Divination is not just good for business; it’s a good business in itself. Prophets are merchants of prediction. The Delphic Oracle sat on Mount Parnassus, on the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth, around ninety miles northwest of Athens, near the port of Crisa. We first hear about the Oracle in the Odyssey, although Plutarch, who served as a priest at the sanctuary, is a more informative source.
To get to the Oracle, you had to ascend the Sacred Way to Apollo’s temple, your sandaled feet treading worn limestone steps that countless pilgrims had climbed before you. The mountain air grows thinner and sweeter as you rise, carrying the smoked scent of burning laurel leaves and the earthy perfume of wild thyme that grows between the cracks of the ancient stones.
Below are the twin cliffs of the Phaedriades tower, like guardian giants, their red-gold faces catching the morning sun. The sound of trickling water from the Castalian Spring, where you stopped to wash yourself and quench your thirst, mingles with the notes of some-one singing Homeric verses in the distance, accompanied by a lyre. As you approach the temple, you pass between rows of magnificent votive offerings-gold-rimmed tripods on which oracles sit to pronounce the future, marble maidens, and bronze warriors gleam in the dappled sunlight filtered through cypresses and olive trees.
The Oracle was not only an experience to remember. First and foremost, it was a commercial enterprise.
The temple’s massive columns rise before you, their surfaces still bearing traces of vibrant paint-blues, reds, and golds. Inside, it is dark and cool. The air grows heavy with the smoke of incense and the sweet metallic tang that rises from a deep fissure in the earth below; it’s the breath of Python, they say, slain here by Apollo himself Those who inhale the fumes feel intoxicated. Centuries later, the chemist Jeffrey Chanton will find traces of ethylene in the earth’s chasm that could have been the cause of altered states of consciousness, which fits with Plutarch reporting a sweet smell.
Your heart quickens as you approach the inner chamber where the Pythia, the priestess, dressed in a white robe, sits upon her bronze tripod, wreathed in sacred vapors. Originally, the Pythia was a young virgin girl from a respectable family. But after one Echecrates the Thessalian raped one of these young girls, the Delphians decided that the Pythia would be an elderly woman who was bound to celibacy during her service. The old woman’s eyes are wild and distant, seeing beyond the veil of ordinary reality. Your palms sweat as you wait for the words that will echo with double and triple meanings, prophecies that will haunt you long after you descend from Apollo’s mountain.
The Oracle was not only an experience to remember. First and foremost, it was a commercial enterprise. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the god promised the priests of his new Delphic cult that if they built an oracle, they would never again want for food or comfort. A successful oracle put a place on the map and fed its people.
Each visitor to Delphi had to provide a sheep for sacrifice before consulting the god, from which priests could choose a cut of meat. Early Delphic priests had a reputation for snatching the best cuts before anyone else stood a chance. The skin of the sheep was then sold to tanners for a handsome price.
Before Christianity came along, magicians were just another profession.
Consulting the Oracle was a lengthy process. The priestess worked only during days in which Apollo was believed to be present at Delphi to channel his wisdom to the Pythia. There were preliminary purification rituals to go through, as well as sacrifices. The queue could be long, and it could be made longer by a high dignitary cutting in. It could take days or weeks to get a response, which was convenient for local hotels and taverns in charge of housing and feeding the visitors. Entertainment grew around oracles. Much as going to Niagara Falls might surprise the visitor who was expecting a natural oasis and finds something closer to an amusement park, places like Delphi and Dodona, the oldest Hellenic oracle, weren’t quite the tranquil spiritual havens that the naive might imagine.
Oracles often sponsored athletic games that attracted competitors and spectators from all over the world. The Pythian Games were held every four years at Delphi. The stadium overflowed with thousands of spectators, their excited shouts echoing off the mountain walls as athletes competed in honor of Apollo. In the theater, poets declaimed their newest works while musicians competed on the kithara. The hippodrome thundered with the pounding of hooves as chariots raced neck and neck, wheels nearly touching, while the crowd roared with each dangerous turn. Laurel wreaths awaited the victors.
As dusk fell, celebrations spilled into the streets; singing, dancing, and impromptu performances blossomed, while the smell of roasting meat and wine filled the air. Everyone joined in the sacred festivities. The union of athletic aptitude, artistic excellence, and divine inspiration made the Pythian Games second only to the Olympics in prestige. It was one big, profitable party.
