De Zirkoff on the Sibylline Oracles

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, taken from a single endnote — number 31 — that de Zirkoff appended to The Esoteric Character of the Gospels in the Collected Writings volume VIII, pages 226 to 229. The frontispiece is Domenichino's Sibyl of about 1616, in the Galleria Borghese. *It is a self-contained piece of classical scholarship*, and the shortest way into a subject that turns up all over this library.

The whole subject of the sibyls of antiquity is, de Zirkoff says at the outset, shrouded in considerable mystery. They were supposed to be women inspired by influences from higher regions, consulted for their prophetic utterances, and flourishing in different parts of the ancient world — and he offers a careful theosophical gloss on what that may have meant in practice: it is likely they ranged from the mediumistic and sensitive stage to that of true seership. According to Varro they were ten in number. The Erythraean was claimed by Apollodorus of Erythrae as a native of that city, though others considered her Babylonian, and she is said to have predicted to the Greeks, as they sailed for Troy, that the city was destined to perish. The most celebrated was the Cumaean in Italy, spoken of by Naevius and other Latin writers and especially by Virgil — the sibyl who accompanied Aeneas to the lower regions. The centrepiece is the Roman legend of Tarquin the Second, told here in full: one of the sibyls came to his palace offering nine books which she declared contained the inspired prophecies of the Sibyl of Cumae, and asked what the king thought an extravagant price. He refused and dismissed her with ridicule — whereupon she turned aside and burned part of what she had brought, returning to offer what remained at the same price as before.

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