The story of the origin of the Pythia, for example, contains points not without resemblance to certain passages in our own early sacred history. The Son of God is at enmity with the serpent; the serpent pursues a woman, and is trodden under foot by the Son. Zeus is the god of the Greeks; Apollo is his son; Leto--or Latona--is pursued by Python, the serpent, and is slain by Apollo. To commemorate this deed a temple was erected at Delhi to Apollo, and the priestess was called the Pythia. Regarded as the symbol of wisdom by the Egyptians, the serpent came to be considered by the Greeks as representing the principle of evil.[8] Ages before this, however, the history of our first parents, the temptation, and the fall, and the prophecy that the Son should bruise the serpent's head, had been recorded. The wonderful Chaldeans too had mapped out the same story among the eternal stars, their great designs being still traceable on the celestial globes of our common schools.
But the intellectual Greek was not long to be imposed upon. Men who could discourse on the immortality of the soul had not much faith in the nonsense often put forth by a priestess of Apollo. Themistocles made a tool of the oracle in order to serve his own purposes, and Demosthenes publicly denounced it. Convinced that the oracle was subsidized by Philip of Macedon, and instructed to speak in his favor, he boldly declared that the Pythia _philippized_, and bade the Athenians and Thebans remember that "Pericles and Epaminondas, instead of listening to the frivolous answers of the oracle, the resort of the ignorant and cowardly, consulted only reason in the choice of their measures."
Had there been a London magistrate at hand in the days of the great Athenian orator, it would certainly have gone hard with the poor Pythia.
No observer of human nature can doubt that we are bound by an "electric chain," and that we are liable to impressions, the sources of which are often unknown to us. Nor can we doubt that there have been abnormally sensitive persons, like Swedenborg, whose receptivity was such that the brain could be impressed by means which would entirely fail with the normal brain. But in respect to the professional mediums, notwithstanding the antiquity of the class and their many advocates, it remains to be shown where they have been of the slightest practical utility, or served any good or useful end. Nay more. It remains to be shown wherein the modern medium is entitled to a particle more of respect than the medium of Endor.