Robert Temple - Author of The Sphinx Mystery




At my cousin Marina Rainey's house in Brittany

These are photos of my favourite cousin, Marina Rainey, on an occasion when she visited our house in Somerset. Marina and I are related through the Mond family. She is the widow of the archaeologist, the late Professor Froehlich (‘Fro’) Rainey, Director of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. The irony is that I knew Fro before she did! That is because Marina was his second wife and I was a student at Penn before she met him. (In fact, I really got to know him through our mutual friend Arthur M. Young. For a year I was the Acting Secretary of his Foundation for the Study of Consciousness, and Fro was its Chairman.) Marina has a wonderful sense of fun and sense of humour, and Olivia and I are never bored for one second when we are with Marina, and we tend to spend all our time together laughing. She has now alas moved further away to Brittany. Marina has a most exotic descent: she is part Croatian and part Venetian! We are both descendants of Mauritz Mond of Kassel, in Germany, in the 19th century, I from his son Adam who settled in America, and she from his son Ludwig, who settled in England and founded a chemical company called Brunner Mond, later named I.C.I. However, we seem to be agreed that our most interesting Mond forebear was without question Sir Robert Mond, the Egyptologist who was also the patron of Sir James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (financed by Mond) I myself later abridged as The Illustrated Golden Bough.



© Robert Temple 2009-2022