I've been listening to some Dan Carlin podcasts while renovating a laundry room / bathroom. One point I see repeated quite often in standard approaches to history is how illogical and superstitious it was for ancient leaders to consult oracles and temple priests concerning major state questions. I think this is just flat out wrong.
Last year I went through Wright's Evolution of God. While I can't stand his persona and attitudes as expressed on his podcasts, I really really enjoyed this book. I'm not sure why he can get the evolutionary perspective of religion so right in his books and then be so dismissive of its utility in modern contexts, or fail to see the religious aspects of wokeism or today's hyper liberalism. Oh well.
The big insight from his book was that ancient temples are best seen in terms of modern political think tanks rather than supernatural venues. They certainly represented community moral meta narratives framed supernaturally. But modern views which separate supernaturalism and religion from governance and politics, are quite frankly not the way old societies worked.
To understand this, think of the way indigenous societies, such as Plains Indians view religious narrative. At a deep level, there is no supernaturalism. It is all meta-narrative designed to teach fundamental, evolutionarily selected lessons in the most efficient way possible. The chaos/unpredictability of Napi reflects the reality of nature's randomness. I suspect, Blackfoot mythology sees this character less in supernatural terms and more in life-lesson terms.
When you apply this cultural evolution logic to ancient temples, what you get is a view that these temples curate certain political and governing perspectives / ideologies much the same way different University based think tanks do today. If you want a hawkish approach to a certain foreign policy you go to group X based on the academic school of thought. They will frame your answer nicely, pull in some post facto data to make things look good and presto. If you wanted to see how opposing views looked on your issue, just select a different group of oracles. See the end of this post (and the hole series) for some more discussion.
The one thing missing with today's political think tanks is their tight connection to public opinion. Modern think tanks can serve up opinion surveys, but until the rise of the moral activist press, they really have never embodied a group of committed followers in the same way ancient religious cults did. Now, however, I would suspect "consulting BLM or other wokeish cults" would be very much the same.
Imagine Biden going to BLM to see how supporting Chineses interests in Ethiopia would go over? Are my drone attacks going to be seen as anti-black? You might get an answer like, no, as long as you phrase it this way, and you pay the right sort of price to keep us, the media, and the folks we influence on your side.
This is VERY much like ancient oracles. The main difference is that ancient oracles / temple groups, probably leveraged the poetry of old textual styles more. Nowdays our speech is very prole. We expect clarity. But imagine if speech from educated folk was expected to be Biblical (or Shakespearan). Matter of fact speech would be too vulgar. Why? In these cases it would be too blunt and afford the regal asker not enough freedom of movement. In a kingly world, that is bad. Piss off the king, and your cult is in danger. Get too many things wrong and you become a Lincoln Project grifter. The cultural evolution market selects for a certain level of ambiguity. Politically, people are coming to the oracle for this. The king needs to show his people that they sought some outside advice. That outside advice was in the scope of the king's plans. The king took some of that advice to heart and mitigated risk accordingly. The people are now more satisfied that a protected group, who has a fair bit of range to speak to real risks, backs you. This oracle group also pushes some political wheels and some populist wheels. It gives a nice "talking point" narrative for public consumption. This is often framed in meta-narrative mythic form. But, usually the depth of mythic form depends upon the depth of the existential threat facing everyone as a whole.
So, Dan Carlin and others, don't discount the wisdom in old leaders like Leonidas going to the oracle of Delphi before the battle with the Persians. There were probably real political, real populist, and real strategic reasons to do so. Did this consultant see the populace having your back through this? As the 2020 US election shows, media narrative and media control do matter. Knowing just the right narrative to sell can be crucial. Just think of how Tech Bro's multi-year prep for hate-speech and misinformation checks played out. Who's back would other countries have? That insight is what you pay an oracle for. In the ancient world, the distribution of temples across multiple states gave them significant insight into what was happening on the ground and and elite levels of state.
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