Two dissertations, published together in the mid-eighteenth century in an English translation from the French, take up a single stubborn question: where did the oracles of the pagan world come from, and when did they stop? Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a member of the Royal Academies of Paris, argues in the first that the voices at Delphi and Claros were never the work of demons but of priests who had turned prophecy into a trade. In the second he argues that the oracles did not fall silent at the birth of Christ, as generations of Christians had assumed, but persisted for roughly four hundred years more, until paganism itself was abolished. The form is expository throughout—part antiquarian history, part polemic, written in a deliberately conversational register that Fontenelle defends as suited to a subject full of imposture and absurdity.
The Case Against the Demons
The Two Dissertations and Their Argument
The volume presents two dissertations by M. de Fontenelle, a member of the Royal Academies of Paris, translated from the best French edition and printed by R. Urie in 1753. The first dissertation sets out to show that the oracles of the pagans were not delivered by demons but were invented and sustained by the craft of the priests. The second argues that the oracles did not fall silent at the coming of Jesus Christ but persisted for some four hundred years afterward, until paganism itself was abolished. The contents promise chapters on why the first Christians believed demons spoke through oracles, on the surprising stories told of oracles and genii, on the agreement of that belief with Plato’s philosophy, on why the common opinion sits badly with religion, on philosophers who held oracles cheap, on oracles that were bribed, and on the founding of new oracles, their sacred days, their answers to sealed letters, dream oracles, ambiguity, and the cheats laid bare. The second dissertation turns to the supposed cessation at Christ’s coming, the contradictions among the ancients about when it happened, the history of Delphi, and the particular causes of the oracles’ decay.
Fontenelle’s Preface and His Debt to Van Dale
Fontenelle explains how the work came about. A Latin treatise on heathen oracles by Dr. Van Dale, a physician, printed in Holland, fell into his hands and confuted the common opinion that demons delivered the oracles and that they ceased entirely at Christ’s coming. Finding it steeped in knowledge of antiquity, he first thought to translate it for ladies and gentlemen who do not read Latin, but judged a translation would miss the mark: Van Dale wrote only for the learned, quoting passages faithfully with exact Greek versions and breaking off into parentheses within parentheses. Fontenelle therefore gave the material another form altogether, rearranging it, cutting what seemed unimportant or dull, adding ornaments and many things that prove or clarify the matter, sometimes arguing differently on the same facts, and inserting arguments wholly his own. He begs Van Dale’s pardon should this come to his knowledge. He notes that M. Mebius, senior professor of divinity at Leipsic, undertook to confute Van Dale, conceding that oracles did not cease at Christ’s coming but refusing to yield that demons were not their authors. Under the name “oracle,” Fontenelle declares, he does not include magic, in which demons are indeed concerned; going to a necromancer or a Thessalian sorceress was not called consulting an oracle. He adds that Father Thomassin had already treated oracles as mere imposture, and that he was troubled until he found only a few words in that work coinciding with his own opinion. He defends his familiar, conversational style on the ground that his materials invite ridicule, and holds that none ought to write in the sublime but he who writes in his own defence.
The Design of the Work
Fontenelle’s aim is not to write a history of oracles for its own sake but to combat the common opinion that attributes them to demons and has them cease at Christ’s coming; doing so requires running through the whole history of oracles—their origin, progress, manner of delivery, and decay. The question, he says, has no great difficulty but what men have raised themselves, since it was a point of religion among the pagans and has become one, without necessity, among Christians. Prejudices reign chiefly in false religions, which are contrivances of human understanding; in the true religion, the work of God alone, none would be found if human understanding could be kept from intermeddling. Christianity never wanted the support of false proofs, and less now than ever, given the pains great men of the age have taken to establish it on true foundations.
The First Dissertation: Demons and the Stories of the Primitive Christians
The first chapter grants that demons exist, condemned to eternal torment, and that they might have animated statues and delivered oracles had God permitted; the only question is whether they had that permission, a matter of fact depending on God’s will, which would have been revealed had it been necessary for us. Scripture nowhere teaches that demons delivered the oracles, so we are at liberty to choose either side. Yet all parties agree there was something supernatural in them; the present age believes it because the first ages of Christianity believed it. The first reason of the primitive Christians was the surprising stories published concerning oracles and genii. Fontenelle relates a few: the pilot Thamus, whose ship lay one evening near certain islands of the Ægean when the winds were hushed on a sudden and a voice from the islands called his name twice before he answered.
