Oracle

ORACLE. - A divine communication given in specific places (cave, grove, sanctuary and the like) by a person consecrated to the sacrifice of a specific deity and invested with a legitimate mission. It is a form of divination, practiced among various ancient peoples.

In Greek, the most used terms are: χρηστήριον, which designates the place where prophecies are dispensed, and then the responses themselves and even the instrument by which they are obtained, and χρησμός, which indicates both prophecies in verse (in hexameters) and oracular responses. Moreover, a much used term is also μαντέον, which in the singular indicates the place and in the plural the prophecy.

I. IMPORTANCE OF THE ORACLES

Among primitive peoples one is sometimes closer to the oracular form than to the merely divinatory one, since it is generally the constituted religious authority (shaman, sorcerer, priest-king) who draws the oracular response, often from one and the same place; thus, for example, in the Sandwich Islands the king, who incarnates the god, pronounces the responses from his wicker hiding place; while in very many other cases the priest, fallen into ecstasy (v.), is possessed by the god who, shaking him violently, in this way makes his will known: as indeed happened, for example, to the priestess Pythia of the Delphic oracle (v. DELFI).

The 7th and 6th centuries mark in Greece the period of the greatest flourishing of the oracles, which then toward the end of the 5th century, together with the crisis of religion, began their decline; until, with the fall of Greek independence, their importance, especially that of Delphi, likewise fell, also because of the establishment of new philosophical and religious theories.

The oracular style and content proper to certain books (Apocalypse of Istaepe, Sibylline Oracles) of Judeo-Oriental writers, heirs of the ancient politico-religious hatred against Rome, was then used by the apologists of nascent Christianity to foretell to the pagan empire its imminent ruin (v. SIBILLA).

In Rome in the most ancient age one should recall the responses of a divinatory and not oracular type derived from the Sibylline Books (introduced from Campania, according to tradition, in the time of Tarquinius Superbus).

II. SANCTUARIES, PERSONNEL OF THE SANCTUARIES AND METHODS OF CONSULTATION

In Greece, while some oracles never succeeded in possessing a sanctuary of their own (being limited to caves, springs, etc.), others instead, in time, had their seat in imposing and wealthy sacred buildings, such as that of Apollo at Delphi, the Didymeion of Miletus (v. below) and many of the oracle-clinics of Asclepius (Athens, Epidaurus [v. below]) in which, with incubation being practiced, there were adjoining porticoes where the sick, in contact with Mother Earth, might receive the revelation of the god. Originally the majority of the oracles seem to have belonged to priestly families, such as that of the Helloi (or Selloi) at Dodona, of the Deukalionides at Delphi, etc. But in time such families lost their authority, so that the oracles passed to the administration of the cities, which had them governed by their own magistrates chosen by lot. In certain oracles, especially the major ones, there were interpreters of the god, called prophets (προφήτες) or prophetesses (προφήτιδες), who were often direct interpreters between the divinity and the faithful (among the prophetesses the most famous was the Pythia of Delphi), while at other times they assisted the "enthused" faithful, interpreting their disjointed words or acts in order to compose (in verse) the response. If extispicy was practiced in the oracle (as at Olympia [v. below]), then there was also a soothsayer (μάντις). Moreover, certain cities (as happened at Rome with the XV viri sacris faciundis for the interpretation of the Sibylline Books) had official public officials consulted (at Sparta the πύθιοι, at Athens the πυθόχρηστοι).

In its essential features the consultation of an oracle took place in the following manner: after certain preliminary ceremonies performed by the devotee (fasting, sacrifices, etc.), there took place the lustratio of the prophet (or priest), who sometimes drank wine or even blood in order to become intoxicated; then, while the client, having handed over the written questions (on tablets), remained outside the adyton, he entered the cave, the spring, etc., in order to place himself in direct contact with the divinity that possessed him. Then his disjointed phrases were generally collected and interpreted by a priest who composed the response on tablets (famous are those of Dodona). Finally the devotee had to pay a tribute, often leaving (as in the sanctuaries of Asclepius) an inscription in memory of the grace or healing obtained.

