October 1, 2012
The Unsolved Mystery of the Tunnels at Baiae
Baiae and the Bay of Naples, painted by J.M.W. Turner in 1823, well before modernization of the area obliterated most traces of its Roman past. Image: Wikicommons.
There is nothing remotely Elysian about the Phlegræan Fields, which lie on the north shore of the Bay of Naples; nothing sylvan, nothing green. The Fields are part of the caldera of a volcano that is the twin of Mount Vesuvius, a few miles to the east, the destroyer of Pompeii. The volcano is still active–it last erupted in 1538, and once possessed a crater that measured eight miles across–but most of it is underwater now. The portion that is still accessible on land consists of a barren, rubble-strewn plateau. Fire bursts from the rocks in places, and clouds of sulfurous gas snake out of vents leading up from deep underground.
The Fields, in short, are hellish, and it is no surprise that in Greek and Roman myth they were associated with all manner of strange tales. Most interesting, perhaps, is the legend of the Cumæan sibyl, who took her name from the nearby town of Cumæ, a Greek colony dating to about 500 B.C.– a time when the Etruscans still held sway much of central Italy and Rome was nothing but a city-state ruled over by a line of tyrannical kings.
A Renaissance-era depiction of a young Cumæan sibyl by Andrea del Catagno. The painting can be seen in the Uffizi Gallery. Image: Wikicommons.
The sibyl, so the story goes, was a woman named Amalthaea who lurked in a cave on the Phlegræan Fields. She had once been young and beautiful–beautiful enough to attract the attentions of the sun god, Apollo, who offered her one wish in exchange for her virginity. Pointing to a heap of dust, Amalthaea asked for a year of life for each particle in the pile, but (as is usually the way in such old tales) failed to allow for the vindictiveness of the gods. Ovid, in Metamorphoses, has her lament that “like a fool, I did not ask that all those years should come with ageless youth, as well.” Instead, she aged but could not die. Virgil depicts her scribbling the future on oak leaves that lay scattered about the entrance to her cave, and states that the cave itself concealed an entrance to the underworld.
The best-known–and from our perspective the most interesting–of all the tales associated with the sibyl is supposed to date to the reign of Tarquinius Superbus–Tarquin the Proud. He was the last of the mythic kings of Rome, and some historians, at least, concede that he really did live and rule in the sixth century B.C. According to legend, the sibyl traveled to Tarquin’s palace bearing nine books of prophecy that set out the whole of the future of Rome. She offered the set to the king for a price so enormous that he summarily declined–at which the prophetess went away, burned the first three of the books, and returned, offering the remaining six to Tarquin at the same price. Once again, the king refused, though less arrogantly this time, and the sibyl burned three more of the precious volumes. The third time she approached the king, he thought it wise to accede to her demands. Rome purchased the three remaining books of prophecy at the original steep price.
What makes this story of interest to historians as well as folklorists is that there is good evidence that three Greek scrolls, known collectively as the Sibylline Books, really were kept, closely guarded, for hundreds of years after the time of Tarquin the Proud. Secreted in a stone chest in a vault beneath the Temple of Jupiter, the scrolls were brought out at times of crisis and used, not as a detailed guide to the future of Rome, but as a manual that set out the rituals required to avert looming disasters. They served the Republic well until the temple burned down in 83 B.C., and so vital were they thought to be that huge efforts were made to reassemble the lost prophecies by sending envoys to all the great towns of the known world to look for fragments that might have come from the same source. These reassembled prophecies were pressed back into service and not finally destroyed until 405, when they are thought to have been burned by a noted general by the name of Flavius Stilicho.
Sulfur drifts from a vent on the barren volcanic plateau known as the Phlegraean Fields, a harsh moonscape associated with legends of prophecy. Photo: Wikicommons.
