the corcoran gallery: the way of the cumaean sibyl

THE CORCORAN GALLERY: THE WAY OF THE CUMAEAN SIBYLAuthor(s): Marlena G. CorcoranSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 78, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1995), pp. 649-660Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178726 .

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THE CORCORAN GALLERY

THE WAY OF THE CUMAEAN SIBYL

Marietta G. Corcoran

The Road

The road is an ancient topos in Western thought.1 Parmenides writes of the girls who led him down the road of the goddess,

who taught him of two roads, the false and the true.2 Using the same word, ho hodos, Heraclitus holds that "the way up and the way down are one and the same."3 The road, it seems, is in some sense double, even when it is the one true road. The journey of the soul in Plato can be considered another case of being on the double road. In the allegory of the cave, the soul journeys up to the light of the sun.4 However, this is not the end of the journey. Having seen the light, the soul turns, and comes back the same way.

I can report that this philosophical topos becomes a topos of the most literal sort - an idea as a place - if one undertakes the journey to the Cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Cuma is in Campania, the region around Naples. The ancients believed Campania to be the meeting place of the lands of the living and the dead. Odys- seus is believed to have undertaken his journey to Hades in Cam- pania, not far from Cuma, at Lake Avernus. Virgil's Aeneas, too,

Editor's Note: Our roving gallerist, having determined that the age for imperial safekeep- ing of classical artifacts is over and that she would in the near future have no luck inspecting the anciant digs of the Cumaean Sibyl at London's British Museum or Mu- nich's Glyptothek or even in cyberspace ^Soundings 78.1 and 78.2 [1995],), recently betook herself to the original site and Scene of Instruction frequented by Aeneas and other notable wayfarers. As usual, she found the journey as instructive as the destination. Marietta G. Corcoran is Chercheur Associé L'Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes du Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Paris. The Editor is not yet aware of projects that might entail visits to the original board rooms at Ms or Vanity Fair, but stay tuned.

Soundings 78.54 (Fall-Winter 1995). ISSN 0038-1861.



650 SOUNDINGS Marietta G. Corcoran

began his descent to the underworld here, guided by the Cu- maean Sibyl. The Sibyl's own site was rediscovered only in 1938. What I found there is a very special path of some 150 meters leading to the inner chamber of the oracle; a path that repre- sents in stone ideas about the journey to wisdom, and the immortality of the soul. The way in and the way back tell an old, old story. We go down to death, yet somehow we return.

The Sibyl

The Greek colony at Cuma was founded around 750 ВСЕ, though legend dates the founding some three hundred years ear- lier. It is thus a very ancient site, from about the time of Homer, and thinking of itself as dating back to a couple of hundred years after the Trojan war, or even, as Virgil claims, to the war itself. It was the colonists at Cuma who founded Neapolis, forerunner of modern Naples. From 700-500 ВСЕ, Cuma exercised considera- ble power in the western Greek world. It was from Cuma that writing, in the form of the Caiman alphabet, spread throughout the western Mediterranean. At Cuma was elaborated belief in the oracle, and the immortality of the soul. The god Apollo spoke at Cuma, through his priestess, the Cumaean Sibyl.

The Cumaean Sibyl seems to have uttered general pronounce- ments, or engaged in extended discourses and even entire narra- tives.5 In this she was unlike her colleague at Delphi, who immediately - and usually straightforwardly - replied to particular questions.6 Questions brought to the Delphic oracle were usually framed to elicit a yes or no response, according to the formula: "Is it better and more good to do X?" The Delphic oracle's response was almost always favorable. The notion that either woman raved is contestable; perhaps we are too quick to assume that a woman venturing to counsel the state must be out of her mind.