Regarding the modes of consultation of the oracles, it may be said that they were as varied as those of divination: 1) water (hydromancy), the agent par excellence of divination, from which the priest obtained the response either by throwing certain objects into it (Epidaurus Limera [Pausanias, III, 23, 8]), or by listening to its murmur in a cavern (Apollo Clarius; v. below) etc.; it was much used in the oracles of Apollo; 2) flight of birds (ornithomancy) was an archaic practice (already known to Homer) and very widespread (Dodona, Delphi, Rome, etc.); 3) examination of the entrails (extispicy), used at Olympia, at Paphos, and sometimes performed on an altar formed from the ashes of the victim (Apollo Spodios at Thebes [Pausanias, IX, 11, 2], Olympia), was particularly widespread among the Etruscans; 4) sortes (cleromancy), a practice well known in Italy (Cere, Falerii, Antium, Praeneste, etc.) where this term was synonymous with oracula (Cicero, Div., II, 33); they consisted of separate letters carved on tablets or dice of wood or bronze (ibid., II, 41) capable, when thrown or chosen, of forming words; 5) fire (empyromancy), in which the soothsayer interprets the divine signs of the flame of the sacrifices (at Olympia [cf. Pindar, Od., V, 13, 9], at Delphi, at Thebes, etc.); 6) incubation (ἐγκοίμησις) closely connected with oneiromancy, or divination through the interpretation of dreams, was practiced in all the sanctuaries of Asclepius, besides in the oracle of Amphiaraus (v. below), of Apollo at Patara (Herodotus, I, 182), of Faunus at Tibur (Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 81; Ovid, Fasti, III, 291; IV, 650), of Podalirius in Apulia, in the majority of the temples of Serapis, etc. The god appeared in a dream (ἐπιφάνεια), or answered the faithful directly - who slept (incubatio) in the temple - in order to heal him or indicate a remedy (iatromancy). Sometimes the incubation was performed by the priest, as in the Plutonion of Acharaca (Strabo, XIV, 1, 44).

III. SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL SANCTUARIES

1. Oracles of the gods

a) Apollo. - This god, who was one of the greatest of the Greek pantheon, lent himself particularly to being worshipped and consulted in oracles, the most famous of which in the ancient world belonged to him. Thus, besides the most celebrated one at Delphi (v.), on the Aegean island of Delos, where the god was born (cf. Hymn. Hom. in Apoll., 115 ff.), tradition claimed that the most ancient of the oracles had arisen, that of Delian Apollo: in it the response was obtained from the living voice of the god, which resounded indistinctly and terribly in the crevices of the adjacent Mount Kynthos (Virgil, Aeneid, III, 60). The coast of Asia Minor had various oracles of Apollo, of which the most famous and perhaps the most ancient was that of Apollo Didymaeus, with a famous temple, near which a spring gushed forth; a priestess, exalted by fasting and prayer and after having bathed her feet and the hem of her garment in the water, mounted the tripod, or circular disk, from which she gave the response (Iamblichus, De mysteriis, III, 2). At Colophon there was the famous sanctuary with the oracle of Apollo Clarius, where for consultations, once the clients had gathered, "the priest asks only the number and the name of the persons present; then he descends into a cave, drinks the water of a mysterious spring, and this man, for the most part ignorant of letters and of poetry, responds in verse to the question that each one puts to him in his thought" (Tacitus, Annals, II, 54). In the age of the Seleucids the oracle of Apollo Daphnaeus was established, near Antioch in Syria, which had its prophetic power in the Castalian spring, whose water, according to some, boiling, gave off a breath that provoked delirium in those present; according to others, it gave the response by throwing into it the leaves of a nearby laurel. b) Zeus. - The oracles of Zeus never had the importance and fame of those of Apollo. Besides that very ancient and better-known one at Dodona (v.), where the god was associated with other divinities, Zeus had an oracle at Olympia (where he replaced a more ancient oracle of Gaea). It consisted of a great altar, made from the ashes of sacrificed animals and sprinkled with the water of the Alpheus. The response was obtained by the priests by means of extispicy and empyromancy. The oracle that could be classified third in the estimation of the Greeks (after Delphi and Dodona) is the one born from a "contaminatio" of a Greek god with an Egyptian one: Zeus Ammon, who had his place of worship in an oasis of Libya, near the famous "Fountain of the Sun" (Diodorus, XVII, 50). The responses were obtained (according to Egyptian custom) by carrying the statue of the god in procession and interpreting its supposed and eventual signs of the head (Diodorus, loc. cit.) and probably (according to Greek usage) by exploiting in some way the water of the nearby spring as well as the trees of the oasis (Silius Italicus, III, 690 ff.). c) Asclepius. - Among his most celebrated sanctuaries are to be remembered those of Trikka (very ancient), of Epidaurus (dating to the end of the 6th century B.C.), of Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates. At Rome, following a pestilence, the Sibylline Books ordered (293 B.C.) that an embassy be sent to transport from Epidaurus the cult of Asclepius, to whom a famous sanctuary was erected on the Tiber Island (Livy, X, 47).

