The Sacred Oak
Dodona and the Origins of the Oracular Tradition
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Hi friends.
I’m back in Cornwall, writing to you from my treasured Morrab Library again. I’ve booked myself a desk here for the month of August, and following my recent fieldwork, the plan is to hunker down to finish my manuscript.
Switching gears a bit today from the Encounters with the Deep Past series. This week I’ve been writing my chapter on the oracular arts, and thought to share some of my thoughts with you here.
Did you know that one of the earliest prophetic seats in Europe was an oak tree?
Long before the marble temples of Delphi rose into prominence, before Apollo claimed the priestess’s tongue, there was a sacred grove in the mountainous region of Epirus, northwestern Greece.
The gods were believed to speak through a great oak tree. But, much like I think the Earth herself was the oracle at Delphi, I suspect the oak tree was originally more than just a funnel. It was the oracle itself.
Dodona is widely regarded as the oldest known oracle in ancient Greece, and perhaps all of Europe. Its roots stretch deep into the Bronze Age and possibly further into the pre-Hellenic, pre-Indo-European religious landscape.
The oracle at Dodona was originally sacred to Gaia, the Earth goddess, and later to Dione, a shadowy, powerful feminine figure often interpreted as an earlier form of Rhea or Gaia herself. In time, Zeus was incorporated as her consort or counterpart. Yet even under the name of Zeus, Dodona retained its earthly, chthonic character — an elemental oracle grounded in the natural world, rather than lifted to the heights of Olympian abstraction.
At the heart of the sanctuary stood a sacred oak tree, believed to be inhabited by the divine. Pilgrims would approach and submit questions, often inscribed on small lead tablets — many of which survive today. Instead of the responses coming from a trance-speaking prophetess, the answers were seen to derive from the tree itself and the wider landscape: the rustling of leaves, the flight of doves, and the clang of bronze cauldrons hung from the boughs. It was a form of divination profoundly rooted in animism — the belief that the Earth and her elements are alive and communicative.
Presiding over the oracle were women known as the Peleiades, which means "doves." This term evokes both the sacred birds of Dione and Aphrodite, and also the pleiades constellation linked to mourning and ancestral memory.
These priestesses were the interpreters of the sacred sounds, listening to wind, leaf, and birdcall with practiced attention. It was a form of oracular art that required presence, atunement, and deep listening — qualities associated with the feminine in many ancient traditions. I personally call this method “Earth Oracles” and teach it in my work.
Dodona’s significance lies especially in what it represents: a time when oracular knowledge was not transmitted through speech alone, but through the living world — through trees, animals, weather patterns and sound.
This worldview reflects a pre-Olympian spiritual logic in which divinity was immanent in the natural world and accessible through relationship with place.
The Peleiades priestesses served goddesses of the chthonic realm, interpreted signs in nature, and mediated between the human and divine realms. They belonged to a sacred lineage of women who listened — not to scripture or dogmatisms, but to the Earth’s own voice.
Dodona was not alone in its animistic form of wisdom. At the same time that the priestesses of Dodona were listening to the oak tree and the birds, another group of prophetic women known as the Thriai were practicing a similar form of divination in the Corycian Cave above Delphi, long before Apollo’s temple was established.
The Thriai — often described as bee-like maidens — divined through pebbles, bones, trance states and natural signs, and they passed this knowledge on to Apollo. Like Dodona, early Delphi was an oracular site rooted in earth-centric, animistic wisdom, shaped by feminine presence and the natural world.
Here is a video from my recent fieldwork in the Corycian Cave-
In myth, Herodotus tells us that two black doves flew from Thebes in Egypt — one to Libya (where the oracle of Ammon was established), and one to Dodona — and there they began to speak. The story is symbolic and potent: the idea that divine speech once emerged from the mouths of birds, that language itself had its roots in nature, not text.
