The Sibyl by Pär Lagerkvist

First published:Sibyllan, 1956 (English translation, 1958)

Type of work: Philosophical fable

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Delphi

Principal Characters:

• The Sibyl, formerly the Delphic Pythia
• A Foreigner, who, though unnamed, is unmistakably
• Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew
• The Sibyl’s Son, a graying, middle-aged idiot
• A one-armed Man, the Sibyl’s lover

The Novel

A prefatory scene emphasizes the tale’s timeless character. On the side of a wild mountain, high above the paths beaten by pilgrims on their visits to Delphi’s temple, an old woman lives in isolation with her feebleminded son. Every so often, the morning light reveals a girl, fresh from her bath in a sacred spring, being led by priests to a nuptial rendezvous with the god. The old woman knows the girl’s thoughts and sensations: In her youth, before being cursed by everyone and driven from the city, she had herself served as consort to Apollo.

The novel proper begins with a stranger’s ascent of the stony slope to the Sibyl’s hut. A pilgrim, he was turned away from the oracle because the question he brought was unanswerable. After roaming the city in despair, he was directed into the mountains by an old blind beggar to consult an ancient oracle “who can answer all that a man can ask.” Now that he has found her, he explains his mission by recounting an incident in the distant past “which had scored itself so deeply into his memory that he seemed not to recall anything besides; an event which left his soul no peace.”

The man (implicitly recognizable as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew) had been enjoying a prosperous, easy life with his wife and young son in a house which faced the road to Calvary. The sight of criminals condemned to crucifixion being led past by the soldiers was a common one. One day, one such prisoner was so exhausted by the task of carrying his cross that he leaned against the house to rest. Ahasuerus, fearing that bad luck might descend on the house through the unfortunate man’s touch, chased him away, and thereby, ironically, earned the crossbearer’s curse: to wander the earth for eternity, never to find rest, even in death. Ahasuerus thought this a strange pronouncement, for mankind had always looked upon immortality as the most wonderful of gifts, not as a punishment; moreover, it seemed a simple matter to ignore the curse and go on living as he had before. His wife, however, immediately saw a terrible agedness in his eyes which began to irradiate their marriage, and she eventually fled with their child. Years later, Ahasuerus learned that the boy had been taken by the plague and that his wife had died after old age had exhausted all of her beauty. In having joylessly survived his family, and all the many subsequent generations, he says, he has carried the burden of the unique destiny of meaningless existence imposed on him by the criminal some now said was a god. He has also learned of a religion based on this god’s teaching of love, but the embittered man has rejected it as absurd.

After Ahasuerus has told his story, the Sibyl invites him into her hut, where, in the presence of her idiot son, she relates her own experience of encountering a god. Reared by pious parents who practiced the religion of nature in its most unsophisticated form, she had been one of the few virgins left in Delphi, a city grown corrupt from its commerce as a sacred site. Her innocence, combined with a susceptibility to suggestion, convinced the priests to select her as the temple’s new oracle. As soon as she was led into the holy cave to spread her legs over a fissure in the earth’s living rock and become the vessel of Apollo, her special affinity for her role was evident; at every festival thereafter, she ate laurel leaves to induce a trance and then received the god, who had taken the appearance of a goat.

The fulfillment the girl initially derived from her ecstasy began eluding her, however, when she understood that the priests were using her for their own venal purposes, and the realization that she meant nothing to the god other than as a means of spending his lust made her feel spiritually forsaken. A hag assigned to be her attendant deepened her misery by constantly speaking of human vileness; although the Sibyl tried to defend herself against this misanthropic instruction, her resistance gradually crumbled. The young woman who had accepted isolation as the price for the peace of oneness with the divine came to believe that she had been played for a fool. Thus, after being summoned to her dying mother’s bedside, she stayed behind to keep house for her father.

One day, while fetching water at a spring near her home, she saw a one-armed man, a childhood friend who, because he was just returning from war, knew nothing of her service as the Pythia. Each immediately fell in love with the other, and they soon consummated their passion. Although the Sibyl feared the consequences, she abandoned herself to this new form of happiness; nevertheless, when the priests commanded her to resume her office at the temple, she obeyed. The one-armed man’s curiosity caused him to follow. Later, she learned that he had violated the sanctuary and heard her screams in the intensity of her orgasmic union with the god. Her happiness with her human lover had come to an end: No mortal could bear the thought of competing with the passion of a god.

After some months had passed, she was again called to serve the god. At the very moment that her divine consort, who appeared to her in the form of a black goat, ravished her as never before, the one-armed man was drowned by the rising sacred river at precisely the spot where they had first made love. Because the man had died clutching a laurel branch that had broken off as he tried to pull himself up from the water, she was sure that his death was the god’s vengeance.

