Black Poplars’, where her priestess drinks bull’s blood, deadly poison to all other mortals.
g. Besides these, there are many other oracles of heroes, the oracle of Heracles, at Achaean Bura, where the answer is given by a throw of four dice; and numerous oracles of Asclepius, where the sick flock for consultation and for cure, and are told the remedy in their dreams after a fast. The oracles of Theban Amphiaraus and Mallian Amphilochus-with Mopsus, the most infallible extant-follow the Asclepian procedure.
i. Some oracles are not so easily consulted as others. For instance, at Lebadeia there is an oracle of Trophonius, son of Erginus the Argonaut, where the suppliant must purify himself several days beforehand, and lodge in a building dedicated to Good Fortune and a certain Good Genius, bathing only in the river Hercyna and sacrificing to Trophonius, to his nurse Demeter Europe, and to other deities. There he feeds on sacred flesh, especially that of a ram which has been sacrificed to the shade of Agamedes, the brother of Trophonius, who helped him to build Apollo’s temple at Delphi.
j. When fit to consult the oracle, the suppliant is led down to the river by two boys, thirteen years of age, and there bathed and anointed. Next, he drinks from a spring called the Water of Lethe, which will help him to forget his past; and also from another, close by, called the Water of Memory, which will help him to remember what he saw and heard. Dressed in country boots and a linen tunic, and with fillets like a sacrificial victim, he then approaches the oracular cave. This resembles a huge bread-baking pot eight yards deep, and descending by a ladder, he finds a narrow opening at the back through which he thrusts his legs, holding in either hand a barley cake mixed with honey. A sudden tug at his ankles, and he is pulled through as if by the swirl of a swift river, and in the darkness a blow falls skull, so that he seems to die, and an invisible speaker then reveals future to him, besides many mysterious secrets. As soon as the has finished, he loses all sense and understanding, and is returned, feet foremost, to the bottom of the chasm, but without honey-cakes; after which he is enthroned on the so-called Chair of Memory and asked to repeat what he has heard. Finally, still in a dizzy condition, he returns to the house of the Good Genius, where he regains his senses and the power to laugh.
k. The invisible speaker is one of the Good Genii, belonging to Golden Age of Cronus, who have descended from the moon to be in charge of oracles and initiatory rites, and act as chasteners, war and saviours everywhere; he consults the ghost of Trophonius in serpent form and gives the required oracle as payment for the suppliant’s honey-cakes.
2. Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the Cretans, who left their sacred music, ritual, dances, and calendar as a legacy to the Hellenes. Her Cretan sceptre, the labrys, or double-axe, named the priestly corporation at Delphi, the Labryadae, which was still extant in Classical times. The temple made from bees-wax and feathers refers to the goddess as Bee and as Dove; the temple of fern recalls the magical properties attributed to fern-seed at the summer and winter solstices (Sir James Frazer devotes several pages to the subject in his Golden Bough); the shrine of laurel recalls the laurel-leaf chewed by the prophetess and her companions in their orgies. Daphnis is a shortened form of Daphoenissa (‘the bloody one’), as Daphne is of Daphoene. The shrine of bronze engulfed by the earth may merely mark the fourth stage of a Delphic song that, like ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’, told of the various unsuitable materials with which the shrine was successively built; but it may also refer to an underground tholos, the tomb of a hero who was incarnate in the python. The tholos, a beehive-shaped ghost-house, appears to be of African origin, and introduced into Greece by way of Palestine. The Witch of Endor presided at a similar shrine, and the ghost of Adam gave oracles at Hebron. Philostratus refers to the golden birds in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales (Fragment quoted by Athenaeus). Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms and rain-inducers, is disputable.
3. Inspection of entrails seems to have been an Indo-European mantic device. Divination by the throw of four knucklebone dice was perhaps alphabetical in origin: since ‘signs’, not numbers, were said to be marked on the only four sides of each bone which could turn up. Twelve consonants and four vowels (as in the divinatory Irish Ogham called ‘O’Sullivan’s’) are the simplest form to which the Greek alphabet can be reduced. But, in Classical times, numbers only were marked-1, 3, 4, and 6 on each knucklebone-and the meanings of all their possible combinations had been codified. Prophecy from dreams is a universal practice.
4. Apollo’s priests exacted virginity from the Pythian priestesses at Delphi, who were regarded as Apollo’s brides; but when one of was scandalously seduced by a votary, they had thereafter to be about fifty years old on installation, though still dressing as brides. Bull’s blood was thought to be highly poisonous, because of its magical potency: the blood of sacred bulls, sometimes used to consecrate a tribe, as in Exodus, was mixed with great quantities of water before being sprinkled on the fields as a fertilizer. The Priestess of Earth however, could drink whatever Mother Earth herself drank.
5. Hera, Pasiphaë, and Ino were all titles of the Triple-goddess, interdependence of whose persons was symbolised by the tripod which her priestess sat.
7. Black poplar was sacred to the Death-goddess at Pagae, and Persephone had a black poplar grove in the Far West (Pausanias).
8. Amphilochus and Mopsus had killed each other, but their ghosts agreed to found a joint oracle.
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