The Oracle combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the countercultural community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury.

In the summer of 1966 a number of meetings were held in the Haight-Ashbury district to discuss the idea of starting a paper, attracting an eclectic group of interested people.

Frisco which lasted for a single 12-page tabloid issue dated September 2, 1966, under the editorship of Dan Elliot and Richard Sassoon (a 31-year-old Yale-educated poet who had once been Sylvia Plath's boyfriend[2]), operating out of a storefront on Frederick Street in cooperation with members of the radical Progressive Labor Party.

The Oracle quickly developed a stable core group of staffers which included, among many others, Michael Bowen, Stephen Levine, Travis Rivers (a Texan friend of Janis Joplin, he was at that time the manager of the Haight Street branch of the Print Mint), George Tsongas, who had returned to the paper, staff artists Dangerfield Ashton, Ami McGill, and Hetti McGee, poet Harry Monroe, Gene Grimm, and Steve Lieper.

[5] The influential sprawling thematic pieces that ran in the Oracle include the astrologers' symposium on the Age of Aquarius in issue #6, with Ambrose Hollingworth, Gayla (Rosalind Sharpe Wall, an associate of John Starr Cooke), and Gavin Arthur; and the "Houseboat Summit" in issue #7 which brought together Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Gary Snyder for a long, free-ranging discussion on the houseboat owned by Watts and Elsa Gidlow through their Society for Comparative Philosophy.

Elsa Gidlow, a quiet counterculture engine in her own right, contributed an essay to that same issue entitled "Sounds From the Seedpower Sitar".

Issue #12, which was to be the last, featured an uncut transcript of a symposium at Masonic Auditorium entitled "2000 A.D." with Alan Watts, Herman Kahn and Carl Rogers.

In 1967 students at San Francisco State College distributed a one-off eight-page tabloid parody of the Oracle called the Orifice, edited by Ben Fong-Torres.