kaos

You cannot be Sirius!
Netherworld: Discovering the Oracle of the Dead by Robert Temple
(London: Century, 2002)
reviewed by Steve Marshall
Netherworld begins keenly enough with a marvellous description of crawling through
tunnels in Baia, Italy, and a truly scary evocation of the giant mosquitoes to be found
there, but falters as soon as the subject of the book has to be revealed. The basic thesis
is that the Greek Underworld of Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid was not a product
of the ancient imagination but was based on an actual physical location, and Robert
Temple—author of The Sirius Mystery—is the only man alive to have been there (not
counting the others).
Inspired as a youth by the late Robert Paget’s In the Footsteps of Orpheus (1967),
Temple has spent the past 20 years trying to get permission to gain access to a complex
of tunnels in Baia depicted by Paget as an “Oracle of the Dead”. Temple says Baia was
meant to be a model of Hades complete with its own River Styx and Charon the
ferryman where drugged seekers were led into a mystery play they believed to be real.
In early 2001 the long-awaited permission came. Robert and wife Olivia booked in for
a great adventure holiday in the Bay of Naples with mate Michael Baigent, a fellow
popular ancient mysteries author, and his wife Jane.
Then, dusting off an old book from 1984, Conversations with Eternity, his first rehash
of Paget’s work, there was the chance for a new book. Despite constantly advertising
his previous books in the text of Netherworld, nowhere does Temple or the publisher
state that this new book is a revised edition of the previous book, the title of which goes
curiously unmentioned. In the description of the earlier book on Temple’s website the
fact that it is about Baia is conspicuous by its absence.
Okay, so now Temple has seen the place for himself. What’s he found? Basically,
tunnels, mud, and mosquitoes, and a lone pipestrelle bat. To add substance to what is
otherwise a book of archæological psychometry without the slightest scrap of evidence
in 500 pages that these tunnels were ever put to the stated use as an oracular model of
the Underworld, he is reduced to the device of “seeming to see in my mind’s eye”. It’s
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