Prophecy and Possession

It is the shared conviction of most of today’s historians of religion, anthropologists, and biblical and Near Eastern scholars, that the prophetic performance is typically associated with a specific state of mind variably called ecstasy, trance, or possession. That prophetic activity involved ecstatic behavior in ancient Israel was already suggested by, for example, Bernhard Duhm¹ and Gustav Hölscher, who began his comprehensive book of Old Testament prophets, Die Profeten, with a chapter on ecstasy and visions as the common feature of seers and prophets of all times and all peoples.² Only a few texts concerning ancient non-Yahwistic prophets could be referred to a century ago, such as the Egyptian narrative of Wenamun, who gives an account of a “great seer” who becomes ecstatic and delivers an oracle of the god Amon on his behalf to the prince of Byblos (*142); and the story of Elijah and the ecstatic prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18), which Hölscher compared with later evidence of the ecstatic worship of the Syrian goddess.³ The Assyrian prophecies were partly published at the time Hölscher and Duhm wrote, but their prophetic nature was not acknowledged.⁴

Thanks to the much-increased number of pertinent sources, today’s scholars are in a much better position to survey the ecstatic element in the (p.172) ancient Near East, and even the Greek sources should no longer be disregarded. First, however, it is necessary to explain briefly the result of the last three decades of clarification of scholarly vocabulary.

The characteristic features of the prophetic performance can be described from the point of view of the one who performs, indicating the specific state of her or his body and mind during the performance. The words trance and ecstasy, the meanings of which largely overlap in scholarly language, refer to “forms of behavior deviating from what is normal in the wakeful state and possessing specific cultural significance, typical features being an altered grasp of reality and the self-concept, with the intensity of change ranging from slight modifications to a complete loss of consciousness.”⁵ Of the same behavior, also the word possession can be used, but whereas trance/ecstasy refers to the psycho-physiological state of the performer, possession is a “cultural theory that explains how contact takes place between the supernatural and natural worlds”;⁶ that is, an explanation of the ecstasy as a state of being possessed by an external, usually superhuman, agent. This presupposes the audience’s interpretation of the ecstatic behavior as being due to divine intervention, such an interpretation belonging to a cross-cultural cognitive architecture of human mind.⁷ Some scholars would use the related word inspiration as a form of possession implying the belief that “the god/spirit/power remains outside the human body, being satisfied with resting upon it while seizing and subduing the soul of the personality without taking its place.”⁸

Ecstasy/trance and possession/inspiration are not always equivalent, because not all allegedly possessed behavior is ecstatic, and not all ecstasy is explained as possession. However, “‘trance’ and ‘possession’ regularly occur in the same cultural contexts, blending together to form a single, composite phenomenon—sometimes not.”⁹ A widely-used category that describes the characteristic behavior is the altered state of consciousness, which can be used for both the psycho-physiological state of the performer and its cultural interpretation.¹⁰

(p.173) On the one hand, the prophetic performance can also be described from the point of view of the audience, in front of which the performer authenticates his or her role corresponding to cultural expectations of what kind of behavior is required of a person who claims to intermediate between human and divine spheres. A useful term to describe this is patterned public performance¹¹ which, regardless of the degree of ecstasy or possession, is a culture-specific signifier of a culturally accepted behavior, considered as appropriate for the specific role of the performer and serving as his or her identity-marker. By its very function as transmissive activity, the prophetic performance needs an audience, and there is no prophecy without interplay between the prophet and the audience. Therefore, the performance needs to be not only patterned but also controlled: contrary to a common presupposition, ecstatic and possessed behavior, however eccentric it may appear, is not entirely idiosyncratic and random but one that can be recognized and appreciated by the audience.¹² This is probably one of the reasons why the established ritual lends authority to the performance and is seen as its appropriate context.

