ORACLE. — A divine communication given in specific places (caves, groves, sanctuaries, and the like) by a person consecrated to the sacrifice of a particular deity and invested with a legitimate mission. It is a form of divination practiced among various ancient peoples.
In Greek, the most commonly used terms are: χρηστήριον, which designates the place where prophecies are dispensed, then the responses themselves, and even the instrument by which they are obtained, and χρημός, which refers both to versified prophecies (in hexameters) and to oracular responses. Another widely used term is μυστήριον, which in the singular denotes the place and in the plural the prophecy.
I. IMPORTANCE OF ORACLES
Among primitive peoples, the oracular form is sometimes closer than the merely divinatory one, since in general it is the constituted religious authority (shaman, sorcerer, king-priest) that draws, often from the same place, the oracular response. For example, in the Sandwich Islands, the king, who embodies the god, pronounces the responses from his wicker hiding place; while in countless other cases, the priest, falling into ecstasy (v.), is possessed by the god who violently agitates him, thereby making known the divine will: as indeed happened, for instance, to the Pythia, the priestess of the Delphic oracle (v. DELPHI).The 7th and 6th centuries mark the period of the greatest flourishing of oracles in Greece, which then, toward the end of the 5th century, began their decline alongside the crisis of religion; and when Greek independence fell, their importance—especially that of Delphi—also waned, due in large part to the rise of new philosophical and religious theories.
The oracular style and content found in certain books (the Apocalypse of Istaspe, the Sibylline Oracles) by Judeo-Oriental writers, heirs of the ancient political-religious hatred against Rome, were later used by the apologists of emerging Christianity to foretell the imminent ruin of the pagan empire (v. SIBYL).
In Rome, in its earliest age, responses of a divinatory rather than oracular kind are to be noted, drawn from the Sibylline Books (introduced from Campania, according to tradition, in the time of Tarquin the Proud).
II. SANCTUARIES, PERSONNEL OF ORACLES, AND METHODS OF CONSULTATION
In Greece, while some oracles never possessed a sanctuary of their own (limiting themselves to caves, springs, etc.), others over time had their seat in imposing and rich sacred buildings, such as that of Apollo at Delphi, the Didymaeum at Miletus (v. below), and many of the healing shrines of Asclepius (Athens, Epidaurus [V. below]), where incubation was practiced and porticoes were annexed where the sick, in contact with the Earth Mother, could receive the revelation of the god. Originally, most oracles seem to have belonged to priestly families, such as the Helloi (or Selloi) at Dodona, the Deucalionidae at Delphi, etc. But with time, these families lost their authority, so that the oracles passed into the administration of the cities, which had them managed by magistrates chosen by lot. In some oracles, especially the major ones, there were interpreters of the god, called prophets (προφήτης, φοροφήτης), who often served as direct intermediaries between the deity and the faithful (among the prophetesses, the most famous was the Pythia of Delphi), while at other times they assisted the faithful in "enthusiasm," interpreting his incoherent words or acts to formulate (in verse) the response. If the oracle practiced extispicy (as at Olympia [V. below]), there was also a diviner (μάντις). Some cities, moreover (as happened at Rome with the XVviri sacris faciundis for the interpretation of the Sibylline Books), had public officials for interpretation (at Sparta the πύθοι, at Athens the πυθόχρηστοι).In its essential features, the consultation of an oracle proceeded as follows: after preliminary rites performed by the devotee (fasting, sacrifices, etc.), there was the lustration of the prophet (or priest), who sometimes drank wine or even blood to become inebriated; then, while the client, having handed over written questions (on tablets), remained outside the adyton, the prophet entered the cave, spring, etc., to come into direct contact with the deity who possessed him. The prophet’s incoherent utterances were generally collected and interpreted by a priest who recorded the response on tablets (famous are those of Dodona). Finally, the devotee had to pay a tribute, often leaving (as in the shrines of Asclepius) an inscription in memory of the grace or healing received.
As for the methods of consulting oracles, they were as varied as those of divination itself: 1) water (hydromancy), the preeminent agent of divination, from which the priest derived the response either by casting objects into it (Epidaurus Limera [Pausanias, III, 23, 8]) or by observing its color in a cavern (Apollo Claros; V. below); it was widely used in the oracles of Apollo; 2) the flight of birds (ornithomancy) was an archaic practice (already known to Homer) and very widespread (Dodona, Delphi, Rome, etc.); 3) examination of entrails (extispicy), used at Olympia, 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 well-known practice in Italy (Caere, Falerii, Antium, Praeneste, etc.), where this term was synonymous with oracula (Cicero, Div., II, 33); it consisted of letters inscribed on tablets or dice of wood or bronze (ibid., II, 41) that, when cast or selected, could form words; 5) fire (empyromancy), in which the diviner interpreted the divine signs in the flames of sacrifices (at Olympia [cf. Pindar, Ol., V, 13, 9], Delphi, Thebes, etc.); 6) incubation (ἐγκύκλιον), closely connected with oneiromancy, or divination through the interpretation of dreams, was practiced in all the shrines of Asclepius, as well as in the oracle of Amphiaraus (v. below), of Apollo at Patara (Herodotus, I, 182), of Faunus at Tivoli (Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 81; Ovid, Fasti, III, 291; IV, 650), of Podalirius in Apulia, and in most temples of Serapis, etc. The god appeared in a dream (ἐπιφάνειν), or answered directly the sleeper (incubatio) in the temple—to heal him or indicate a remedy (iatromancy). Sometimes incubation was performed by the priest, as in the Plutonium of Acharaca (Strabo, XIV, 1, 44).
