mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Jaynes on Oracles Julian Jaynes wrote of the oracle at Delphi: The replies to questions were given at once, without any reflection, and uninterruptedly. The exact manner of her announcements is still debated, whether she was seated on a tripod, regarded as Apollo's ritual seat, or simply stood at an entrance to a cave. But the archaic references to her, from the fifth century on, all agree with the statement of Heraclitus that she spoke "from her frenzied mouth and with various contortions of her body." She was entheos, plena deo. Speaking through his priestess, but always in the first person, answering king or freeman, 'Apollo' commanded sites for new colonies (as he did for presentday Istanbul), decreed which nations were fiiends, which rulers best, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues or famines, the best trade routes, which of the proliferation of new cults, or music, or art should be recognized as agreeable to Apollo - all decided by these girls with their frenzied mouths. Truly, this is astonishing! We have known of the Delphic Oracle so long from school texts that we coat it over with a shrugging usualness when we should not. How is it conceivable that simple rural girls could be trained to put themselves into a psychological state such that they could make decisions at once that ruled the world? The obdurate rationalist simply scoffs plena deo indeed! Just as the mediums of our own times have always been exposed as frauds, so these so-called oracles were really performances manipulated by others in front of an illiterate peasantry for political or monetary ends. But such a realpolitik attitude is doctrinaire at best. Possibly there was some chicanery in the oracle's last days, perhaps some bribery of the prophetes, those subsidiary priests or priestesses who interpreted what the oracle meant. But earlier, to sustain so massive a fraud for an entire millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had yet known is impossible, just impossible. Nor can it gibe with the complete absence of criticism of the oracle until the Roman period. Nor with the politically wise and often cynical Plato reverently calling Delphi "the interpreter of religion to all mankind." Here, Jaynes stops just short of the real $64,000 question: How could anybody sustain so massive an institution for an entire millennium through the most brilliant intellectual civilization the world had yet known, OTHER THAN WITH REAL INFORMATION? , That's a hell of a thought, isn't it? Could somebody like Joan of Arc possibly be receiving real information from her "voices"? I would only be guessing, but my guess would be as follows: that unlike our own age in which we know the spiritual realm only through faith, the true antediluvian age was one in which real lines of communication existed. I would also guess that, in our age (i.e. during the last 2600 years or so) if somebody on the other side with sufficient authorization to try such a thing wished badly enough to provide a French maiden with the information needed to confound the English or some other group of malefactors, he/she might attempt it, but there is no guarantee that it would work, or that it would keep on working if it worked once or twice; it would be like trying to communicate over an unreliable telephone connection (which might finally break down altogether). Moreover, for it to even work once or twice, the girl would have to be special , a throwback of sorts. Most of us could no more receive such a signal should it come to us, than a non-special ostrich could fly were gravity lowered to the point at which he might attempt it. Our faculties for receiving such information, like the wings of the ostrich, are vestigial.