Plato’s Daemons and the Christian Embrace of Them
No philosophy was more in vogue than Plato’s during the first ages of the church, and his conformity with religion carried almost all knowing Christians into his sect. They looked on him as a sort of prophet who had foretold many points of Christianity, especially the Trinity, and took his works almost for comments on scripture. Plato supposed God so exalted above creatures that they could not come immediately from his hands; he therefore placed the Word between them and him as a step by which God’s act might pass down—an idea the Christians embraced of Jesus Christ, which may explain why no heresy was more generally espoused or more hotly maintained than Arianism. This Platonism fully maintained the existence of daemons, naturally adopted into the Christian notion of oracles. Plato thought daemons a nature between gods and men: aerial genii, messengers between the gods and us, near us yet invisible, penetrating our thoughts, loving the good and hating the bad. Plutarch assures us Plato owned there were evil daemons as well; Eusebius recites many passages of Porphyrius describing them as authors of enchantments and witchcraft, deceiving the eyes with spectres, lying by nature, nourished on the blood and fat of sacrifices, and alone undertaking to give out oracles—at their head he places Hecate and Serapis. Jamblichus said as much. The Christians received these things with joy, adding that the daemons stole from the prophets some knowledge of things to come. The system had the advantage of explaining to the pagans, by their own principles, the origin of their false worship: both sides agreed there was something supernatural in the oracles, and the Christians deprived them of all advantage by imputing it to such authors—a shorter way than contesting each miracle by long inquiry. To the three reasons Fontenelle might add a fourth: that in this system there is something marvellous, and mankind is much taken with the marvellous.
The Golden Tooth of Silesia
Before troubling ourselves with the cause, Fontenelle urges, let us be assured of the matter of fact; he will not be so ridiculous as to find a cause for what is not. This misfortune befell some learned Germans at the end of the last age. In 1593 a report spread that the teeth of a seven-year-old child of Silesia had dropped out and that one of gold had come in place of a great tooth. Horstius, professor of physic at Helmstad, wrote its history in 1595, pretending it was partly natural and partly miraculous, sent from God to comfort the Christians then afflicted by the Turks. In the same year one Rullandus wrote the history of it; two years after, Ingolsteterus, another learned man, wrote against it.
Paganism, God’s Goodness, and the Tricks of the Priests
Fontenelle argues that paganism, abominable as it was to God, would have been only an involuntary and excusable error if the false priests had always deceived the laity. He rejects this: men must guard against errors other men lead them into, but cannot arm themselves against errors led by genii or daemons above them. His reason suffices to examine whether a statue speaks, but once it speaks he cannot help thinking it a divinity. God is obliged by his goodness to protect men only from impositions they cannot defend against.
The Priests as Masters of the Oracle Trade
The argument turns to the machinery behind the voices. The great priestess, Fontenelle suggests, was in the priests’ pay, and only the priestesses delivered oracles aloud, raving on the tripods like furies, while the priests kept what amounted to a record office of written prophecies and acted as masters, dispensers, and interpreters of the god. For the honour of their function they could even be scrupulous toward would-be bribers, particularly when success looked unlikely. Lysander’s scheme to remodel Sparta’s government is the example: perhaps the faction of Agesilaus, then opposed to him, grew jealous of the project and got to the oracles first. Would the priests of Ammon really have travelled from the far end of Libya to Sparta to prosecute Lysander unless they already understood his enemies, who pushed them into it?
New Gods, New Oracles
The establishment of fresh oracles weakened the Daemon hypothesis as much as the corruption of the old ones. After Hephaestion died, Alexander, to console himself, wanted him deified; the courtiers agreed without difficulty, temples rose in many cities, festivals and sacrifices were instituted, miraculous cures were credited to him, and he was made to pronounce oracles. Lucian says Alexander was at first astonished to see the divinity pass so smoothly, then came to believe it himself, congratulating himself that he was not only a god but had the power of making gods. Hadrian did the same for young Antinous, building a city in his memory and consecrating temples and prophets to him—there were no prophets except in temples with oracles—and a Greek inscription survives: “To Antinous, companion of the gods of Egypt. M. Ulpius Apollonius, his prophet.” Augustus too delivered oracles, and he was surely as venerable as Antinous or Hephaestion, who likely owed divinity to nothing but beauty.