The existence of the Sibylline Books certainly suggests that Rome took the legend of the Cumæan sibyl seriously, and indeed the geographer Strabo, writing at about the time of Christ, clearly states that there actually was “an Oracle of the Dead” somewhere in the Phlegræan Fields. So it is scarcely surprising that archaeologists and scholars of romantic bent have from time to time gone in search of a cave or tunnel that might be identified as the real home of a real sibyl–nor that some have hoped that they would discover an entrance, if not to Hades, then at least to some spectacular subterranean caverns.
Over the years several spots, the best known of which lies close to Lake Avernus, have been identified as the antro della sibilla–the cave of the sibyl. None, though, leads to anywhere that might reasonably be confused with an entrance to the underworld. Because of this, the quest continued, and gradually the remaining searchers focused their attentions on the old Roman resort of Baiæ (Baia), which lies on Bay of Naples at a spot where the Phlegræan Fields vanish beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. Two thousand years ago, Baiæ was a flourishing spa, noted both for its mineral cures and for the scandalous immorality that flourished there. Today, it is little more than a collection of picturesque ruins–but it was there, in the 1950s, that the entrance to a hitherto unknown antrum was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri. It had been concealed for years beneath a vineyard; Maiuri’s workers had to clear a 15-foot-thick accumulation of earth and vines.
The narrow entrance to the tunnel complex at Baiae is easy to miss amid the ruins of a Greek temple and a large Roman bath complex.
The antrum at Baiæ proved difficult to explore. A sliver of tunnel, obviously ancient and manmade, disappeared into a hillside close to the ruins of a temple. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into its cramped entrance discovered a pitch-black passageway that was uncomfortably hot and wreathed in fumes; they penetrated only a few feet into the interior before beating a hasty retreat. There the mystery rested, and it was not revived until the site came to the attention of Robert Paget in the early 1960s.
Paget was not a professional archaeologist. He was a Briton who worked at a nearby NATO airbase, lived in Baiæ, and excavated mostly as a hobby. As such, his theories need to be viewed with caution, and it is worth noting that when the academic Papers of the British School at Rome agreed to publish the results of the decade or more that he and an American colleague named Keith Jones spent digging in the tunnel, a firm distinction was drawn between the School’s endorsement of a straightforward description of the findings and its refusal to pass comment on the theories Paget had come up with to explain his perplexing discoveries. These theories eventually made their appearance in book form but attracted little attention–surprisingly, because the pair claimed to have stumbled across nothing less than a real-life “entrance to the underworld.”
Paget was one of the handful of men who still hoped to locate the “cave of the sibyl” described by Virgil, and it was this obsession that made him willing to risk the inhospitable interior. He and Jones pressed their way though the narrow opening and found themselves inside a high but narrow tunnel, eight feet tall but just 21 inches wide. The temperature inside was uncomfortable but bearable, and although the airless interior was still tinged with volcanic fumes, the two men pressed on into a passage that, they claimed, had probably not been entered for 2,000 years.
A plan of Baiae’s mysterious “Oracle of the Dead,” showing the complex layout of the tunnels and their depth below ground level.
Following the tunnel downward, Paget and Jones calculated that it fell only around 10 feet in the first 400 feet of its length before terminating in a solid wall of rubble that blocked the way. But even the scanty evidence the two men had managed to gather during this early phase of their investigation persuaded them that it was worth pressing on. For one thing, the sheer amount of spoil that had been hauled into the depths suggested a considerable degree of organization–years later, when the excavation of the tunnel was complete, it would be estimated that 700 cubic yards of rubble, and 30,000 man-journeys, had been required to fill it. For another, using a compass, Paget determined that the terrace where the tunnel system began was oriented towards the midsummer sunrise, and hence the solstice, while the mysterious passage itself ran exactly east-west and was, thus, on the equinoctial sunrise line. This suggested that it served some ritual purpose.
