Everybody has some concept of some mythology that has been unearthed on the planet. The most common mythology anyone claims to know something of is mostly Roman, Greek, Norse etc. Mythology has been a part of human history since the beginning of civilization. There have been plenty of authors that have written their own interpretations of these myths, more famously Rick Riordan with his Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series that delves into the Greek/Roman mythologies. The one thing each of these mythologies have in common though, is their own type of oracle/augur/psychic that will have a prediction about the future. It was brought up by Francesca in class on Monday, that when Mark Spitz and crew went in to see the psychic, it was sort of like some books I have read before that have to do with mythology.
The Oracle of Delphi was a crucial part of Greek Mythology, most of the heroes we’ve read about wouldn’t be as great as they are if the Oracle wasn’t there. The Oracle is the one who gave out the prophecies, or riddles that the hero was to decipher and work out to complete an assignment or quest. In Rick Riordan’s hit series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Phoebus Apollo’s Oracle is placed within the Camp full of demigods (children of the Greek gods, half-human half-god) and she is who the young heroes go to seek counsel from when they have a questions, or a quest that needs fulfilling. In the books, the Oracle is described as having an air of reptiles or snakes wherever she walks, and the Oracle is described as ‘a human female body shriveled to a husk. The skin of her face was thin and leathery over her skull and her eyes were glassy white slits, as if the real ones had been replaced by marbles; she’d been dead a long, long time.’ (PJO: The Lightning Thief). The Oracle was integral in making heroes heroes, but without fail, whenever a prophecy was issued, chaos followed in the years to come until that Prophecy was fulfilled. The main prophecy in this series spoke of the second Titan War against the Greek gods, and how the demigod son of Poseidon can either save the world or let it die with a single choice (sorry for spoilers).
In Zone One, before Gary met his end by another one of his microaggressions, the trio of Mark Spitz, Kaitlyn and Gary happen upon a Fortune Tellers shop, and Gary wants to go in and get his palm read. Everything was going fine, and the straggler fortune teller wasn’t moving one inch as Gary laid his hand in her palm. But as soon as Gary moved his hand from hers, she moved and chomped down on Gary’s hand, sealing his doom, even though he tried to stave off the plague rushing through his body with ‘anticiprant’. The straggler fortune teller is described as having, ‘a hunk of the fortune-teller’s neck beneath her right ear was absent. The exposed meat resembled torn-up pavement tinted crimson, a scabbed hollow of gaping gristle, tubes, and pipes: the city’s skin ripped back.’ (Zone One). As in any mythology, after visiting the oracle to have a reading of the future, and having Gary’s thumb savagely bitten off, chaos ensued as pointed out by Prof. McCoy. In the streets all of the dead are surrounding the city, the few survivors are trapped in the building with no way out and it seems to be the end for our characters.