The answers of the oracles were famous for their obscurity and lack of meaning. They were often susceptible of two or more meanings. When King Crœsus asked of the oracle whether he should make war against Alexander, the reply was: “If you make war you destroy a great kingdom.” Crœsus began the war thinking that he would destroy Alexander, but it was his own kingdom that he destroyed.
The responses of the Pythia were not considered authoritative till they had been submitted and approved by the presiding priest. Delphi was the most famous oracle and became the center of all the Greek oracles. Even the Romans believed in its power.
With the coming of Christianity, the oracles lost much of their influence. Eusebius affirms that Christ put an end to the reign of Satan on earth and thereafter the oracles became silent.
In Greece there were altogether twenty-two oracles to Apollo, which were consulted for various purposes. One was used exclusively for the interpretation of dreams, another for the foretelling of battles, still another was consulted by those who went into the Olympian games to find out whether they would be victorious. At Patræ sick persons came to inquire whether they would get well. At Nysa the priests would take patients and induce a cataleptic sleep, during which the sick man prescribed his own remedy.
It is easy to see why many of the utterances of the oracles came true. They appealed to the superstition of the primitive people, who took the replies as coming from their gods, and tried to live up to them. The will to see the prophecy fulfilled was often sufficient to make it come true.
Napoleon’s Oraculum
This well-known method of telling fortunes is exceedingly ancient, and was a favorite with Napoleon;—hence its name. The usual method was to mark down four rows of dots at random on a sheet of paper and then count them. If the first row had an uneven number of dots, one star was put in the first place, if an even number, two stars were put down, and so for each of the four rows. The resulting figure gave the key by which the chart was to be consulted. It often happened, however, that the questioner consciously or unconsciously regulated the number of dots to suit his purpose.
A more modern and strictly impartial way is the following: Take any book. Hold it tightly shut and stick a card at random between two of its pages. Open the book at those pages, note the first four words on the upper line of the left-hand page. Count the letters in these four words. If the first word has an even number place two dots in the first space, if odd, place only one dot. Then take the second word and place one or two dots in the same way, and so for the other two words. You will thus get a symbol that may look as follows:
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