Wednesday 9 November 2016

THE ORACLE: FROM MAGNA GRAECIA TO SPRINGFIELD

Donald Trump & Homer Simpson in 2000.
The Grandma is on The Orient Express travelling to Istanbul. She's crossing some lands which were part of the Magna Graecia some centuries ago and it's impossible not thinking in our Mediterranean origins. Greece is the beginning of our history. The relation between Heracle & Hermes and the Mediterranean lands is a great evidence and the Greek influence in our culture nowadays is obvious.

The Grandma has been reading the press with the latest news in The USA. It's not a surprise. It's the consequence of thinking only in the economic markets and forgetting working people. It's impossible to read the news without making a reflexion about the paper of the press nowadays: is the press offering information or creating it? The press is acting like those Greek oracles who guessed the future, not because they had magic powers, but they knew what was going to happen.

Today, we have our own oracle. It's a yellow family who lives in Springfield and they have a glass ball to guess the future.


Dodona, Greece
In classical antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination.

The word oracle comes from the Latin verb ōrāre (to speak) and properly refers to the priest or priestess uttering the prediction. In extended use, oracle may also refer to the site of the oracle, and to the oracular utterances themselves, called khrēsmoi (χρησμοί) in Greek.

Oracles were thought to be portals through which the gods spoke directly to people. In this sense they were different from seers (manteis, μάντεις) who interpreted signs sent by the gods through bird signs, animal entrails, and other various methods.

The most important oracles of Greek antiquity were Pythia, priestess to Apollo at Delphi, and the oracle of Dione and Zeus at Dodona in Epirus. Other temples of Apollo were located at Didyma on the coast of Asia Minor, at Corinth and Bassae in the Peloponnese, and at the islands of Delos and Aegina in the Aegean Sea. The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of oracular utterances written in Greek hexameters ascribed to the Sibyls, prophetesses who uttered divine revelations in frenzied states.

In Egypt the goddess Wadjet (eye of the moon) was depicted as a snake-headed woman or a woman with two snake-heads. Her oracle was in the renowned temple in Per-Wadjet (Greek name Buto). The oracle of Wadjet may have been the source for the oracular tradition which spread from Egypt to Greece. 

Oracular inscription on sheet of lead
In Greece the old oracles were devoted to the Mother Goddess. At the oracle of Dodona she will be called Diōnē (literally heavenly), who represents the earth-fertile soil, probably the chief female goddess of the PIE pantheon. Python, daughter (or son) of Gaia was the earth dragon of Delphi represented as a serpent and became the chthonic deity, enemy of Apollo, who slew her and possessed the oracle.

Dodona was another oracle devoted to the Mother Goddess identified at other sites with Rhea or Gaia, but here called Dione. The shrine of Dodona was the oldest Hellenic oracle, according to the fifth-century historian Herodotus and in fact dates to pre-Hellenic times, perhaps as early as the second millennium BC when the tradition probably spread from Egypt. Zeus displaced the Mother goddess and assimilated her as Aphrodite.

It became the second most important oracle in ancient Greece, which later was dedicated to Zeus and to Heracles during the classical period of Greece. 
 

 Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library. 

Henri Frederic Amiel

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