74 Rafacl Karsten. [N:o 1 



is to him not an evil but a most clesirable good, and he men- 

 tions as instances of such mad diviners the prophetess at Del- 

 phi and the priestesses at Dodona, who when ont of their 

 senses have confened great benefits upon Hellas. The ancient 

 inventors of names, he continues, would never had connected 

 prophesy (fiavrixri) which fortells the future and is the noblest 

 of arts, with madness (/iiavixjj) or called them both by the same 

 name if they had deemed madness a disgrace or dishonour; 

 they must have thought that there is an inspired madness 

 which is a nobel thing ^). Plato, although in general he 

 is not happy in matters of etymology, no doubt is right in 

 this case and points out an interesting parallel. 



As a matter of fact the Greek oracles borth in earlier 

 and later times seem to have had their inspired prophets 

 and prophetesses. Thus at Dodona already in Homer's time 

 the oracular responses were delivered by „hypophets" who 

 „lay on the grouud with their feet unbathed" ^) — a statement 

 which has evideiitly reference to the artificial means by which 

 the priests tried to bring themselves into an exstatic state of 

 mind and to enter into a close physical comnection with the 

 divine oak from which they derived their mantic skill. When 

 elsewhere we gather that the priestesses in prophesying had 

 their heads crowned with oak-leaves^), this statement points to a 

 similar physical transference of the mantic spirit of the oak 

 into the woman who acted as a medium. 



The great religions importance of the Delphian oracle, as 

 we know, was due to the intoxicating mephitic gasses which 

 arose from its adytum as well as to its mantic spring Cassotis. 

 Similarly we have seen that various other sulphurous wells 

 were connected with divination and prophesy because of the 

 inspiring power they possessed. That inspiration or ecstasy 

 was essential to the prophetic skill, being ascribed to a tem- 

 porary possession by a divine spirit, also appears from a sta- 

 tement af Maximus of Tyre in his dissertation On the Dae- 

 mon of Socrates. That Socrates was attended by a daemon. 



^) Plato, Phneclr. p. 244. 



■') Honi. 11. XVI, 235. 



') Hermias, the philosopher, in Opsopoeus, De oraculis Graecornm, p. 4. 