It took Paget and Jones, working in difficult conditions with a small group of volunteers, the beter part of a decade to clear and explore what turned out to be a highly ambitious tunnel system. Its ceremonial function seemed to be confirmed by the existence of huge numbers of niches for oil lamps–they occurred every yard in the tunnels’ lower levels, far more frequently than would have been required merely to provide illumination. The builders had also given great thought to the layout of the complex, which seemed to have been designed to conceal its mysteries.
The “River Styx”–an underground stream, heated almost to boiling point in places, which runs through at the deepest portions of the tunnel complex. It was the discovery of this stream that led Paget to formulate his daring hypothesis that the Great Antrum was intended as a representation of the mythic underground passageways to Hades.
Within the portion of the tunnels choked by rubble, Paget and Jones found, hidden behind an S-bend, a second blockage. This, the explorers discovered, marked the place where two tunnels diverged. Basing his thinking on the remains of some ancient pivots, Paget suggested that the spot had at one time harbored a concealed door. Swung closed, this would have masked the entrance to a second tunnel that acted as a short-cut to the lower levels. Opened partially, it could have been used (the explorer suggested) as a remarkably effective ventilation system; hot, vitiated air would be sucked out of the tunnel complex at ceiling level, while currents of cooler air from the surface were constantly drawn in along the floor.
But only when the men went deeper into the hillside did the greatest mystery of the tunnels revealed itself. There, hidden at the bottom of a much steeper passage, and behind a second S-bend that prevented anyone approaching from seeing it until the final moment, ran an underground stream. A small “landing stage” projected out into the sulfurous waters, which ran from left to right across the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point.
Conditions at this low point in the tunnel complex certainly were stygian. The temperature had risen to 120 degrees Fahrenheit; the air stank of sulfur. It was a relief to force a way across the stream and up a steep ascending passage on the other side, which eventually opened into an antechamber, oriented this time to the helical sunset, that Paget dubbed the “hidden sanctuary.” From there, more hidden staircases ascended to the surface to emerge behind the ruins of water tanks that had fed the spas at the ancient temple complex.
The Phlegræan Fields (left) and Mount Vesuvius, after Scipione Breislak’s map of 1801. Baiae lies at the northeastern tip of the peninsula of Bacoli, at the extreme westerly end of the Fields.
What was this “Great Antrum,” as Paget dubbed it? Who had built it–and for what purpose? And who had stopped it up? After a decade of exploration, he and Jones had formulated answers to those questions.
The tunnel system, the two men proposed, had been constructed by priests to mimic a visit to the Greeks’ mythical underworld. In this interpretation, the stream represented the fabled River Styx, which the dead had to cross to enter Hades; a small boat, the explorers speculated, would have been waiting at the landing stage to ferry visitors across. On the far side these initiates would have climbed the stairs to the hidden sanctuary, and it was there they would have met… who? One possibility, Paget thought, was a priestess posing as the Cumæan sibyl, and for this reason he took to calling the complex the “Antrum of Initiation.”
The tunnels, then, in Paget’s view, might have been constructed to allow priests to persuade their patrons–or perhaps simply wealthy travelers–that they had traveled through the underworld. The scorching temperatures below ground and the thick drifts of volcanic vapor would certainly have given that impression. And if visitors were tired, befuddled or perhaps simply drugged, it would have been possible to create a powerfully otherworldly experience capable of persuading even the skeptical.
A general plan of the tunnel complex, drawn by Robert Paget. Click twice to view in higher resolution.
In favor of this argument, Paget went on, was the careful planning of the tunnels. The “dividing of the ways,” with its hidden door, would have allowed a party of priests–and the “Cumæan sibyl” too, perhaps–quick access to the hidden sanctuary, and the encounter with the “River Styx” would have been enhanced by the way the tunnels’ S-bend construction concealed its presence from new initiates. The system, furthermore, closely matched ancient myths relating visits to the underworld. In Virgil’s Aeniad, for instance, the hero, Aeneas, crosses the Styx only once on his journey underground, emerging from Hades by an alternate route. The tunnel complex at Baiæ seemed to have been constructed to allow just such a journey–and Virgil, in Paget’s argument, had lived nearby and might himself have been an initiate in Baiæ’s mysteries.