Terminological clarity is needed first and foremost to enable scholarly communication and to avoid arbitrary use of scholarly language. However, terms like “ecstasy” or “possession” (or “prophecy,” for that matter) are not established entities that exist in their own right; rather, they reflect the ongoing scholarly process of understanding. Moreover, when applied to ancient texts whose way of expression is only partially understood by us, and to which the scholarly conceptualization is fundamentally alien, we cannot expect them to yield easily to our classifications.¹³ Therefore, we have to be careful about not knowing too much about ancient prophets who are no longer available to anthropological observation. This should not discourage us from attempting to understand prophetic performance in the ancient world; on the contrary, the cornucopia of bits and pieces that we have at our disposal should egg us on to put the puzzle together and see what kind of picture will emerge.

Prophetic Performance in Ancient Near Eastern Sources

The standard prophetic designations in the Akkadian language, muḫḫûm/muḫḫūtum (masc./fem., Old Babylonian) and maḫḫû/maḫḫūtu (masc./fem., Neo-Assyrian), are derived from the Akkadian verb maḫû “to become crazy, (p.174) to go into a frenzy.”¹⁴ This verb is used for people who go out of their wits, or, at least, behave in unexpected ways,¹⁵ and it is also used for a highly emotional performance.¹⁶ The reflexive N-stem of maḫû repeatedly refers to prophetic performances, presumably indicating the condition in which the prophets received and transmitted divine words and suggesting that the characteristic behavior associated with the prophets appeared as a kind of “madness” in the eyes of those who witnessed them.

It may be asked, of course, whether etymologies, notoriously treacherous as they are in defining actual meanings of words, tell anything about the real comportment of the prophets. Moreover, one might argue that the use of the verb maḫû represents nothing more than a customary introduction to prophetic speech that has lost its original reference to their characteristic behavior; a similar argument could be made of the noun maḫḫû. That this is not the case, however, is evident, for instance, in the newly published fragment of the fifth tablet of the Epic of Gilgameš, dating to the Neo-Babylonian period. In a previously unknown scene, Enkidu and Gilgameš are on their way to the cedar forest where they are supposed to kill the demon Humbaba. While standing and marveling at the forest, Gilgameš becomes horror-stricken:

• As the cedar [cast] its shadow,
•     [terror] fell on Gilgameš.
• [Stiffness took] a grip of his arms,
•     and feebleness beset his legs.
• [Enkidu] opened his mouth to speak, saying to Gilgameš:
• “[Let us go] into the midst of the forest,
•     [set] to it and let us raise (our battle) cry!”
• [Gilgameš] opened his mouth to speak, saying to Enkidu:
• “[Why], my friend, are we trembling like weaklings,
•     [we] who came across all the mountains?
• [Shall…]…before us
•     […] shall we see the light?”
• “My [fr]iend knows what a combat is,
•     he who has seen the battle has no fear of death!
• You have been smeared [with blood], you have no fear of death!
•     [Be] furious, like a prophet (āpilum) g[o into f]renzy!¹⁷
• Let [your] s[hout] boom loud [lik]e a kettledrum!
•     [Le]t stiffness leave your arm, let debility depart [from] your [l]oins!”¹⁸

(p.175) This passage suggests that the altered state of consciousness of a prophet (āpilum) was taken for granted, and since the ecstasy of the prophet was interpreted as being due to a divine intervention, the same connotation may be heard here, especially since Gilgameš a little later turns to Šamaš, receiving the divine answer: “Fear not, stand against him!”¹⁹

The expression denoting the altered state of consciousness is šanû ṭēmu, which means “to change one’s consciousness.” This phrase is used in a prophetic context in a Hellenistic text to be discussed later in this section,²⁰ but it is also known from Enuma eliš, where its subject is Tiamat who is being compared to a prophet: “She became like a prophet, she changed her consciousness.”²¹ The word ṭēmu means, among other things, “reason” and “intelligence,” and with the verb šanû it either denotes changing one’s mind or becoming mad;²² hence, the expression šanû ṭēmu offers a semantic equivalent to the verb maḫû, giving an even better idea of what is thought to happen when a prophet acquires the proper state of mind: his consciousness is changed.

