Oracles
Typology
Gianmarco Cristofari:
"There are oracles of place (Delphi), of the body (shamans), of objects (bones and tablets), of text (I Ching), and of time (Mayan calendars)."
(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-59-machinic-pastoral-power?)
History
Gianmarco Cristofari:
"I personally remember the Greek oracles. The oracle of Delph was a Panhellenic institution located on the slopes of Parnassus. The priestess, Pythia, sat on a tripod and answered in an ecstatic state delivering pronouncements in ambiguous and poetic form; so much so that the poor Croesus attacked Persia after learning that, once he crossed the river Halys, he would destroy a great empire. However, the empire destroyed turned out to be his own. I was fascinated by the oracle of Dodona, associated with Zeus and Dione, more everyday in character. It spoke through the rustling of the leaves of a sacred oak, to which travelers addressed lead tablets with questions about children or marriages and trade. Alexander the Great himself, after the conquest of Egypt, consulted the oracle of Amun, crossing the desert to receive confirmation of his divine descent.
The Chinese oracles also catch my attention. In the Shang dynasty, during the second millennium before Christ, divination was practiced using oracle bones and turtle shells which now remains as the earliest evidence of Chinese writing. Cavities were first carved into the bone, then heated to interpret the resulting cracks, with questions and answers finally inscribed on the surface. The king himself played a central role in divination, and the questions concerned the administration of the kingdom and military expeditions. Then there is the famous I Ching, a divinatory text based on 64 hexagrams composed of solid and broken lines representing dynamic combinations of yin and yang: used by officials and philosophers, it still serves to understand the qualities of the moment and to grasp the symbolic structure of a situation. I consulted it for the occasion: it told me 62, “preponderance of the small”. The list of oracles could go on."
(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-59-machinic-pastoral-power?)