The fame of the Cumaean Sibyl in Christian times rests largely on three accomplishments, all documented at the Vatican in Rome. In the Vatican Library, she figures among the inventors of writing, whose likenesses and letters are painted on the central columns of the long hall. Larger wall paintings in the same hall represent great moments in the history of books, and one of them depicts Tarquin bargaining with the Cumaean Sibyl.7 The Sibyl offered to sell Tarquin nine books. She named her price,



The Way of the Cumaean Sibyl 651

which Tarquín found outrageous. She threw three in the fire. How much for the remaining six? The same price. Again Tarquin refused. The Sibyl consigned three more books to the flames. How much were the last three books worth? The same as ever. Tarquin paid the Sibyl - as much, one hopes, for the lesson in the value of wisdom as for the three particular books. Tarquin established a college of priests, male of course, who consulted and interpreted the oracular books when the Roman Senate or- dered up advice. In 83 ВСЕ the books burned in a fire, acciden- tal this time.

The most famous representation of the Cumaean Sibyl at the Vatican is on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michaelangelo depicts her in the company of the other oracles of the pagan world, all female, alternating with male prophets of the Old Tes- tament. They were all born before Christ, but in this Christian interpretation, they look to the Messiah. The Cumaean Sibyl in particular is held to have foretold Christ's birth - a rather large and, I suppose, charitable interpretation of her vision of the blessed future, as recounted in Virgil's "Fourth Eclogue." As in the Vatican Library, she is here associated with learning, and spe- cifically with writing. She is shown with a book; and the book is not the iconographie accessory of a raving person. She seems alert, oriented, and intelligent, and the book seems to be - her book.

It is difficult to imagine a sophisticated and learned Greek fig- ure living in what is called in English, a cave, and in Italian, a grotto. And because the Cumaean Sibyl was an institution and not just an individual, the alleged cave would have been home to generations of women, books, and god. I decided I'd make the journey.

Journey Through Campania

Around the untouristic eastern curve of the Bay of Naples, past Pozzuoli and the Phlaegrean Fields, past the remains of Roman villas, past the offshore island of Ischia and the port of Baia, lies Cuma, today a sleepy town. It's not easy to get to. I can see why the concierge of our hotel in Naples advised taking a taxi. Being short of cash and dauntless, my husband and I wandered instead up the meandering Neapolitan market street of Pignasecca, where enterprising bakers sell their twenty loaves of bread on small



652 SOUNDINGS Marlena G. Corcoran

folding tables, and fishmongers pattern the street with shallow circular trays, a meter wide, filled with glorious unidentified shellfish, their variegated shells glistening like the mosaics in the Museo Archeologico. At the Stazione Cumana, we remember not to take the Ferrovia Cumana, which precisely and exactly does not go to Cuma. My husband asks for two train tickets on the Circum- flegrea line to Cuma. "Due?" asks the uniformed agent, in confirmation.

"Cuma?" is what he should have asked, in disbelief. For the train doesn't go there these days. What he sells us, dutifully stamped with the current date, are tickets to nowhere. At Poz- zuoli, everyone rushes off the train, shooing us along as well. We stumble along in the general direction of the crowd, only to find ourselves stranded on the Mediterranean shore. There were no other non-Italians on the train. I look up at the crumbling stucco of dilapidated buildings, into curtainless rooms from which suspi- cious odors are drifting. I remember that "Pozzuoli," close to the sulfurous Phlegrean Fields, means "stinking."

"Where are we?" I whisper. "The birthplace of Sophia Loren." When our hilarity subsides, we find our way back to the train

station. An older Italian gentleman, dressed in an almost comic imitation of a British gentleman, is standing outside the station. I take a chance.

"The tracks are interrupted," he explains in English-teacher's English. "For repairs. One must take the bus here, catch up with the train to Baia, and transfer to another bus to Cuma." I ask him if we can use our well-worn train tickets. He assures me it doesn't matter one way or the other.

