MeMoMu_PSW_059 AN AMAZING CONTINUITY

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Here's an amazing continuity; I know of an 11th century French MS depicting Kybele and a Gallus, showing that she was remembered long after her temples in Lyons and other places were destroyed. Here, the 18th century Icelandic writer Jakob Sigurðsson compares her to the völva (prophetic seeress) in his own ancestral culture.
"The goddess and prophetess Cybele from the Greco-Roman classical era is equated in the manuscript ÍB 299 with the unnamed völva in the eddic poem Völuspá. ["Prophecy of the Seeress," an oral poem written down around 1000 CE.]
"Cybele is identified as a völva at the top of the illustration and the illustration is situated directly opposite the beginning of Völuspá within the manuscript. The iconography associated with Cybele includes her distinctive crown, the key in her hand, the lion at her feet, and the books in the background-which presumably are the Sybilline books." [IB 299 4 to 1v]
The smiling goddess holds a key and is gesturing toward it. She is wearing the mural crown (city walls) associated with Kybele and Tykhe in Hellenistic times. The style is late baroque but the subject is wholly pagan. The header directly states: Cybele Valva (Vala being a late form of völva).
The heathen text is prominently displayed, and they're probably right that the volumes represent the Sibylline Oracles. Those mythically date back to another lineage, the Archaic Greek Sibyl of Cumae, founded in Campania, within sight of Mt Vesuvius on the eastern side of the Bay of Napoli. To the Icelandic writer, Kybele is no longer a goddess but a prophetess.

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