From Greek sibylla, the title of ancient prophetesses who delivered divine oracles.
Sibyl descends from the ancient Greek 'sibylla,' the title given to women in the ancient Mediterranean world who were believed to possess prophetic gifts and serve as oracles of the gods. The most celebrated was the Cumaean Sibyl, who guided Aeneas through the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid and who, according to legend, offered King Tarquin of Rome nine books of prophecy — the Sibylline Books — that were consulted for centuries during moments of Roman crisis. The sibyls became so embedded in Western spiritual imagination that Michelangelo painted them alongside the Hebrew prophets on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, recognizing them as pagan forerunners of sacred truth.
As a personal name, Sibyl (and its variant Sybil) entered English usage in the medieval period, sanctified partly by the theological rehabilitation of the sibyls as prophets who foretold the coming of Christ. The name gained literary prestige through Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel 'Sybil, or The Two Nations,' a searing examination of class inequality in industrial England that gave the name both political seriousness and romantic beauty. In the twentieth century, 'Sybil' became associated with the famous 1973 psychiatric case study of a woman with multiple personality disorder, a cultural moment that complicated the name's reception for a generation.
Today, Sibyl is recovering its older mystique. The spelling with a 'y' is the more common variant, but the classical 'i' spelling carries greater fidelity to the original Greek and a certain austere elegance. It is a name for a child whose parents want her to carry history lightly but unmistakably — a name that whispers of oracles and ancient futures.