The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles

by Michael Wood

Overview

Cultures of all epochs have consulted oracles in times of need. This fascinating exploration of the enduring popularity of oracles examines how they are interpreted and why. Taking examples from literature and history, from the oracles at Delphi to those in Macbeth, and further still to the works of Kafka and Bob Dylan, and even in the film The Matrix, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide a lively account of humanity's persistent faith in signs, which continues to exert an important influence on the course of civilization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312423070
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Michael Wood is broadcaster and film-maker, as well as being the author of several highly praised books on English history, including In Search of Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

	On the road	3
1	The Clever Animals	5
2	What God, Which God, Where?	20
3	So Much for Nero	41
	The way back	61
4	The Death of the King	63
5	What Are Such Things?	81
6	Sibyls and Poets	103
	Calling home	131
7	The Death of Oracles	133
8	Can the Devil Speak True?	157
9	Vestiges	181
	Dead or alive	209
10	Medicine and Probability	211
11	Our Astrology	229
	Off the road	251
	Bibliography	255
	Acknowledgments	265
	Index	267

Editorial Reviews

An immensely rich and provocative subject...Wood's wide-ranging and penetrating scrutiny is cogently philosophical, keenly aesthetic, and gratifyingly entertaining.” —Booklist

“There's a little something here for everyone...Sometimes erudite, sometimes esoteric, always unpredictable.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The Road to Delphi is a refreshingly original and sometimes startling rereading of oracles, from ancient ambiguities on through Shakespeare to our current perplexities of medicine and terrorism. For Wood, the gods keep returning, but only to confound us.” —Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon

“If not an oracular pronouncement, then a source of terrific and myriad pleasures. Michael Wood's The Road to Delphi is all that and then some.” —James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street

From the Publisher

Wood, who teaches English at Princeton, is not a true believer -- he is an amiable skeptic with a soft spot for the oracular utterances of astrologers. But in The Road to Delphi, his erudite romp through the history of oracles, from the ancients to the soothsaying economists and physicians of our own time, Wood finds a beautifully clear picture of the complex mechanics of mythmaking and a helpful explication of the tangle of human desire and interpretation. — Laura Ciolkowski

The New York Times

If Wood didn't write with such clarity and modest good sense, one might regard his range as a bit show-offy. As it is, The Road to Delphi seems elegantly European, the sort of essay a Roland Barthes might turn out or a Roberto Calasso. — Michael Dirda

The Washington Post

The oracle’s enduring presence in literature, film, and popular culture, assessed by Wood (English/Princeton Univ.) as a historical and cultural phenomenon. There’s a little something for everyone here. The author provides learned, sometimes challenging discussions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Milton; he alludes to The Matrix, Bob Dylan, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, films both popular (Minority Report) and otherwise (Throne of Blood); he offers revisionist and even generous considerations of the daily horoscope, Nostradamus, and your primary-care physician. Wood (Children of Silence, 1998, etc.) begins by wondering why the idea of oracles has lingered in so many cultures since its origins in--as nearly as he can tell--Greece in the eighth century b.c. He considers the centrality of the notion of gods in the oracular tradition. ("All things are full of gods, even if they are often figurative, and these gods talk all the time") and explains how the oracles worked: communication with a god, then a generally ambiguous reply or prediction or warning. Wood distinguishes carefully among the various sorts of predicting entities and their intermediaries, giving a particularly interesting analysis of sibyls and a lovely riff on the sound of sibylline. Examining Cassandra, best known of all sibyls, he chronicles the cursed princess’s appearances in myths and in Christa Wolf’s 1984 novel, Cassandra. The author wonders (with Wittgenstein, whom he considers at length) about certainty, which he concludes has both "appalling attractions and alluring dangers." Wood sees astrology as a harmless, playful pastime for people who don’t bother to ask about the process astrologers use to arriveat their generally genial pronouncements. And he tells a couple of brief, wrenching personal medical stories, one about a brother-in-law who died, another about his own son, who lived. Sometimes erudite, sometimes esoteric, always unpredictable.

Kirkus Reviews