Dating the construction of the complex was a greater challenge. The explorers found little evidence inside the tunnels that might point to the identity of the builders–just a mason’s plumb bob in one of the niches and some ancient graffiti. But, working on the assumption that the passages had formed part of the surrounding temple complex, they concluded that they could best be dated to the late archaic period around 550 B.C.–at pretty much the time, that is, that the Cumæan sibyl was said to have lived. If so, the complex was was almost certainly the work of the Greek colonists of Cumæ itself. As for when the tunnels had been blocked up, that–Paget thought–must have taken place after Virgil’s time, during the early Imperial period of Roman history. But who exactly ordered the work, or why, he could not say.
In time, Paget and Jones solved at least some of the Great Antrum’s mysteries. In 1965 they persuaded a friend, Colonel David Lewis of the U.S. Army, and his son to investigate the Styx for them using scuba apparatus. The two divers followed the stream into a tunnel that dramatically deepened and discovered the source of its mysterious heat: two springs of boiling water, superheated by the volcanic chambers of the Phlegræan Fields.
One of the two boiling springs that feed the “Styx,” photographed in 1965, 250 feet beneath the surface, by Colonel David Lewis, U.S. Army.
Whether Paget and Jones’s elaborate theories are correct remains a matter of debate. That the tunnel complex served some ritual purpose can hardly be doubted if the explorers’ compass bearings are correct, and the specifics of its remarkable construction seem to support much of what Paget says. Of alternative explanations, only one–that the tunnels were once part of a system designed to supply hot mineral-rich waters to bathhouses above–feels plausible, though it certainly does not explain features such as S-bends designed to hide the wonders ahead from approaching visitors. The central question may well be whether it is possible to see Paget’s channel of boiling water deep underground as anything other than a deliberate representation of one of the fabled rivers that girdled Hades–if not the Styx itself, then perhaps the Phlegethon, the mythic “river of fire” that, in Dante’s Inferno, boils the souls of the departed. Historians of the ancient world do not dispute that powerful priests were fully capable of mounting elaborate deceptions–and a recent geological report on the far better known Greek oracle site at Delphi demonstrated that fissures in the rocks nearby brought intoxicating and anaesthetic gases to the surface at that spot, suggesting that it may have been selected and used for a purpose much like the one Paget proposed at Baiæ.
Yet much remains mysterious about the Great Antrum–not least the vexed question of how ancient builders, working with primitive tools at the end of the Bronze Age, could possibly have known of the existence of the “River Styx,” much less excavated a tunnel that so neatly intercepted it. There is no trace of the boiling river at the surface–and it was not until the 1970s, after Paget’s death, that his collaborators finally discovered, by injecting colored dyes into its waters, that it flows into the sea miles away, on the northern side of Cape Miseno.
Paget found one foot-high fragment of roughly painted graffiti close to the entrance of the tunnels. He interpreted the first line to read “Illius” (“of that”), and the second as a shorthand symbol representing a prayer to the Greek goddess Hera.
Little seems to have changed at Baiæ since Paget’s day. His discoveries have made remarkably little impact on tourism at the ancient resort, and even today the network of passages he worked so long to clear remain locked and barely visited. A local guide can be hired, but the complex remains difficult, hot and uncomfortable to visit. Little attempt is made to exploit the idea that it was once thought to be an entrance to the underworld, and, pending reinvestigation by trained archaeologists, not much more can be said about the tunnels’ origin and purpose. But even among the many mysteries of the ancient world, the Great Antrum on the Bay of Naples surely remains among the most intriguing.
