In famous fairy tales, like ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ascribed to the voice of Mother Goose, the narrator hides under the bird’s vulgarity while at the same time transcending it by the act of narrative itself. Such a heterodox and ambiguous figure could not, however, have infiltrated the nursery and settled herself down by the fire if she had not combined with other figures, or been remoulded by another context. The cosy, well-behaved, even respectable nursery storyteller who emerges in the late seventeenth century entered mainstream culture with the help of contacts, of her own variety of godmothers: the Sibyls on one side and Jesus’ grandmother, Saint Anne, on the other.
Mother storks can deliver stories, as well as babies. (London, c 1911.)
The Sibyls, ten, or sometimes twelve in number, were imagined to have prophesied from every corner of the known earth; as the only group of female figures from paganism to survive in the Christian pantheon they offered artists a rich opportunity for visual pleasure and invention. Here the Persian Sibyl in a magnificent turban (that heathen headgear) raises her index finger to point out the truth; ‘She made the invisible Word tangible in words’, says the caption, referring to her prophecy of Christ’s coming. (Simon de Vries, early seventeenth century.)
CHAPTER 5
No Hideous Hum: Sibyls I
Meanwhile the prophetess … ran furious riot in the cave …1
Virgil, Aeneid VI
HERACLITUS, AROUND 500 BC, described how the ‘Sibyl with frenzied lips, uttering words mirthless, unembellished, unperfumed, penetrates through a thousand years with her voice’.2 His is the earliest source to mention such a prophetess; Pausanias, describing Delphi and its surroundings, later establishes the seer’s monstrous aspects for the first time. He reports that the Lamia, the snake-woman so sumptuously imagined later by Keats, bore a daughter after coupling with Zeus: ‘they say she was the first woman to sing oracles and was named Sibyl by the Libyans’.3 Here, in this enterprising travel writer’s aside, we find an early trace of the later, wonderfully rich and suggestive legend about an oracular woman with some hidden, snaky nature, which later influences the fairytale cast of fairy queens, demon brides, wicked enchantresses and cursing god-mothers. Pausanias also records that in Alexandria, a Sibyl was reputed to have warned Hecuba, through the interpretation of a dream, that Troy would fall – ‘that future which we know was to come true’.4 He quotes a snatch of a song she used to sing as she stood by her rock at Delphi which begins: ‘I was born between man and goddess,/ slaughterer of sea-monsters and immortal nymph …’5
The books of Sibylline prophecies which had survived the burning bargain driven by the Cumaean Sibyl with Tarquin were kept on the Capitol in Rome and guarded by a select number of the Republic’s great and good; in times of crisis, they were opened at random to offer a diagnosis and maybe a remedy (more sacrifices, more worship) until the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, which housed them, was itself burned down in 83 BC. Under the Empire, envoys were despatched to find more oracles, and this new harvest, under Augustus, was enshrined in the temple dedicated to Apollo, a more provident patron, perhaps, for prophecies, since the art was under his protection. There they were consulted, it would appear for the last time, in AD 363, half a century after the classical gods had been officially set aside by Rome, though the last Roman temple of the Sibyl’s secrets was closed only in the fifth century (in spite of the legend of the Sibyl of Cumae’s earlier flight).6 Though the books were lost (much to the disgust of early humanists) fragments continued to circulate, and quotations in secondary sources recorded the Sibyls’ apocalyptic warnings and resonant denunciations, expressed with great determination, but indeterminately open to interpretation. These materials offered shelter – and a house style – to later Sibylline fortune-telling.