In Baia, it would have taken a direct revelation from Apollo to show us either the location of the restaurant we were looking for, or the bus to Cuma. Wandering about, we admire the rotting hulk of a ship in the beautiful harbor of Baia, which serves as a maritime graveyard. Also buried beneath the waves are entire Ro- man villas, inundated in a geological upheaval of modern times, and which Mary Shelly claims she skimmed over in a boat in her journey through this region on her own efforts to locate the Cave of the Sibyl.8




Walk Down the Aisle

On our third stroll down the main street, I pause outside a church to join the crowd waiting for the Roman Catholic mar- riage rites to take their inexorable course. I can't say I exactly blend in with the crowd, which consists largely of men who have ducked out for a smoke, and who come up to my shoulder; eth- nic evidence that Campania was settled by Greeks. I feel myself relaxing into the desultory Catholicism of my native Brooklyn, where, if you are there for the elevation of the host, you have done your duty. And hey - here comes the bride.

The cigarettes are ground underfoot just in time for the bliz- zard of rice that veils the appearance of the happy pair. Little children run around with white tulle beribboned bags of pale pink or blue candied almonds: little bride packs filled with al- mond babies. It's a wedding in southern Italy, where fertility means something. The bride is arrayed in one of those dresses no one has worn in the States in forty years, where the woman is a magical sphere of lace and veil and billowing skirt that all in all makes it impossible to approach her. I haven't seen the likes of this since my mother's sister married Danny Calabria. The bride steps into her waiting car, and two people pack in her volumi- nous train.

It is scary, actually. The bride walks majestically through the day in her sacred space, acting the parts of both virgin and mother. The little children at the altar are neither as mature nor as well-disciplined in their role as their counterparts in northern countries. They run around the bride, emblems of her link to life to come.

But any link to life is a link to death. The bride's attendants are dressed in black.9 Suddenly the robes of the officiating priest look different to me, as if he were suited up for the spiritual equivalent of biohazard. He waves at the door, and we are dismissed.

The Road to Cuma

The bus from Baia to Cuma and beyond drops us off a bit beyond the Villa Vergiliana, on a country road. The driver points to the left and says, "Sibylla.

" It doesn't seem likely. In the dust of the departing bus, we look down the road to nowhere and nothing.



654 SOUNDINGS Marietta G. Corcoran

"Oh, look," I say. "There's the bride." "Don't be ridiculous," says my husband. "Ha ha, you thought

- the bride was going to see the Sibyl." "That's her car," I say. "The black one with the white ribbon." "She's ... in the restaurant." "Oh, okay." The restaurant at the intersection is clearly de-

serted, but this is no time for a tiff. And it does seem implausible that on her wedding day, the bride should journey to the suburbs to have her fortune told.

A little farther up the road is a turn-off to the right, where there are excavations in progress. It is fenced off, and a sign in Italian severely warns all unauthorized persons to stay away. That's more like it, I think. Avanti, profani We're getting mysti- cally warm.

The hill before us looks more and more like a weathered acropolis, the pentimento of ancient civilization discernible through the overgrowth of vegetation. Yes, here we are, at the postcard stand. There are no tickets today. No reason.

We turn into the path to see a bridal tableau. It is - a different bride. A photographer's assistant holds up a reflector that bathes the faces of the wedding pair in preternaturally brilliant Mediterranean light. To one side stands the attendant in black.

The sudden flash breaks the spell, and the figures relax into almost-human demeanor. "Maria, vieni qua.

" The proud bridegroom escorts the fantastically-arrayed bride along the path, trailed by the silent reminder in black. The tech team schlepps the required equipment. Old site, new ritual.

Does every household in Campania display the requisite wedding photo from the Cave of the Cumaean Sibyl? I wonder if it stands next to the picture of the Queen of Heaven.

The Way In

My husband and I look toward the mouth of the cave, a hundred feet away. A dull, roiling thunder echoes from within.

"Maybe the thunder is coming from the sky." Or maybe it's coming from the Cave of the Sibyl. A slow, mea-

sured cadence, pacing itself, pausing, resounds like human intel- ligence from the depths of the earth. Its thoughtfulness is rhythmic. We hear the form of speech, though not its meaning.




