He took out of his pocket the most respectable hunting-watch I ever saw, and preventing the spring with his thumb from opening far, looked in at the face as if he were consulting an oracular oyster, shut it up again, and said, if I pleased, it was half past eight.

Oracular literature, also called orphic or prophetic literature, positions the poet as a medium between humanity and another world, sometimes defined as supernatural or non-human.

Among indigenous North Americans, spiritual and/or political leaders like The Great Peacemaker used oracular rhetoric to artistic effect in delivering their messages.

Within the European and American literary traditions, oracular speech that links the individual creative artist with forces larger than the individual ego have been part of several movements.

American Transcendentalists found inspiration in an oversoul, which Ralph Waldo Emerson also called an "oracular soul."

Imagism based art on deep connection with an object outside the self, thus allowing some of its practitioners to develop an art with oracular content.

Important writers whose work has been defined as oracular include Arthur Rimbaud, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Butler Yeats, and H.D. Modern usage.

While modernism generally discouraged writers from employing an oracular voice to connect humanity with the more-than-human, some contemporary authors, especially those whose work reflects concern for the natural world and/or social justice, have embraced the role.

Nevertheless, a temple was an important religious site for all classes of Egyptians, who went there to pray, give offerings, and seek oracular guidance from the god dwelling within.

In any case, the oracular events during festivals provided an opportunity for people to receive responses from the normally isolated deities, as did the other varieties of oracle that developed late in Egyptian history.

By contrast, the Augustan poet Ovid in Book 11 of the "Metamorphoses" speaks of a place "on Trojan soil ... close to the sea, to the right of Sigeion, to the left of Rhoeteum" which is not Ajax's tomb or the Aeantion promontory (as the description might suggest), but instead "an old altar of Jupiter the oracular, god of the thunder".