Pythia by Collier
oracle 1.a: a person (as a priestess of ancient Greece) through whom a deity is believed to speak. b: a shrine in which a deity reveals hidden knowledge or the divine purpose through such a person. c: an answer or decision given by an oracle. ~Webster’s Dictionary
I know I was hanged on the windy tree
For nine full nights,
stabbed by a spear, offered to Odin
Sworn by myself to myself,
Upon that tree that no man knows
From what root it rises.
No bread did they bear to me nor horn handed,
Into the deep I gazed–
I took up the runes, took them up, screaming,
Then fell back again.
~Havamal: 138-39
The way is not without danger. Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yes to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects — truly a task that taxes us to the utmost. ~Carl C. Jung, from commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s The Secret of the Golden Flower
Introduction
By divination we mean the attempt to elicit from some higher power or supernatural being the answers to questions beyond the range of ordinary human understanding. Questions about future events, about past disasters whose causes cannot be explained, about things hidden from sight or removed in space, about the right conduct in a critical situation, about the time and mode of religious worship and the choice of persons for a particular task — all these have from ancient times and in all parts of the world been the subject of divinatory enquiry. ~Michael Loewe and Carmen Blacker
Whether the medium is a priestess, priest, smoke, birds, stones, bones, cards, clouds or dreams, oracles have existed throughout human history as a means of communication with the numinous and mysterious force or energy woven into all that exists. This communication, known in the English language as divination, has always provided knowledge, wisdom, guidance and inspiration to those who seek it. Even in our own time divination continues to be one of many ways in which we can communicate with and be in relationship to spiritual reality as we understand it. It is a medium through which we can come to know ourselves, our life purpose and discover our sacred dream.
Opening the door between our ordinary reality and the realm of the divine has always been, although not exclusively, the provenance of oracles. For oracles carry the ability to show us something we may not yet be able to fully and completely see on our own. They carry the ability to provide us with insight, depth, clarity, and most importantly, knowledge, all of which give us the opportunity to more fully and completely know ourselves, our inner and outer landscapes of soul, psyche and ordinary life. Oracles are in the business of making us conscious. They reveal, hence they deal in revelations, often enigmatic and symbolic. To work with oracles is to be in direct contact with the numinous aspect of divine knowledge.
I developed The Self-Created Oracle in the late winter of 2005 during a time when, in the immortal words of Dante, ‘Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.’ I asked myself, ‘What is really full of heart and meaning for me? What has life been teaching me? What am I learning? How do I heal? How do I live?’ The answers that came were the words and symbols that would become my personal oracle. I crafted an oracle in word and image, an oracle I could continue to use as one way (for there are as many ways as there are people) to connect with my inner guidance, to communicate with my story, my spiritual allies and guides, my intuitive knowing, with the divinity in me.
The oracle I made was founded upon and composed of my life experience and personal symbol system — my inner language, my mythos. These symbols arose from and spoke directly to my experience and helped me discern my work as I journey through life. By using my personal oracle as guide and teacher, I am beginning to know my self more deeply. It is my continual hope that I will be able to discern what wisdom life is gifting to me at any time, a wisdom born of and through my direct experience. It is in this spirit that I share this method with you.
Know Thyself
…life, the condition for becoming conscious. ~Marie-Louise von Franz
You must understand that taking the path of self-knowledge means facing problems like cramps, depressions, deaths, and the misunderstandings and anger of those around you, as if all of these were your own potential power. ~Arnold Mindell
Why know ourselves?
The call to self-knowledge may arise throughout our lives at different stages, most often during the times where we turn — transitional, betwixt and between times. It is at these times we may feel we are not living up to our potential, not fully breathing life into our gifts, not birthing them, not following and living our heart’s desire, not doing what we really and truly want to be doing, staying on the surface, not diving deep, not fulfilling our dreams, repeating the same patterns. Many of us may feel that something is missing or we have really and truly lost the Center on every level of our being. Perhaps we are experiencing depression, grief, illness, despair or misery, all of which are valid experiences and in themselves a call to awakening, a call to know the self more deeply at the most intimate levels of being. It is nature itself who calls to us through these feelings, calls us deeper. It is also the inevitability of our death that catalyses us to choose: will I live or die?