Early in the fourth century AD, Lactantius gave an account of the ten Sibyls in some detail in his book The Divine Institutions, citing Varrò as his source.7 Lactantius is a crucial figure in the story of Sibylline imagery’s dissemination: a classical rhetor, like Augustine, and born like him in the North African possessions of the pre-Christian empire, he first lost his professorship under the persecuting emperor Diocletian, and lived in poverty. With the conversion of Constantine, he was eventually restored and appointed tutor to the imperial family. Thus Lactantius, who himself spanned the worlds of the old faith and the new, was eager to demonstrate that the Sibyls acted as hyphens between the past and the present, that Christianity need not break altogether with the culture of its enemies. He offered semi-biographical sketches for the Sibyls, and by individualizing them, furnished a sequence of mnemonics for the later authors of the flourishing oracular literature which imitated the classical model. His descriptions helped to anchor the Sibyls’ characters in the mind of his audience. He also quoted some remarkable examples of the Sibyls’ prescience: ‘He will satisfy five thousand from five loaves and a fish of the sea.’8 The Sibyl’s Song, filled with eschatological prophecies, even created in the first letters of each line an acrostic ‘JESUS SOTER’, or Jesus Saviour:
Judgement’s sign: the earth shall drip with sweat;
Everlastingly the King shall come from heaven, who
Shall be present to judge bodies and the world.
Unfaithful and faithful shall thus behold God
Sublime among the saints, at time’s utmost limit.9
Such apparently irrefutable proofs of Sibylline powers allowed these prophets of antiquity a unique place in Christian thought. The medieval romances which feature the exiled Sibyl of Cumae demonized her when they associated her with sexuality and sensual enchantments of every kind. But in this the secular legends parted from an important strand of learned medieval Christian syncretism, which incorporated the Sibyls into the scheme of redemption – as gifted seers who had enjoyed foreknowledge of the Messiah, ‘Christians before time’. The Emperor Constantine, in his Oration to the Council of Nicaea on Easter Day, 325, invoked various witnesses who had foreshadowed him in proclaiming the truth of Christ, and he included among them the Sibyl who, he declared, had prophesied the coming of the Saviour to Virgil in the Fourth Eclogue: ‘I cannot but think the Sibyl blessed, whom the Saviour thus chose to unfold his gracious purposes for us.’10 The poem heralds the advent of ‘the last age, sung of by the Cumaean Sibyl’, and greets the birth of the boy child who will bring about a new beginning.11
Another legend of the early Church, which was well established by the sixth century and retained its popularity in the middle ages, featured the Emperor Augustus meeting his local, Rome-based, prophetess, the Tiburtine Sibyl, on the Capitoline Hill, and hearing her proclaim, ‘Ecce ara primogeniti Dei’ (Behold the altar of the firstborn son of God). The scene, as represented in many Italian and Northern European Renaissance paintings, shows the Virgin Mary (herself a type of seat or altar for the Christ child) floating in a blaze of glory in the heavens above the Sibyl and the emperor.12 The Capitol, in Republican times the site of the vault where the Sibylline leaves were guarded, was dedicated to S. Maria in Aracoeli in the early years of Christianity – it was already considered an ancient basilica in the sixth century and the legend may well provide a mythic aetiology for its foundation. This was the spot where Gibbon heard the monks chanting and was set to musing on the glory that was Rome – the Sibylline connection no doubt helped to inspire his own prophetic meditation on fatality and frailty in the passage from paganism to Christianity.
Developing from both the Athenian and Roman prophetic traditions, the Oracula sibillina, the collection of religious-political documents attributed to the prophetesses, circulated in eight books of Greek hexameters; believed now to have originated among Christian and Jewish circles from the mid-second century BC to around AD 300, they were transcribed in many languages, though a full Greek manuscript was not rediscovered in Western Europe until 1545, by a scholar, Xystus Betuleius, who found one in Augsburg; this was translated into Latin ten years later.13 The materials had proved very popular far afield:
the Tiburtine Sibyl’s prophecies exist in no fewer than a hundred and thirty manuscripts, thirty of them before 1200, in many languages which include Ethiopic and Arabic as well as Latin and Greek.14 So when later local legends ascribed the Cumaean Sibyl’s flight to a fit of spite that Mary had been chosen to be the mother of the coming Redeemer instead of her, they were embroidering on exalted connections between paganism and Christianity, on beliefs that she, like her Tiburtine sister in prophecy, had indeed foreseen Christ’s coming.
