Do you know why people/states consulted oracles? :)
Fun fact: people think in patterns. We, as a species, LIKE patterns, and we instinctively seek them out wherever we are. We also dislike uncertainty — how do you feel when you take a test and don’t know how you did? The higher the stakes in a situation, the more we want to know FOR CERTAIN what will happen.
Before things like science and medicine were understood clearly — before we could accurately forecast the weather (and huge storms) and reliably cure diseases — humans still sought that certainty. They still wanted to know what would happen — would their ship reach Egypt safely? Would their son recover from his fever?
Religion — and by extension, consulting oracles — was a way for humans to put a pattern to their environment. Devastating hurricane that no one predicted? Neptune must be mad at someone. Your wife die in childbirth? Juno is in a bad mood. But your relative or friend gets over a life-threatening illness? Divine intervention of Apollo!
Oracles were a way for humans to look at events in their world and figure out the gods’ will — to predict the future. This sign would mean that something good would happen, that sign would mean something bad, and that OTHER sign might mean “your day is fucked, you may as well stay in bed.” (Cough Julius Caesar on the ides of March…poor old arrogant Caesar.)
Eventually, people stopped believing in the gods, but they kept giving sacrifices (to thank the gods or ask them to please stop being so angry) and checking the oracles because the Romans were NOTHING if not traditional. And if you think about it, traditions are just another sort of pattern — you repeat X in the same way every time because it makes you feel comfortable.
…this is also why your teacher probably follows the same or a similar schedule during class each day. Opening activity, possibly check/collect homework, teach something new, practice it as a class (then in small groups and/or individually), give homework, review the day’s lesson/do a closing activity…and bell. Students focus best when their environment is predictable — when they know what to expect from a teacher and a classroom. If your teacher is happy one day, crying the next, screaming the third, and catatonic the fourth, then by Friday the whole class will want a new schedule. But if a teacher is consistent (AKA predictable), then students can learn to adjust to it…even if they don’t like the teacher, at least they know what to expect.
