Sibylline Oracle Among the Bulgarians and Serbs – A Contribution to the Understanding of Political Eschatology in the Late Middle Ages
Sibylline Oracle Among the Bulgarians and Serbs – A Contribution to the Understanding of Political Eschatology in the Late Middle Ages

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we aim to investigate the “Sibylline Oracle [Сказание за Сибила]”, a medieval apocryphal text, in a wider literary-historical and socio-political context since it appears to give evidence about a specific historiosophy of a contemporary man, the periodization of history in which an average Bulgarian and Serb found themselves during the Late Middle Ages, in a text barren of orthodox spirituality and strict orthodoxy, but of value for shaping of an image of the other. The Oracle of Sibyl is a literary work which testify of a political background of popular eschatology in the late 15th century. Corpus of South Slavic medieval apocryphal manuscripts is methodologically elusive, and poorly investigated, lacking research of the manuscript traditions of Serbian monastic scribe centers. Thus, the “Tale of prophetess Sibyl” is preserved in several Serbian manuscripts, among which the most complete copy is the one from the Nikoljac monastery near Bijelo Polje (today’s northern Montenegro) dated to 1485. Picturesque forms and fantastic narratives of medieval apocrypha illustrate in what manner the mental frame and psychology of the medieval man was pervaded by the powers which kept him away and separated him from the tranquil and restrained, socially non-dynamic spiritual world of the official ecclesiastical ideology and orthodox practices. The example of the Sibylline Oracle in its medieval South Slavic variations, certainly manifests pre-Christian beliefs, and stands on the verge of the theology of “spermatic logoi” (λόγοι σπερματικοί) according to which the logos is embedded everywhere in the oikoumene, in greater or lesser amount, and in the context of Orthodox Slavic Balkans, narrates about the capability of absorption and concise understanding of historical processes (appearance of Christianity, characterology of nations, appearance and enumeration of the rule of „nine“ nations, reception of messianic ideas and so on). In this apocrypha the authors search for the echoes of contemporary political misfortunes which are responsible for pessimistic views which appear in the Medieval Balkan society, in Bulgaria and Serbia, in the break of Ottoman conquests.

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