Netherworld: Discovering the Oracle of the Dead and Other Ancient Methods of Divination
by Robert Temple
Century, £17.99, ISBN 0712684042

A frustrating book on an interesting subject. It’s a study of historical methods of divination from both the West and the East, leaving out astrology (on the sensible grounds that there’s been an awful lot written about that already) but including the “I Ching”. The Western section is fascinating, but the interest drops off as he moves Eastward.
Still, it starts well. The discovery and (very) partial excavation of the giant underground complex that once housed the Oracle of Baiae is fascinating stuff, and it’s shameful that this amazing structure hasn’t been properly investigated yet. The beginning of the book is taken up with its rediscovery and structure, which leads into an entertaining potted history of classical oracles, both deliberately faked and honest. He shows evidence for drug use both by oracles and by unwary questioners, who could easily be drugged to the eyeballs by the oracular priests and then killed if they showed any signs of being less than impressed when regaining consciousness. Other suggested methods of sacred cheating include the use of carrierpigeons – doves and pigeons were apparently a feature of ancient temples, though there’s no mention of how they would be transported between them. Then we come to what Temple considers the other main technique of Classical divination – haruspicy; divination by entrails. Sensitive readers may not wish to read further, as his hands-on research involved persuading his local abbatoir to let him study the entrails of just-killed animals. Valuable for understanding the ancient methodology and casting light on some obscure texts, though with a high yuk factor for us squeamish cityfolk.
I don’t think it’s much worth reading further, though. Up till this point, while you get occasional reminders that this is a “fringe” book, they’re fairly minor.
The occasional complaint about closed-minded academia and a spirited defence of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s “Lifecloud” theories in the context of comets and meteors as portents is about as strong as it gets. But once he gets on to the “I Ching”, he takes it as a licence to explain his pet theories on “event lattices” and the book suffers accordingly. A pity, really. The Shang Oracle Bones deserve a better popular treatment than this.
As I said, the first part is worthwhile reading in spite of this, but I can’t imagine this book will gain him any credit in academia, which, alas, is still the acid test for theories.

The Book of Nothing
by John D Barrow
Vintage, £8.99, ISBN 0099288451

Barrow is a professor of mathematical sciences, and author of “Theories of Everything” and “Impossibility”.

This is a curiously substantial book about how nothing can amount to something (rather than the dire idea that nothing can amount to anything). The first part concerns the significance of zero: “The Indian system of counting is probably the most successful intellectual innovation ever devised by human beings.” Ever tried reckoning with Roman numerals? The zeros in our computers’ binary logic are, so to speak, much more than half the story. (Small numerical complaint: which nowt – archaically an oafish person – chose for a science book a font where 1 is indistinguishable from capital I?)

Here we find an amazing demonstration of how the natural numbers can be generated from the null set, and Barrow provides a very fine illustration of the null graph on p.163.

The second half discusses the nature of the vacuum. This soon leads into relativity and quantum theory, in as clear a way as one could hope for in a popular science book. It emerges that there is more to the vacuum than the mechanical difficulty of creating a perfect one: it is neither empty nor inert, “and without its powerful contribution, the unity of Nature could not be sustained”.

There is a peculiar cosmic significance for ourselves: “Universes that contain life must be big and old, dark and cold. If our Universe was less of a vacuum it could not be an abode for living complexity.” One of Barrow’s pet themes is the Anthropic Principle, although he is restrained about it here. On the other hand, for this reviewer there is rather too much space devoted to old theological ruminations about creating something out of nothing.

One last word – a gift that we might like to make use of – nullibilists: those who believe that no spiritual beings exist.

