The Sibyl of Cumae's 3 Greatest Myths: horrifyingly relevant cruelties
Let's relegate this pattern to history.
Her story proves that not much has changed in three thousand years.
The Sibyl of Cumae
The priestesses of the oracles were called Sibyls. The most famous if these on the Italian peninsula was the Sibyl of Cumae, and the most famous of her stories is also the most frequently misrepresented.
The gods were terrible about fooling around with mortal women. So, it should come as no surprise that Apollo was a dog. He decided he wanted to take the virginity of the Sibyl of Cumae and offered her anything in return. She saw a pile of sand and asked for as many years of life as there are grains of sand in that pile, and Apollo agreed.
Only, when he came to take her, she couldn’t give herself to him.
For his revenge, he gave her the years of life she asked for, but she hadn’t asked for eternal youth. As she aged, she grew older and older.
The Greeks thought: when a person gets older, they get shorter. If the sibyl lived a thousand years, she must have gotten really, really tiny.
That’s why, in the Satyricon, when Trimalchio claims to have seen the Sibyl, he says he saw her hanging in a jar.
Aeneas and the Golden Bough
In Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl escorts Aeneas into the underworld, but when they reach the River Styx, Charon initially refuses to ferry them across because Aeneas is alive. The Sibyl solves this by showing him the golden bough she’d instructed Aeneas to find, but the part that interests me is that Aeneas being alive is Charon’s only concern.
What about the Sibyl?
There are answers to this. She is a priestess and prophetess of Apollo and has appealed to Hecate with incantations and rituals that they may have safe passage into the land of the dead.
But the Sibyl is older than humanly possible by the blessing and curse of Apollo. She ages and shrinks and will eventually be kept in a bottle until nothing is left but her voice, begging for death. She lives a life which cannot be considered a life, and I believe there are many in their final days who see themselves in her situation, as if they are the souls of the dead, trapped in a body which will not release them.
The Sibyl is not the only character of mythology to hold this dual distinction. Hecate herself is called upon as the queen of both heaven and hell. Hecate befriends Persephone who becomes the wife of Hades and splits her year between the underworld and the land of the living, a timeshare she inherited from her mother.
Hecate is a chthonic deity because her dominion is liminal spaces. She rules over transitional spaces, which includes crossroads, a boundary between the realm of the natural and the supernatural; magic and witchcraft, supernatural activity in the hands of mortals; and the the underworld, where she carried the keys to the gates separating the living and the dead.
The Sibyl calls upon Hecate because in crossing over, they enter her domain.
But when I look at the Sibyl, I see a liminal creature, and though she is a priestess of Apollo, I imagine the passing of the years makes her more and more a servant of Hecate, a creature of the borderlands.
We are alive for a time, and then we are dead. Occasionally, we occupy some space in between.
Psychology expands these liminal spaces to the thresholds between two life states. The first that comes to my mind was when my daughter left for college. She lived with us and then she didn’t. She’d been in the church worship band for years, and the first Sunday someone else sang Oceans, I wept.
Even the song itself is a religious celebration of the liminal space between being safe on the boat, where we are limited but have some sense of control, and stepping out onto the waters by a divine calling, free from the limits that once confined us but now fully dependent upon God.
The Sibyl’s ritual is merely a darker version of the same song.
She enters the underworld as one liminal creature serving another, and I can only imagine that when Charon saw her, he saw one of his own.
The Sibylline Books
In 12 B.C.E., Augustus elevated Apollo’s status by transferring the Sibylline Books from Jupiter’s temple to Apollo’s. These ancient texts guided Rome, revealing rituals to prevent calamities but were eventually burned in 405 C.E.
Although written by other Sibyls it is said the Sibyl of Cumae offered the nine Sibylline Books to Rome’s last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. He scoffed at the price, and she burned three of the books. She repeated the offer, maintaining the price with fewer books. He refused, and she burned three more. Finally, he relented and bought the remaining three.
These ancient texts are said to have guided Rome through pestilence, plague, and war.
Michelangelo's Prophetess
Michelangelo immortalized the Sibyl of Cumae on the Sistine Chapel ceiling alongside Moses and the other prophets. Why did Renaissance Christians tolerate pagan figures like the Sibyl? They believed she foretold the coming of the Messiah.
Virgil’s fourth Eclogue was the pastoral poem responsible for the Sibyl’s authority in the minds of renaissance Europeans who believed she prophesied the Messiah’s coming. In the Sibyl’s voice, the Eclogue foretells a boy—a god—who ushers in a golden age. The church saw this as a prophecy of Jesus Christ.
An Ancient Woman with Modern Problems
Shall we review? The Sibyl was sexually harassed with demands made by those above her, and she was made to suffer for retaining autonomy over her own body. Instead of being called upon to lead, she was asked to guide the “chosen” man through areas too scary and too difficult for him to handle on his own. The value of what she had to offer was questioned, and she only held onto relevancy by having her work appropriated and used to glorify a Man.
Three thousand years later, we’re still struggling to do better.
Until next time,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas.
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