The Oracles are the Ithorian scriptures, recorded by various jungle priests who held the title of oracle. It is said to be inspired by the Mother Jungle herself, though it is unclear if Oracles were practicing dictation, or if they mean “inspired” more loosely. The work is a mix of genres, including Ithorian history, poetry, prophecies, doctrine, philosophy, and natural science. The book is typically divided into three parts: the Flower, the Facet, and the Face (or informally: Vegetable, Mineral, and Animal respectively).
- The Flower contains notes and musings from various oracles about botany, animal husbandry, and other natural sciences. It contains a comprehensive set of rules about planting, harvesting, soil care, humane collecting of animal products, and other agricultural practices. It holds one of the most famous passages of Ithorian culture: the Law of Life.
- The Facet contains primarily prophecies about future events and teaching on what is commonly called The Force. It is the most obscure and difficult portion of the work to interpret.
- The Face contains Ithorian history, poetry, and doctrine. This section was written later than the other two, the majority of it after the Ithorians had left the surface of Ithor and started dwelling on herdships. It includes a great deal of commentary on the other two portions, with applications for the space age.
Our best source for the text of Oracles comes from the recently-discovered Waawat Codex, an ancient set of manuscripts found in an ancient temple on the planet Ithor during Oracle Waawat’s first pilgrimage. Despite their age, the codex was in good condition, with only a few pages and passages decayed or damaged. Textual critics have concluded that this is the oldest complete manuscript we have of the Ithorian religious text, though there are a number of less-complete older manuscripts. Using the other manuscripts we have preserved, we are able to confidently fill in the blanks of the Waawat Codex. The harmony between this text and older texts is remarkable, despite the several hundred years between their writing.
The Waawat Codex includes several chapters which are unique to itself, and not corroborated by older manuscripts. This is hardly surprising, since it is the privilege of each Oracle to add to the body of the text. As such, later manuscripts are often longer than earlier ones. However, one of the new chapters has not yet been released publicly by the finder, for reasons he has not yet revealed. Some have speculated that they contain prophecies only intended to be viewed by future Oracles, while others believe it is written in an ancient language that the Oracle is presently translating personally, but Waawat has refused to speak publicly about the topic.
Translation of the work into Galactic Basic is challenging, as the ithorian language is stereophonic (befitting a species with two mouths) and highly nuanced. The written form of ithorese is somewhat basic, reflecting the ithorian preferance for oral tradition over writing. As such, the language is sometimes muddied by writing it down, and can make it very difficult to tell sometimes which word or sound is intended. For example, Ithorese has more vowel markings than consonant markings, so while it would be very easy to distinguish, say, “pen” from “pin,” it’s sometimes hard to tell from the marking if the word should be “thin,” “fin,” or “bin.” Ithorese can also be written either left-to-right or right-to-left, adding an additional layer of complexity to the translation work.
Another unique feature of the language is a phenomenon known as “Phantom Phonics.” Sometimes, when two (or more!) Ithorians, each read separate texts in sonorous double-voices, their words can combine to form the “phantom sound” of a third word. It’s a poor analogy, but imagine I said the word “trait” while you said the word “brave” – a listener might hear a combination of those words, such as “Rave” or “Braid.” Several passages in the Oracle make use of this phenomenon, especially in the Facet. These hidden passages sometimes appear to give new shades of meaning to their parent passages, while others appear to be independent thoughts. Scholars and musicians alike continue to search for hidden words, some finding whole chapters that require multiple voices to detect. Some go so far as to read half of a passage with their left mouth and a different passage with their right mouth! A few instances of these phantom words are so well-known they are considered part of the text’s canon, despite not being written down in the book at all! This has led many Jungle Priests to teach that the Oracle is not a book that can be read alone, but requires a community in order to understand it. Some mystics also teach that the phantom phonics are part of how Mother Jungle speaks to individuals, and say that while we should listen for them, what we hear is individual and subjective, and not to be shared. In any case, Phantom Phonics have become an important part of the text’s history and comprise a sort of hidden code sprinkled throughout the work. Some phantom passages have been recorded as a sort of Apocrypha to the text, and famous ones are often included in as an appendix or margin notes in many recent editions.