The Sibyls make an interesting, even unique showing in Christian mythology, since they are directly inherited from the pagan belief system, and were long assimilated to demonesses, witches and fairies. Yet no less a figure than Saint Augustine himself had quoted Sibylline prophecies with approval: ‘She [the Erythraean Sibyl] seems to me to have been a citizen of the city of God.’15 Consequently, the Sibyls managed to win wholehearted endorsements from thinkers like Peter Abelard, and to be accepted as severe prophets of the coming, Christian salvation – or doom. The Franciscan poet Thomas of Celano took an apocalyptic view in the beautiful thirteenth-century sequence for the Mass of the Dead still sung today:
Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum sibylla.
[The day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world into ashes,
as David and the Sibyl testify.]16
Relicts of paganism, the Sibyls constitute the only such group of female figures in Christian tradition; in spite of some Neoplatonist efforts in the fifteenth century, and again by some hermeticists in the seventeenth, to establish the classical gods as Christian angels in disguise or allegorical forerunners, classical divinities or heroes remained effectively in permanent exile from orthodoxy.
From the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the surviving fragments of the Oracula sibillina grew in popularity until, with the invention of printing, they reached a wide, secular readership as well. Translations and variations and attributions began being published in the vernacular, in illustrated books and booklets from Germany, Venice, St Gallen, predominantly for readers in Catholic communities; they inspired many works, like the beautiful sgraffito pavement of Siena Cathedral, created by several hands in 1482–3, which gives individualized portraits of Lactantius’ ten Sibyls (here).17 As the Old Testament prophets are to the Jews, so in the Renaissance, the Sibyls became to the Gentiles. Mantegna’s grisaille painting A Sibyl and a Prophet, of around 1495, conveyed a characteristic humanist desire to reconcile ancient wisdom with biblical soteriology. The very imitation of antique bronze bas relief on the canvas enacts an analogous collapsing of the centuries that have elapsed: the once upon a time in which the seers exchanged knowledge can be remade in the present tense through mimesis. Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling probably gives the Sibyls their most celebrated and monumental interpretation, as the five he chose to portray take their places on the pendentives between their biblical counterparts, the prophets (Pl. 4). To the Church exegetes, these heathen seers came to represent the unredeemed world’s foreknowledge of the Christian faith and, in consequence, stood for the universality of the scheme of salvation: all of history retroactively could be gathered under the mantle of the Holy Roman Church, for these female prophets from all points of the known world, named to gather in the furthest borders of the Roman and Greek empire, had prophesied aspects of the true, coming redemption. In France, they make an appearance in miracle plays, and sometimes are introduced to endorse arguments in praise of women.18
The Sibyl, as a cross-cultural symbol, necessarily denies historical difference; her words, originating in the past, apply to the rolling present whenever it occurs; however, the perceived fact of her roots in that distant past adds weight to her message precisely because it is free of the historical context in which she uttered it; she was not fettered by her historical time and place but could transcend it with her visionary gifts. In their very identity as truth-tellers, the Sibyls of tradition cancel connections to history – this is crucial in their contribution to the composite character of the female narrator and inventor of future fictions. They speak their verses, or sing their messages, and though they are always communicating a prior, universal wisdom, they are seen as actively shaping it – their voices are the instruments of the knowledge they pass on in order to prepare for life ahead. As a sibylline poem declares:
Many a song my own singings have uttered within myself;
the songs which I write, those God knows …19
In art the motifs were not confined to the high manner and high ceilings of Renaissance masters. The Oracula sibillina inspired a proliferating number of lowly engravings and woodcuts printed for distribution in vernacular series throughout Christendom, as recognizable as the familiar intercessors and mysteries of redemption.20 The Erythraean Sibyl, for instance, was depicted foreseeing Christ as the Man of Sorrows and his mocking at the hands of his jailers, in a crudely drawn print of 1473 from Germany (here), redolent of the anti-semitism which became a feature of this material (see Chapter Eight).
