“Teste David cum Sibylla,”
as says the glorious hymn uniting the voices of Hebrew and Gentile prophecy; and in this character do Michel Angelo’s magnificent Sibyls adorn the Sistine Chapel; though later painters, such as Guido and Domenichino, made them mere models of female intellectual beauty.
Sibilla, probably through the influence of Campania upon nomenclature, early spread as a Christian name. Possibly the word was the more acceptable to Northern ears from its resemblance to the Gothic sibja (peace, or friendship), the word familiar to us as the Scottish sib (related), forming with us the last syllable of gossip, in its old sense of god-parent. Thence came Sippia, Sib, or Sif, the lovely wife of Thor, whose hair was cut off by Lok, and its place supplied by golden tresses, which some consider to mean the golden harvest.
Perhaps it was this connection that recommended the Italian Sibila to the Norman chivalry. At any rate, Sibila of Conversana was the wife of Robert of Normandy, and Sibille soon travelled into France, and belonged to that Angevin Queen of Jerusalem, whose many marriages gave so much trouble to the Crusaders. It was very frequent among English ladies of Norman blood; and in Spain, Sevilla, or Sebilla, is frequent in the earlier ballads. Sibella, Sibyl, or Sibbie, is most frequent of all in Ireland and Scotland; but I believe that this is really as the equivalent for the ancient Gaelic Selbhflaith (lady of possessions).
Russia has the name as Ssivilla; the Lithuanians call it Bille; and the Esthonians, Pil. Sibilley is the form in which it appears in a Cornish register in 1692; in 1651 it is Sibella.[[75]]
Section VIII.—Saturn, &c.
Saturnus was a mythical king of ancient Italy, peaceful, and given to agriculture, indeed, his name is thought to come from satus (sown). It is very odd that he should have become the owner of all the fame of the Greek Kronos, infanticide, planet rings, and all; but so completely has he seized upon them that we never think of him as the god of seed-time, but only as the discarded king of heaven and father of Jupiter.
We should have little to do with him were it not that the later Romans formed from him the name of Saturninus, which belonged to sundry early saints, and furnished the old Welsh Sadwrn.
Sylvanus was a deity called from sylva (a wood), the protector of husbandmen and their crops, in the shape of an old man with a cypress-tree in his hand. His had become a Roman name just before the Christian era, and belonged to the companion of St. Paul, who is called Sylvanus in the Epistles, and, by the contraction, Silas in the Acts. This contracted form, Silas, has been revived in England as a Scripture name.
St. Sylvanus, or Silverius, was a pope whom his Church esteems a martyr, as he died in the hands of Belisarius; but sylvan, or salvage, was chiefly used in the middle ages to express a dweller in a forest, rude and hardly human. Silvano, Selvaggio, or Silvestro, was generally the name of monsters with shaggy locks, clubs, and girdles of ivy leaves, who appeared in romance; and Guidon Selvaggio was the rustic knight of Boiardo and Ariosto. Occasionally these words became names, and about the year 1200, Sylvestro Gozzolini, of Osimo, founded an order of monks, who, probably, are the cause that Sylvester became known in Ireland as a Christian name, and has come to us as a surname, while the French have it as Sylvestre.