When the Sibyl realized that she was pregnant, she cherished the life she believed her human lover had planted within her body. This thought sustained her after the hag who attended her learned her secret and spread word of the scandal. As the Sibyl awaited punishment for infidelity to the god, the angry citizens of Delphi threatened to rip her apart. Only the kindness of a humble man who swept the temple saved her: While she hid in the sanctuary, he beat the crowd back with his broom. Strangely, in this moment of danger she experienced a new feeling of serenity with god and suddenly walked into the mob’s midst. Perhaps because they were taken aback by her audacity, her tormentors allowed her to escape into the mountains.

Throughout a long, hard winter, she foraged for food; then, in the spring, she noticed that she attracted animals, and she fed on goat’s milk. The child that grew within her, however, showed no sign of being ready to be born. Finally, during a furious lightning storm at the end of summer, a herd of goats led her to the mountain’s summit, where, on a carpet of goat dung that reminded her of the ritual cave at the temple, she gave birth. Only then did it occur to her that the child had been conceived by the god.

Now that she has finished her tale, the Sibyl wonders aloud over the cruel joke the god has played on her, whether the witless creature she has reared to manhood is indeed his child. Then, suddenly, she realizes that her son has disappeared, and she suspects that, despite his apparent insensibility, he has understood her lamentations. Frantically, she and Ahasuerus follow his footprints until, as though he had ascended bodily to Heaven, they vanish on the top of the mountain.

Observing her anguish, Ahasuerus speaks of her son’s departure as another terrible proof of divine malevolence, similar to his own curse, but the Sibyl rejects his conclusion. Life, she declares, can only be accepted; the ways of God lie beyond human comprehension. Ahasuerus refuses to be mollified, and, reminding her of the purpose that brought him to Delphi, he asks her to describe his destiny. Yet she can supply neither an explanation nor a prophecy. God, she says, is his destiny, and the hatred he feels may be merely his experience of the divine:

“Perhaps one day he will bless you instead of cursing you.... Perhaps one day you will let him lean his head against your house. Perhaps you won’t. I know nothing about that. But whatever you may do, your fate will be forever bound up with god, your soul forever filled with god.”

As Ahasuerus treads down the mountainside to resume his unending journey, a girl clad for a nuptial ceremony with the god is seen walking the sacred path to the cave.

The Characters

The tale’s protagonists represent contrasting responses to life’s mystery. Lacking charity, Ahasuerus seeks a meaning for existence that is based solely on reason and justice; since no such answer can be revealed to him, he is doomed to search forever. Not even the whole of the world can deliver satisfaction, because he is ultimately inadequate within himself. That human limitation is the basis of his suffering—a kind of crucifixion akin to the human agony of Jesus on the Cross. The Sibyl, on the other hand, is wholly giving and makes herself completely vulnerable to the divine will. Nevertheless, her love is also not a final answer. At the end, she seems to understand that love is only the means for acceptance of the mystery.

Critical Context

Although he is best known outside Sweden for his parable-like novels, Lagerkvist was also a poet, dramatist, and essayist who, throughout his career, adopted radical positions. Like Fyodor Dostoevski, whose views bear some resemblance to his own, Lagerkvist demonstrated an early interest in socialism, but his deepest motivations stemmed from his striving to understand man’s relationship to God, primarily as expressed symbolically through the Crucifixion.

His first novel, Dvargen (1944; The Dwarf, 1945), which was a great popular as well as artistic success, treated intertwined themes that recur in all his mature work: the elusiveness of truth, the unfathomability of life’s ends, and man’s irreconcilability to the reality of his condition. Barabbas (1950; English translation, 1951), his second novel, focused that inquiry in a retelling of the Crucifixion from the point of view of the thief who was spared and who then spent his life trying to deny that Christ’s death had transformed his life. The Sibyl, published several years later, returns to that obsession. Lagerkvist’s most ambitious work up to that time, it confirmed his place among the giants of twentieth century literature; shortly after it appeared, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Subsequently, he extended his narratives dealing with the Crucifixion in the Tobias trilogy, a series built around the emblematic figure of Ahasuerus.

Bibliography

Scandinavica. X, no. 1 (1971). Special Lagerkvist issue.

Spector, Robert Donald. Pär Lagerkvist, 1973.

Swanson, Roy A. “Evil and Love in Lagerkvist’s Crucifixion Cycle,” in Scandinavian Studies. XXXVIII (November, 1966), pp. 302-317.

Vowles, Richard B. “The Fiction of Pär Lagerkvist,” in Western Humanities Review. VIII (Spring, 1954), pp. 111-119.

Weathers, Winston. Pär Lagerkvist: A Critical Essay, 1968.