The Sibyl, "The Waste Land" and Hollywood

Σιβυλλα τι θελεις;… αποθανειν θελω*

Sibyl, what do you want? … I want to die.

At the end of the last post, we looked at this quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon, which is featured in the epigraph of The Waste Land. In this post (dedicated to my Advanced Higher English class) we will have a closer look at the Sibyl, and the theme of prophets and prophecy in the first part of the poem, The Burial of the Dead. Along the way there will be a slight digression onto the subject of my favourite TS Eliot-related film.

Sibyls (sibyllae), or prophetic priestesses of Apollo, were to be found in various locations in the ancient world. The most significant in Roman legend was the Sibyl of Cumae, who turned up at the door of Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, in the form of an old woman. She offered to sell him nine books of prophecies, which she claimed would provide valuable advice whenever the city of Rome found itself in danger. The Sibyl’s asking price was too much for the king, however, and he declined the offer; whereupon the Sibyl threw three of the books onto the throne room’s fire, and asked for the same price for the remaining six. Tarquinius was, unsurprisingly, even less inclined to part with the cash; the Sibyl then lobbed another three volumes into the flames, maintaining her original price, but now for only a third of the goods.**

Lucretia

Never play poker with a man called Doc, or argue with a Sibyl. His bluff called, Tarquinius cracked and agreed to purchase the three remaining books at the full RRP. Although the books did apparently prove useful to Rome throughout the coming centuries, they did not help King Tarquin the Proud very much: not only was he a poor poker player, he was also a thoroughly bad egg (the clue is in the name, perhaps); he was driven out of Rome after forcing himself on Lucretia, the wife of a Roman nobleman; ironically, he died in exile at Cumae. The monarchy had lost its authority, and kings were no longer welcome: Rome became a republic - for five hundred years, anyway.

According to Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV, 101 ff. the Cumaean Sibyl had become a grumpy old woman as a result of an incident involving Apollo. She explains to Aeneas that she had been propositioned by the god, who had asked her to name her own price for her affections:

ego pulveris hausti
ostendens cumulum, quot haberet corpora pulvis,
tot mihi natales contingere vana rogavi;
excidit, ut peterem iuvenes quoque protinus annos.

I pointed to a pile of dust, and stupidly asked that the number of my birthdays should equal the specks of the dust; but I failed to ask that I should stay youthful.

The Sibyl's Cave, Cumae

So the Sibyl was destined to live for a thousand years: and without the benefit of L’Oreal or Olay, she wrinkled and withered away until she was so tiny she could live inside a jar:  which was where Trimalchio claimed to have seen her in the 1^st Century CE. Exhausted by unnatural old age, and having witnessed centuries of the follies of mankind, her only wish was to be allowed to die.

So in choosing this text as the epigraph to The Waste Land, TS Eliot was perhaps suggesting that as a poet/prophet (the Latin word vates means both) he shared the Sibyl’s ennui and general world-weariness. At the ripe old age of thirty-four, Tom Eliot is figuratively sick to death of the twentieth century.

Petronius had not been his first pick for the epigraph: the early drafts were headed by a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
"The horror! The horror!"

These are the last words of Kurtz, a highly intelligent and well-intentioned European who has come to Congo to export ivory, but allows himself to worshipped as a god by an African tribe, and has taken part in their gruesome rituals. He appears to the narrator to have gone insane.

The meaning of this quotation is not dissimilar to the words of the Sibyl: Kurtz has witnessed such horrors that he is ready to die; he is, like the Sibyl, at least partly responsible for his own predicament.

Eliot was persuaded by the unofficial editor of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound, that Conrad was not sufficiently “weighty” as a writer to provide the introduction to the poem. According to his widow, Eliot regretted his decision to drop Conrad; he later went some way to making amends by citing another quotation from Heart of Darkness as the epigraph of The Hollow Men.

The Waste Land and Heart of Darkness were, incidentally, reunited half a century later in the form of Francis Coppola’s war movie masterpiece Apocalypse Now (1979).  The action of Conrad’s novella is transferred to Vietnam, where Kurtz is a renegade American colonel who is worshipped as a god by an irregular army of indigenous people. The US Army High Command believes him to be insane, and sends a special forces captain, Willard, upriver with orders to assassinate him.

Coppola conflates Conrad’s tale with the Fisher King imagery of The Waste Land: in the Arthurian legend which gives the poem its title, the land is barren because its king is sickly and weak; in Apocalypse Now, the “insane” Kurtz is a symbol of the madness destroying Vietnam.

Whether Kurtz is truly insane, or is in fact the only character who offers a clear analysis of the war, by the end of the movie he, like the Sibyl, wants to die. Rather than be cured by the questing knight, Willard, he is killed by him. We are reminded of an earlier Italian version of the myth which links the strength of the king with the land he rules: that of the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, in which continued fertility requires human sacrifice:

The Golden Bough, JMW Turner

 In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far   into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

                                                                                          JG Frazer, The Golden Bough, chapter 1

Just in case we don’t make the connection, while Kurtz awaits his end, he recites The Hollow Men, and reads Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, both of which are cited by Eliot as formative influences on The Waste Land.

The Golden Bough takes its title from the wood of a tree in the “sacred grove” which the would-be priest would have to break off before attempting to kill the incumbent. This sacred wood also has a connection with the Sibyl: when, in Virgil’s Aeneid VI, Aeneas wishes to visit his late father in the Underworld, he is told by the Sibyl that it’s easy to get there, not so simple to come back; only the golden bough of a magical tree will provide him with a return ticket on Charon’s ferry.

In addition to acting as tour guide to the Underworld, the Sibyl also offers Aeneas a number of prophetic observations, including a vision of war:

...bella, horrida bella
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno

 I see war, terrible war, and the River Tiber foaming with much blood'

  Virgil, Aeneid VI 86-87

(Incidentally, these lines, or a mistranslation of them, are probably Britain’s best-known Virgilian verses, having become a sort of shorthand for anti-immigration politics and predictions of disaster.)

The prophetic imagery of the epigraph continues into the first part of The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead:

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.            The title, The Burial of the Dead, is taken from a rite in the Book of Common Prayer; dust, as in ashes to ashes, dust to dust, symbolises what will become of us after death; but here the dust is also an allusion to the legend of the Sybil, where it paradoxically symbolises life, even if it is a long, painful and undesired life. There is also a passing reference to a biblical prophet, Ezekiel: Son of man,   You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images In the Old Testament, the phrase son of man frequently refers to Ezekiel, who has a vision of a Valley of Dry Bones. Perhaps Eliot sees himself as the prophet/poet, confronted by the disarticulated bones of his poem? The prophecy imagery now turns to the Madame Sosostris, the Tarot reading, horoscope delivering, clairvoyante; who, despite her various abilities to tell the future, was unable to predict a common cold. Through his ironical depiction of this psychic fraud with her wicked pack of cards, Eliot seems to suggest that his credulous twentieth century society is debased even in its choice of prophets. Nevertheless, Madame Sosostris’ Tarot cards predict a number of characters who will feature elsewhere in The Waste Land. In the next blogpost we will look at the central role of the prophet Tiresias in the poem. *   Footnote 1: Transliterated,  Sibylla, ti theleis?... Apothanein thelo ** Footnote 2: In The Godfather Part II, the Sibyl’s uncompromising negotiating strategy is adopted in reverse by Michael Corleone. Faced with a demand for a huge bribe in return for a gaming licence, Michael’s (ultimately successful) counter-offer is less than nothing. The film was directed by…Francis Coppola.