At once he will prophesy. You will be faint in soul, and not in yourself, when he answers you. He speaks to you the oracle in verses, and having spoken he will depart, and you stand speechless — for you will take all this in of its own accord, and then

The god does not converse; he prophesies — chrēsmōidḗsei, chants an oracle, and in verse, dià stíchōn, the way Delphi always answered. Ancient prophecy came metered; the meter was part of the authority. And the human on the receiving end is wrecked by it: hypéklytos, unstrung, 'faint in soul,' and ouk en seautôi — 'not in yourself,' the plainest possible description of dissociation. The reborn god of the previous lines is, in the same body, a man barely holding on. The most interesting promise is about memory. You stand there eneós, struck dumb, and yet you will 'take it all in automátōs' — automatically, of its own accord — and remember it whole. The rite guarantees a kind of possessed recall: you will not understand or transcribe the oracle in the moment, because you are not present to yourself, but it will be written into you anyway, to be read back later. It is a strikingly accurate account of how ecstatic and traumatic experiences are actually laid down — not chosen, not composed, but imprinted — reported here as a technical feature of the divine encounter.