in Pagan theology, the Pythians, or priestesses of Apollo, who delivered oracles from within, without any action of the mouth or lips.

The ancient philosophers, &c., are divided upon the subject of the engastrimythi. Hippocrates mentions it as a disease. Others will have it a kind of divination. Others attribute it to the operation or possession of an evil spirit. And others to art and mechanism. M. Scottus maintains that the engastrimythi of the ancients were poets, who, when the priests could not speak, supplied the defect by explaining in verse what Apollo dictated in the cavity of the bason on the sacred tripod.