Tucked at the very back of this volume is a single handwritten leaf, in a German hand, headed Griechische Schriftzüge u. Abkürzungen, "Greek scripts and abbreviations." Six neat columns descend from single letterforms to the knotted compendia that stand for γαρ, και, επι, μετα, ταυτα. It is a decoder ring, and it exists because seventeenth-century Greek type is a beast. The fonts of this era kept the whole ligature system of Byzantine scribes, hundreds of curls and contractions that printers later abandoned, so that by the nineteenth century a reader trained on clean modern Greek would open a book like this one and find something close to cipher. One such reader sat down, worked out the system, and wrote himself a key. The book comes with its own Rosetta stone, left where he filed it.
What that reader was working to decode is the largest gathering of ancient oracular literature the seventeenth century produced. The main text is the Sibylline Oracles: eight books of Greek hexameter prophecy, delivered in the voice of the ecstatic pagan Sibyl but composed, in fact, by Jewish and early Christian writers hiding behind her. The disguise worked for well over a millennium. Church Fathers cited the Sibyl as a pagan witness to Christ; Constantine quoted her acrostic on the name of Jesus to the assembled bishops; the Dies Irae seats her beside King David as an authority on the end of the world ("teste David cum Sibylla"), and Michelangelo painted five of her incarnations onto the Sistine ceiling among the prophets of Israel. The oracles themselves deal in the destruction of cities, numbered ages of the world, monstrous portents, and the coming of final judgment. Apocalypse in the grand manner.
The Dutch scholar Servaas Gallé (Gallaeus) made this the definitive text of its century: Greek with the Latin verse translation of Sebastian Castellio on facing columns, the accumulated commentary of a hundred and fifty years of scholarship beneath, and fresh readings from a manuscript belonging to Edward Bernard, Savilian Professor at Oxford. Ebert singled out the edition for exactly this: a new recension plus the careful assembly of the whole exegetical apparatus. It held the field until the nineteenth century.
The second part, separately paginated, is where the volume earns its keep in an occult library. Here is Johannes Opsopoeus’s collection of the Oracula magica Zoroastris: the Chaldean Oracles, fragments of a second-century revelation on fire, soul, and the summoning of gods, attributed to Zoroaster and treasured by the late Neoplatonists. Proclus is said to have remarked that if he could preserve only two books from a burning world, they would be the Timaeus and these Oracles. The text travels here with the scholia of Michael Psellus and of Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine philosopher whose enthusiasm for the Oracles helped ignite the Platonic revival in Medici Florence; two centuries after this printing, W. Wynn Westcott’s translation made them required reading in the Golden Dawn. Alongside them: metrical oracles of Jupiter, Apollo, Hecate, and Serapis, and the Oneirocriticon of Astrampsychus, a dream-interpreter’s manual passing under the name of a legendary Persian magus, edited by no less a philologist than Joseph Scaliger. The added engraved title, an unsigned etching attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe, sets the tone: the Sibyl mid-frenzy, arm flung skyward, while scribes scramble to take dictation.
The copy wears its history openly. Contemporary vellum over boards, gilt fillets, the spine inked Oracula Sibyllina in an old hand; one cover carries an unidentified gilt armorial supralibros (a pale between six stars, flanked by rampant lions), while the vellum of the other has largely perished. And the stamps tell the best story. This was a working book in the Seminarbibliothek der Christengemeinschaft: the seminary library of the Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded in 1922 by Lutheran clergy around Friedrich Rittelmeyer, with its rites and structure shaped directly by Rudolf Steiner, and its priests trained at the Stuttgart seminary from 1933. In June 1941 the Third Reich banned the Christengemeinschaft in its "Aktion gegen Geheimlehren," the campaign against secret doctrines, and seized its property. The stamps establish seminary ownership, but do not date the volume’s arrival in the library.
Provenance: Gilt armorial supralibros (unidentified) on contemporary vellum. Circular ink stamps of the Seminarbibliothek der Christengemeinschaft on title and endpapers, with classification stamp SACHWORTKARTEI and pencil shelfmark V/13.4.3 "Ora" (Oracula). Manuscript leaf of Greek ligatures and abbreviations, in German hand, preserved at rear.
ΣΙΒΥΛΛΙΑΚΟΙ ΧΡΗΣΜΟΙ, hoc est, Sibyllina Oracula... Opera & Studio Servatii Gallaei. Accedunt etiam Oracula Magica Zoroastris, Jovis, Apollinis, &c. Astrampsychi Oneiro-Criticum, &c. Amsterdam: Henric and the Widow of Theodor Boom, 1689. Quarto, contemporary vellum with gilt armorial. Greek and Latin.
GALLAEUS, Servatius (Servaas Gallé, 1627?–1709), editor. Σιβυλλιακοι Χρησμοι, hoc est, Sibyllina Oracula. Amsterdam: Henric & Widow of Theodor Boom, 1689.
Physical Description: Quarto. [13] leaves, 791 pp., [13] leaves, 127 pp. Engraved title attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe, letterpress title with woodcut device. Greek and Latin in parallel; second part (the oracle collections of Opsopoeus and the Astrampsychus dream-key) separately paginated. Collated and complete.
Binding: Contemporary vellum over boards, gilt fillets, gilt armorial supralibros (unidentified), spine lettered in ink.
Condition: Vellum worn and soiled; covering largely lost from one board; spine reinforced and repaired, one outer hinge cracked. Internally sound: some browning, scattered marginal worming, small library stamps as noted. A complete copy with substantial wear to the binding.