Gilgameš and Enuma eliš are not the only texts associating prophets with ecstatic behavior. In a prayer to Nabû, an acrostic poem well comparable with biblical psalms, the humble speaker describes his life:

• I invoked you, Nabû—accept me, o mighty one!
• I have humbled myself among the people, I have abased myself to the ground.
• I became affected like a prophet, what I do not know I bring forth
•     (allapit kīma maḫḫê ša lā īdu ūbal).
• I have invoked gods, (being) thoroughly pious.²³

The speaker describes himself as being “hit,” or “struck,” or “affected” (lapātu), as the result of which he brings forth things that are not emerging from his own consciousness. The prayer captures in a nutshell what prophecy is all about, combining the altered state of consciousness with the prophet’s role as an inspired intermediary. The speaker’s “prophetic” state of mind is positioned liminally between the gods invoked and other people among whom he has humbled himself, which may reflect something of the prophets’ social position in the surrounding community.

In the Neo-Assyrian commentary on Šumma izbu, a series of birth omens, the prophets are equated with “possessed men”:

Prophetesses (maḫḫiātum) will seize the land = possessed people (šēḫu) will seize the land.

Prophets (maḫḫû) = possessed men (šēḫānu).²⁴

(p.176) Similar equations are made by several Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian lexical lists, repeatedly associating prophets with people like zabbu “frenzied,” kalû “chanter,” munambû “lamentation singer,” lallaru “wailer,” assinnu and kurgarrû “man-woman”—all devotees of Ištar with appearance and conduct noticeably different from the average citizen; for example:

Thanks to these and other similar²⁶ documents, we are not dependent on etymology alone when tracing the image of the Mesopotamian prophets. The etymological and lexical examination makes the prophets appear as proclaimers of divine words associated with cult performers, practitioners of non-inductive divination, and people whose more or less non-standard behavior, perhaps perceived as “queer” by the majority of the population, corresponded to their roles in the religious community.

The way the lexical lists associate the prophets with other people performing in the context of worship can be taken as indicative of their socio-religious setting. This is also strongly supported by most tangible evidence provided by ritual texts from Mari, belonging to the ritual of Ištar which was the annual highpoint of the ritual calendar.²⁷ According to two texts describing this royal ceremony,²⁸ even prophets and prophetesses feature prominently in it, together with musicians. According to one of these texts, when the king enters the temple and takes his position, the musicians first strike up “ú-ru am-ma-da-ru-bi,” a Sumerian canonical city lamentation.²⁹ After this, the prophet is supposed (p.177) to prophesy and, if he is able to fulfill his task, another canonical lamentation, “mà-e ú-re-mén,”³⁰ is sung. However:

If by the end of the mo[nth] the prophet (muḫḫûm) maintains his equili[brium] (ištaqa[lma]) and is not a[ble] t[o] prophes[y] when it is time for [the chant] “mà-e ú-re-m[én],” the temple officials let the m[usicians] go. If he pro[phesies] (im[maḫḫima]), [they strike up] “mà-e ú-re-m[én].”³¹

To all appearances, the verb šaqālum denotes an unaltered state of mind, a “sober” condition that does not allow for a proper prophetic performance.³² If the prophet “maintains his equilibrium” (ištaqal), that is, fails to achieve the altered state of mind necessary for prophesying, when it is time for another lamentation, the music is not performed and the musicians can go. In the other text, the female prophets and the musicians come before the goddess, and there is, again, interplay between prophesying and lamentation, but the text is too poorly preserved to yield a clear idea of what actually is supposed to happen.³³ According to a possible reading, if the women prophets are not able to prophesy, the musicians cover for them by singing a lamentation; in any case, they are not sent away as in the previous case.

