Sketches of imposture, deception, and credulity / [R.A. Davenport].

  • Davenport, R. A. (Richard Alfred), 1777?-1852
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sketches of imposture, deception, and credulity / [R.A. Davenport]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of its oracles, and from its localities was well suited for such impostures, being mountainous and full of caverns, by means of which sounds and echoes, appa- rently mysterious, could be easily multiplied to excite the astonishment and terror of the supplicants. Herodotus informs us that one of the first oracles in Greece was imported from the Egyptian Thebes. It happened, says Mr. Mitford, in his History of Greece, that the master of a Phenician vessel carried off a woman, an attendant of the temple of Jupiter, at Thebes on the Nile, and sold her in Thesprotia, a mountainous tract in the north-western part of Epirus, bordering on the Illyrian hordes. Reduced thus unhappily to slavery among barbarians, the woman, however, soon became sensible of the superiority which her education in a more civilised country gave her over them; and she conceived hopes of mending her condition by practising upon their ignorance what she had acquired of those arts which able hands imposed upon a more enlightened people. She gave out that she possessed all the powers of prophecy to which the Egyptian Priests pretended ; that she could discover present secrets, and foretel future events. Her pretensions excited curiosity, and brought numbers to consult her. She chose her station tinder the shade of a spreading oak, where, in the name of the god Jupitei*, she delivered answers to her ignorant inquirei’s; and shortly her reputation as a prophetess extended as far as the people of the country them- selves communicated. These simple circumstances of her story were after- wards, according to the genius of those ages, tui’ned into a fable, which was commonly told, in the time of Herodotus, by the Dodonxean priests. A black pigeon, they said, flew from Thebes in Egypt to