Sources
C.F. Hardie. “The Great Antrum at Baiae.” Papers of the British School at Rome 37 (1969); Peter James and Nick Thorpe. Ancient Inventions. London: Michael O’Mara, 1995; A.G. McKay. Cumae and the Phlegraean Fields. Hamilton, Ont: Cromlech Press, 1972; Daniel Ogden. Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; R.F. Paget. “The ‘Great Antrum’ at Baiae: a Preliminary Report. Papers of the British School at Rome 35 (1967); R.F. Paget. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Story of the Finding and Identifications of the Lost Entrance to Hades, the Oracle of the Dead, the River Styx and the Infernal Regions of the Greeks. London: Robert Hale, 1967; H.W. Parke. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1988; P.B. Wale. “A conversation for ‘The Antrum of Initiation, Baia. Italy’.” BBC h2g2, accessed 12 August 2012; Fikrut Yegul. “The Thermo-Mineral Complex at Baiae and De Balneis Puteolanis.” The Art Bulletin 78:1, March 1996.
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
Thanks for a truly facinating article.
It’s always neat to see Baiæ get its time in the sun, so to speak – I researched the site a little as part of my bachelor’s thesis in Classical Studies. :)
Incidentally, my pet theory about how they managed to cut a tunnel that so neatly intersected the stream was that they were actually expanding an existing cavelet that ran from the hillside to the stream. That neatly explains how they knew the stream was there and how they knew exactly where to cut the tunnel, and the Romans, early or late, were certainly not afraid to modify their surroundings to suit themselves.
Thanks for posting this!
The author appears to be unaware of my book ORACLES OF THE DEAD (American title; the original English title was NETHERWORLD) which contains a full account of the Baian tunnels and the results of my explorations of them. Anyone wanting to get correct information about this subject is advised to read my book and consult its illustrations and photographs. Further information is given in the documentary film which I made for National Geographic, entitled DESCENT INTO HELL, as that film was made after the book appeared and hence contains later discoveries. The tunnels at Baia are not an unsolved mystery, but they do pose many further problems and need to be cleared of the soil and rubble with which they were largely blocked by Agrippa, so that a full inspection of the blocked portions, the underground lake, and the ‘River Styx’ may be undertaken. There is very good reason to suppose that archaeological artifacts could be discovered within the chamber labelled by Paget ‘the Inner Sanctum’, beneath the soil and rubble which presently fills it. It took me 20 years to get permission from the archaeological authorities to undertake the investigations and to film the site, because they believed it to be full of poison gas. But it is not full of poison gas, and the oxygen cylinders and other such precautions which I brought on the first occasion proved to be unnecessary, as well as the rope tied around my ankle so that they could pull out my corpse (I had already signed a form stating that the Italian Government was not responsible for my death). If anyone wants to fund the clearance so that the tunnels may be more fully investigated, let me know.
What an absolutely fascinating article! It reminds me of the same discovery made by certain archaeologists and others in Central America, which were a series of caverns that represented the Mayan and/or Aztec underworld replete with many sacrificial symbols, knives of jade and obsidian, underground rivers and lakes and human remains. That the Greek and Roman peoples did the same thing using the The Great Antrum at Baiae at perhaps around the same time period is what I find extremely fascinating and very provocative. I would love to see the Great Antrum at Baiae excavated and explored much more. I would also hope that someone else besides myself would put together the same realization that I pointed out and observed in my above comments. Two to three different civilizations on two different and separate continents creating the same thing. Their version of The Underworld. Perhaps the great author and explorer who commented above, Robert Temple, would be interested in what I have written and see the correlation between them. I would hope that someone would! Thank you again for an excellent and extremely interesting article. BJM – Helena, Montana
Quote from the BBC article The Antrum of Initiation, Baia, Italy
“In 2002, Robert Temple tried to bring the Antrum of Initiation into the new age with his book, Netherworld. Sadly, on his web page about Netherworld, Temple gives no mention or acknowledgement of RF Paget and his years of work clearing rubble from the long tunnels and providing the basic interpretation which Netherworld repeats. While impossible to foresee accurately, it is doubtful that Temple’s speculative conclusions will endure as long as has the Antrum of Initiation and its Mystery.”
