Ancient Prophecies: A Brief Intro (long)

[Megan]

No: HPFGUIDX 128215

There is a lot of talk going on about the Prophecy and WHAT DOES IT 
MEAN? So I decided to look up information about the Oracle at Delphi 
and about the prophecies that occurred there and see if it will help 
us decipher Jo.

Delphi was the center of the Grecian "spiritual life." Commoners, 
Kings and everyone in between traveled to Delphi speak and advice 
them on said problem. They HAD to consult the oracle on even the 
tiniest of matters of risk offending the Gods.

For the Prophecy to happen, the priestess would enter a small chamber 
and sit on a 3-tiered stand above a pit. She would then fall into a 
trance (they have found an ancient fault line below the temple that 
spews gasses) and makes the Prophecy. A priest then reads it aloud 
with no inflections and writes it down, with NO PUNCUATION, and hands 
it to the recipient. It is then up to the recipient to infer what 
he/she wants from the words. When I went to Delphi last summer, I 
remember the tour guide also mention "The Speaking Waters". The 
priestess would also drink from water from the ground before making 
Prophecies.

Here is an example from a website I found talking about prophecies 
and the Oracle at Delphi:

"`You will go you will return not in the battle you will perish' was 
an example of this duality of meaning. The above sentence can be 
interpreted two different ways depending where the comma can be 
placed. If a comma is placed after the word `not' the message is 
discouraging for him who is about to depart for war. If on the other 
hand the comma is placed before the word `not', then the warrior is 
to return alive."

However the recipient read into it was the meaning of the Prophecy. 
Look at the story of Oedipus, if he would have stayed where he was, 
he would have never killed his father and married his mother. He did 
not have all the facts, just as LV did not. He made a judgment call 
from the knowledge he had and believed the course of action he 
followed to be correct. You would dare NEVER to oracle and therefore 
the gods. 

Jo probably did a little research on this and thus meant to trick us 
on purpose. On another note, Sybil was the name given to many 
priestesses at Delphi. Here is an interesting quote in the ancient 
Sybils that might (or might not- I am wrong a lot) give us insight 
into our own WW Sybil:

'The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, 
unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her 
voice by aid of the god.' (Heraclitus, fragment 12) 

Either way Jo wrote the Prophecy to be, LV made a choice with the 
knowledge he had. Had he heard the whole thing and if we have heard 
the whole thing is not necessarily the issue: LV and many of us have 
made a call on what we think it means. Now all we can do is wait and 
see how Book 6 and 7 pans out.


Here are the links to the quotes within the post:
1) http://www.ancient-greece.org/history/delphi.html
2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl


*Megan goes back to Drinking her glass of water and hopes for another 
trance-like state*


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