To be honest, I’ve been a little fuzzy about the Oracle at Delphi. All I knew was the Oracle always had the answers, and if you were an ancient Greek with questions you might have penciled in a trip to Delphi.

Probably not for the name of the winner of the #3 at Churchill Downs, or to pick paint chips for the living room, but something of greater spiritual or military significance.

I didn’t realize the oracle was a human, because my lack of recall makes me functionally illiterate. I visualized the Oracle as something like the light show that the Great and Powerful Oz put on for company. But in reality, or what passed for it in ancient Greece, the oracle was an actual human person through whom the gods spoke directly, and so was rarely doubted. There wasn’t just the one oracle. It was a franchise. Most of the time the oracle was a woman. (Men who claim to channel the voice of God tend to be Presidents or schizophrenics.)

“Oracle at Delphi” sounds like a retirement community (“Oracle Springs at Delphi Creek”). But actually the famous Oracle at Delphi—her job title was Pythia—was just a woman whose home office was in Delphi. There were Oracles at Didyma and at Paphos and lots of other places. We still hear about the oracle at Delphi because she had the best press. Supposedly the King of Lydia did a scientific test of the available oracles by dispatching supplicants to seven of them and asking them all, on the same day, what the king was doing. The Pythia nailed it with “The King is making lamb and tortoise stew.”

There are several possibilities here. Could have been a lucky guess. Could have been she had informants and so already knew the King made lamb and tortoise stew on Thursdays and darned socks on Fridays. Could, of course, have been that Apollo whispered the correct answer in her ear. And when you’re a regular citizen dabbling in the spooky arts, it’s never a bad idea to go with the gods option, just to be on the safe side. At any rate, if you needed a consultation and you had the scratch, Delphi was your market of choice.

The Oracle at Delphi operated for up to eighteen centuries, and no, the same woman was not presiding. There was a whole string of them, like Popes. She wasn’t magical. She did, however, enter a frenzied state when she was busy oracling. She sat on a special golden tripod stool centered over a fissure of some kind—not her personal fissure—that emitted sweet-smelling fumes and put her into a trance.

Speculation has been that the vapors might have been methane or ethylene or the like, gases well-known to produce spaciness and hallucinations and, if you’re lucky, really good advice. It all sounds rather contrived: like, why did this temple just happen to be over some special fancy gas? It’s like the machinations of the Wizard of Oz all over again.

But if you did have a hydrocarbon-emitting fissure on your landscape and people were going into trances in its vicinity and occasionally dispensing remarkably good advice, stands to reason you’re going to build a temple over it. Modern scientists looking into the area discovered some interesting intersections of fault lines that might have accounted for the phenomenon by releasing such gases. Then all you really needed was the golden tripod and some virgins and bang, you’ve got your oracle material.

They had to quit using the virgins because they proved too attractive to some of the petitioners and kept getting spoiled, so later oracles were generally middle-aged women wearing girls’ clothes. The advice was still good and they didn’t need to keep training people up.

That’s who should be running things today.