The path of self-knowledge is an important one to follow in our lives if we can stick with it and The Self-Created Oracle is only one of many methods that can help us do that. It is a method in which one has a choice to raise up the shadows of despir, depression, meaninglessness and misery, to name a few, as teachers and guides right alongside joy, hope, light and meaning.
Why not know ourselves while we have the opportunity? After all, as Jung said, ‘Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known. Only a unified personality can experience life, not that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself ‘man.’” (Psychology and Alchemy, 81). Jung also noted “that which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” Even so, the Fates have a role to play in our lives and by creating our own oracle we are called to develop relationship with them. For the Fates are in the business of helping us to awaken, to become distinctly conscious of the quality of our spin, our measure and our discernment. They ask: What is the quality of your weave? What is the life you are weaving? What do you need to see that you refuse to see or acknowledge? What needs to change?
Creating Your Own Oracle
The whole life span of a man or woman is a journey. That is our belief. Ajo l’aye…’journey of life.’ When you are going to start your life, you go through a journey…And if you want to develop on the life, it is a journey. So it is just journey, journey, journey all the while…Alll movements are journeys. We are progressing, we are moving. ~Ositola to Margaret Drewal, Yoruba Ritual
To make an oracle is to take a journey. In The Self-Created Oracle method, this is an inner journey through the map and terrain of your consciousness. What you find there will provide the materials out of which you create and work with your oracle. By creating a personal oracle out of the most charged symbols of our life, we acknowledge our desire to be in deeper, more conscious communication and communion with the numinous within ourselves. We acknowledge that what we love, what we find heartful and meaningful, and what recurs for us all hold keys to who we are as well as to the purpose and praxis of our lives.
Listed below are the steps or stages, the ‘how to,’ if you will, for creating your own oracle. These steps are further elaborated in the sections of this article that follow.
Finding Your Oracle or Catching the Symbol. At this first stage of your journey you set out to find and record the symbols of your life that will become your oracle, the words and/or images that are uniquely your own and special to you.
Giving Place to Your Oracle. At this second stage of your journey you create your oracle. Here is where you write, draw and decorate your oracle, give place to it in physical reality.
The Oracle Book. Once you have created your oracle, the third stage of your journey is to create your oracle book, the place where you will record your experiences with the oracle.
The Work. Now that you have created your oracle and your oracle book, you are ready to begin work with your oracle on a daily basis.
Finding Your Oracle or Catching the Symbol
…the rules and truths must be personal to you. Truth must always be individual, and you will find it from your own experiences and your interpretation of these. ~Simon Buxton
And to find out what we are, we must enter back into the ideas and the dreams of worlds that bore and dreamt us and there find, waiting within worn mouths, the speech that is ours…For all that is lost yearns to be found again, remade and given back through the finder to itself, speech found for what is not spoken. ~William Goyen
In the Self-Created Oracle method each oracle card you create originates from the symbols of your life that you find personally meaningful, symbols that have heightened meaning for you. The symbols you choose become oracles when you make them into oracles, in other words, when you decide or realise that a particular energy has been at work in your life, has heightened meaning for you, carries important knowledge or has deeper lessons for you. You know energy is at work in your life when, whether positive or negative, the same symbols repeat themselves or you are continually drawn to them. For example: you find that a pattern of experience repeats itself, shows up in daily life and dreams; you have dreamt the same dream all your life; you have an interest in something that has stayed with you all your life and to which you constantly return (and you continually experience synchronicities in connection with this symbol). Symbols can be people, spiritual beings, animals, things, places, weather patterns, seasons, sigils, sacred symbols, scents, feelings, moments, concepts. They are not simply words on paper. They are living experiences of the visible face of Spirit.
You know when something has meaning for you. Whatever it is has something to teach you about yourself and your experience of life. When you make this symbol an oracle, you raise it up in your awareness, decide that it will be a more conscious presence in your life. By working with an oracle composed of your personal symbol system, you embrace what is very meaningful to you and that you know has more to teach you.
