Delphi and the road to it. The Oracle and the Horseradish

Delphi is the mountainous site where heaven and earth were said to meet, the center of the world, and where the Oracle foresaw the future.

Delphi oracle and horseradish.

The Oracle also dealt with mundane matters:  The Oracle told Apollo, god of the sun, something like this:  That the radish is worth its weight in lead; the beet its weight in silver; and the horseradish its weight in gold. See The Big Book of Herbs, by Arthur O. Tucker and Thomas DeBaggio, Interweave Press, 2000 (as reported in the New York Times somewhere, didn't write down the cite properly). See it at ://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=The+Big+Book+of+Herbs&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=10638887543693337901&ei=q_q9S6DWO4OClAfonaXdBg&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBsQ8wIwBA#ps-sellers/
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Its story, Delphi in its glorious past,  is told well at www.greecetravel.com/delphi. For a photo gallery, here are some signposts: see www.galenfrysinger.comdelphi, and www.in2greece.com/english/places/historical/mainland/delphi.

Delphi is a World Heritage Site. See sacredsites.com/europe/greece/tholos_temple_delphi.

Delphi, Greece











Getting to Delphi:  Delphi plants.  Find broom, poppies, a flowering pink bush. Surprising color in the dry.
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Delphi, view of landscape, Greece












Is there any culture that has not tried to foretell? Individuals came to Delphi for that purpose. What about Nostradamus? Did he ever do individual prophecies,as did the Oracles?

What makes an oracle different from a soothsayer, a fortune teller? Search on those.

A good overview on oracle-ing is at www.en.wikipedia.org, under Oracle. There is another section there for the specific Oracle at Delphi.

This source suggests that part of the mystique of Delphi stemmed from certain earth-gases seeping into the underground cavern, and inhaled by the Oracle. See news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/08/0814_delphioracle.