Exploring Ancient Methods of Divination and the Re-Discovery of the Entrance to the Underworld.
Most of us consult oracles and believe in divination. So what is in this tradition of trying to predict the future? Can we perceive what will happen to us or what forces are at work upon us?
In this book, Robert Temple examines the science of prediction in the ancient world, contrasting the techniques and traditions of divination in classical Greece, Rome and ancient China. He looks at how the oracles of classical antiquity were stage-managed to create in their clients convictions of authenticity and a sense of having a genuine "conversation with eternity".
Secret mechanisms of the ancient underground initiation systems - described in the literature of Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas etc, going down into the underworld - worked to persuade the heavily drugged neophytes that they were undergoing supernatural experience. This is tied in to the archaeological site at Baia in southern Italy, which was actually believed to be the entrance to the underworld.
Drawing his evidence from a range of sources within orthodox scholarship, but also accounting for the latest scientific discoveries about time and space, particularly in the realm of quantum mechanics in relation to ancient practices - Temple shows that there is at least a possibility that the "magical" and "scientific" world views are not all that far apart.