Such novelties made even the least thoughtful reflect: were the old oracles not of the same nature? To judge the origin of Amphiaraus, Trophonius, Orpheus, and Apollo himself, one need only mark how Hephaestion’s, Antinous’s, and Augustus’s began. Yet the new gods never enjoyed the old credit. They were invoked to compliment princes, not seriously consulted; for weighty questions people still went to Delphi. The ancient tripods had possessed futurity time out of mind, and the word of an experienced god seemed surer than a novice’s. The emperors, who expected the same divinity themselves, would gladly have made the oracles of deified predecessors famous, but the people, used to the old ones, could not muster the same confidence and probably laughed at the whole business—how could they imagine the eagle flying from a Roman emperor’s funeral pyre was that emperor’s soul ascending?
Why the First Deceptions Took Hold
Fontenelle then asks why people were deceived at the first erection of gods and oracles. Paganism had two sorts of gods: those supposed essentially divine, declared by wise men or legislators amid mysteries and never seen by the people, and those originally human, deified by popular reverence for their good works. The people framed an exalted idea of the first because they never saw them, and of the second because they had them. But no such devotion could attach to an emperor made a god by court order rather than by the people’s love, and so recently a man known to be merely a man.
As for the first oracles: find half a dozen persons persuadable that daylight is not owing to the sun, and whole nations may embrace the opinion; any hypothesis, however ridiculous, maintained long enough gains the character of antiquity and is then thought sufficiently proved. On Parnassus was a hole issuing an exhalation that set goats dancing and mounted to the head; perhaps someone whose head was turned by it fell to talking without knowing what he said and happened to speak some truth. At once something divine was fancied in the vapour, and little by little ceremonies gathered round the hole. Thus in all probability arose Delphi; and since it owed its origin to a heady exhalation, the Pythian priestess could not prophesy without fury, though elsewhere fury was unnecessary. Once one oracle stood, a thousand followed the example—if the gods can speak in one place, why not in others? The people, struck by the marvellous and hungry for profit, wanted oracles everywhere, and in time all acquired the standing of antiquity. The new ones, established by princes, had no such success, for people believe most readily what they make themselves. Add that at the first institution of gods and oracles ignorance was far greater: philosophy did not yet exist to contradict the most extravagant superstitions. The vulgar are never mighty knowing, but there are ages when all mankind is vulgar, and those times are beyond comparison the most favourable for establishing errors.
Sealed Letters and the Spy Among the Deities
The author concedes the objection that oracles answering sealed letters, and especially those delivered in dreams, could not have existed without Daemons—then shows they contained nothing more marvellous than the rest. The priests were not so scrupulous as to fear unsealing letters. Letters were laid on the altar and the temple shut, which the priests well knew how to enter unperceived; or they were handed to the priests to sleep upon and dream an answer. Either way the priests had leisure and liberty to open them privately, using secret arts—some practised by Lucian’s false prophet—for unsealing without detection. They certainly used such secrets on the letter the Governor of Cilicia sent to the oracle of Mopsus at Malla. The Governor, surrounded by doubting Epicureans, resolved, as Plutarch pleasantly puts it, to send a spy among the deities. His envoy slept in the temple and dreamed of a comely man who said only “Black.” The court Epicureans thought the answer ridiculous; the Governor was astonished, opened his letter before them, and showed the question: “Shall I sacrifice a white or a black ox to you?” After that miracle he was devoted to Mopsus for life. The letter, Fontenelle notes, was highly probably opened and skilfully resealed; had a Daemon answered, there was no need to send it at all.
Where priests dared not open letters, they used cunning to discover the consulter’s errand, since consulters were commonly persons of note with known designs. Through talk about sacrifices, or delays before answering, they drew the business from the consulters’ own mouths; they made them offer sacrifice after sacrifice until they had light, and handed them to petty temple officers who, under pretence of showing antiquities, statues, paintings, and offerings, made them blab. These antiquaries, like their successors in Italy, knew the miracles by heart and told long stories of every consecrated present; Lucian says pleasantly that all men of this sort lived on fables and in Greece would have been sorry to be told truths, though it cost them nothing. If consulters held their tongues, their servants might not: an oracle-town held scarcely anyone but oracle-officers—prophets and priests, poets who versified prose oracles, mere interpreters, sacrificers who examined entrails, sellers of perfumes and beasts, antiquaries, and innkeepers enriched by the resort of strangers—all in the god’s interest. The false prophet of Pontus had correspondents as far as Rome, sending accounts of consulters’ most secret affairs. By such means answers could return even without letters, as with the Apollo of Claros, where, Tacitus says, one need only tell the prophet the number and names of the consulters; he retires into a grotto, drinks from a secret fountain, and answers in verse whatever is in your thoughts—often very ignorantly. Delphi was entrusted to a woman because she had nothing to do but act possessed, while Claros, being harder, required a man. The prophet’s ignorance, on which the marvel largely depends, could not easily be discovered; and the Daemon, Daemon as he was, could not dispense with knowing the consulters’ names.
