A much more obvious explanation is that it involved nothing more than stream-of-consciousness rambling. You take a random sentence and you convince someone it's deep and profound. They work hard trying to understand it, and they end up having a sudden moment of insight. The sentence itself did nothing. It was the work in trying to understand it that did the trick.
Reading tea leaves? You're just looking at something random. Scrying? It's the same. Nothing about the Oracle of Delphi strikes me as odd enough to demand a deeper explanation than that. It was just a person making nonsensical statements.
Reading tea leaves? You're just looking at something random. Scrying? It's the same. Nothing about the Oracle of Delphi strikes me as odd enough to demand a deeper explanation than that. It was just a person making nonsensical statements.