The Serpent Papers (64 page)

Today the original pagan Sibylline verses of Rome (cited by Anna in the novel) are entirely disappeared.
What we have instead are Christian and Jewish reinterpretations called
the
Oracula Sibyllina
,
assembled by a Byzantine scholar around the 6
^th
century ce. This diverse opus consists of twelve books, numbered 1-8 and 11-14. Books 9 and 10 have been lost to history, and Book 7 has suffered the tribulations of time.

After surviving the decline of Paganism and the transition to Christianity, in the 17
^th
century the Sibyl suddenly starts fading into oblivion. This fading interested me. I began to hunt for the Sibyl in English literature – and the results were breathtaking.

First I found the Sibyl inside the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s
The Wasteland,
then I saw her lurking beside Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar,
and lingering in her poetry. The Sibyl appeared in Mary Shelley’s work, in Coleridge and Keats, then in Shakespeare . . . I chased her as she stretched back and back and back
,
morphing into her original form. I realized then that she had existed in Western literature through every century. A constant presence in the imagination of European popes, poets, philosophers, and theologians. And then I discovered that the Sibyl’s own written works had once constituted the most powerful texts in Roman Empire – the
Libri Sibillini
or Sibylline Books, which had, conveniently for my purposes, disappeared from history.

I thought – what if the original Sibylline Books were found by a modern scholar?

What if Sibyls were ‘palimpsested’ – like Archimedes or Cicero – but instead of a religious, Christian text above them, they were covered by the drawings of a medieval alchemist?

When I was in Mallorca I saw a poster for an event called
The Song of the Sibyl
– a tradition that began in the 10
^th
century in southern France, and stretched into Catalonia, Castile and parts of Italy. The song was banned in the 16
^th
century, but has since been reinstated in Catalonia, and has a special role on the island of Mallorca
.
In a
matin
before Christmas Eve, a woman robed in a white tunic trimmed in gold and silver holds an enormous sword in front of her nose and sings into the blade before a seated congregation. She sings a violent
prophecy.
An apocalyptic song based on the verses spoken by the Sibyl to Saint Augustine
.

Why? I asked myself when I first saw her singing. Why is this clearly pagan woman singing about the Apocalypse on the eve of Christ’s birth? Why is she holding a sword? More importantly: what does it all mean? I’d like to think that the Sibyl exists at the frayed edges of Western, Christian history, at the uncomfortable overlap of conversion, of religion and faith.

The Mallorcan traditions of the Sibyl gave me the creative licence to invent Philomela and her Sibylline Books and then to bind her to Rex Illuminatus, himself the shadow of the Mallorcan mystic Ramon Llull. Both are, in that sense, distortions of a certain kind of historical truth.

And there you have it – the birth of the fictional, physical object – the mystical palimpsest:
The Serpent Papers.