Drawn to the mystery, we turn down to the cave. The sound is the echoing footsteps of a bride - another one. Standing before the entry, one feels oneself already within the sacred space. It is not dark and not formless. It is not a natural formation, and it is certainly not a cave. It is a long horizontal tunnel cut into the tuff stone in a strange trapezoidal shape. The walls go straight up for over a meter, and then a horizontal shelf widens the shaft. The top looks like a flat-topped triangular opening, with its base sit- ting on the shelf. The floor is at least twice as wide as the ceiling. The ridge cut along both walls, right and left, is like a shelf in the rock, like a handle on the mystery.

The shape looks like a house; and the shaft looks like a tomb. All in all, it is more Mycenaean than classical Greek. The Lion Gate at Mycenae (c. 1250 ВСЕ) consists of two vertical columns flanking a rectangular open space, a long horizontal lintel ex- tending past the capitals of the supporting pillars, and over it all, a flat-topped triangle formed by two lions rearing on their hind legs toward each other. If you draw the outline around the whole shape of the Lion Gate - the rectangle, the long lintel and the flat-topped triangle - and imagine that outline as all open space, you have imagined the shape of the path of the Cumaean Sibyl.

The eerie trapezoidal shape is repeated in large transverse ap- ertures cut into the outer wall, each of which lets a band of light shine in directly across the path to the Sibyl. The path, one road, thus alternates between dark stretches and light. Each suc- ceeding swath of light looks smaller, as the path recedes. Stand- ing at the entrance, looking straight down the road to come, the trapezoids are nested one within the other: dark, light, dark, light. They look like a strangely telescoped game of cosmic chess, in which there is only one move, first black and then white. It no longer seems incongruous that the bride and her attendant have chosen this place.

Looking down the path of the Cumaean Sibyl, one sees em- bodied in light and stone the teaching that life follows death, follows life, follows death. The echoing voice of the earth sings a never-ending song, metrically governed by one human foot placed after the other on the Sibyl's path: GONG-ah-ah GONG- ah-ah. I wonder if this reverberation is a result of wooden planks or metal reinforcement installed in the earth during the twenti-



656 SOUNDINGS Marlena G. Corcoran

eth-century excavation. And yet, Virgil may have been thinking of this remarkable echoing effect when he reports that the Cu- maean Sibyl spoke with aa hundred voices" (Aeneid 6:44). By the time you reach the vault of the Sibyl at the end of the path, you have been presented with the answer to the big question, the one about life and death, the one you may have been too preoccu- pied to ask.

Whether one is listening is of course a different matter.

Pauntropos Harmonie

The pathway at Cuma leads to a vault with a higher ceiling, a more predictable shape, and a generally disappointing air. There is another chamber, also large and ungainly, to the left. This area has the feel of a much later construction, widened out, opened up, more like the ritual site of a generally more aired-out religion. Nevertheless, this is presumed to be the site of the en- counter. Here the question was posed, here the answer received. Here is the architectural point where the questioner is drawn taut, like the bow and lyre of Heraclitus, in palintropos harmonie, a back-turning harmony.10 For the oracular responses we possess - largely from Delphi - reveal a certain back-turning harmony between the question and the answer.

Over the entry to the oracle at Delphi was written "Gnothi sauton, " "Know yourself." The injunction might allude to the answer carried within the question brought to the oracle; remember that responses were almost always affirmative. Careful attention to the injunction would also have served questioners who received the notoriously double-tongued responses which form the heart of the Delphic oracle's reputation for cryptic am- biguity. Croesus, for example, wrongly interpreted the oracle's pronouncement, "that if Croesus attacked the Persians, he would destroy a great empire" (Herodotus, Hist, 1.53, trans, de Sé- lincourt).11 Croesus took this for a reply favorable to his invasion, but the empire lost was Croesus' own. "Gnothi sauton" might have the hermeneutic function of reminding visitors: "Know yourself in what I'm saying - I'm talking about you"

We might think of this as a mirror function of oracular discourse. The answer is: you.




