‘So the Greek colonists brought the first Sibyl with them?’
‘Yes and no.’
Costas groaned. ‘Facts, Jack. Facts.’
‘Supposedly there were thirteen Sibyls across the Greek world, though the earliest references suggest they derived from the idea of a single all-seeing prophetess. The site of Cumae is one of the few places where archaeology adds to the picture. In the 1930s, an extraordinary underground grotto came to light, exactly as the Romans described the cave of the Sibyl. It’s a trapezoidal corridor almost fifty metres long, lit by side galleries and ending in a rectangular chamber, all hewn out of the rock. In Virgil’s Aeneid, this was where the Trojan hero Aeneas consulted the Sibyl, to ask whether his colony in Italy would one day become the Roman Empire. And this was where she took him down into the underworld, to see his father Anchises.’
Costas pointed to the steaming crater below them. ‘You mean the fields of fire, the Phlegraean Fields?’
‘There were probably open volcanic vents here in antiquity. It must have been a vision of Dante’s inferno if there ever was one,’ Jack said. ‘People are always drawn to these places, creation and destruction together in one terrifying cauldron. It was the perfect location for the Sibyl, who must have seemed like an apparition from the underworld itself. Supplicants were probably led through the fumaroles and boiling mud, so would have been shaking with fear even before they stood in front of her cave.’
‘If my memory serves me, Aeneas was a Trojan prince escaping from the Trojan War, at the end of the Bronze Age,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘That means Virgil thought the Sibyl was here already, way before the Greeks or the Romans arrived.’
‘All of the mythology we know today associated with the Cumaean Sibyl was Greek, especially her relationship with the god Apollo. But this may have been what the Greeks brought with them, and layered on to a goddess or prophetess who already existed in prehistoric Italy. The Greeks and the Romans often fused their gods with similar native gods, even as far away as Britain.’
‘So there may have been a much older female deity here.’
‘Our friend Katya has a theory about that. Her team at the Palaeographic Institute in Moscow are almost ready to publish the Atlantis symbols. You remember the Neolithic mother goddess of Atlantis?’
‘Could hardly forget her. I’ve still got the bruises.’
‘Well, we already knew that corpulent female figurines were being worshipped across Europe at the end of the Ice Age, at least to the time of the first farmers. For years archaeologists have speculated about a prehistoric cult of the mother goddess, a cult that crossed boundaries between tribes and peoples. Well, Katya thinks the survival of that cult owes everything to a powerful priesthood, the men and women who led the first farmers west, whose descendants preserved the cult through the Bronze Age and to the classical period. She even thinks the druids of north-west Europe were connected.’
‘I remember,’ Costas murmured. ‘From Atlantis. The wizards with conical hats. Lords of the Rings.’
‘The idea of Tolkien’s Gandalf, like Merlin in the King Arthur stories, may ultimately derive from the same tradition,’ Jack said. ‘Men with supposedly supernatural powers who could pass from one kingdom to the next, who knew no borders. Healers, mediators, prophets.’
Costas peered down again at the Phlegraean Fields. ‘Seems that every culture needs them,’ he murmured.
‘And the mother goddess also survived in different guises. The Roman goddess Ceres, the Greek Demeter. Magna Mater, the Great Mother.’
‘Every new culture adds its own layer of paint, but it’s the same old statue underneath.’
‘And the same allure, the same mystery. I’ve just been giving you the facts as we know them. Part of me can’t help thinking that there was something about the Sibyls that defies rational explanation, something so powerful that it allowed them to maintain the mystique over centuries, so alluring that it even drew in the Romans, the most rational and practical of peoples. Something the Sibyls themselves believed in.’
‘Don’t go all supernatural on me, Jack.’
‘I’m not suggesting it. But if the Sibyls believed in themselves, and if others with the power to shape the world, emperors, believed in them, then it becomes something we have to take seriously.’
Costas grunted, then peered down through his visor at the indented shoreline that was now directly beneath them. ‘What’s that place now?’
‘Pozzuoli. Roman Puteoli.’
‘So that was where St Paul was heading? After Sicily, after surviving the wreck?’
‘According to the Acts of the Apostles, he and his companions sailed up from Syracuse on a ship of Alexandria, then stopped at Puteoli. That’s the ancient Roman grain port you can see now. It complements the naval port beside it at Misenum.’ Jack tapped the screen. ‘The words are: “We found brethren there, and were intreated to tarry with them seven days.’
‘Brethren? Fellow Christians? What about persecution?’
Jack jerked his head to the north. ‘The Phlegraean Fields. Perfect hideaway. Probably always a place for outcasts, beggars, misfits.’
‘And then Paul goes to Rome. Where Nero had him beheaded.’
‘The New Testament doesn’t actually say so, but that’s the tradition.’
‘Might have been better for him if he’d gone down in that shipwreck after all.’
‘If that had happened, then western history might have been utterly different.’ Jack banked the helicopter to starboard, then nosed it towards the smudge on the eastern shore of the bay. ‘We might have ended up worshipping Isis, Mithras, or even the great mother goddess.’
‘Huh?’
Jack adjusted the throttle, glanced at the air traffic screen and flicked on the autopilot. ‘That shipwreck really was one of the pivotal events of history, not because of what was lost but because of who survived. Remember, Jesus’ ministry in his lifetime was confined to Judaea, mainly his home province of Galilee. The idea that his word should spread to Jewish communities abroad, and then to non-Jews, only seems to have taken hold after his death. Paul was one of the first generation of missionaries, of proselytizers. Without him, many of those who proved receptive to Christianity might have been seduced by one of the other cults on offer. At the time we’re talking about, the spread of the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana meant that the Mediterranean world was awash with new cults, new religious ideas, some brought back by soldiers from newly conquered lands, others brought by sailors to ports such as Misenum and Puteoli. The Egyptian goddess Isis, the Persian god Mithras, the ancient mother goddess, any one of these could have provided the kernel of a monotheistic religion, giving the common people something they craved in the face of all the gods and rituals of Greece and Rome. If one of those religions had truly taken hold, it might have been enough to repel Christianity.’
‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘And I thought with the crucifixion it was all a done deal.’
‘That was really just the beginning,’ Jack said. ‘And the amazing thing is, there’s no indication that Paul ever met Jesus in life. Paul was a Jew from Asia Minor who had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, but only after the crucifixion. And yet he may have been responsible more than any other for the foundation of the Church as we know it. The spread of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as the Messiah, the meaning of the Greek word Christos, all seem to owe a huge amount to his teaching. The word Christian probably first appears about the time of his travels, and the emphasis on the cross. It’s as if, a generation after Jesus’ death, after people’s personal experience of him, the focus had shifted from Jesus the man to the risen Jesus, almost as if he’d come to be seen as a god, been put on a pedestal.’