The symbolic connection between birds and bees is especially striking in these oracular traditions. Both creatures were seen as messengers — able to traverse worlds, carry divine speech, and represent the soul in flight. In Orphic and Platonic thought, the soul was imagined at times as a small, winged being — whether a bird or a bee — able to leave the body in trance, dream or death (Plato, Phaedrus 245c–d).
During my field research, I found these part-bird, part-woman figurines all across Greece, from Delphi, to Eleusis, to Crete…
The doves of Dodona and the bee-maidens of Delphi are parallel in more than myth. Both are linked to the sacred feminine, to prophetic knowledge that emerges from listening to the natural world. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes describes the Thriai as three winged maidens who eat honeycomb and teach Apollo the art of prophecy.1 Likewise, Pindar refers to the Delphic priestess as the "Delphic Bee," a title which appears in the scholia to his Pythian Odes.2
Birds and bees were not simply symbols of the sacred; they were living instruments of it. Jane Ellen Harrison notes that in archaic religion, both bees and birds were understood not metaphorically but as real manifestations of spiritual presence, reflecting an older order of belief.3 Similarly, Hilda M Ransome writes that priestesses called Melissae may have mimicked the movements or sounds of the hive in sacred rites.4
That these symbols were embodied by priestesses — the Peleiades and the Thriai — reinforces the idea that prophecy in the ancient world was once the domain of women.
The doves of Dodona and the bees of Delphi are both linked to the sacred feminine and to prophetic knowledge that emerges from listening to the natural world.
The oracle at Dodona persisted well into the classical period, and even into Roman times, though by then it had lost much of its central place in the religious imagination. Likewise, Apollo’s rise at Delphi eventually eclipsed the older site, shifting the cultural focus from a nature-based oracle to a more stylised and state-sanctioned form of prophecy.
But these ancient sites remain a powerful symbol — not of what was lost, but of what was once possible. A form of spiritual life in which groves and caves were temples, priestesses listened to oak trees, birds and bees, and the Earth herself was the oracle.
Homeric Hymn to Hermes, lines 550–568.
Pindar, Pythian Ode 4.60–70, scholia.
Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 151–152.
Ransome, The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore, p. 96.
POETRY OFFERING
In this poem, Mary Oliver illustrates a moment of pure, attentive listening to the more-than-human world. Just like the rustling leaves at Dodona were once believed to be the voice of Gaia, here the song of the bird becomes a divine utterance, comprehensible only when we stop and listen.
Also consider this quote from her poem “Instructions for living a life” (from Sometimes):
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
These lines distill her entire ethos — akin to a priestess attending to the murmurs of the sacred grove.
SUCH SINGING IN THE WILD BRANCHES
— Mary Oliver
It was spring
and finally I heard him
among the first leaves –
then I saw him clutching the limb
in an island of shade
with his red-brown feathers
all trim and neat for the new year.
First, I stood still
and thought of nothing.
Then I began to listen.
Then I was filled with gladness –
and that’s when it happened,
when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree –
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,
and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward
like rain, rising,
and in fact
it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing –
it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed
not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,
and also the trees around them,
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfectly blue sky – all, all of them
were singing.
And, of course, yes, so it seemed,
so was I.
Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn’t last
for more than a few moments.
It’s one of those magical places wise people
like to talk about.
One of the things they say about it, that is true,
is that, once you’ve been there,
you’re there forever.
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?
Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then – open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Thanks Gabriela for bringing Dodona to us. It reminded me of a plant Dodonea viscosa, considered a native of Australia and also native to Brasil. It appears in India, Dubai and recently seen in Egypt. Earth calls to herself ways of communication; lightning from the Gods above and Oaks with mistletoe are quite talkative as are the Lime (Tilia) trees here in Italy. They like Baobabs in Africa have been used traditionally as talking trees where people come to listen and to teach. Some say the first schools were around such trees.
My very favourite classical oracle is the one of Fortuna Praeneste at what is now Palestrina, where a man,s dream caused the oracle to be established. The guardian of the oracle was a child, who would bring out a box full of wooden tokens, the querent withdrew one token and had to interpret it for herself!