Seers unattached to a particular city could also become quite wealthy—especially if they became celebrities or worked for a king or court. Diviners worked like freelancers and were often also magicians. Magic and divination are close cousins, and for centuries were thought to be the same. The word “sorcery” is derived from the Latin word sors, a divinatory lot (reading the future through a throw of objects like dice or coins, or through randomly selecting written symbols like cards). While it was illegal in many parts of the ancient world to harm someone with magic, its use was widely accepted. Before Christianity came along, magicians were just another profession.
But divination and magic also go together for business reasons; they are complementary products, like salty chips that make customers thirsty for beer in a bar. Divination can tell you the future, and magic can change it. What good is it to know that something is coming if you can’t alter it? Patrons could sometimes intervene in their destiny without the help of magic, but it was in the interest of the seer to recommend a course of action that would necessitate their further services.
Seers followed diagnosis with a prophylactic treatment, analogous to when tech companies prescribe more tech to deal with the problems that arise from tech. Social media companies prescribe AI to moderate vitriolic content that is partly created through the design of algorithms that prioritize “engaging” content. Dating apps are designing AI “wingmen” to generate conversation prompts in the hope of keeping interactions interesting between users.
While established oracles like the one at Delphi tended to be more prestigious, not everyone had the resources to make the journey there. And not every situation could wait for weeks; there were bets to wager, partners to choose, and schemes to plot.
One reason why oracles like that of Delphi are less closely associated with magic is that they had enough business to thrive with only one product. Apollo could afford to limit his services. Freelance seers needed more tricks to make a living. Conjurers made money by offer-ing solutions that mainstream religion didn’t. Magicians provided convenience, much as tech does today.
The symbiosis between prediction and profitable action becomes apparent in spells that encourage the magician to revisit the god for a “better prophecy” if the first one was too grim. Magicians were entre-preneurs, and they needed to offer the services that their clientele asked for. Most people are not shopping for news that leaves them feeling despair. If a seer could bend the future in favor of his clients, then all the better for business.
Two of the most prominent side businesses of prediction are, and have always been, medicine and war. Perhaps it’s because life is at stake in both, and the more we fear, the more desperate we become for forewarning and hope.
In ancient cultures, healers were also often priests, shamans, or spiritual leaders who used divination as one of their many tools. Prognosis is the second most important task of ancient and modern medicine, the first being treatment. But adequate treatment is unlikelier if the doctor has no understanding of the causes behind the ailment. Prognosis involves understanding causality. It’s about reading the signs of the body and their relation to the environment. The right treatment is in essence a prediction that a particular remedy will heal a particular illness. Ancient doctors made use of dreams, astrology, and other forms of divination to prescribe a treatment, in addition to herbal knowledge and common sense.
Health and war are also two areas in which our new prophets, the executives of tech companies, are gaining terrain.
Predictions were as important in war as they were in medicine. Good strategy involves good predictions. Soothsayers in ancient Greece were often found on battlefields. In the Iliad, Calchas gives prophetic advice but also joins the fight. Lamid Tisamenus won five battles for the Spartans with the help of divination. The seer Aristander advised Alexander the Great through many military undertakings.
Before judging ancient people too quickly for turning to seers and astrologers for medical advice and policymaking, bear in mind that divination was the cutting-edge method of decision-making then. It’s controversial to call any kind of ancient practice “science,” because it is anachronistic, but divination was nonetheless a pursuit for which people trained and learned techniques, and whose objectives were related to truth as well as power. Perhaps a more precise word is the Greek term techne, or practical knowledge.
Health and war are also two areas in which our new prophets, the executives of tech companies, are gaining terrain. In health, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft are supplying data infrastructure services to health-care providers, and are involved in home medical surveillance, electronic health records, predictive measures for infectious diseases, wearables for clinical studies, and more.
In the military, OpenAI is working with the U.S. Department of Defense develop-ing “frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in … warfighting.” Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Microsoft have contracts worth billions with the Pentagon, and Anthropic has partnered with Palantir to bring its bot, Claude, to the U.S. military. In a ceremony in June 2025, four current and former executives from Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir, dressed in combat gear and boots, swore an oath to defend the United States and were pronounced lieutenant colonels in a new unit, Detachment 201, designed to advise the army on technologies for combat. We haven’t diverged too far from our ancestors.
In On Divination, the great Roman orator Cicero wrote, “I know of no people … who does not consider that future things are indicated by signs, and that it is possible for certain people to recognize those signs and predict what will happen.” For prophecy to work, you have to believe that the world is built in such a way that it leaves clues that allow a glimpse of what’s to come. Then you need a method to read the signs of the world.
And freelance seers were even more susceptible to corruption.