The two texts allow several implications concerning the prophetic performance. (1) Prophets, male and female alike, are supposed to prophesy during a ritual celebration. However, (2) it is taken for granted that they are not necessarily able to do so. This can be interpreted as a kind of “randomizing” feature in the prophetic performance, indicating that the required state of consciousness is not a matter of course but depends on something that is not in the performers’ own control.³⁴ Furthermore, (3) the temporal modifier “by the end of the month” is too imprecise to point at the very moment allotted to the prophet’s performance in the ritual, and rather suggests that the prophetic state of consciousness was expected to last in some form for a certain period of time—if not as an enduring state of ecstasy, then at least as some kind of a “standby” position that precludes the actual ecstatic performance.³⁵ (4) The (p.178) prophets are not themselves introduced as musicians but perform in interplay with them. That their performance is preceded by music may suggest that the music was supposed to trigger or intensify the state of mind necessary for uttering a prophecy.³⁶ Alternatively, the prophecy and the music may together have formed a kind of liturgical alternatim, the music responding to the divine word uttered by the prophet and becoming useless without it. (5) Prophecy coincides with lamentation, which may be taken both as an indication of the specific quality of the laments as triggers of the prophetic utterance, and of its presumed contents.³⁷ It is noteworthy in this ritual context that the “úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi” (also known in an Akkadian translation) is a lament cried out by the goddess Inanna/Ištar who is distressed over her destroyed city.³⁸ As mouthpieces of the goddess, the prophets are probably supposed to commiserate with her agony—something that also belonged to the role of other personnel listed in the above-mentioned word-lists, such as the lamentation singers and the persons with unconventional gender roles.³⁹

Prophetic Performance in Greek Sources

The divinatory performance is a common topic in Greek literature. The impressive body of Greek sources on the oracle of Apollo at Delphi yields more elements than the ancient Near Eastern evidence to reconstruct the enactment of a prophetic oracle. Moreover, while Delphi was the oracular site par excellence for the Greeks,¹⁰⁴ and much of our image of Greek divination is extrapolated from that of Delphi, the oracular activity of the Pythia was not the only type of prophetic performance in the Greek world. In particular, the temple of Apollo at Didyma, in many ways comparable to that of Delphi, enjoyed a high status in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE,¹⁰⁵ and that of Zeus in Dodona, Delphi’s greatest rival at times,¹⁰⁶ deserve to be mentioned as principal sites of Greek prophecy.¹⁰⁷

(p.192) The earliest Greek evidence of prophetic performances may be found in Minoan Crete. Although the Minoan culture does not provide us with applicable textual sources, Nanno Marinatos has recently turned attention to four Minoan images from the sixteenth century BCE showing men who shake branches of a tree and kick their legs, women who seem to be in a twirling movement, and also women leaning on a stone.¹⁰⁸ According to her interpretation, the positions of the persons illustrate ecstatic behavior, and the images depict oracular scenes in an open air sanctuary: “shaking the branch leads to understanding of the language of the tree, and leaning over a stone leads to understanding the whisper of the stone or dreaming a vision.”¹⁰⁹ Marinatos interprets the female figure in the images to be the Minoan queen personally involved in a prophecy ritual. Her office as the high priestess thus included the role of an intermediary akin to that of the later female prophets of Apollo.¹¹⁰ This is reminiscent, not only of the roughly contemporaneous Ugaritic epic of Keret that mentions “a word of tree and whisper of stone,” possibly referring to a royal oracle,¹¹¹ but also of the tree oracle at Dodona¹¹² and Hesiod’s claim of his own Muse-inspired poetic gift: “But what do I care about these things concerning a tree or a stone?”¹¹³ In all these cases, trees and stones “appear together as part of a religious scenario linked to divine knowledge that is normally beyond the reach of simple mortals.”¹¹⁴

