Antonio Emanuele Piedimonte returns to the bookshop with Secret Pompeii (Edizioni Sub Rosa), a volume that moves at a narrative pace between popular essay and unconventional guide, reconstructing the esoteric fabric of the city destroyed by Vesuvius. The author, one of Italy's leading scholars of occult sciences, takes the reader on a stroll through domus, frescoes, and artifacts that offer glimpses into a Roman world far more imbued with magic than the textbooks portray. "What is revealed," writes Piedimonte, "is a horizon of symbols, cults, and knowledge that still speak to us today, if we learn to look at them."
The journey intertwines mythology, philosophy, art, anthropology, religious history, and archaeology, creating a map that shows how the Romans experienced the sacred and the transcendent in an extremely concrete way. Traces of initiatory rites emerge from the connections the author reconstructs between ancient mystery practices and contemporary esoteric organizations, from Freemasonry to other initiatory currents spanning the centuries. This is a continuity that Piedimonte has already explored in his research, culminating in the recent volume dedicated to Southern Freemasonry.
The "secret" Pompeii evoked by the book is populated by divinations, spells, amulets and apotropaic symbols. The aegyptiaca and the numerous erect phalluses displayed to ward off the evil eye, the rituals dedicated to the spirits of the dead, the propitiatory inscriptions such as the famous graffiti that warns: "Here is the son of Zeus, the victorious Hercules. Evil must absolutely not enter here." Each find opens a door to a ritual dimension that, according to the author, was not at all marginal, but an integral part of daily life in the Vesuvian city.
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The book also extends its gaze to the dense network of relationships that, over two thousand years ago, linked Campania to the Mediterranean world, from the Mesopotamian coast to the Pillars of Hercules. Within this fabric lie the Greco-Egyptian origins of Western esotericism, beginning with the cult of Isis, known as the "Lady of Benevento," whose presence in Pompeii is evidenced by the only temple to the goddess still standing outside Egypt.
Among the most surprising stages are the “Magic Square” or Tent, found in several places in the city, and the enigmatic "Panteae Hands" dedicated to the god Sabazius, kept in the so-called "Complex of Magical Rites". Figures such as Orpheus, Hecate, Athena-Minerva, Janus, Venus, Hermes and Heracles appear, up to Dionysus, the absolute protagonist of the initiatory rites evoked in the frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries and in the more recent paintings of the “House of the Thiasos”, analysed with symbolic meticulousness.
The volume concludes with a foray into Gothic literature inspired by casts of the eruption's victims and an appendix on the relationship between magic and philosophy in antiquity, marking the final stage of a journey that reintroduces Pompeii as a crossroads of myths, archetypes, and spiritual anxieties. A city that continues to speak, especially when one learns to decipher what has lain beneath the surface for centuries.
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