Whether we call it science, techne, trickery, or a combination of all three, the seer was someone who could read the book of the world, whether it was on the canvas of the body, the battlefield, the starry sky, or our dreams. All were instances of the same ability to read the signs of the larger cosmos through its reflections in smaller details of the mundane.
Among the many methods of divination, reading the entrails of dead animals was essential. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought of organs as writing tablets for gods—a metaphor that was taken a tad too literally by a seer who wrote “victory of the king” with ink onto a freshly procured liver.
The metaphor of reading the cosmos is one that runs throughout the history of prediction, and it makes books especially important. Books, one of the threads weaving the narrative of this story, hold weight for us partly on account of the metaphor they embody.
All divinatory methods are ways of reading the signs in the book of the universe. They were all prone to abuse, and abused they were.
Wherever there is money, there is power, and wherever there is power, there is abuse of power. Herodotus tells us that the priestesses of the Oracle of Delphi were sometimes accused of accepting bribes in return for delivering convenient political messages. And freelance seers were even more susceptible to corruption.
The marketplace of Abonoteichus buzzed with excitement. It was the 150s, and word had spread through the small Black Sea port that Alexander (not the Great, a much lesser one) had returned home-a man transformed, no longer the humble carpenter’s son who had left years earlier. Alexander the Paphlagonian had piercing eyes, and he moved with the confidence of someone touched by divine power.
His first miracle was modest but effective. Walking along the muddy shore one morning, Alexander “discovered” a goose egg. As a crowd gathered, he cracked it open to reveal a tiny, newborn snake. People gasped. This was no ordinary serpent, Alexander announced; this was Glycon, the new incarnation of the healing god Asdepius, come to deliver prophecies directly to the people.
Alexander told the locals that the Sibylline Oracle, which no one had heard about before, and some bronze tablets that he claimed had been discovered at a temple of Apollo, commanded that they set up a cult in Asdepius’s honor. The prophet’s charm sold the locals on the idea.
In the shrine, behind a curtain, Alexander would receive supplicants seeking to know the future, with the fully grown Glycon wrapped around his shoulders. Charisma goes a long way with prophecies, because for predictions to be powerful, people have to believe them, and there are few tactics as effective at earning people’s trust as self-confidence. Having the snake perform the astonishing feat of speaking when delivering predictions also helped.
What the gullible didn’t see was the elaborate mask that Alexander had crafted for the snake. When the animal was wrapped around his shoulders, Alexander could discreetly tug on horsehairs that would make the mouth of the mask open and dose. Nor did the audience notice, in the penumbra of the temple, the speaking tube made from a crane’s windpipe hidden in the wall through which an assistant would provide the divine voice for the snake.
Alexander was a con man. And Lucian, a contemporary writer and satirist, was intent on exposing him. The prophet had tried to kill the writer for investigating his methods. But Alexander’s assassination attempt only gave Lucian’s investigation new life, and his pen new purpose. Word of advice: Don’t mess with a writer.
Those wanting to ask Glycon a question were told to write it on a scroll, roll it up, and seal the scroll by stamping an imprint on hot wax. When the scrolls were returned to their owners, they were still sealed, but the questions had been answered. Could that be magic?
Lucian explains that Alexander would carefully open the wax seal with a hot needle and then close it again in the same way after having written his responses. If that failed, he would make a plaster copy of the seal, which he would use to reseal the scroll.
Alexander kept records of his most important prophetic responses. If time showed that an answer had been misguided, he destroyed that record and rewrote history, coming up with a more adequate response.
Despite Lucian’s warnings of fraud, Alexander’s cult flourished. Even the imperial aristocracy consulted the Sibylline Oracle. Coins representing Glycon circulated for centuries after Alexander’s death. Few want to expose a false prophet for whom they have fallen. Once, Marcus Aurelius himself asked for a prophecy from Alexander. The latter declared that the Roman army would be triumphant over the Marcomanni; they were not.
Bringing down con men can be surprisingly difficult, no matter how much of a sham they might be. Prophecies sell well because there’s a market for them. We create con artists by craving to know a future that is unknowable. Alexander, however, has gone down in history as the con man he was. In my book, that makes Lucian the victor.
The first lesson that Lucian teaches us is as true today as it was in his time: Where there are predictions, there are con artists. Caveat emptor; buyer beware. Second lesson: If more people had read Lucian, they might’ve avoided being conned, so pay attention to critics of prophets. Third lesson: Where there are predictions, there is also power.
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From Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI. Used with the permission of the publisher, Doubleday. Copyright © 2026 by Carissa Véliz
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from PROPHECY by Carissa Véliz, excerpt read by Robertson Dean. Carissa Véliz ℗ 2026 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
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