Carolyn Kunin wrote: "In an attempt to persuade
Jansy that Sybil and Sylvia are in fact the same person, I checked
the dictionary and discovered two interesting things - > the correct
spelling is Sibyl so the Sybil spelling may be a clue
indicating a
relation to Sylvia - - sybl = sylv, "b" & "v" being variants of each
other in some languages..."
Adding a few non-sibilating tidbits and
reminders:
1. Humbert Humbert writes in "Lolita":
"I was born in
1910,
in Paris. My father was a gentle... His father and
two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively... My very
photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) ...My
mother's elder sister,
Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected....Aunt Sybil
had pink-rimmed azure eyes and ...
2. In "Pale Fire" we find that
Charles
the Beloved saw Queen Disa for the first time on July 5 ( lots of
birthdays...) and whe find that Disa is compared to Sybil, on page
207 ( Disa at thirty and Sybil as painted in PF)
.
3. We have the Delphic Sybil that was mentioned by T.S.Eliot (
another indirect link with Pale Fire) and her fortune-telling by reading
from "leaves" is also mentioned by Gerard Manley Hopkins ( Spelt from Sybil's
Leaves).
4. This Sybil-seer has a very sad story because,
like Aun Maud's "leaf-sarcophagus", she was granted eternal life by Apollo,
but not eternal youth...Therefore, she kept shrinking for ever and had to
be kept inside a bottle where she hung from a thread ( that's how I
remember it, haven't checked again).
5. Wikipedia brings:In antiquity, the oracular
seeresses of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean were referred to
by the Greek term "sibyls".
NB: In modern times, when "Sibyl" is adopted for
a woman's name, the conventional spelling is "Sybil".
6. Concepts ( still from Wikipedia): A "Sybil
attack" is the use of stolen or forged multiple identities for defeating a
reputation system. Sybil also refers to a type of card flourisinhing in which a
deck of cards is split into "packets" and
manipulated.