Origins
Walter Burkert observes that "Frenzied women from whose lips the god speaks" are recorded in the Near East as in Mari in the second millennium BC and in Assyria in the first millennium BC. In Egypt the goddess Wadjet (eye of the moon) was depicted as a snake-headed woman or a woman with two snake-heads. Her oracle was in the renowned temple in Per-Wadjet (Greek name Buto). The oracle of Wadjet may have been the source for the oracular tradition which spread from Egypt to Greece. Evans linked Wadjet with the Minoan snake goddess, a chthonic deity and one of the aspects of the Great Mother.
In Greece the old oracles were devoted to the Mother Goddess. At the oracle of Dodona she will be called Diōnē (the feminine form of Diós, genitive of Zeus, PIE *Dyaeus; or of dīos, "godly", literally "heavenly"), who represents the earth-fertile soil, probably the chief female goddess of the PIE pantheon. Python, daughter (or son) of Gaia was the earth dragon of Delphi represented as a serpent and became the chthonic deity, enemy of Apollo, who slew her and possessed the oracle.
Read more about this topic: Oracle
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