### III. SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL ORACLES — I. Oracles of the gods.
#### a) Apollo.
This god, who was one of the greatest in the Greek pantheon, was particularly suited to be venerated and consulted in oracles, the most famous of which in the ancient world belonged to him. Thus, in addition to the most renowned one at Delphi (q.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 oracle of all, that of Apollo Delius, had arisen there: in this oracle, the response was obtained from the living voice of the god that resounded indistinctly and terrifyingly in the crevices of the adjacent Mount Kynthos (Virgil, *Aeneid*, III, 90). The coast of Asia Minor had various oracles of Apollo, the most celebrated and perhaps the oldest of which was that of Apollo Didymaeus, with a famous temple beside which a spring gushed forth; a priestess, exalted by fasting and prayer and after having washed her feet and the hem of her garment in the water, ascended 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 Clarus, where, for consultations, once the clients were gathered, the priest would ask only for the number and the names of the people present; then he would descend into a cave, drink from a mysterious spring, and this man, usually ignorant of letters and poetry, would answer in verse to the question that each person was asking in their mind (Tacitus, *Annals*, II, 54). In the age of the Seleucids, the oracle of Apollo Daphneus was established near Antioch in Syria, which derived its prophetic power from the Castalian spring; its water, according to some, boiling exhaled a breath that induced delirium in those present; according to others, it gave the response by casting into it the leaves of a nearby laurel.
#### b) Zeus.
The oracles of Zeus never attained the importance or fame of those of Apollo. In addition to the very ancient and well-known one at Dodona (q.v.), where the god was associated with other deities, Zeus had an oracle at Olympia (where it replaced an earlier oracle of Ge). It consisted of a great altar made from the ashes of sacrificed animals and sprinkled with water from the Alpheus. The response was obtained by the priests through extispicy and empyromancy. The oracle that might be ranked third in the esteem of the Greeks (after Delphi and Dodona) is that born from a "contaminatio" of a Greek god with an Egyptian one: Zeus Ammon, whose cult site was in an oasis in Libya, near the famous "Fountain of the Sun" (Diodorus, XVII, 50). Responses were obtained (according to Egyptian custom) by carrying the statue of the god in procession and interpreting any supposed signs from its 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 Asius (Silius Italicus, III, 690 ff.).
#### c) Asclepius.
Among his most celebrated sanctuaries are those of Tricca (very ancient), of Epidaurus (dating back to the end of the 6th century B.C.), and of Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates. At Rome, following a pestilence, the Sibylline Books ordered (293 B.C.) that an embassy be sent to bring the cult of Asclepius from Epidaurus, for whom a famous sanctuary was erected on the Tiber Island (Livy, X, 47).
### IV. ORACLES OF HEROES AND ORACLES OF THE DEAD.
A clear distinction between these two types of oracles is arbitrary, since generally the dead evoked had been heroes or even seers in life:
#### 1. Oracles of heroes:
##### a) Oracle of Trophonius.
This consisted 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 young boys, purified with oil, drank from the waters of the two springs, Lethe and Mnemosyne, and, crowned with two honey-cakes, descended by a long staircase into the cave. As soon as he entered the gallery, according to Pausanias’ cautious description (IX, 39, 11), who visited the oracle, he was immediately dragged by a kind of suction like that of a whirlpool formed by the most violent and rapid of rivers. Once inside the inner *adyton*, not all learned the future in the same way: some saw and others heard. But all returned in the same manner and were expelled from the opening feet-first. Collected almost unconscious and terrified, the devotee was questioned by the priests about what he had seen and heard, from which they derived the response of the hero.
##### b) Oracle of Amphiaraus, near Oropus in Attica, where a temple was also erected with a large altar and the statue of Amphiaraus, the famous seer who had been swallowed up in a chasm opened by the wrath of Zeus, along with two sacred healing springs. The devotees, after a full 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). Those who were healed had to throw some gold coins into the spring of Amphiaraus.
#### 2. Oracles of the dead.
These were generally connected with caves, tunnels, etc., sometimes permeated by mephitic exhalations from the earth, 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), in which Odysseus, having landed in the mythical land of the Cimmerians (by some considered nothing other than the coastline of Cumae in Campania [q.V. below]), digs a small pit in the ground where 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 rush up with a cry; but he holds them at bay with his sword until the shade of the seer Tiresias approaches, who, having drunk the blood, prophesies to Odysseus the future. The most ancient necromantic oracle in Greece was undoubtedly the Acheron of Ephyna in Thesprotia, where Orpheus had evoked Eurydice (Pausanias, IX, 30, 6), and the tyrant of Corinth, Periander, the soul of his wife Melissa, whom he had killed (Herodotus, V, 92, 7); the oracle of Phigalia 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 entrance to the underworld was that of the Avernus of Cumae in Italy (q.V. MORTI, world of the dead), where, from the sacred cave of Apollo, the Sibyl (q.v.) led the devotee to the infernal regions.
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