No, Ruby has symbols because it was inspired by Smalltalk which has symbols. Of course, Lisp also has symbols, and it was one of the inspirations for Ruby (and Smalltalk), but the idea of representing message sends (ie. method calls) as symbol + arguments comes from Smalltalk.
It's not a historical article tracing the lineage of the feature.
Ruby took some things the designer liked from Lisp, from Smalltalk, from Perl, from other places. He liked symbols because they're good for performance (and compile-time correctness) at a low cognitive cost, and that's why Ruby has symbols.