The Minoan iconography compares well with the Near Eastern sources mentioned above—both when it comes to the prophets’ characteristic behavior and the lack of any theoretical explication of its communal interpretation. The last mentioned aspect is, however, amply discussed in Greek literature from later times. The most famous Greek discussion on different forms of the divinatory art is the speech of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus (244a–45a) concerning different forms of mania, “madness,” as opposed to sōphrosynē, the “sane” kind of reasoning. Socrates defends the divine origin of mania by referring to ancient sages who defined it as the art of divination; the letter “t” in mantikē is but a tasteless addition of the moderns who think that the divinely inspired knowledge should be replaced by human reasoning, that is, the divinatory techniques (tekhnē) based on observation and calculation:¹¹⁵

(p.193) (…) and in proportion as prophecy (mantikē) is more perfect and august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness (mania) superior to a sane mind (sōphrosynē), for the one is only of human, but the other of divine, origin.¹¹⁶

The first traditional type of mania is the gift of foretelling the future as practiced by the prophetess at Delphi, the priestesses at Dodona, the Sibyl, and other inspired persons who conferred great benefits on Hellas while being out of their senses (maneisai) but less so while in their senses (sōphronousai). The second type of mania is beneficial in curing sicknesses, and the third type is the one that comes from the Muses, inspiring songs and poetry. Plato equates the divine inspiration of the poets and the diviners even elsewhere,¹¹⁷ and it is interesting to note that all three types of divine inspiration can be found both in the ancient Near Eastern documents of prophecy and in the Hebrew Bible.

At first sight, Plato’s typology seems to correspond perfectly to the distinction between inspired and technical divination familiar to us from ancient Near Eastern sources and scholarship. It must be borne in mind, however, that in the rhetorical framework of the passage, constituted by the relationship of the “mad” lover and the “sane” non-lover, all three traditional types of mania are presented as an introduction to a “divine erotic madness” superior to all of them. Hence, the speech of Socrates is not primarily about ranking different kinds of divination but about the necessity of mania in the self-knowledge which is essentially love. Indeed, “divine erotic madness and divine sophrosyne are to be united in the successful experience of love.”¹¹⁸

To be sure, Plato does acknowledge the inspiration of the diviners (manteis) who are not inspired speakers such as the Pythia and the priestesses of Dodona but utilize inductive methods of divination. In his dialogue with Ion, Socrates juxtaposes the diviners with the poets inspired by the Muses while arguing for the divine origin of poetry:

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine; had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away reason from poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses the pronouncers of oracles and holy prophets (khrēsmōdois kai tois mantesi tois theiois), in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves, who utter these priceless words while bereft of reason (nous mē parestin), but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is addressing us.¹¹⁹

No trace of the distinction between inspired and technical diviners can be found here; on the contrary, even the seers (manteis) are said to speak “while (p.194) bereft of reason” like the poets. The manteis were not prophets exactly in the sense that ancient Near Eastern and biblical scholars understand the word, that is, transmitters of divine word by non-technical means. Greek seers practiced divination using technai such as observing entrails of sacrificial animals and watching the flight of birds, but it is noteworthy that even in their case, a successful divination was believed to be based on a god-given insight without which the technai would have remained unfulfilled.¹²⁰ On the other hand, even the Pythia-type divination was understood as a technē, that is, a god-given skill that Zeus, according to Aeschylus, inspired in the mind of Apollo, who was the spokesman (prophētēs) of his father,¹²¹ while Pythia, for her part, was the spokesperson (prophētis) of Apollo.¹²²