This cave is mentioned in Micheal Baigents book The Jesus Papers if I am correct. Baigent was the one who took photographs inside the tunnel system en crawled through them.
I am so happy to see Robert Temple here, as I was about to send out my own volcanic blast, asking the author of this article if he had never heard of NETHERWORLD, a book which, as I recall, gives full salute to RF Paget, website notwithstanding. Nice to see others acknowledge Temple here, too.
Like the others, I found this article exceptionally interesting & informative. This is the same as many other articles from the Smithsonian. On the other hand, what I’d really like to see (& read) and what I think many would find, not only quite interesting and maybe even more relevant would be stories on why the Smithsonian keeps certain artifacts well hidden and not available to the public! Among these are the many large human skeletal remains proving giants did once walk the earth and not just in biblical myth!
I doubt they’ll approve this posting; however, if it is, I thank you for doing so.
I have been piecing together all the information I can about the site at Baia on a web site at http://www.oracleofthedead.com.
I have an eye witness who went in there in 1970 who is writing up his story for me as we speak. I am also working on a 3D model of the tunnel complex.
Robert Temple, if you read this could you contact me at info@oracleofthedead.com or through any of the pages at http://www.oracleofthedead.com as I’d love to know more about the twin tunnel junction behind the swivel door. I know you didn’t go down that 120 tunnel, but Michael Baigent did. His description in The Jesus Papers is sparse.
There are factual errors in the article above. The antrum discovered behind the pizza oven in 1932 was Maiuri’s discovery of the antrum of the Sybil at Cuma, not the antrum of the Oracle of the Dead at Baia.
Maiuri excavated the site at Baia only in the 1950s. Before then it was covered under 15′ or 5 metres of soil and vines – see pictures in 1933 and the early 1950s at http://www.oracleofthedead.com/the-site-at-baia
So the first curious onlookers could not possibly have seen the entrance before world war II. The site was only excavated between 1956 and 1958 and buried before then. Paget first entered in 1962.
The retired English gentleman’s name was Robert Paget, not Robin as you state several times.
Paget does not say that the mysterious tunnel is oriented towards the midsummer sunrise, the solstice. The terrace on which it sits faces that way.
The main tunnel does however run due east-west and is on the equinoctial sunrise line. Moreover the sun would have appeared to rise behind Vesuvius, which of course was much bigger and had not erupted when the complex was in use.
The Sybil of Cuma operated well into Christian times.
Thank you. I’ve corrected the error in the date the tunnel was identified and updated to incorporate your information about the orientation of the passageway.
Fantastic piece, Dr. D.
My attentions were riveted from start to finish.
I look forward to your articles, and have yet to be disappointed.
Thanks for ongoing adventure & intrigue!
Best,
MLT
Very interesting. This should be at least well known as the “Money Pit” on Oak Island.
I think it is still misleading to say “but it was there, in the 1950s, that the entrance to a hitherto unknown antrum was discovered by the Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri.”
Maiuri never thought he’d discovered an antrum here at all. His workmen never went far into the tunnel, forbidden to do so because of suspected toxic fumes. As Amedeo Maiuri’s plan shows, he could only plot the tunnel as far as the back of the Tholos structure, which is really no distance at all.
The discovery of the Antrum is entirely the discovery of Paget and Jones. They could see where the workmen’s footprints ended, just a short way in. They were the first to venture inside.
A bit pedantic, but I would say he uncovered it but did not discover it. In the context of the overall plan of the Bath complex at Baia it looks like a very unimportant part of the site, unremarkable.
Full marks for putting the place on the map though, it’s about time something was done about investigating this place. Not least we want to know what, if anything remains, is inside the sealed up inner sanctuary.
