Netherworld is an engaging and engaged investigation of some of the most important ways of looking into the future employed by peoples of the past. Robert Temple lights up the darker reaches of the subject with abounding enthusiasm and an active sympathy for early questioners and fortune-telling professionals. He balances a robust scepticism toward potential cheats, biased readings, and strategies for establishing clairvoyant authority with a deep respect for the urge to discover the way things are tending.
Ranging heroically across ages and places, Temple brings the same fascination to each of many ancient modes of anticipating events (although astrology is, refreshingly, relegated back to the rather low-rent status it had in the Classical world), while looking for patterns in these ways of looking for patterns in the world. His concern to pick out what has been excluded from commentary can seem overstretched in places, but it's effective because this book works by not passing over the odd shape of anything.
Temple begins by exploring a rubbish-strewn tunnel in Southern Italy before claiming it as the original oracle visited by Homer and Aeneas. He provides a thorough and lively account of the oracular establishments across Greece and Italy, and demands a more realistic reappraisal of their place in the culture. He repeatedly draws attention to activities that are usually passed over in perplexity or embarrassment, particularly extispicy, the ubiquitous sacrifices and entrail-examinations of Classical Greece and Rome. It is a measure of his engagement with his subject that he can tell you what it is like to examine a freshly excised liver in an abattoir.
Gradations and varieties of oracular material and practice are duly clarified: "Signs indicate what might happen in nature, but portents are supposed to indicate what will occur with reference to ourselves". And in each case these practices were not just attempts to see what is coming, but culturally-specific confirmations that the individual, the group, or the state, fits into nature and into greater patterns.
From Europe, Temple moves to ancient China, a culture familiar to him from previous researches, but probably less so to most of his readers. He pores over carefully cracked scapulae and tortoise-shells, explaining the crucial nature, for Chinese questioners, of directions of breaks in their surfaces. These patterns, or hints towards patterns, and the number-patterning of the I-Ching, then lead him on to contemporary physics, and theories of deep structures in space and matter. Analogies and connections sometimes seem presumptuous, but with this subject you are starkly aware of the presumption (and arbitrariness) of any effort to comprehend ultimate order.
Temple rails, largely effectively, at hierarchies of knowledge, but he finds structures in knowledge as compelling as the original questioners found their myriad structures of meaning. At times the exposition seems wayward, but never for long. There is real wonder here in discovering the almost unintelligible past, to match the wonder inherent in trying to discover the future.
Although the desire to see beyond the present is made real by a grounding in seeing and touching, the utter peculiarity of the past is not diminished by this tactile approach, it is just brought closer. The next time someone asks your star sign, talk to them about lumps on the organs of cattle, or cracks in old tortoise carapaces.
Reviewed by Ben Hawes
