The Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier (public domain)
My first encounter with The Sybil came when, I read about a strange and rather beautiful Christmas Eve ritual, it involved a text called ‘The Song of the Sybil.’ Much of my praxis involves poetry and I thought it would be interesting to render the Catalan language of this song into English. I was being rather casual about it: I had an old documentary about WW1 on the television as I worked and was also chatting online with my magical sister. She was a little unwell that night, lying on her bed 200 miles away, probably more than usually susceptible to influence. Without knowing what I was doing she began to muse aloud. Her talk began to mirror — to the second — the experiences being recounted by the WW1 veterans. One former soldier talked about hearing the muffled pop of the gun five miles away and then a slowly increasing hum as the shell came closer and closer: at exactly that time she told me how the current situation in the world felt like something huge is coming towards us, not quite visible over the horizon. She talked about earthquakes at the very moment that the black and white footage showed a shell landing and sending up a shower of earth into the air. And the synchronicities continued throughout the program and the conversation.
In what was almost certainly a case of observer bias and yet no less a synchronicity for that, I began to hear settings of the Dies Irae, which is a form of the Song, on the radio playing in a shop or on the television, or it suddenly appeared on my music streaming service suggestions. Skies became more full of reds and purples and the Judgement card turned up in every tarot reading. Just studying the Sybil is sometimes enough to allow her contact.
The Sybil is both one and many, she is both her own creature and the mouthpiece of the divine, she is known in individual caves and as a homeless wanderer, she is the embodied voice of a particular woman and a flow of truth that settles in the mouth of anyone who calls her, she speaks in the language of both Christian and Pagan. In other words, she is not a spirit for those who like fixed categories and easy definitions: she is both a prophetess in Cumae speaking for Apollo and a mythical faerie queen in Arthurian Britain.
One of her strangest manifestations is a centuries old Christmas tradition in which she is at her most fearsome. On Christmas Eve, at churches scattered around the Mediterranean, The Sybil is processed into church before the beginning of Midnight Mass accompanied by two acolytes. In this instance, The Sybil is a robed boy carrying a sword. Arriving at the pulpit, the boy then sings in an unbroken voice, the apocalyptic Song of the Sybil, describing the horrors of the end of the world. At the end of The Song, the boy makes the sign of the cross with the sword over the congregation and is led from the church so Mass can begin.
The Song of the Sybil was originally prescribed to be recited in churches at the Mattins service on Christmas morning. This was true until the 1500s when the Council of Trent banned the practice, perhaps queasy about the pagan pedigree of The Sybil. But folk religion being what it is, the practice was almost immediately taken up again in Catalonia, particularly in the Balearic Islands, in Provence, in Italy and I have even found references to it happening in Malta in living memory. Today it is still alive and well in Catalonia and you can watch footage of it on Youtube, taken in the 21st century.
The ancient Sybil was one of the few pagan ‘voices’ approved of by the early church fathers because it was felt her prophetic and apocalyptic pronouncements could be understood as prophecies of Christ and that they chimed well with Christian understandings of the End Times. A series of verses were developed which became known as The Song of the Sybil.
The first surviving version of the song is found in chapter 23 of Saint Augustine’s City of God. It is an acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out a message about Christ. But Augustine was writing in the 400s and he was already mentioning earlier versions so there is no way of knowing how early the song appeared. The other versions we know today are in medieval Catalan and in Provencal. The Catalan texts are thought to have been translated from the Provencal, and so by the 1300s this text had already been on quite a journey. That said, the key parts of the apocalyptic vision remain more or less in place in all versions: fire from heaven, the emphasis on the fleshly return of Christ, the levelling of mountains and valleys, earthquakes and thunder and sometimes trumpets, the separation of the good from the bad, sulphurous smells, a universal wailing and crying, the dimming of the sun and other celestial bodies and the conflation of fire and water. Many of these features are, of course, Biblical and can be found in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Old Testament in Isaiah (particularly Deutero-Isaiah), Joel, Ezekiel and Daniel. Many if not most of these texts were composed during the exile in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. They pop up again in the New Testament, most notably in The Book of Revelation but also in a host of non-canonical Christian and other writings of the period.
The sword is a fascinating ritual implement in this context. The sword is a long-standing symbol for the tongue, particularly when used to utter prophecy or harsh words. It has also been a symbol of the Word of God and the double-edged sword is a Biblical symbol for the Word of God as a dividing and therefore judging implement. The Sybil here is uttering the word of god, though not the Christian one. Although she is permitted into this Christian space because her words can be interpreted as pertaining to this supposedly scriptural vision of the end times (Augustine says that she should be admitted into The City of God), actually her words were traditionally those of a pagan god, sometimes Apollo, sometimes a chthonic deity, that is a deity of the underworld. The sword is a magnificent focus for all these convergent elements.
As a magician, an approach to The Sybil has provided me, every time, with revelation. An apocalypse is, by definition, a ‘revealing’ or ‘uncovering’. The Sybil’s voice is one which can be harnessed and embodied by the magician. To use The Song of the Sybil in a ritual context is to invoke this ancient and mysterious spirit into one’s own flesh and to hear her words both ancient and new come from one’s own mouth.
Performing this ritual aligns the magician’s voice to the voice of the Sybil. It is not the kind of ritual that is to be performed often, or even necessarily more than once, but it will feed the magician’s ability to divine the future when looking at the bigger scheme of things, it will provide a depth and tone of voice to the magician’s divinations on the larger and more complex issues of the day, it allows the magician to prophesy the direction of the world. It can also add an apocalyptic tone to the magician’s journeying in the other place.
The Ritual
This ritual should not be performed in a domestic setting. Ideally it should be performed out of doors, high up or in some place where there is a vista so that as one speaks the words one can see a large and expansive area. If indoors is the only option, a large open setting should be preferred: a large church, an empty warehouse, a sports hall or whatever one has access to along those lines. If in an urban setting then the roof of a building would be ideal, giving a view over the town or the city.
The ritual is best performed at night-time or when the sky is dark through storm or cloud.
Make an offering to the gods. This must be done in a way that makes sense to you but as The Sybil was often associated with chthonic deities and made her home in caves, one suggestion is to dig a hole in the ground and to offer fire and water by placing a burning lump of charcoal in it, then pouring in spring water and carefully back-filling the hole.
Take hold of the sword and hold it upright in front of you, in your dominant hand.
Visualise the sword as a shaft of light that penetrates deep into the earth below and high into the sky.
Declaim the words of one of the Songs. Let it breathe through you. Make it a primeval scream if you can. It doesn’t matter which one you use. If you know Catalan or Latin or a language close enough to let you manage the original that’s great, otherwise there are renderings into English. Speak loudly and strongly, shout if you have to be heard above weather. If you are a competent musician, then it can be sung to a plainchant melody. The ritual is far better served by a magician having learnt the words by heart.
After the Amen you may be moved to continue speaking and if this happens you should allow the words to come no matter how weird and/or nonsensical they may seem.
The ritual can be ended either by making the sign of the cross with the sword (a variant of which would be to point it in each compass direction), or by upending the sword and pushing it into the ground.
(There is an album titled “El Cant de la Sibil-La” by Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall which contains a number of different versions of The Song and also Dead Can Dance have a version as a track on their album, “ A Passage in Time”)