I would also add that Paget, although he mentioned the entrance passage went due east-west, he never worked out or mentioned that the tunnel was aligned on the equinox, that was my discovery, aided by a friend.
I’d mentioned to an archaeoastronomer, Tony Ropper, that the tuunel was aligned on the solstice (I got this from Temple’s book) and he immediately said ‘Don’t be ridiculous, if it faces east-west it must be equinoctal, not solsticial.’
The exact sunrise line depends on the viewpoint and the horizon. I verified this by using Google earth to show the sunrise behind Vesuvius on the required date, as seen form the entrance.
The sun rises obliquely, so there is margin for interpretation, but broadly the sun would appear to rise from behind Vesuvius on the autumn equinox..
Robert Temple mentions the tunnel is aligned to the summer sunrise in his book Netherworld, but this is down to a simple misinterpretation of the mention of it in Paget’s book.
Thank you for a very interestin g article, and for giving due credit to the hard work and bravery of Mr. Paget and his associates. I’ll definitely be sharing this with my friends and family. There’s so much to this article, from devious religious leaders to dangerous explorations to haughty ancient kings!
———————
Regarding the statement about the mystery of the tunnels’ construction: Exactly how it was done and how the river was discovered is certainly a mystery, but that ancient people could do it at all is, maybe, not so mysterious.
The Tunnel of Hezekiah/Siloam that provided water to Jerusalem during the Assyrian siege dates to about 2700 years ago. An inscription describing the final phase tells how two work crews, having started at opposite ends and working toward each other, could hear one another through the rock and then joined the two parts. An article from dsc.discover.com quotes the inscription: “There was heard a man’s voice calling to his fellow … the hewers hacked each toward the other, axe against axe — and the water flowed from the spring to the pool.”
Also using the strategy of digging from both ends and meeting in the middle, a similar tunnel, the Eupalinian aqueduct, was dug in Samos, Greece two hundred years later, which, I think, puts it around the same time as the tunnels of Baiae.
Dear Mr. Dash,
I would like to commend you, one human being to another, for reading and responding to the posts placed on your blog. Not everyone bothers to do so. I understand not responding to disrespectful and inflammatory comments (I sincerely hope mine don’t fall into that category, as that is the opposite of the intention).
Still, the impression many give is that they are too far above the hoi polloi to bother with any interaction. You are clearly better than that, and deserve to hear it.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for the kind words and also for the constructive comments you have made about the mystery. I think what you say about the tunnels’ construction is a very good point – someone else has suggested to me that what must have happened is that the buildings enlarged an existing natural fissure, which (at least at first glance) also makes a lot of sense.
There are no natural fissures in the entrance tunnel nor anywhere else that has been investigated so far. They have been looked for and don’t exist.
There is a dead straight entrance passage over 400 feet long, just 22 inches wide and uniform height. This was no widening of an existing feature. It runs exactly east-west on 270º.
This is far more than two people digging a tunnel from either end. For a start there is no other end, there is only one entrance.
It is a complex of extreme intricacy, It has a junction of five tunnels at a swivel door whose rebates can be seen and there was even a hinge pivot remaining in the floor when Paget first entered. Someone unknown took it. There must still be traces of where it once sat.
From the Styx there is a curved and twisting passage leading back to the pillared sanctuary above. It curves over and above the entrance to the Styx where there is a kind of chimney chute vertically over the start of the river. From the back of the ordeal of the Styx another passage curves round and up to the sanctuary.
Paget, who went in here almost daily for four years says he has seen no evidence of reworked tunnels or false starts, it is all solid tufa with no volcanic cracks.
It has two deliberate S bends to obscure the view ahead at strategic places which point to ritual use, as does the hundreds of lamp niches in the walls.
As for the Styx, how could someone know there was a water source to be found, dig into it and somehow know he would not immediately drown when he did so? Or were bodies expended wholesale in doing so?
It throws up so many questions, which is why there should be a proper investigation.