The Way Out

The way in is the way out; we must go back the way we came. The path of the Sibyl is called a aromos, or race-course. Greek race courses were not straight. Runners ran to a certain point - and turned, and ran back to their beginning. The cyclical struc- ture of the Sibyl's path lays out in stone the cycle of death and rebirth; death again, and life. Looking back down the path, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The Leaves of the Sibyl

The Cumaean Sibyl, from ancient reports, wrote her responses on leaves. The details are sketchy. Did she keep them? Hand them out? The leaves were light as thistledown, according to Livy, and blew about. Virgil, relying on older sources, recounts that the Sibyl arranged the leaves, but then let them scatter in the breeze, "so men who have come to/ Consult the sibyl depart no wiser, hating the place" (Aeneid 3.42-52, lines 51-52 trans. C. Day Lewis12).

She kept books, according to Pliny, and one wonders if the Sibyl's palm-leaves ever made it into the pressed rolls of something like papyri. Tarquín, after all, bought books, and not bags of leaves. Where would they have kept the books?

Halfway down the length of the dromos, cut yet deeper into the hillside and lower into the earth, is a set of three rooms. Scholars believe them to be the site of ritual baths. Perhaps we remain too attached to the vision of an allegedly ignorant girl in the throes of spiritual rape to see another possible function of these rooms. However, the sibyl composed verses in hexameter, and was liter- ate. She wrote books. Usually people who write books also read books. Maybe we should be looking for - a library.

I wonder if the people who came to consult the Sibyl took scraps of writing with them, as a form of reminder. Maybe they thought of them the way southern Italians think of holy pictures. Granted, one suspects that written bills of lading on merchant ships probably played a larger role in the dispersal of the Caiman alphabet from Cuma. Nevertheless, a[t]he first evidence of Greek writing in the West comes from Pithekoussai (Ischia), where sev- eral texts going back to the second half of the eighth century B.C. have been found."13 The writing deals with our double fate



658 SOUNDINGS Maxima G. Corcoran

at death, and with immortal life: "the bones of the buried one go into the earth, the soul up into the sky."14

Just then the bride from Baia sweeps down the dromos, escorted by her entourage: bridegroom, black-clad attendant, photographer, photographer's assistant. I step quickly into a side cutting in the rock. "Felicitazione? I murmur as she swirls by. "Tanti auguri?

Leaving Campania

Back at the hotel, I empty my pockets onto the desk. A ripped ticket from the Caffè Gambrinus, for sfogliatene and coffee. The punched ticket for the train that does not go to Cuma. The ticket, not punched, for the bus that does, though I took the wrong one, and got there nonetheless. A scrap on which an ele- gant Neapolitan lady had written the words, "Molo Beverello," as she directed me to the bus that cost a fraction of a taxi from the airport. I think of the missing card: I declined to give money for the alphabet of the deaf. I freely disburse any of the various al- phabets I know.

A particularly colorful scrap catches my eye. Some years ago, Italian museums, strapped for cash, simply doubled their entrance fees. Suddenly, the exaggerated attention given to the de- sign of the tickets seemed more in proportion to their cost. The price of entry for two to the Museo Archeologico in Naples ex- ceeded the price of the previous evening's dinner, so I take a second look at the sunburst of cheap color that looks almost as if the intricate pattern were meant to dissuade forgery. It looks like the currency of some aesthetic realm. The ticket was validated with the stamp of the day, and the price of the season. I fold it in half before pocketing this artwork, mainly to keep the ink from rubbing off.

It is time to leave. Once seated on the upper deck of the ferry that will carry us away from Naples, I take a closer look at our fellow passengers. Italians, mainly, judging from the titles of the guidebooks, and the sound of the chatter over the rumbling of the ship's motor. Italians, judging from their easy reaction to the next stage of our settling-in.

