Concept
Oracle
Overview
An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
At that time the oracle at Tegyrae was flourishing; there they say that the God was born, and of the streams which flow past it one, as some tell, is called the “Palm”, the other the “Olive” to this day. Again, in the Persian wars, when Echecrates was prophet, the God promised victory and might in war to [Sidenote: C] the Greeks.
Plutarch, Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II.
The chapter “ON THE CESSATION OF THE ORACLES” is titled for Oracle; names Oracle several times.
Regarding it Xenophon expresses himself (ibid. §§ 3, 4) to the effect that it manifests itself in different ways through oracles, sacrifices, flight of birds, &c., but to Socrates this oracle is his Genius. To hold the future, or what is foreseen by the somnambulist or at death to be a higher kind of insight, is a perversion which easily arises even in our ideas; but looked at more closely, we find in this the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Oracle is; names Oracle twice.
Lastly, to the Prognostiques of time to come; which are naturally, but Conjectures upon the Experience of time past; and supernaturall, divine Revelation; the same authors of the Religion of the Gentiles, partly upon pretended Experience, partly upon pretended Revelation, have added innumerable other superstitious wayes of Divination; and made men believe they should find their fortunes, sometimes in the ambiguous…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
States what Oracle is; opens on Oracle.
Philosophers who discussed Oracle
Related ideas
- Ancient Egyptian religion
- Jesus
- Aphrodite
- Athena
- Hinduism
- Herodotus
- Western philosophy
- Heracles
- Italy
- India
- Insight
- Judaism
- Julian (emperor)
- Karnataka
- Latin
- Sibyl
- Lydia
- Christians
- Lactantius
- Aether (classical element)
- Mahabharata
- Yoruba people
- Near East
- Occult
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Heraclitus.