mosaic of the Sibylla Lybica (Libyan Sybil), floor of the Duomo di Siena.
“The Libyan Sibyl, named Phemonoe, was the prophetic priestess
presiding over the Zeus Ammon Oracle (Zeus represented with the horns of
Ammon) at Siwa Oasis in the Libyan Desert.
The word Sibyl comes (via Latin) from the ancient Greek word sibylla,
meaning prophetess. There were many Sibyls in the ancient world, but
the Libyan Sibyl, in Classical mythology, Lamia, foretold the "coming of
the day when that which is hidden shall be revealed.”
In Pausanias Description of Greece, the sibyl names her parents in her oracles:
I am by birth half mortal, half divine;An immortal nymph was my mother, my father an eater of grain;
On my mother’s side of Idaean birth, but my fatherland was redMarpessus, sacred to the Mother, and the river Aidoneus. (Pausanias 10.12.3)“
The Greeks say she was the daughter of Zeus and Lamia, a Libyan queen
loved by Zeus. Euripides mentions the Libyan Sibyl in the prologue of
the Lamia. The Greeks further state that she was the first woman to
chant oracles, she lived most of her life in Samos, and that the name
Sibyl was given her by the Libyans.
Serapion, in his epic verses, says that the Sibyl, even when dead
ceased not from divination. And he writes that, what proceeded from her
into the air after her death, was what gave oracular utterances in
voices and omens; and on her body being changed into earth, and the
grass as natural growing out of it, whatever beasts happening to be in
that place fed on it exhibited to men an accurate knowledge of futurity
by their entrails. He thinks also, that the face seen in the moon is her
soul”
(
wikipedia)
