 After a year of inactivity, my Photolog of Sacred Sites is back! I’m resuming the presentation of mysterious, intriguing, or famous places of power that have affected people since remote times.
In this post I will give an example of a sacred place that has “shut down” due to either desecration of the physical site, debasement of its original purpose, or neglect through loss of human intention—or all three. It’s the famous oracle of Cumaean Sybil in southwest Italy. Cumae was the oldest Greek colony on the Apennine Peninsula, founded in the 9th century BC. It was the Greek Cumeans who introduced the alphabet into Italy and established the oracle where Sibyl divined. Now, Sibyl was actually not a personal name, but a Latinized Greek word for “prophetess”--sibylla. Dedicated to the sun god Apollo, Sibyls were virgin priestesses endowed with powers of divination and believed to be semi-divine beings. As such they were immortal, or nearly so. There were several Sibyls in antiquity, but the Cumean Sibyl was the most famous. She was so venerated that Virgil, in his grand epic the Aeneid, had his hero Aeneas seek guidance from the Cumean Sibyl before undertaking his journey into the Underworld. Her fame stretched well into Renaissance times, when Michelangelo included her in the composition on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (although her looks are far from flattering—he painted her to look like a weight-lifter crone). According to the Latin poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the Cumean Sibyl lived for about one thousand years.
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