The voice of divine prophecy

Delphi was the center of the ancient Greek world, called "the navel of the earth" (omphalos). Here, in the temple of Apollo, the priestess Pythia delivered the oracle. Pythia would breathe the vapors rising from a cleft beneath the temple, fall into ecstasy, and murmur the words of Apollo, which the priests then interpreted and conveyed to those who came to inquire. The Latin oraculum derives from orare (to speak, to pray) -- meaning "words received by praying to a god." The most famous of Delphi's maxims, carved at the temple's entrance, was "γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton)" -- "Know thyself." King Croesus, receiving the oracle that "if he attacked Persia, a great empire would fall," began the war -- but the empire that fell was his own, Lydia. The essence of the oracle was to hide truth within ambiguity.

Singimyosan (神機妙算) originally means "divine strategy and exquisite calculation," and it became most famous as the phrase describing Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮, 181-234) in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. At the Battle of Red Cliffs (208 CE), Zhuge Liang observed the heavens, foresaw that the southeast wind would blow, and proposed an attack by fire. Cao Cao's host of eight hundred and thirty thousand was annihilated by that wind and flame. Afterward came the Empty Fort Stratagem (空城計), in which he repelled Sima Yi by playing the zither atop a deserted city wall, and the strategy of retreat that drove off the living even after his death -- Zhuge Liang's foresight came to be called "not of man, but of the divine." Yet the Zhuge Liang of the historical Records of the Three Kingdoms was not the demigod of the Romance but a master of thorough preparation and the gathering of intelligence. Singimyosan was not the supernatural but the result of human effort carried to its limit.