ORACLE, a special place where a deity is supposed to give a response, by the mouth of an inspired priest, to the enquiries of his votaries, or the actual response. (Lat. oraculurn, from orare, to speak ; the corresponding Greek word isgavrelov or xpnarhptov.) (See DIVINATION, MAGIC, OMENS.) The whole question of oracles is bound up with that of magic. They are commonly found in the earlier stages of religious culture among different nations. But it is as an ancient Greek institution that they are most in teresting historically.
A characteristic feature of Greek religion which distinguishes it from many other systems of advanced cult was the wide prevalence of a ritual of divination and the prominence of certain oracular centres which were supposed to give voice to the will of Providence. In the Greek world the methods of divination were of great variety, but nearly all can be traced among other communities, primitive and advanced, ancient and modern. The most obvious and useful classification of them is that of which Plato was the author, who distinguishes between (a) the "sane" form of divination and (b) the ecstatic, enthusiastic or "insane" form (Phaedrus p. 244). The first method appears to be cool and scientific, the diviner (,zetvrts) interpreting certain signs ac cording to fixed principles of interpretation. The second is worked by the prophet, shaman or Pythoness, who is possessed and over powered by the deity, and in temporary frenzy utters mystic speech under divine suggestion. To these we may add a third form (c) divination by communion with the spiritual world in dreams or through intercourse with the departed spirit : this resembles class (a) in that it does not necessarily involve ecstasy, and class (b) in that it assumes immediate rapport with some spiritual power.
We may subdivide the methods that fall under class (a) ac cording as they deal with the phenomena of the animate or the inanimate world; although this distinction would not be relevant in the period of primitive animistic thought. The Homeric poems attest that auguries from the flight and actions of birds were commonly observed in the earliest Hellenic period as they oc casionally were in the later, but we have little evidence that this method was ever organized as it was at Rome into a regular system of state-divination, still less of state-craft. We can only quote the passage in the Antigone where Sophocles describes the method of Teiresias, who keeps an aviary where he studies and interprets the flight and the cries of the birds; it is probable that the poet was aware of some such practice actually in vogue. But
normally the Greek augur drew omens from the cries or actions of some bird or beast casually met with (as Horn. 11. )(Hi. 521; Aesch. Agam. 109; Serv. Virg. Aen. iv. 377; Paus. ii. 19. 3) ; it is very rare to find such omens habitually consulted in any public system of divination sanctioned by the State. We hear of a shrine of Apollo at Sura in Lycia (Steph. Byz. s.v. l'apa, Plutarch, De sollert. anim. p. 976 c; Ael. Nat. anim. xii. i) where omens were taken from the movements of the sacred fish that were kept there in a tank; and again of a grove consecrated to this god in Epirus, where tame serpents were kept, and fed by a priestess, who could predict a good or bad harvest according as they ate heartily or came willingly to her or not (Ael. Nat. anim. xi. 2).
But the method of animal divination that was most in vogue was the inspection of the inward parts of the victim offered upon the altar, and the interpretation of certain marks found there according to a conventional code. A conspicuous example of an oracle organized on this principle was that of Zeus at Olympia, where soothsayers of the family of the Iamidae prophesied partly by the inspection of entrails, partly by the observation of certain signs in the skin when it was cut or burned (Schol. Pind. 01. 6. I I I). Another less familiar procedure that belongs to this sub division is that which was known as divination bat ancoblwv, which might sometimes have been the cries of birds, but in an oracle of Hermes at the Achaean city of Pharae were the casual utterances of men. Pausanias (VII. 22. 2) tells us how this was worked. The consultant came in the evening to the statue of Hermes in the market-place that stood by the side of a hearth altar to which bronze lamps were attached ; having kindled the lamps and put a piece of money on the altar, he whispered into the ear of the statue what he wished to know; he then departed, closing his ears with his hands, and whatever human speech he first heard after withdrawing his hands he took for a sign. The same custom seems to have prevailed at Thebes in a shrine of Apollo, and in the Olympian oracle of Zeus (Farnell, Cults iv. 221).