When we make an oracle using the most important symbols of our life, we are making the decision to consciously open a dialogue with the force of divination. Whether an oracle is a tarot deck, a set of runes, a particular set of stones or bones used by a divinatory priest or priestess from the many divination practices present in our world, all oracles are based upon a symbol system and are embedded with many layers of meaning. By choosing symbols from our personal symbol system to make our own oracles, we acknowledge our inherent seer, our oracular and intuitive abilities and skills and allow them to open the door for us to a place where we can learn and discover what our soul and the divine want to communicate to us. Our ancient ancestors worked with oracles, often through certain individuals known to be gifted see-ers, such as volvas in the Norse tradition and the mantic priestesses of ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, such as the Pythia. Some of these persons may also have worked with physical oracles–stones, bones, twigs and so on–and may have been tasked during their initiation rituals to discern the materials that would themselves choose to become their divinatory tools and allies. It is in this spirit that you are encouraged to catch the symbols of what will become your oracle.
Meditation
Choose a time and place where you will not be disturbed. Enter a meditative state through whatever means works for you such as breathwork, drumming, movement, night-time dreamwork, Buddhist meditation, chanting, prayer, silence). The intent is to enter an altered state of consciousness that is not your everyday ordinary state, a state Diane Skafte calls ‘oracular consciousness’ and Dr. Michael Harner, founder and developer of contermporary core shamanism, calls the ’shamanic state of consciousness’ or SSC. It is important to note, as one of my teachers recently explained to me, that one enters the shamanic journey once once has fully entered into the SSC. In other words, consciousness needs time to alter itself from the ordinary world to the non-ordinary world before one can begin to vision. So allow yourself all the time you need to enter this state. Once you have entered an altered state of consciousness, set off in your inner vision or into dreaming or on a journey to find your oracle. Remember, you are seeking the symbols of your personal symbol system that have proven truly meaningfuly to you in your life. Symbols embodied as words and/or images may arise. These symbols originate from the place(s) in you that hold the knowledge of who you are. It is the place where the Divine or Spirit speaks to you. You may return to this place many times to catch the symbols that truly have heart and meaning for you.
Record what arises. If at first a word appears, an image might arise later. Likewise, if at first an image or scene appears, a word or phrase may arise that captures the essence of the image. Scents, colors, feelings, insights, memories may arise. Record them all. My understanding of this stage of the work is that you are calling your life symbols to you. You are calling who you are to you. You are calling to you what is, in your present awareness, most meaningful to you–and your inner oracle answers. The oracles that arise from consciousness are personal symbols of your inner landscape, your inner language. They are powerful allies for you on your journey toward self-knowledge. Trust what comes. Give yourself permission to know yourself in all of your depth, beauty and grace.
If you experience difficulty connecting with your inner vision or entering an altered state of consciousness, here are some questions you can ask yourself that might help.
What are the themes, patterns or dominant symbols of my life?
What has had the most heart and meaning for me throughout my life?
What is truly my own?
What do I know?
Where am I calling to be working in my life right now?
By what symbols do I live?
What is my inner language or landscape?
What is the personal myth(s) by which I live?
To discover the most meaningful symbols in your life can be a profound experience of excavation. There are no right and wrong oracles. There is only what is personally true, heartful, and meaningful to you. As you discover your oracles, take notes on why a particular symbol is coming up for you, how you relate to it, life stories associated with it, and sketch any images that accompany it. The original reasons for your discovery of a meaningful oracle will become important as you work more deeply with it on a daily basis. Also, these first notes are important for your oracle book, which you can create later.
It is also at this stage of your journey through your Self-Created Oracle that you intuit how many oracles you want in your deck, which can increase or decrease at any time. For example, I have 49 oracles in my deck. The number 49 is meaningful to me from my studies of Tibetan Buddhism, where it is believed that the newly departed soul spends 49 days in the bardo or ‘the place between’ before it is reborn into another body. For me the bardo symbolises the soul’s journey through life and represents metaphorically the place between the death of one way of being and the birth of another. It is a number representative of a crossroads, a liminal space, a turning place, a place betwixt and between and therefore deeply sacred. One of my teachers also explained to me that in her experience, 49 days or 7 weeks is the shortest amount of time to effect a change in consciousness, which I have personally experienced as true.
There are 64 I-ching hexagrams, 52 cards in a playing deck, 78 cards in a Tarot deck. What number is most meaningful to you?