Paul Taylor

An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment
by Patricia Fara
Icon Books, £9.99, ISBN 1840463481

“Electricity has one considerable advantage over most other branches of science, as it both furnishes matter of speculation for philosophers and of entertainment for all persons promiscuously.” Thus Joseph Priestly in the 1790s, providing a succinct summary of the subject of this thoughtful and lucid book by Patricia Fara, an historian of science and an expert on 18th century magnetism.
Between about 1730 and 1790 entrepreneurial philosophers and self-styled “electricians” (not scientists yet – that word would not appear for another forty years) like Benjamin Franklin, Volta, Nollet, Boyle and Galvani began the work that would one day make a world run by electricity possible.
While theories about electricity and magnetism were plentiful, money and resources were not and for most experimenters publicity and the ability to earn money from entertaining shows and practical devices were as important as obtaining and publishing results. Hence the long running Anglo-American dispute over pointed versus rounded lightning conductors, the popular treatments available at the London Electrical Dispensary and Graham’s (literally) sparky “Celestial Bed”.
The history of scientific discovery is never a simple, linear narrative progressing towards the inevitable triumphant conclusion and Fara charts the usual false starts, blind alleys and squabbles that are as much personal as theoretical. Distinct national schools were important too: the French favouring an algebraic approach to their experiments, the British tending towards theologically flavoured theories concerning aethers, particles and “the Electrical fluid”.
Once the dramatic effect of electricity on isolated muscles had been shown, thoughts about treating the paralysed or resuscitating the dead inevitably followed, leading to some gruesome experiments on fresh corpses and subsequent speculation about the link between life, death and electricity. Speculation that would lead Mary Shelley, whose husband had enthused as an Oxford student over ‘a new engine’ (the galvanic battery), to produce in 1818 an enduring literary classic describing the career of a certain fictional experimenter by the name of Frankenstein.

How to Build a Time Machine
by Paul Davies
The Penguin Press, £9.99, ISBN 0713995831

Like “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” with a bodice-ripping cover, this little book will not satisfy. Not only did I not learn HTBATM, I learned that it is not possible in the world as we know it (that is to say without our being able to harness antigravity, space warps, wormholes or other devices from Star Trek).
Although a hardback, the text is only 11 by 14 cm and the 136 pages are interspersed with 36 full-page illustrations which add little to the product. Most of them are sketches of famous scientists which appear to have been created by tracing a photograph with a thick felt pen. Where the illustrations are referred to in the text they are identified by page numbers, but the pages that have illustrations are not numbered. You get used to this after a while. Don’t expect any sex, maths, religion or UFOs and you won’t be disappointed. Although he is no Carl Sagan, Professor Davies’ reputation as a physicist is imperilled from time to time by such remarks as:
“CERN propels electrons at 99.999999999 per cent of the speed of light… so fast that it falls short of the speed of sound by a literal snail’s pace.” “Cylindrical surfaces have no intrinsic curvature.” (Don’t write me: I know what he meant and he should have said “right circular cylindrical surfaces”.) “…thus rescuing the cherished law of change conservation.” (I think he meant “charge conservation”.) “…the motion of two (billiard) balls after collision is completely determined by the initial speed and direction of the cue ball.” Clearly he doesn’t play billiards or pool or snooker. I also found irritating his quoting all very small numbers in the form “a billion trillion trillionth of a centimetre”.
Conclusion: science-popularisation-wise this book doesn’t cut the mustard.

A Magick Life: The Life of Aleister Crowley
by Martin Booth
Coronet Books, £8.99, ISBN 0340718064

