This book traces the belief in oracles back to Orpheus, the legendary poet-prince, who travelled with Jason, charmed the sirens, and descended into Hades trying to save his Eurydice. Orpheus is one of those figures like Theseus, somewhat historical, fascinating, the subject of 27 operas.
Orpheus may be the first Kristos, 'anointed one,' said to be a pioneer, a preacher (of apparently very persuasive talents), who preached a belief in metempsychosis, forbade sacrifice, murder, or the eating of meat - went against the mainline of belief and was said to have been assassinated during a Dionysian ceremony.
Orphic writings, while mentioned by Plato and others, are lost, but his ideas have come down to us through a succession of Christos -Zoroaster, Krishna, Gautama, Jesus, Mani, Muhammad - not all of whom found martyrdom to be sure: Zoroaster was said to have been consumed by a flash of lighting, and there is Muhammad, suspended between heaven and earth.
The lost poems of Orpheus are said to be oracular in nature and Bakkids and Sybils roamed the byways reciting them. This was before temple building, and one of the earliest of these was the shrine at Delphi. Of course belief in oracles goes hand in hand with a belief in any immaterial and parallel world inhabited by spirits or 'souls' where the future is as clearly perceived as the past. The priest of the shrine - or the shrine itself - provided mortals some access to that other world and its foreknowledge - the ancient Greeks believed.
The author wants to demonstrate, not the truth (necessarily) of oracles but the power of belief in them, and in the attempt to show the influence of Orpheus on oracular belief we must also acknowledge his influence on spiritual or "Orphic religions," and how we have traded an entire world of the spirit for something more efficient but far less 'soul-satisfying.'
Nostradamus emerges somewhere out of the Middle Ages to show that belief in oracles had not yet died. After all, the spirit was still with us in almost universal belief. The author interprets one of Nostradamus' quatrains that seems to presage the Gulf War and Norman Schwartzkopf.
