Priestesses at the Oracle of Delphi delivered ancient Greece's most famous and consequential prophecies while sitting over a geological fault line that leaked sweet-smelling, highly intoxicating ethylene gas.

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Priestesses at the Oracle of Delphi delivered ancient Greece's most famous and consequential prophecies while sitting over a geological fault line that leaked sweet-smelling, highly intoxicating ethylene gas. Kings and generals would travel for months and pay massive fortunes to ask the Pythia whether they should go to war, entirely unaware they were taking advice from a woman who was absolutely zooted on subterranean fumes. She would speak in frantic, incoherent babbles that a team of priests would conveniently translate into vague, poetic riddles that could be interpreted multiple ways. When King Croesus asked if he should attack Persia, the Oracle told him a great empire would fall, which he took as a green light. He ended up losing the war and destroying his own empire, proving that making geopolitical decisions based on the hallucinations of a high priestess is a fundamentally terrible military strategy