The prophetic “madness” finds a mythological prototype in the honey-induced frenzy of the bee maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (sixth century BCE): these semi-divine nymphs had the gift of prophesying but could not prophesy unless having partaken of meli chlōron, which probably stands for an intoxicating mead.¹²³ Greek sources sometimes mention diviners in a way that suggests a characteristic behavior, such as Theoclymenus in the Odyssey (20.351–62), who is said to be “out of his senses” (aphrainei) by the suitors of Penelope because of his interpretations of portents;¹²⁴ Plato’s seer Euthyphro who complains: “when I speak in the assembly about divine things, and foretell the future to them, they laugh at me and think me a madman (mainomenos)”;¹²⁵ and Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,¹²⁶ who claims to be appointed by Apollo to her office, utters an oracle of woe and is seen by others as frenzied (phrenomanēs) and god-possessed (theophorētos).¹²⁷ Perhaps the most important legendary figure portrayed as an ecstatic prophet is the “Sibyl with raving mouth (Sibylla mainomenōi stomati)” who, according to Heraclitus, “utters mirthless things.”¹²⁸ The ecstatic character of the figure of the Sibyl may be modified according to the model of the Delphic Pythia.¹²⁹

(p.195) It is difficult, if not impossible, to judge exactly what kind of “mad” behavior the readers of each of the above-mentioned texts were supposed to imagine. Without an oracular content, the words of Theoclymenus or Euthyphro could be interpreted as quite ordinary speech that for some reason sounded ridiculous to their opponents; at any rate, as far as their words are quoted, they are presented in an intelligible language. But as the example of the poets in Plato’s Ion shows, incomprehensibility can hardly be said to be the main characteristic of a divinely inspired speech in Greek literature. Not only the poets sing by power divine; even a diviner can utter a prophecy in hexameter verse, as does Amphilytus the chresmologue (that is, a collector of oracles) before the battle of Pallese in 546 BCE to Pisistratus, allegedly under divine inspiration (entheazōn).¹³⁰

The Greek vocabulary certainly suggests a specific state of consciousness of the divinely inspired speakers, but it does not necessarily refer to an uncontrolled behavior, even though this sometimes may indeed be the case. What matters is that the people thus characterized are given a role that sets them apart from other people, and the words they speak are given a meaning that implies a divine–human communication. Whether prophets in the Near Eastern sense or practitioners of inductive divination, “both the inspired prophet and the learned diviner fulfill the same role in society as intermediaries in the process of communication between the human and divine spheres.”¹³¹ The essential prerequisite of this role was that the prophet and the diviner could convince the audience of his or her legitimacy, which was always open to contradictory assessments, as the examples of Theoclymenus and Euthyphro demonstrate.

All this should be kept in mind when we turn to the Pythia of Delphi, whose legitimacy was beyond question in the Greek world for centuries, and this is reflected by the host of sources dealing with the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. While not the only available example of Greek prophetic performance, the Pythia constitutes the most thoroughly analyzed case also in modern scholarship.¹³² However, as one might expect, the reliability (so-called) of each source is a much-debated issue, and, as abundant as the references are, substantial gaps remain in our knowledge of what actually happened at Delphi. These gaps cover, among other things, the alleged divine possession of the Pythia. Another debated issue is the authenticity of the Pythia’s oracles (p.196) in verse and the nature of her speech. Here, if anywhere, we encounter constructions, ancient and modern, between the extremes of the “raving” Pythia entirely possessed by the god and the “cool, collected Pythia, mildly inspired by a distant Apollo.”¹³³

The traditional construction of the Pythia’s performance, represented by older scholarship, mostly presents the image of a virgin who,

robed in white, enters a darkened room at the back of a temple. She sits on a tripod, which is positioned over a chasm in the earth. From the chasm pour forth intoxicating vapors, and as they fill her body, she becomes possessed by Apollo. She speaks for the god in an incoherent voice, and her gibbering message is translated by priests into poetic verse that enquirers will be able to understand.¹³⁴

Among ancient writers, the construction of the raving Pythia uttering unintelligible sounds can only be found in Lucan (39–65 CE), who depicts her raging madly about the cave:¹³⁵

…first the wild frenzy overflowed through her foaming lips; she groaned and uttered loud inarticulate cries with panting breath; next, a dismal wailing filled the vast cave; and at last, when she was mastered, came the sound of articulate speech (…).¹³⁶

