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The extraordinary discovery of the Underworld of the ancient Greeks. We tend to think of ancient stories of visits to the Underworld by Odysseus, Orpheus and Aeneas as being poetic fictions, but Robert Temple shows here that in fact, the Ancients believed the Underworld to be a place that actually existed. It was maintained by a college of priests who would prepare, through ritual fasting, prayer, animal sacrifice, bathing and solitude, whoever wished to meet the shades of the dead. The candidate would then be led through the entrance to the Underworld, a dark, terrifying place, far underground, where after a series of ordeals and apparitions, they would finally meet with the ghosts of the dead. All these features recur in the ancient stories. Recently Robert Temple heard that a 1962 archaeological expedition had actually discovered the entrance in Italy.This is the amazing story of what he found when he was finally allowed to make his own descent into the Underworld – the River Styx, false doors, a snake pit and carved invocations to the Goddess of the Underworld, all revealed for the first time since ancient times.… (more)
User reviews
Unfortunately any original conclusions or extrapolations by the author are to be treated as wild speculation, since he seems to lack any ability to approach his sources critically -- or rather, he seems to lose that ability when the extrapolation goes in a direction that he finds fascinating.
At some point in the course of the book, I gave up howling and screeching at him every half page and started becoming amused instead, and this did improve the reading experience.
The second half of the book is cookier. It starts out with Chinese oracles (bones/tortoise shells and the I Ching), gets entranced with the fact that the I Ching, based on a binary system of whole or broken lines, is -- wait for it -- BINARY!!! But the binary system was only discovered in the West by Leibniz in the 17th century!!! (Not discovered, invented. And binary notation is not the same as binary arithmetic: the I Ching is not binary arithmetic. Sorry Mr Temple -- Ed.)
From here he moves on to hexagons, which he seems to find really exciting. After explaining in detail how they are the most economical way of filling a plane, he then proceeds to find it nothing short of miraculous that so many things that need to cover a surface actually and in the real world do so with hexagons. From two-dimensional hexagons he goes on to "economical" solids, which are related to hexagons!!! (And in those cases where they aren't, it is possible to work out hexagons one way or another by combining selected faces. Or at the very least they will be found to contain 60-degree angles somewhere). This all seems to have deep and portentous significance. There's a longish section where every sentence that contains the word "hexagon" seems to end in an exclamation mark.
Also notable is the "they also laughed at Hoyle and Wickramasinghe" part, if nothing else as a true piece of cookie bravura. (This is in connection to comets predicting plague and other disasters. According to the author, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe clearly "demonstrated" that viruses come on Earth from space via cometary debris -- which is also the origin of life on Earth -- and so comets did predict plagues. Even so, he kind of forgets to explain about the other disasters, but hey.)
In his favour, the author is a kook but not a crook: he comes across as honest and genuinely enthusiastic, which can be endearing and makes the book easier to read -- just a bit lacking in the critical-approach department.
In conclusion: the book collects some interesting facts, but does so under wildly speculative theories that really don't stand up, sorry. Worth having a look at if you have an interest in one of the specific areas he touches on. Just don't give it to young and impressionable readers who may themselves lack critical reading skills and may therefore take it too seriously.