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The oracle of Trophonius was, as Philostratus notes, “the only oracle which gives responses through the person himself who consults it.” At all the others of Greece — Delphi, Dodona, Corinth — the visitor would address his questions to a priestess, who would then consult the god on his behalf and deliver its response. Not so Trophonius, which requires a by all accounts harrowing descent into the underworld that might last for days.

It’s not clear who or what Trophonius was — a god, a spirit, a man. He was sometimes identified with an aspect of Zeus, perhaps a cthonic one. According to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, he and his brother Agamedes built the temple to Apollo at Delphi. Pausanias adds that they constructed a treasury for Hyrieus with a secret entrance, so that they could slip in by night and steal the gold within. When Hyrieus discovered this, he laid a trap, which ensared Agamedes. Trophonius, so that his brother would not be tortured to death and so that his own identity would remain unknown, cut off his brother’s head and fled with it, but the earth opened beneath him and swallowed him alive.

The oracle was in use by at least the 6th century BC. Pausanias writes that it was discovered after a severe dought prompted the locals to consult the oracle at Delphi, who told them to find and placate Trophonius. One of the envoys searching for his crypt found a swarm of bees and followed them into a hole in the earth, discovering the oracle within.

His crypt sits at the source of the river Hercyna, which emerges from a cave alcove and divides the groves and temples of the site from the city of Lebedeia (today Livadeia). A man who sought to consult the oracle would live for a set time in a particular building on the site, abjuring hot baths and washing himself only in the river. He would sacrifice regularly to Trophonius, Apollo, Cronus, Zeus, Hera, and Demeter, who was set to have nursed Trophonius. A haruspex would divine from the entrails of the sacrificial victims whether the visitor could expect a good response from the oracle. On the last day of his preparation, the pilgrim was taken by night to the river, bathed, and annointed, then brought by priests to two fountains named for waters of the underworld. He drank first from Lethe (forgetfulness) “that he may forget all that he has been thinking of hitherto, and afterwards he drinks of another water, the water of Memory [Mnemosyne], which causes him to remember what he sees after his descent.” At the oracle on the mountain a ram is sacrificed, and only if its entrails too portend an answer does he descend through a set of doors ringed by spikes in a white marble sanctuary. Below them the site of the revelation.

A ladder is let down and the pilgrim enters a hollow in the earth. It is profoundly dark; there is no light. The walls are shaped by masonry, with a crack or hole near the floor into which the visitor shoves his feet. Then something grabs them. The seeker is dragged through the hole into the darkness beyond, and the question he brought to the oracle is answered, “by sight sometimes [i.e, a vision] and at other times by hearing.” When it is over, he is thrust back into the cave feet first, somehow having been turned around in the crevice.

This was, by all accounts, terrifying. Sometimes it seems the visitor remained down there for days. Pausanias writes that those who were at last brought up by its priests were “paralyzed with terror and unconscious both of himself and of his surroundings,” and would need to be carried back to their lodgings by their relatives, only gradually recovering his senses. As a side effect of the overwhelming terror, the visitor would lose his ability to laugh, sometimes for a very long while: the lost history of Semus of Delos recounts the case of one Parmeniscus, who did not fully recover from his experience in the cave until after he’d visited the Oracle of Delphi and traveled to the shrine of Apollo at Delos. The place seems to have been a byword of fear; Aristophanes, in The Clouds, uses it as a synonym for anything frightening.

Archaeological exploration of the site has not been extensive. It is not one of the better-known oracles in Greece, and is little visited by tourists. The location of the cave remains unknown. However, out of a general familiarity with the horror genre, I might suggest looking under the Church of St. Sophia on the mountain above the grove — right where Pausanias said the cave was.

You can read Plutarch’s account of a vision experienced in the crypt of Trophonius here.

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