This once popular image of the Pythia has been largely abandoned by more recent scholarship because it differs from that of other ancient authors.¹³⁷ Plutarch (c.46–120 CE), who himself was a priest of Delphi and probably witnessed the Delphic oracle working in his time, does not portray Pythia’s behavior in such a way. To be sure, Plutarch does relate a case of a Pythia who went into the oracular chamber unwillingly, failed to perform in an appropriate way, and finally became hysterical.¹³⁸ In this case, evidently, the prophetic performance was a failure and did not meet usual expectations; otherwise, Plutarch’s presentation of the Pythia is void of references to her frenzy or incoherent speech.

While Plutarch, to whom we owe much of our image, if not knowledge, of the Delphic oracle,¹³⁹ lived in the period of Delphic decline, his testimony can be said to be valid for his own time but anachronistic with regard to the mantic session at Delphi in older periods. However, Herodotus, who lived half a millennium earlier (c.484–425 BCE) when the oracle of Delphi was at its height, makes dozens of references to the Delphic oracle throughout his work, (p.197) constructing the image of the Pythia in a way that is not essentially different from that of Plutarch, at least when it comes to her comportment. Herodotus’ Pythia is not raving, speaks completely intelligible words usually in hexameter, and communicates directly with the consultants.¹⁴⁰ Herodotus’ contemporary Euripides (480–406 BCE) depicts the Pythia “singing to Hellenes cries that Apollo sounds,”¹⁴¹ without any clear references to her wild behavior or unintelligible speech; the “cries” do not need to be understood as such.¹⁴² The same can be said of the oldest known presentation of the Pythia in Greek literature, that of Aeschylus (c.525–456 BCE), who in the opening scene of his Eumenides portrays her as entering the temple of Apollo, taking her seat as seer (mantis) and doing what had to be done: “For as the god doth lead, so do I prophesy.”¹⁴³

The image of the “raving” Pythia, hence, finds little support in ancient constructions of the Delphic oracle, and the idea of extravagant behavior of a prophet seems to derive only from Roman times.¹⁴⁴ Nevertheless, it is clear that the ancient authors without exception, beginning with Aeschylus, saw her as speaking on behalf of Apollo and under his inspiration. Herodotus clearly sees her as impersonating Apollo when he refers to the Pythia straightforwardly as “the god,”¹⁴⁵ and Plato, as we have seen, attributes the Pythia’s mania to divine inspiration. Lucan’s raving Pythia is entirely possessed by Apollo: “he forced his way into her body, driving out her former thoughts and bidding the human nature to come forth and leave her heart at his disposal.”¹⁴⁶ Plutarch, from the mouth of his brother Lamprias, claims the opposite in his The Obsolescence of Oracles: “Certainly it is foolish and childish in the extreme to imagine that the god himself after the manner of ventriloquists (…) enters into the bodies of his prophets (prophētōn) and prompts their utterances, employing their mouths and voices as instruments.”¹⁴⁷ Nevertheless, even Plutarch attributes the Pythia’s inspiration to a divine source explained in different ways in his dialogues. One explanation is that Apollo does not actually enter her body but gives an impulse to her soul which, combined with the impulse coming from Pythia’s own soul, results as prophetic speech.¹⁴⁸ Alternatively, impulse was given by a daimōn, a disembodied intermediary conveying the divine inspiration.¹⁴⁹ Yet another theory is that (p.198) “the earth sends forth for men streams of many other potencies,” one of them being the “prophetic current and thread” which is most divine and holy (mantikon rheuma kai pneuma theiotaton esti kai hosiōtaton).¹⁵⁰

The pneuma from the earth is identified by many ancient writers as the source of the Pythia’s inspiration,¹⁵¹ and not only hers, but also of the prophetesses of Apollo at Didyma who, according to Iamblichus, were inspired by the spirit rising from the holy spring. For Iamblichus, ecstasy was not as such the defining characteristic but a mere symptom of the divine possession: “they themselves are wholly possessed by the divine, the consequence of which is ecstasy.”¹⁵²

