Oh. Here I go again with my Word of the Day.
Oracular is the pick this time around.
It comes to us from long ago. There were people called “Oracles.”
An oracle was typically a priest or priestess believed to speak on behalf of a deity. A god of some sort. The most famous example is the Oracle of Delphi, where the priestess Pythia would enter a trance. Then, she would deliver cryptic prophecies that were said to come from Apollo.
But that was Greece.
In other cultures, similar figures existed. They were shamans, seers, sibyls, prophets. Each of them could be seen as a connection between the human and the divine.
Oracles were thought to possess a connection to hidden knowledge. They did this in different ways, like through divine communication. They claimed to channel a god’s voice. And there were a lot of gods.
Sometimes an Oracle had a prophetic vision. They could “see” the future or the unseen forces shaping events.
And then on other occasions, they used an interpretation of signs. Most oracles went into trances. But some did not. Instead, these oracles interpreted natural signs. Like the flight of birds, the patterns of entrails, or even dreams. The patterns of entrails? I really don’t want to know how that came about.
Anyway. Back to the word at hand. Oracular.
Oracular things are the kinds of statements or insights that feel heavy with meaning. It is as if they’ve been dipped in something timeless. Sometimes they’re clear. Sometimes they’re incredibly cryptic. But always, they seem to knock on our doors with a sense that the Universe is trying to say something through them.
We call someone’s wisdom “oracular” when it seems to see around corners. They seem to know some deeper thing. It doesn’t have to be about predicting the future. It’s just that oracular language seems to carry weight. Those insights belong to some larger story we can’t quite read yet.
Oracular. Like the oracles.
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“Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.” — Eugene Peterson
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“Some words do not inform; they transform.” — John O’Donohue
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“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin
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