Sibyl's Cave - Entrance to Another World?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the poem "Aeneid" Virgil tells about some soothsayers - the Sibyls, who, inspired by the god Apollo, predicted the future and performed many other mystical functions. The most famous of them is the Sibyl of Kumskaya, who predicted the future for Aeneas and accompanied him to the underworld.

According to one version of the legend, Apollo measured this Sibyl as many years of life as there were grains of sand in her handful. However, she forgot to ask God for eternal youth and dried out until she turned into a tiny wrinkled creature. Over time, her body fit into a bottle that hung on a tree, and between the sayings of the prophecies, she asked for death.

The collection of Sibyl prophecies are known as the "Sibylline books." Sibyl of Kumskaya suggested that King Tarquinius buy nine of these books from her. When he refused, she burned three books and offered him six for the same price. He refused again, and she burned three more, asking the same price for the rest. These three books were bought by the king. Subsequently, other books were added to them, and at critical moments for the state, the Romans turned to them for advice.

In 1932, in Kumah, a place near Naples, a cave was discovered, which is believed to belong to the Sibyl of Kumskaya. Kumas is perhaps the first Greek colony on the Italian coast, founded in the 18th century BC. Here are the remains of the temple of the Sibyl inspirer Apollo and the Temple of Jupiter of the 5th century BC.

Nearby in a volcanic crater is Lake Avernus, which the Greeks and Romans perceived as the entrance to hell. When the birds flew over the lake, they died from the poisonous fumes. They may have influenced Virgil, who drew up the outline of his poem on the shores of the lake.

I must say that Kuma is a whole underworld, but the Sibyl's Cave occupies a special place in it. The entire cave, 131 meters long, was carved into the rock. Completely straightforward, it ends in a small hall with three niches, which were the home of the Sibyl.

It is believed that the tunnel was built by the ancient Greeks, and then the Romans already in two stages: first, between the 6th and 5th centuries BC, they laid a gallery and an oracle hall in a very hard rock, and then in the 4th-3rd centuries BC the tunnel was changed and expanded. But if you look at the cave as a whole, it has nothing to do with the Roman style, but it bears striking similarities, for example, with the tunnel that leads to the famous tomb of King Pacal in the Mayan pyramid in Palenque.

The trapezoidal shape is very characteristic of the oldest stone structures scattered all over the world. You can remember the entrances to the Etruscan tombs, the megalithic walls of the Inca people in Cuzco and Ollantaytambo, and many other examples. The question arises as to how people who lived at different times, on different continents, came to the same architectural style.

Today it is difficult to understand what this type of geometry actually meant in the past, what functions it performed, and why exactly the trapezoidal shape was used. Official science is also unable to explain what this cave really was, and why it was made in this form. She explains this by the union of masculine (square) and feminine (triangle) principles, which strive for heavenly perfection.

In the right wall of the corridor, which is 5 meters high, 2.5 meters wide and more than 130 meters long, nine holes are also made in a trapezoidal shape. Elsewhere, deep niches of unknown purpose are carved into the wall. In the middle of the corridor on the left there is a square room with three more trapezoidal rooms, which are located crosswise. From them there is access to a small staircase. The rooms on the left are closed today.

At the bottom of the square room are several pools that vaguely resemble sarcophagi, but are much smaller in size. A little further, there is another small room, only a few square meters wide and about 1.60 meters high, with a corner stone that looks like a sofa.

In the lower part of the tunnel there is another square room with a rounded arch, and immediately behind it to the left, a little lower, is the oracle room, with three small arches placed in a cross. For a person who enters the first room and looks towards the oracle room, it seems that this is only the vestibule and the tunnel can continue further through three doors, but then the understanding comes that they are closed, as if a huge mass of cubic blocks prevents the entrance to further space.

It seems a little strange that such a long corridor suddenly ends in a small oracle room, only a few square meters in size. And if you look closely at the three niches, it seems that these are doors well locked in the rock. The central door has two deep grooves. What could be hidden behind these carved doors? Perhaps there are secret chambers or even other corridors that lead to no one knows where. Perhaps this is the famous entrance to hell, which the poet Virgil described in his famous "Aeneid".

All along the corridor on the walls on both sides there are rectangular holes about ten centimeters, as if something was being passed from one side to the other. Finally, on the sides of the cave there is a kind of curb on which some kind of overlap may have been.

The entire territory of the Phlegrean fields is associated with myths about death and with hell. It was here, according to ancient Greek mythology, that gigantomachy took place - the battle of the gods led by Zeus, who was helped by Hercules, with the giants. Homer in the Odyssey mentions the Chimerians who lived in the area even before the Greeks and were associated with the Phlegrean underworld. Strabo describes them as ancient inhabitants of the Tsuman region, living in houses underground, which were connected by tunnels.

According to the ideas of the Greco-Roman peoples about the afterlife, the entrance to Tartarus is hidden somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Avernus. It is no coincidence that Virgil sends his hero Aeneas here to meet in the kingdom of the dead with his blind father Anchises, who told him about the future greatness of Rome. It was the Sibyl of Kumskaya who led Aeneas to Tartarus, so it is not surprising that below the level of the Sibyl's Cave there is a Roman crypt - an example of underground architecture and the engineering talent of the Romans. It is connected by underground passages with other places in Kuma, as well as with Lake Avernus, through the Cocceio cave. The tunnel has been explored for about 180 meters, and then everything is clogged with debris and rubble.

There are many other famous ancient structures in the world that use trapezoidal architectural elements. This strange style can be seen inside the Great Pyramid, in the Great Gallery. In the Queen's chamber there is a trapezoidal niche formed by blocks in the wall, which does not bear any load from the mass of the pyramid. This style bears direct resemblance to elements of Mayan architecture, for example, in Jochicalco in Mexico.

Kurgan Kara-Oba is one of the most mysterious monuments of the history of the Kerch Peninsula and, perhaps, of the entire Northern Black Sea region, has an entrance that is no different from the Mayan one. The Kurgan still remains a mystery, and there is still no consensus on the purpose of such a grandiose structure.

Mysterious Kumas once again make you think about the connection between ancient civilizations - similarities in culture, architecture, and technology among all peoples who lived in antiquity on different continents. Many peoples believed that the gods lived underground and built false entrances for them, carved into the rocks. And who knows, maybe behind the mysterious doors in the Sibyl's cave, there is also an entrance to an unknown world.