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~ SYBIL ~

She was the Latin version of Cybele, the Great Mother of Gods. Her name means Cave-dweller. This may have been derived from the Babylonian subultu, a Goddess seen in the sky as the constellation of the Celestial Virgin. Her oracular spirit spoke through a succession of priestesses in the sacred cave of Cumae, near lake Avernus, dedicated to Triple Hecate. Famed as an entrance to the underworld, Sybil's priestesses called up the dead for necromantic interviews.

In the 2nd Century B.C., the aniconic idol of Cybele was carried to Rome by order of the Cumaean sybils whose oracles guided imperial policy. Texts of the priestesses' sayings, the Sybilline Books, were so respected that Christians spent many centuries rewriting these books and creating additions to them, all to make it seem that the sybils foretold the coming of Christ.

According to Varro, in the 1st Century B.C., there were ten great sybils who divided the known world among their ten oracular shrines.

Christian scholars, throughout the Middle Ages, described each of the great sybils as a prophetess of Christ, painting them with Christian symbols such as crucifixes, crowns of thorns, lilies, etc.

It is maintained among folk tradition, that after the Christian conquest of Europe, the sybils continued to occupy sacred caves in certain mountains that belonged to the Great Mother of the Gods. These were the Venusbergs of medieval paganism. Many legends told of men, who like Tannehauser and Thomas Rhymer, entered just such a cave and dwelt in "the Paradise of Queen Sybil".