Tucked at the very back of this volume is a single handwritten leaf, in a German hand, headed Griechische Schriftzüge u. Abkürzungen, "Greek scripts and abbreviations." Six neat columns descend from single letterforms to the knotted compendia that stand for γαρ, και, επι, μετα, ταυτα. It is a decoder ring, and it exists because seventeenth-century Greek type is a beast. The fonts of this era kept the whole ligature system of Byzantine scribes, hundreds of curls and contractions that printers later abandoned, so that by the nineteenth century a reader trained on clean modern Greek would open a book like this one and find something close to cipher. One such reader sat down, worked out the system, and wrote himself a key. The book comes with its own Rosetta stone, left where he filed it.
What that reader was working to decode is the largest gathering of ancient oracular literature the seventeenth century produced. The main text is the Sibylline Oracles: eight books of Greek hexameter prophecy, delivered in the voice of the ecstatic pagan Sibyl but composed, in fact, by Jewish and early Christian writers hiding behind her. The disguise worked for well over a millennium. Church Fathers cited the Sibyl as a pagan witness to Christ; Constantine quoted her acrostic on the name of Jesus to the assembled bishops; the Dies Irae seats her beside King David as an authority on the end of the world ("teste David cum Sibylla"), and Michelangelo painted five of her incarnations onto the Sistine ceiling among the prophets of Israel. The oracles themselves deal in the destruction of cities, numbered ages of the world, monstrous portents, and the coming of final judgment. Apocalypse in the grand manner.
The Dutch scholar Servaas Gallé (Gallaeus) made this the definitive text of its century: Greek with the Latin verse translation of Sebastian Castellio on facing columns, the accumulated commentary of a hundred and fifty years of scholarship beneath, and fresh readings from a manuscript belonging to Edward Bernard, Savilian Professor at Oxford. Ebert singled out the edition for exactly this: a new recension plus the careful assembly of the whole exegetical apparatus. It held the field until the nineteenth century.
The second part, separately paginated, is where the volume earns its keep in an occult library. Here is Johannes Opsopoeus’s collection of the Oracula magica Zoroastris: the Chaldean Oracles, fragments of a second-century revelation on fire, soul, and the summoning of gods, attributed to Zoroaster and treasured by the late Neoplatonists. Proclus is said to have remarked that if he could preserve only two books from a burning world, they would be the Timaeus and these Oracles. The text travels here with the scholia of Michael Psellus and of Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine philosopher whose enthusiasm for the Oracles helped ignite the Platonic revival in Medici Florence; two centuries after this printing, W. Wynn Westcott’s translation made them required reading in the Golden Dawn. Alongside them: metrical oracles of Jupiter, Apollo, Hecate, and Serapis, and the Oneirocriticon of Astrampsychus, a dream-interpreter’s manual passing under the name of a legendary Persian magus, edited by no less a philologist than Joseph Scaliger. The added engraved title, an unsigned etching attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe, sets the tone: the Sibyl mid-frenzy, arm flung skyward, while scribes scramble to take dictation.
The copy wears its history openly. Contemporary vellum over boards, gilt fillets, the spine inked Oracula Sibyllina in an old hand; one cover carries an unidentified gilt armorial supralibros (a pale between six stars, flanked by rampant lions), while the vellum of the other has largely perished. And the stamps tell the best story. This was a working book in the Seminarbibliothek der Christengemeinschaft: the seminary library of the Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded in 1922 by Lutheran clergy around Friedrich Rittelmeyer, with its rites and structure shaped directly by Rudolf Steiner, and its priests trained at the Stuttgart seminary from 1933. In June 1941 the Third Reich banned the Christengemeinschaft in its "Aktion gegen Geheimlehren," the campaign against secret doctrines, and seized its property. The stamps establish seminary ownership, but do not date the volume’s arrival in the library.
Provenance: Gilt armorial supralibros (unidentified) on contemporary vellum. Circular ink stamps of the Seminarbibliothek der Christengemeinschaft on title and endpapers, with classification stamp SACHWORTKARTEI and pencil shelfmark V/13.4.3 "Ora" (Oracula). Manuscript leaf of Greek ligatures and abbreviations, in German hand, preserved at rear.
ΣΙΒΥΛΛΙΑΚΟΙ ΧΡΗΣΜΟΙ, hoc est, Sibyllina Oracula... Opera & Studio Servatii Gallaei. Accedunt etiam Oracula Magica Zoroastris, Jovis, Apollinis, &c. Astrampsychi Oneiro-Criticum, &c. Amsterdam: Henric and the Widow of Theodor Boom, 1689. Quarto, contemporary vellum with gilt armorial. Greek and Latin.
GALLAEUS, Servatius (Servaas Gallé, 1627?–1709), editor. Σιβυλλιακοι Χρησμοι, hoc est, Sibyllina Oracula. Amsterdam: Henric & Widow of Theodor Boom, 1689.
Physical Description: Quarto. [13] leaves, 791 pp., [13] leaves, 127 pp. Engraved title attributed to Romeyn de Hooghe, letterpress title with woodcut device. Greek and Latin in parallel; second part (the oracle collections of Opsopoeus and the Astrampsychus dream-key) separately paginated. Collated and complete.
Binding: Contemporary vellum over boards, gilt fillets, gilt armorial supralibros (unidentified), spine lettered in ink.
Condition: Vellum worn and soiled; covering largely lost from one board; spine reinforced and repaired, one outer hinge cracked. Internally sound: some browning, scattered marginal worming, small library stamps as noted. A complete copy with substantial wear to the binding.
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