Giving Place to Your Oracle
…put energy into finding out who you are. ~Marion Woodman
Now that you have discovered your personal oracles, and they have discovered you, give place to them in physical form. To ‘give place’ to your oracle is a spiritual concept in which you make room in your life for this work. It also means to create your oracle using pen or paper or any material you want. You are not limited to pen and paper but the medium is useful at the beginning. Give yourself permission to be as creative as you want. Be as elaborate or simple as you want. Play! Indulge!Make the oracle with your own hands, your own energy, infusing it with your life force. There is power in this type of creativity. Your deck can be round, square, triangular, every card a different shape and colour. Collage is also a wonderful medium for creating your personal oracle deck. This is your oracle, your personal work of art, your gift from yourself to yourself. Bring attention, reverence and love to what you are creating.
When I first created my oracle deck, I used blank academic study cards. You can also use blank business cards or special papers found in stationary stores, cardboard or index cards. I wrote my oracle words on one side of the card and drew a design on the other side, which I repeated on all the other cards. I finished by laminating the card with clear contact paper because I wanted them to be protected and last me a while. Cards are an old medium and travel well. How do you want to create your oracle?
Set a time frame for completing the deck. It can takes or weeks but setting a completion date is important so that you can continue on your journey and begin to work with your oracle. If you choose to draw your oracle in pictures or images, a lovely ritual of giving birth to your oracle is to do it over a special number of days. You can use moon phases such as the dark moon to journey to your oracle, the new moon to start constructing your oracle and the full moon to complete the oracle and ritually celebrate its birth into your life.
Once you have completed your deck, you may want to pause and reflect upon your creation. You have given birth to your personal sacred circle or wheel of meaning. Perhaps you put your ALL into it, added pictures, colours, glitter, gave each card depth and meaning, infused life into them, all of which will increase the oracle’s medicine in your life as you work with it. Express gratitude toward yourself and honour what you have created.
At this stage in your journey you might consider creating an altar to hold your oracle and be the sacred space or sanctuary in which you will work with it. To take counsel with the oracle at the temple is an old and revered practice.
The Oracle Book
If you choose to explore your own inner landscape, peopled from your own cultural background and tradition, you should seek to know all that you can about those you may meet along the way, what they will say to you, what symbols they will show you. You need to know the words that will open certain doors and how to address those who guard them. You will need maps. ~Caitlin and John Matthews
Now that you have given place to your oracle, the next stage on your journey through the Self-Created Oracle method is to create a book where you can record your oracular wisdom. Your oracle book is the place where you will record your experiences with your oracle as your journey with it through life. It is your map. It can be a file on your computer, pages within a ring binder, a spiral notebook or fancy journal. If you already keep a journal, you can incorporate oracle work into it. It can be as simple or elaborate as you want.
The only suggested requirement of this method is that there be space for you to record the insights you gain from working with your oracle and that there be room for it to change because this is a living oracle. Also, if you want your oracle book to be portable, take this into consideration as well. Allow your creativity to guide you on how you want to make your book. Put thought and energy into what you are creating and what will work best for you.
The Work
…divination…makes visible one’s destiny, the configuration of sacred powers governing one’s ceaseless transformations. ~Lawrence Sullivan
Now that you have created your oracle and your oracle book, you can begin to work with the oracle in any way you want. Choose one or more cards every day. You can also use well-known tarot layouts with your oracle, such as the Celtic Cross, to gain deeper and different insights. Feel free to make up your own layouts as well. Given will and imagination, your oracle will bless you with experiences, synchronicities, answers, lessons, dreams, and more questions. It challenges you to pay attention.
Pay attention to the oracles you choose and how they manifest in your life. Oracles are energy and working with oracles is working with energy and how it moves in your life. It shows what energy might be ‘up’ on a given day and has a deep relationship to the kind of knowledge and communication that usually appears through synchronicities. Use your oracle as a helpful guide and friend in all aspects of your life. As you use it, record thoughts, experiences, pictures or photographs, dreams, doodles, quotes, favourite books, words you overheard that you find stirring or meaningful, poems, songs, anything that comes up in your life that may be related to the oracle with which you are working on a given day. By being in close touch with your oracle you are in close touch with your soul. In this way the oracle will continually give you more and more intimate and direct information about your purpose, your soulwork, and your location on the map that is the journey of your life. Where and how much you choose to ‘tune in’ is up to you.