If you believe in magic as much as in little green men from Mars, it is difficult to be impressed by the most famous magician of the last century. Edward Alexander Crowley was born into the peak of the Victorian Age in 1875 and lived until 1947 to see the first and second World Wars. Before Crowley discovered magic at age 22 he was a chess player of repute and he wrote poetry of more than ordinary ability. He became a mountaineer with numerous first ascents to his name; initially in England and Scotland, later in the Alps, and eventually in the Himalayas. For all his daring and pioneering climbs, he was known as an exceedingly careful and deliberate mountaineer. Yet, “Crowley was to develop into a person forever pushing the boundaries of experience, reacting to emotions and impulses rather than reason.” (p. 22).
He was considered the greatest magician of his age. This means he was opposed to Christianity, he borrowed from Theosophy, Spiritualism, and other psychic beliefs of the time. Crowley described magic as using one’s will power to accomplish things without obvious means. “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (p. 82). He compared this to the Roman Catholic Mass where the will of the priest changes the bread and the wine. The astral body of light, the universal ether, and human thought were part of the faculties needed for accomplishing magic. The author of the biography says that much of what Crowley suggested as magic, that is the imagination, the subconscious, the reaching for control by the mind, have today become topics in the psychiatrist’s office (p. 85).
Crowley claimed to have been inspired by the Rosicrucians, by the history of the Knights Templar, the Cathars, and Albigensians. Organizations Crowley founded or belonged to bore such names as the Golden Dawn, “Lichte Liebe LebenTempel”, the Theosophical Society, “Ordo Templi Orientis”, or “Argentinum Astrum”. Clearly the concepts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding what was magic and what is real differed from the ideas of later periods. Booth has written a competent biography of an exceptional character. It is easy to read, but much more difficult to understand or to sympathize with.

Fairies in Nineteenth-century Art and Literature (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-century Literature & Culture)
by Nicola Bown
Cambridge University Press, £40, ISBN 0521793157

Victorians were fascinated by fairies. Ariel, Puck, Oberon and Titania were the subject of countless paintings. But Victorian fairies were not the twee little beings that we see nowadays on greetings cards and “Flower Fairies” books. These were something altogether more sinister.
Victorian painters such as Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald painted Bosch-like fantasies of grotesque creatures engaged in bizarre activities which verge on the surreal. But why were the Victorians so interested in these strange, mythical beings? Nicola Bown argues that it was an expression of nostalgia for a vanished rural past – “the industrial revolution killed the fairies”. From the onset of Darwinism to the notorious case of the Cottingley Fairies, belief in fairies gradually declined. Bown explores various artistic and literary manifestations of this decaying belief. I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of Darwinism in relation to Dadd’s “The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke” – a painting which most of us only know via the Queen song of that title.
It is a shame that Bown does not reproduce more of the paintings, though presumably this would have made the cost of the book prohibitive. It is best read alongside the lavishly illustrated catalogue of the Royal Academy’s 1997 “Victorian Fairy Painting” exhibition.
The book offers a fascinating insight into the Victorian psyche. But were the Victorians so different from us? Was nineteenth-century belief in fairies so very different from modern beliefs in crop circles, alien abduction and supernatural spoon-bending? Maybe we can’t really count ourselves superior.

Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations
by John Diamond
Vintage, £7.99, ISBN 0099428334

Because the medium through which most people knew John Diamond was his Times column, in which he could pick and choose the facts around which he built his witty and sometimes scathing opinions, it’s easy to forget that first he was a journalist. The surprise in Snake Oil, his unfinished “uncomplimentary look at the world of alternative medicine” is the extent to which he knew the subject (he also had an excellent researcher).
It’s not just that once he made public his cancer diagnosis thousands of people wrote to him recommending he try this and that cure. He’d already spent years researching articles on the subject for a wide variety of publications. Certainly, the years he spent in treatment for his cancer gave him a thorough understanding of how the medical establishment and the human body work, if he didn’t already have those.
The unfinished book is polemical, well-reasoned, and entertaining (“Look,” he writes, “at any advert for those cosmetics which claim to rid the body of ‘toxins’ and you’ll understand what the popular understanding of the function of the kidneys is.”). But it is unfinished – and hard to tell how he’d have been able to weave
together the disparate strands of his discussion. To fill out the rest of the book, the editor (brotherin-law Dominic Lawson) selected a representative sampling of Diamond’s popular journalism. Many are from his Times column; others are from publications such as the Jewish Chronicle, and the Spectator, and cover the range, from the physics “experiments” conducted by his baby daughter to Nostradamus’ prophesies. All in all, worth reading, though in the rush to publication it’s a great shame they didn’t include an index. Also sadly missing is any sample of his online postings, which were some of his best writing.