The pneuma inspiring the Pythia is often associated with the vapors coming out of a chasm in the ground, above which the Pythia’s tripod was located. While the existence of the chasm and its vapors used to be routinely dismissed by scholars as a legend,¹⁵³ recent geological investigations have suggested that the temple of Apollo actually stood above an intersection of two fault lines along which three different gases indeed came up, among them ethylene that may cause an altered state of consciousness.¹⁵⁴ While it may be doubted that the chasm kept producing its vapors for centuries, always at an appropriate time, it is thinkable that its existence is one of the reasons for the emergence of the Delphic oracle, and the very tradition of the existence of these earth-exhalations, perhaps together with their eventual appearance, may have triggered the mania necessary for prophesying.¹⁵⁵

A comparable trigger is provided by the sounds caused by bronze cauldrons, doves, and trees that allegedly inspired the priestesses of Dodona¹⁵⁶ and may find an iconographical expression in the above-mentioned Minoan images. Furthermore, the mantic session at Didyma may have been accompanied by music.¹⁵⁷

(p.199) It would be all too rational to explain the prophetic performance at Delphi, or anywhere, simply as a hallucinatory session of drug-addicted or otherwise stunned persons, whose twaddle was then given an interpretation by others.¹⁵⁸ However, this is how scholars have often imagined “ecstasy” or “possession,” that is, as a state of mind which deprived the prophet of her or his intellectual capacity, disallowing intelligible and coherent speech. This understanding of divine possession has also affected scholars’ constructions of the Pythia. If the wild, uncontrolled, and raving image of her is to be rejected, what is the alternative? Joseph Fontenrose agrees that she was believed to be inspired by Apollo; however, he vehemently denies any traces of what he considers symptoms of possessive behavior: “The Pythia experiences enthusiasm, but not an uncontrolled and irrational frenzy.”¹⁵⁹ This construction of the “cool, collected Pythia, mildly inspired by a distant Apollo” presupposes that a god-possessed person is unable to attain any intellectual achievement, such as coherent speech. Michael Flower, again, presents the Pythia as the prime example of someone experiencing spirit possession as the mouthpiece of a deity and indeed entering into an altered state of consciousness—and spontaneously composing hexameter verse.¹⁶⁰

So was the Pythia raving or cool? Probably the most honest answer is that we do not really know. A detailed historical vision of the Pythia and other inspired mouthpieces of gods in Greece remains elusive and we are left with constructions and reconstructions dependent on the ideological, conceptual, and literary contexts in which they are created. As has been discussed in Chapter 3, the received wording of the Delphic and other Greek prophets cannot be taken as their ipsissima verba.¹⁶¹ The texts available to us are the result of a substantial process of communication,¹⁶² the reversal of which is, to put it mildly, a highly demanding task.

One thing is beyond doubt however: regardless of the writer, the Pythia and her colleagues were believed to be inspired by Apollo or Zeus and to transmit divine knowledge to their consultants.¹⁶³ What they said mattered more than how this knowledge was achieved and what kind of characteristic behavior accompanied the oracular event; that they were divinely inspired was crucial, not how the inspiration manifested itself.¹⁶⁴ To all appearances, (1) these (p.200) women had an acknowledged role as transmitters of divine knowledge, especially because (2) “place mattered”:¹⁶⁵ the divine word received in an established oracle site such as Delphi, Didyma, or Dodona was appreciated by virtue of the authority of the temple; and (3) the behavior of the inspired speakers was patterned in the way that it came up to the audience’s expectations.¹⁶⁶ In whatever way the inspired speaker’s mania became noticeable, its existence seems to have been believed by all those who contributed to the construction of her image. It was a god-given skill (technē) to be the mouthpiece of the divine, and persons with such a skill were not expected to behave like anyone else, and certainly not while transmitting divine knowledge.