By recording your thoughts and experiences in your oracle book you give place to your awareness of your life, the direction in which you are moving, how you are living the symbols that have heart and meaning for you, and the nature of your relationship with Divinity. The purpose of keeping track of how the oracle works in your life is so that you can create your own book of wisdom which, over time, will be composed of your self-knowledge, soul-knowledge, life experience and communication with Divinity. As you choose your oracles over and over again you build your oracle book, drawing upon and adding to this map, well and repository of knowledge, in this way coming to know yourself at deeper and deeper levels. The oracle book is more than a journal or a book of reflections. It is a book of wisdom and knowledge that you create through the symbols that have heart and meaning for you. The oracle book tracks your ‘ceaseless transformations.’
Questions to Ask Your Oracle
As you begin your oracle work you may find the following questions useful in deepening your relationship to your oracle, your soul and the divine. I encourage you to find and explore questions that are meaningful to you but I share these because they are helpful to me in my own oracle work.
What is the meaning and association for me in this oracle?
What is my relationship to this oracle and my experience of it?
Where is this appearing in my life? Where and when has this appeared before?
What is this oracle’s message to me?
What is my body’s relationship to this oracle?
What is my mind’s relationship to this oracle?
What is my soul’s relationship to this oracle?
One further question to ask your oracle is where does this oracle appear in comparative mythology or religion? This question is about amplifying the symbol in your life in order to know how it has manifested in the collective or how people over time have experienced it. Amplification is a concept developed by C.G. Jung. Jungian analyst and scholar Daryl Sharp defines amplification as ‘A method of association based on the comparative study of mythology, religion and fairy tales, used in the interpretation of images in dreams and drawings’ (15, Jung Lexicon). By asking this question of your oracles you are using amplification to interpret them and deepen your understanding of their presence in your life.
On the Passing of Oracles
Some oracles will remain powerful in your life forever. Some will die and others will be born. The Self-Created Oracle is a living oracle: because you change, your oracle changes. As one of my teachers once expressed to me, when you do your inner work and remain yoked to the discipline it requires, you know when you have stirred a symbol or pattern so deeply in the cauldron of your being that you have fully integrated it. When one oracle or the entire deck passes out of your life or ceases to have heart and meaning for you, its work in your life is complete. When this happens, you can choose to let it go. This is not a static oracle; its capacity to be changed is meant to reflect the cyclical nature of our lives.
Keep old oracle cards in a place separate from your living oracles or dispose of them ritually by thanking them for the wisdom they have brought you that has helped you know yourself more deeply. Notes on this oracle made in your oracle book may be kept as part of your wisdom-knowing or disposed of as lessons learned.
Conclusion: Oracular Studies in Our Time
…know thyself in true proportion. ~Inscription at the ancient temple of Delphi
…at every instant, each thought and gesture modifies the invisible weft upon which the Fates weave the patterns of our destiny, which we, knowingly or unknowingly, prepare. ~Bid Ben Bid Bont
The Self-Created Oracle method is unique from other oracles only in that you are the oracle and the maker of the oracle. The oracle is not made for you–only the method and the method is simple. The oracle you create using this method is entirely your own. You are the diviner, the oracular priest or priestess working in partnership with your higher knowing and perhaps your spiritual teachers to find the symbols that have heart and meaning for you. Once created, you have set the intention that the oracle will be the medium through which the Divine speaks to you and dialogues with you. When you work with your oracle, you journey to your inner temple of self-knowing to find knowledge, answers, sanctuary, understanding, purification, healing, wisdom, on a daily basis. When one works within the sanctum of one’s own patterns, symbols and experience, one continually brings what is unconscious to light. In this way one remains conscious, connected to soul and aligned with life purpose. There is no better advisor for your life than You (although from time to time of course we do need other guidance). In this method you have the opportunity, as one of my teachers once expressed eloquently to me, ‘to work out your own salvation’ with the guidance and assistance of the Divine.