The Last Blow to Paganism and the Survival of Its Titles
The final suppression of pagan worship came in 451, when the emperors Valentinian III and Marcian forbade every exercise of the old religion on pain of death. Yet these same zealous Christian princes kept certain relics of the very system they outlawed—chief among them the title of sovereign Pontiff, which had originally signified the head of the augurs, soothsayers, and all the colleges of pagan priests, the summit of Rome’s ancient idolatry.
Zozimus claims that Constantine the Great, Valentinian, and Valens willingly accepted both the title and the robe of that dignity when it was presented to them at their accession, and that Gratian alone refused the pontifical equipage. When the priests heard of his refusal, their chief answered in great heat: “If the prince will not be called Pontiff, he will very shortly become Pontifex Maximus”—a jab that played on the Latin words and on the revolt then brewing under Maximus, who meant to strip Gratian of the empire.
Inscriptions prove more trustworthy than Zozimus. They grant the title Pontifex Maximus to Christian emperors even in the sixth century, two hundred years after Christianity had mounted the imperial throne; the emperor Justin, among his other styles, assumes it in an inscription set up for Justinipolis in Istria, the city he named for himself.
Divine Titles and Imperial Vanity
To be enrolled among the gods of a false religion is worse still than to be its Pontifex Maximus. The heathens had deified their emperors and made the city of Rome a goddess; and Theodosius and Arcadius, though Christians, allowed Symmachus, that great champion of paganism, to address them as “Your Divinity”—words he could only mean in the pagan sense. Inscriptions in honour of Arcadius and Honorius carry the formula “Devoted to their divinity and majesty.”
The emperors did not merely receive such titles; they gave them to themselves. The constitutions of Theodosius, Valentinian, Honorius, and Anastasius call their edicts heavenly statutes and divine oracles, and sometimes say outright “the most happy decree of our divinity.” Fontenelle calls this the court-chancery style of the age—ridiculous even under heathenism, blasphemous under Christianity. Flattery from subjects and princes’ appetite for praise kept the habit alive far too long; that a man should seriously call another a god is hard to conceive, but that the man should accept it and learn to apply it to himself, while knowing what a god is, cannot be reconciled with the honour of human nature.
Nothing in the title of Pontifex Maximus tempted the emperors so much as its power to swell their vanity. Perhaps they thought it would prolong the respect of the remaining pagans, or took pleasure in standing at the head of the Christian religion under so ambiguous a name—for on occasion they used it with a high hand. Some authors say they renounced the style out of respect for the popes, who likely feared the ill use they might make of it.
Human Sacrifice, the Last Superstition to Go
It is less surprising that such relics were transplanted into Christianity than that the most barbarous and senseless of all pagan practices—human sacrifice—was the last to quit the field. The old religion was strangely whimsical, part frolic and part tragedy: in one place ladies went to the temples in devotion to offer their favours to the first comer; in another the same devotion had men’s throats cut on an altar. These detestable offerings were made among all nations. The Greeks performed them as well as the Scythians, though less often; and the Romans, who had forced the Carthaginians by treaty to stop sacrificing their children to Saturn after the custom inherited from their Phoenician ancestors, themselves sacrificed a man every year to Jupiter Latialis. Eusebius cites Porphyrius for the practice in his own day; Lactantius at the beginning and Prudentius at the end of the fourth century each testify for his own time. These horrors lasted as long as the Oracles themselves, which discovered nothing but folly and credulity.
Why the Oracles Would Have Failed Anyway
Even had paganism never been abolished, the Oracles would still have ceased—the first particular reason for their decay. They could not escape the ruin of paganism once Christianity overthrew it; and Christianity did them great damage even before it prevailed, since Christians laboured to disabuse mankind by exposing their impostures. But quite apart from Christianity, the Oracles declined for other reasons and at last must have failed of themselves.
It was noticed that they began to degenerate from the very moment they stopped answering in verse. Plutarch wrote a tract expressly to inquire into the cause of this change, setting down, in the manner of the Greek authors, all that could be said on the question—and there the surviving text breaks off.