A short, stocky man in brown robes tied with cord brushes past the secular ticket-takers and hoists himself up the stairs. He doesn't have to say anything. Left and right, the Italians reach




into their pockets. In exchange for minuscule donations, the monk deals out holy pictures. Full, glossy color, thinnest paper I've ever seen. I got the last St. Anthony. The brown robes of the saint are a miniature version of the garb of the man before me. The Christ Child rides serenely on Anthony's arm, his own arms outstretched, relaxed, as if he knows the routine. Anthony's eyes close dreamily on the vision. There is a faint hint of Chris- tophoros in the pose, the grown man carrying the child. I look out over the water, wondering if some of our fellow-passengers are afraid of the voyage. I pocket my ticket to heaven.

Rising over the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius glowers its eternal threat to throw the underworld into the sky. I bid farewell to Campania, the land of journeys to the dead. Good-bye to Odyseus, good-bye to Aeneas. Good-bye to the Cumaean Sibyl. Some day I will be back.

NOTES

1. The Instituto per gli studii filosofici generously extended its hospitality to me during my stay in Naples. Professor Sarolta Takács of Harvard Univer- sity provided valuable comments on the essay. It was written during my stay as a visiting scholar at The Center for Literary and Cultural Studies of Harvard University.

2. Parmenides, fragments 1 and 2. 3. Fragment CIII, trans. Charles H. Kahn, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus:

An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979).

4. Republic, Book VII. 5. There are stories around and about the Cumaean Sibyl, such as the one in

which she is granted near-immortal life, but not eternal youth; or Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, in which she conducts the hero through hell, and is repre- sented as holding extensive conversation with Aeneas.

6. The most widely-known work on oracular discourse is E.R. Dodds's discus- sion of the Delphic oracle in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: U of California P, 1951), esp. 68-80. Dodds's memorable formulation, "the god entered into her and used her vocal organs as if they were his own" (70) has overshadowed his rejection of a

" 'frenzied' Pythia" (73, note 41); and of the mephitic vapor theory (73); as well as his report that "Professor Oester- reich once chewed a large quantity of laurel leaves in the interests of sci- ence, and was disappointed to find himself no more inspired than usual" (73). The extensive work of Joseph E. Fontenrose, especially his The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations, with a Catalogue of Responses (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978), carefully dismantles the image of a raving priestess; Fontenrose documents the form of the questions and responses. William Golding's posthumously-published novel, The Double Tongue (London: Faber, 1995), perpetuates the notion of spiritual rape of the medium, yet



660 SOUNDINGS Maxima G. Corcoran

stresses the role ot the library, particularly hexameter verse, in training the Pythia; a homosexual high priest with political interests occasionally sup- plies verse form, or even entire responses, for the Pythia. On the Cumaean Sibyl, see H.W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, ed. B.C. McGing (New York: Routledge, 1988), especially Chapter 4, "Cumae."

7. The painting is inscribed: "Tarquinius Superbus libros sibylUnos tres aliis a mu- liere incensis tant idem emit. n Other sources claim the purchaser of the Sibyl- line Books was Tarquinius Priscus.

8. See the author's introduction to Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. with an introduction bv Hugh Ï. Luke, Tr. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965).

9. Black might be seen simply as the color of formal attire; though most of the women in the church were wearing dresses that were both formal and colorful.

10. "They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: <it is> an attunement (or 'fitting together', harmonie) turning back <on itself>, like that of the bow and the lyre" (fragment LXXVIII, in Kahn, trans. See also Kahn's commentary, 195-202).

11. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised, with an introduction and notes by A.R. Burns (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 60.

12. С Day Lewis, The Aeneid of Virgil (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952). 13. Exhibit on Cuma, Museo Archeologico, Naples. 14. From the exhibit on Cuma at the Museo Arceologico in Naples, inv. 115388

(Vetter 109).



the corcoran gallery: the way of the cumaean sibyl

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