It’s really good of you to highlight this wonder of the world. Please keep doing so.
@John Smout:
I agree the engineers did something astounding here. I hope you didn’t think I was denigrating their achievement – far from it. I was just feeling enthusiastic. Sorry I gave the wrong impression by naming two such similar strategies, but they were the only other ancient tunnels I could think of at the time.
It certainly wasn’t meant as a suggestion as to how these were done or a belittling of anyone’s ideas, including the author’s – just expressing my agreement that this was surely more than a minor remodeling of something already there. Getting intent across was hard enough when we wrote in cursive – it’s something of a nightmare with nothing but a keyboard.
Hello, it is November 7 and I have just glanced at this discussion again for the first time since I added my earlier note nearly five weeks ago. I am extremely annoyed at Whit Carver for suggesting that I did not give credit to Robert Paget. He says I do not mention him on my Netherworld page, but I do not have a Netherworld page and do not know what he is talking about. My book NETHERWORLD (known in America as ORACLES OF THE DEAD) is full of praise for and information about Robert Paget, as the discoverer of the Oracle of the Dead. (Some people in this discussion have confused it with the Oracle of the Sybil at Cuma, but if they had seen my book they could not have made this mistake, as I describe both sites very thoroughly, and publish photos of both). I went to great trouble to track down as many surviving friends of Paget as I could. As for Michael Baigent, he and I are great personal friends and I invited him to explore the site with me because of his years of caving experience at Qmran. After my book came out, he published an account of our adventures in one of his own books. We took photos of each other inside the site, which appear in my book and his book. It is true that it was claimed that the site was full of poisonous gas fumes, so when Michael and I first entered we had oxygen cylinders ready for use, but we did not need them, because there was no such gas. However, none of the Italian archaeologists was willing to explore the site with us, as they were afraid of the gas, nor did they do so when I went back and filmed inside the tunnels for the television documentary. (Some of the tunnels are only 18 inches high, due to their being so full of soil and rubble placed there by the Romans to block them up and ‘decommission’ the Oracle, and no one with claustrophobia would be able to explore them. They also get very short of oxygen deep inside and one gets pretty spaced-out crawling around and not being able to breathe properly.) I can assure everyone that the tunnels were not cut along the track of any pre-existing fissure. There are no such fissures. It is not rock, it is tufa, and it is all solid. A lot remains to be done at the site, because there is another whole level which we could not reach due to the blockages. The site needs to be cleared of soil and rubble inside, the remainder of it explored, and then certain portions should be excavated. Also, the underground lake needs proper exploration by divers. It is not described in the book but only in the film, which I made after the book came out. I have had a quick look at the website ‘oracleofthedead’, which has no direct connection with me, and it looks interesting, but I have no time at present to study it properly. I believe that after clearance of the site, we will discover another secret entrance, and that will lead to an explanation of how they knew where the spring and underground lake were, in order to construct the Styx and all the other tunnels around them. This mystery has only just begun to unravel. Before it can progress any further, funding for the clearance must come from outside Italy, as the Italians have no money to pursue such projects, since their country is collapsing economically, as everyone knows, alas. I am glad everyone finds this so interesting. It is.
Surely Amalthaea must have had a copies of her scrolls sold to Mr. Superbus. Like Gurdjieff tracing the map to his heart’s cave.
Ive read The Oracle of the Dead by Robert Temple and Ive seen the TV documentary on the same subject which was fascinating and eye opening. As Robert Temple states at the beginning of the documentary on the question of wether Hell was a mythical story or a real place…. “I’ve been there” He said …which is the start of a fantastic journey, All the more revealing about the lies, trickery and corruption of “Priests” and how nothings really changed except that now we can proove they are all corrupt liars – Is that why the pope resigned today I wonder….Thanks to Robert Temple for making the documentary and incidentally its impossible to obtain that doco’ online, but I luckily taped it on an old video and have a copy but would love to see the full version online