We will never known whether or not the Pythia (who, before she spoke for Apollo, first spoke as Delphine for the most ancient of oracles, Ge or Earth) ever uttered the words know thyself. We do know that many famous orators and wise people from the ancient world were credited with uttering these words. What is important is that the phrase has true meaning then and it has true meaning now, which is to say that we can learn from it, gain good and helpful knowledge from it as we journey through life. These words arose from an ancient world in which oracles, their priestesses, personnel and institutions were as beloved and powerful as our own sacred sanctuaries are today (and just as filled with intrigue!). Hence, these words arose from a people who accepted and truly knew the spiritual reality of oracles and their capacity to give knowledge. Oracle centres were places where the divine god or goddess dwelt in the forms in which they were understood, perceived and accepted in the heart-minds of our ancestors.
Like those ancient peoples, many of us also desire communication with the Divine and perhaps to know ourselves to the fullest extent possible while we experience human life. The greater purpose of creating an oracle that is truly your own is to create the space otu of your own personal experience where open communication with the deeper god or goddess within can occur, a place where we are heard and where we listen deeply. It is a way of giving place in physical form to the Mystery, to that aspect of our being that knows and holds our deeper meaning. By creating your own oracle out of the personal symbols that have heart and meaning for you (in effect, from your own body) you allow yourself to develop relationship to this Mystery, this Divine, your soul, the place in you that knows, and give yourself permission to receive guidance and counsel as you journey through life. This method was developed to help you take YOU as ‘the most serious of tasks,’ as Jung once wrote.
The Self-Created Oracle is a method that can help you come to know yourself. It is one way among many in which one can study oracles and oracular methods in our own time through personal experience. I hope you will benefit from it and find your own oracle to be good medicine in your life, a powerful ally, and a helpful, joyful, insightful and practical tool.
Bibliography, References, Further Reading
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Aswynn, Freya. Northern Mysteries and Magick: Runes, Gods, and Feminine Powers. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2006.
Aune, David. “Greco-Roman Prophecy: Oracular Places and Persons.” Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983. 23-48.
——-. “The Form and Function of Greco-Roman Oracles.” Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. 49-79.
Bouthillier, Narelle. “Reconstructing the Pythia through Plutarch’s The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse and The Obsolescence of Oracles.” Unpublished paper. Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, January 2004.
Buxton, Simon. The Shamanic Way of the Bee. Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2005.
Collin, Rodney. The Theory of Celestial Influence: Man, the Universe and Cosmic Mystery. London: Penguin Arkana, 1954.
Corbin, Henri. “Mundus Imaginalis: or, The Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Located at www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm.
Danfulani, Umar Habila Daden. “Pa Divination: Ritual Performance among the Ngas, Mupun, and Mwaghawl of the Jos Plateau, Nigeria.” In African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions. Ed. by Jacob K. Olupona. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000. 87-111.
Drewal, Margaret Thompson. “The Ontological Journey.” In Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Goyen, William. The House of Breath. New York: Persea Books, 1986.
Hedsel, Mark, with David Ovason. The Zelator: A Modern Initiate Explores the Ancient Mysteries. London: Century Books, 1998.
Hemenway, Priya. Divine Proportion: PHI in Art, Nature & Science. New York: Sterling Publishers, 2005.
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1992.
——-. “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams.” In The Undiscovered Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
——-. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Keller, Mary. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Green, Gene L. “‘As For Prophecies, They WillCome to an End’: 2 Peter, Paul and Plutarch on ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles.’” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82 (2001). 107-122.
Loewe, Michael and Carmen Blacker, eds. Oracles and Divination. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1981.
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Plutarch. “The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse.” Moralia, vol. 5. Trans by Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1927, 394-409, pp. 259-345.
——-. “The Obsolescence of Oracles.” Moralia, vol 5. Trans by Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1927, 410-438, pp 351-501.
Price, Simon. “Delphi and Divination.” In P. Easterling and J.V. Muir, eds., Greek Religion and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 170-206.
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Roob, Alexander. Alchemy and Mysticism. Germany: Taschen, 2006.
Sharp, Daryl. Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 1991.
Skafte, Diane. When Oracles Speak: Understanding the Signs and Symbols All Around Us. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2000.
Sullivan, Erin. Saturn in Transit. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 2000.
Sullivan, Lawrence. Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
von Franz, Marie-Louise. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1995.