IV. THE SHRINE OF THE HEROES AND THE SHRINE OF THE DEAD

A sharp distinction between these two types of oracle is arbitrary, inasmuch as generally the dead who were evoked had been in life heroes or even seers:

1. Oracles of the heroes: a) Oracle of Trophonius

Consisting of a crevice along the flank of a mountain above the sacred grove and the temple of Trophonius (Pausanias, IX, 39). The devotee, accompanied by two youths, purified and anointed with oil, drank the water of the two springs Lethe and Mnemosyne and, dressed in white, with two honey cakes, descended by a long stairway to the grotto. As soon as he entered the gallery, according to the cautious description of Pausanias (IX, 39, 11) who visited the oracle, he "was immediately swept along by a kind of suction similar to that of a whirlwind formed by the most violent and rapid of rivers. Once they have entered the inner adyton, not all learn the future in the same manner: there are some who have seen and others who have heard. But all return back in the same way and are cast out from the opening feet first." Picked up almost unconscious and terrified, the devotee was questioned, about what he had seen and heard, by the priests, who drew the hero's answer from his account. b) Oracle of Amphiaraus, near Oropus in Attica, where the temple was also erected with a great altar and the statue of Amphiaraus, the famous seer who had been hurled into a chasm in the ground opened by the wrath of Zeus, with two sacred healing springs attached. The devotees, after a whole day of fasting and the sacrifice of a kid, spent the night in the temple (incubation), lying on the skin of the animal (Pausanias, II, 34, 5). The clients who were healed then had to throw some gold coins into the spring of Amphiaraus.

2. Oracles of the dead

They were generally connected with grottoes, galleries, etc., sometimes pervaded by mephitic exhalations from the ground, through which it was believed one could reach the regions of the dead. The prototype of these oracles remains that of the Homeric episode (Odyssey, XI), of Ulysses who, having landed in the mythical land of the Cimmerians (considered by some to be nothing other than the coast of Cumae in Campania [v. below]), digs a small pit in the ground into which he pours milk, honey, wine, water, flour and finally the blood of sacrificed victims (v. 25 ff.), to drink which the shades of the dead, shouting, crowd together in haste; but he holds them at bay with his sword, until the shade of the seer Tiresias approaches who, having drunk the blood, will prophesy the future to Ulysses. The most ancient necromantic oracle of Greece was without doubt the Aornon of Ephyre in Thesprotia, where Orpheus had evoked Eurydice (Pausanias, IX, 30, 6), and the tyrant of Corinth, Periander, his wife Melissa, whom he had killed (Herodotus, V, 92, 7); the oracle of Figalia in Arcadia where the Spartan Pausanias evoked the soul of a young girl he had killed by mistake (Pausanias, III, 17, 8-9). But the most famous road of access to the underworld was that of the Avernus of Cumae in Italy (v. MORTI, mondo sotterraneo dei) where, from the cave sacred to Apollo, the Sibyl (v.) led the devotee to the infernal regions.

Cesare D'Onofrio