in Pagan theology, the Pythias or priestesses of Apollo who delivered oracles without any action of the mouth or lips. The ancient philosophers, and others, are divided upon the subject of the engastrimythi. Hippocrates mentions this peculiar manifestation as a disease; some have regarded it as a kind of divination; others attribute it to the agency of an evil spirit; and others again to art and mechanism. Scotus supposes that the engastrimythi were poets, who, when the priestesses could not speak, supplied the defect by explaining in verse what Apollo dictated in the cavity of the sacred tripod.