Of organised oracles the earliest was no doubt the earth oracle, and the part played in the ceremonial by natural fissures, springs, and trees probably grew out of their close connection with the earth. The most famous oracle of antiquity, that of Delphi, was situated at the opening of a natural cleft in the rock, believed to be at the very centre of the earth, and was originally presided over by the great earth-mother, Gaia, the subordinate part played by the laurel which once grew near the cleft being expressed by the legend that Daphne was the daughter and priestess of Gaia.[203] The procedure at another famous oracle, that of Trophonius at Lebadea, near Mount Helicon in Boeotia, was distinctly modelled on the idea of a descent into the under-world,[204] the suppliant obtaining his answer in a cave, where his experiences were so terrible that he never smiled again; whence it came to be said of any particularly lugubrious individual that he had consulted the oracle of Trophonius. A still more striking illustration of the antiquity of this conception is found in the account of the initiation of an augur given on a Babylonian tablet in the British Museum. The candidate is there made to descend into an artificial imitation of the lower world, where he beholds “the altars amidst the waters, the treasures of Anu, Bel, and Ea, the tablets of the gods, the delivering of the oracle of heaven and earth, and the cedar-tree, the beloved of the great gods.”[205] Here the earth-oracle and the tree-oracle are seen in very early conjunction; but the belief in the divine power inherent in the tree can be traced still farther back, for in a bilingual text of much earlier date we read of “the cedar-tree, the tree that shatters the power of the incubus, upon whose core is recorded the name of Ea,” i.e. the god of wisdom.[206]
The idea of the tree-oracle was familiar to other branches of the Semitic race, and is expressed in their common tradition of a tree of knowledge. Several allusions to oracular trees are met with in the Old Testament. That Jehovah should speak to Moses out of the burning-bush, if not to be regarded as a case in point, was at any rate quite in conformity with surrounding tradition, for there is no doubt that the belief in trees as places of divine revelation was very prevalent in Canaan. The famous holy tree near Shechem, called the tree of the soothsayers in Judges ix. 37, and the tree or trees of the revealer in Genesis xii. 6 and Deuteronomy xi. 30, must have been the seat of a Canaanite tree-oracle.[207] The prophetess Deborah gave her responses under a palm near Bethel, which, according to sacred tradition, marked the grave of the nurse of Rachel. And David, when he inquired of the Lord as to the right moment for attacking the Philistines, received the signal in “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees.”[208] The ashêra or artificial tree in which the deity was supposed to dwell also appears to have been used by the Canaanites for the purposes of divination, a practice probably alluded to in the rebuke of the prophet, “My people ask counsel at their stock, and their staff declareth unto them.”[209]
But by far the most striking instance of a tree-oracle, and perhaps one may even say the most signal vestige of the primitive tree-worship, was the oracle of the Pelasgic Zeus at Dodona in Epirus. Here in a grove of oaks there was a very ancient tree, believed to be the actual seat of the deity, whose responses were interpreted from the rustling of its branches, from the murmur of the sacred spring which welled forth at its foot, or from the drawing of the oracle lots kept in an urn beneath it. The origin of the oracle is lost in prehistoric gloom; probably it existed earlier than the worship of Zeus himself. Homer makes Ulysses visit it,[210] and Hesiod states that Zeus dwelt there in the trunk of a tree.[211] Herodotus affirms, on the testimony both of the priestesses of Dodona and of the Egyptian priests at Thebes, that the oracle was introduced from Egypt, and adds that the manner in which oracles were delivered at Thebes and at Dodona was very similar. The priests at Thebes told him that two women employed in their temple had been captured by Phoenicians, and sold the one into Libya, the other to the Greeks; the former established the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan desert, the latter that of Dodona. In the account given him by the Dodonaean priestesses, it was asserted that the oracles were founded by two black pigeons from Thebes.[212] We know from other sources that the oracle of Zeus-Ammon was vested in an ancient tree (γεράνδρυον).[213] But whatever may have been its origin there is no doubt that the oracle of Dodona had a long and active career, continuing for close upon two thousand years. Silius Italicus, towards the end of the first century A.D., reiterates the statement of Hesiod that the deity at Dodona occupied a tree;[214] Pausanias a hundred years later found the tree still green and flourishing,[215] and Philostratos about the same time saw it adorned with wreaths and sacred fillets, “because, like the Delphic tripod, it gave forth oracles.”[216] A later writer states that the oracular voices ceased on the felling of the tree by a certain Illyrian bandit,[217] but there is evidence that the tree and the oracle were still in existence in the middle of the fourth century A.D. These ancient testimonies to the importance of the oracle have been marvellously corroborated by the discovery in the course of recent excavations of a large number of leaden tablets inscribed with the questions addressed to the god by his votaries, and dating from 400 B.C. onwards.[218]
According to classical mythology, the oracular virtue of the famous oak of Dodona was not only transmitted to its offshoots, but even preserved in the dead wood after its separation from the tree. Ovid, in relating the story of the plague of Aegina, tells how Aeacus, standing beneath
A branching oak, the Sire’s own tree, from seed
Of old Dodona sprung,
calls upon Zeus to repeople his stricken kingdom, and fill his desolate walls anew with citizens as numerous as the ants at his feet.
Not a breath
Was stirring, but the branches shook, the leaves
With rustling murmur waved.