Priests, Puppets, and the Machinery of a Miracle
Fontenelle’s priests are not merely frauds; they are administrators. The great priestess might rave on the tripod, but behind her stood men who kept records of written prophecies, who interpreted and dispensed them, and who understood that a god’s reputation is a business with correspondents in every province. The temple staff—the sacrificers who read entrails, the poets who turned prose answers into verse, the antiquaries who recited the god’s miracles to visitors, the innkeepers grown rich on pilgrims—all had a stake in the oracle’s credit, and all of them talked. A consulter’s servants talked too. Fontenelle dwells on the mechanics because the mechanics are the argument: once you see how a sealed letter could be opened and resealed, how a name whispered to the prophet of Claros could be answered in verse, how a dream could be stage-managed in a darkened temple, the supernatural explanation stops being necessary. The famous answer to the governor of Cilicia—the single word “Black,” which turned out to fit a question about which ox to sacrifice—looks like a miracle until you notice that the letter had ample time to be read.
What makes the book more than a catalogue of tricks is Fontenelle’s second move: he turns the same skepticism on the pagans themselves. Oenomaus the Cynic mocked Apollo for knowing the number of grains of sand yet muddling the war between Croesus and Cyrus. Aristophanes put the gods on stage as starving beggars, and the same audience laughed—then prosecuted Socrates for impiety. Papirius, told a false augury, simply put the lying keeper in the front rank and let an arrow settle the theology. Whole cities, not just philosophers, treated an oracle as something to be bargained with: the Athenians, warned to wait thirty years before attacking Aegina, built the required temple at once and sailed. Fontenelle’s conclusion is that the pagans believed their oracles roughly as much as they needed to, and that the primitive Christians, eager for any weapon against paganism, took the demons far more seriously than the pagans ever had.
Why the Error Took Hold
The book’s deepest subject is not divination but belief—how an absurdity becomes antiquity, and antiquity becomes proof. Fontenelle offers a natural history of the process. A goat-herd on Parnassus breathes an exhalation, raves, and happens to speak sense; something divine is suspected in the vapor; ceremonies accumulate; and in time the oracle is ancient, which is to say, established. New oracles, by contrast, fail, because they are known to have been made by princes—Hephaestion, Antinous, Augustus—and no one can quite believe in a god whose elevation they remember. The people are more inclined to believe what they make themselves. Fontenelle adds a sharper point: there are ages when all mankind is the vulgar, and those ages are the most favorable for planting errors. The primitive Christians, he argues, inherited a Platonism that filled the space between God and man with aerial genii, and so they had a ready-made machinery for explaining the oracles; they wanted the demons to be real because the demons made paganism intelligible and refutable at once. Fontenelle’s own view is that Christianity never needed false proofs, and that yielding the pagans their demons was a strategic blunder—it left Porphyry’s last entrenchment standing.
The Long Silence and the Relics of Paganism
The second dissertation dismantles the comfortable chronology. The oracles did not announce their own death at Christ’s coming; the supposed deathbed answers are forgeries or misreadings, and the story that Delphi was struck by lightning in Julian’s reign is a pious transplant of an accident that happened at Daphne. Delphi was still functioning under Constantine’s father, was pillaged under Constantine, briefly revived to answer Julian, and then vanishes from the record. Other oracles lasted longer still: Amphilochus was delivering dream-oracles in the third century, the fire-oracle at Apollonia answered questions about everything except death and marriage, and the Venus of Aphaca was still receiving votive offerings in the lake nearly four hundred years after Christ. Fontenelle closes by tracing the afterlife of paganism in Christian Rome—emperors who kept the title Pontifex Maximus into the sixth century, flatterers who addressed Christian rulers as “Your Divinity,” and, most stubborn of all, human sacrifice, which outlasted almost everything else. The oracles, he concludes, would have decayed even without Christianity: they began to fail when they stopped answering in verse, and their decline tracks the decline of the whole religion that housed them.
An Argument That Outlived Its Occasion
Fontenelle’s book belongs to the long quarrel between erudition and credulity, and its method—demand the evidence before you assign the cause—has proved more durable than its conclusions. He wrote for readers who did not read Latin, and he wrote with a smile, insisting that a subject so full of folly deserved a style that could laugh at it. The result is a work of scholarship that behaves like a conversation, and a piece of Christian apologetics that spends most of its energy correcting Christians. Later centuries would take up his tools against other miracles, and the priests of Delphi would become a standing example of how institutions manufacture the supernatural. Fontenelle would perhaps have enjoyed the irony: the oracle he set out to explain has itself become a kind of oracle, consulted whenever someone wants to know how belief is made.
