Sibylline foresight from shuffled book-slivers.

Created through iterative generative processes, this text imagines visions from three of antiquity’s sibyls — Persia, Libica, and Delphica.

Christine de Pizan (1365–1429), prolific medieval poet, letter writer, and advocate for women’s intellectual abilities (“freer and sharper whenever they apply themselves”), describes the ten sibyls as having received (from God) “such a profound and advanced prophecy that what they said did not seem to be prognostications of the future but rather chronicles of past events which had already taken place, so clear and intelligible were their pronouncements and writings.”

01

Delphica		I am moved by a light that is formed in heaven
Libica		I hear the comet song of my own body
Persia		there is a sense in which we are always awake and always have been
Libica		history is our present moment
Persia		continuous and endless it cannot be named it returns to its state of nothingness
Delphica		thus it can be called the shape of the shapeless

00

Delphica, Libica, Persia

someone will remember us we say even in another time

02

Libica		a sudden roar
Persia		the insubstantial can penetrate even where there is no opening
Delphica		new compact dimensions rolled up into tiny scrolls with immeasurable diameters
Persia		curled up into the form of a giant shape that curves back in on itself far on the other side of the universe
Libica		endless varieties of name and form
Delphica		sentient subsystems

For the hexecutable method and DIY instructions, see Hexecutable Rules.

03

Libica		every moment a new song comes out of the fire
Persia		out through the cornea it flies into the bowl of the sky
Delphica		on to an icy spoke to a wheeling flight of birds
Libica		now is the time of struggle
Persia		the transition must be completed
Delphica		shock brings success shock comes—oh, oh! laughing words—ha, ha!

Spell Kit for Navigating Uncertainty

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Further reading and references