XIV. The Sibyl and the Dream of One Hundred Suns: An Old Apocryphon

Extract

IN addition to the more or less accredited ancient Sibylline oracles, others circulated, under the name of the one or the other of the Sibyls, which also claimed to be of equal authority. The name was a recommendation for a special kind of apocalyptic literature, and the example set of old of foretelling the future was thereby continued for many centuries. The character of this Sibylline Oracle was akin to some of the old Apocalypses, in which the future was revealed in a symbolical form, and the events to come foretold by allegories and signs, which were interpreted by the Sibyl as by one of the prophets of old. By connecting such apocalyptic revelations with some ancient name and ascribing to men or women of the past works composed at a much later time, these compositions entered into the domain of that apocryphal Christian literature which made use of old formulas for disseminating new teaching and thus prepared the mind of the people for untoward incidents. These oracles were soon drawn into the cycle of the Doomsday; the legends of Antichrist and of the Last Judgment were incorporated with the older oracle; and thus an oracle which originally may have been a mere forecast of purely political events became a religious manifesto, a prophetic pronouncement on the course of events, leading up to the final drama.