The popular print series tend to follow Lactantius and portray ten Sibyls; Filippo Barbieri, in some widely circulated verses first published in Venice in 1481, follows Lactantius in listing them as the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Cimmerian, the Erythraean, the Samian, the Cumaean, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian and the Tiburtine, and then adds two – by name Europa and Agrippa – to match them to the twelve apostles.21
The classical sources also specify the Sibyls’ ages, not it seems with some arcane numerological intent, but to anchor them in real history as well as geography: some are said to be rather young – the Cumaean Sibyl, for example, is only eighteen in Lactantius’ account. The Delphic Sibyl, likewise, is young, aged twenty. These two youngest Sibyls were coincidentally the most famous vates of antiquity, attending powerful and popular shrines and directly serving the god of prophecy, Apollo, whose inspiration, writes Virgil, made the earth shake in the Sibyl’s cave. It is not surprising that they take shape as the most fascinating temptresses in the subsequent folklore, as in the case of the Cumaean at Norcia.
The printed material of sayings ascribed to the Sibyls often reflected current propaganda against non-Christians: the Erythraean Sibyl foresees Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and evokes the mocking of his gaolers. Her anachronistic fifteenth-century dress underlines the ugly contemporary message of the image. (Ulm, 1473.)
The Cimmerian Sibyl, from the far north, was specified as twenty-four years old. All the rest are frequently portrayed in various stages of decrepitude; they are old women who reverse the classical and medieval misogynist trend relying on the crone to represent vice. In the case of the Sibyls, the processes of physical ageing, however faithfully rendered, are not assumed to be repugnant, or even pitiful, as they so commonly were in earlier didactic literature. Old age, in this tradition of Sibylline iconography, stands for wisdom. This antiquity figures forth their memory of deep time as well as their foreknowledge of the deep future. In the series of woodcuts printed around 1514 in Oppenheim, for instance, the Hellespontine Sibyl is evoked: ‘An old woman wrapped in an ancient rustic dress, with an old veil tied about her head and wrapped around her throat to her shoulders, looking down at what she writes, just as Heraclitus wrote …’ (here).22
Every Sibyl was ascribed a defining attribute which could also act as a mnemonic; it emphasized the approved message of the particular prophecy, allowing the receiver – especially among the illiterate – to understand the story behind the image. In the attractive series of woodcuts printed in St Gallen, Switzerland, in 1485, each Sibyl sits facing the fulfilment of her prophecy in the New Testament on the facing page. The Samian carries a wooden cradle of the type which would have been in use in St Gallen at the end of the fifteenth century, for her prophecy concerns the birth of Christ in a manger. The nativity accordingly appears opposite, in an early example of the cartoon-strip form of narrative, in which the speaker’s text turns into pictures before the
reader’s eyes.23 The Hellespontine Sibyl usually enters the cycle later, and her message correspondingly takes up the story late in Jesus’ life and passion. Her attribute is the cross, and her prophecy often focusses on the crucifixion: for example, ‘Felix ille deus ligno qui pendet ab alto’ (Happy the god who shall hang from that beam on high).24
But the iconography of the Sibyls varies, and their textually prescribed attributes cannot be wholly relied upon to identify them. Nor does an appearance of old age or youthfulness remain consistent – the northern Italians of the Quattrocento for instance resist depicting them as halt and wrinkled.25 The different oracular messages passed down in the verbal tradition are also frequently transposed from one to another. It seems the case that the printed materials distinguished the Sibyls by age, emblem, prophecy more scrupulously than do the single standing figures in situ by a major artist, as in the pavement of the Duomo of Siena. For such works, lessons take second place to aesthetics.
The Sibyls provided a teaching tool. In themselves, they represented the expansiveness of the divine plan, while their prophecies provided a topic for a preacher to expound. They are depicted raising an index finger to Heaven, or tapping a scroll or book like a schoolmistress teaching her pupils a new vocabulary. Both these gestures characterize other-worldly inspiration, male and female; it is the text which the Sibyl cites or explains which confers authority on her. God speaks through her, she is an unwitting medium, even, of the divine afflatus which proclaims Christianity before time.
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