Hamlet's Mill
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| Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth | |
| Author | Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Sara Eisenman (1st paperback edition; 1977) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Mythology and Astronomy |
| Genre(s) | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press (1969; possibly also published by Gambit); David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. (1977) |
| Publication date | November 1969 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 505 (1st paperback edition; includes the 25 chapters, 39 appendices, bibliography and indices) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0876450087 (First edition) |
Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969), is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy. It resembles Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God.
Its essential premise is that much mythology and ancient literature has been badly misinterpreted and that they generally relate to a sort of monomyth conveying significant scientific and specifically astronomical ideas and knowledge.
The English edition was hastily assembled and published just prior to de Santillana's death. Hertha von Dechend prepared an expanded second edition several years later. The German translation, which appeared in 1993, is slightly longer than the original. The Italian edition of 1999 is reportedly greatly expanded.
Contents |
[edit] Background
Santillana had previously published, in 1961, The Origin of Scientific Thought which greatly influenced Hamlet's Mill - indeed, it could be considered a sequel or elaboration of the 1961 work[1]; further influences can be found in the work of Leo Frobenius (Leach 1970 mentions particularly the 1900 Die Mathematik der Oceaner and the 1904 Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes).
The proposed interpretation is that the precession of the axis was discovered long before the accepted date of the Greek discovery, and that this was discovered by an ancient (perhaps around 4000 BCE) civilization of unsuspected sophistication; this civilization believed that the world passed through cyclical & Zodiacal stages based on the precession, and that myths which encode this astronomical knowledge symbolically transmit this belief, typically through a story relating to a millstone and a young protagonist - the title, "Hamlet's Mill", comes from a prototype of the Shakespearean Prince Hamlet, the Scandinavian Amlodhi of Saxo Grammaticus or Snorri Sturluson.
Careful examination of the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages"[2] permit reconstruction. In particular, the book reconstructs a myth of a heavenly mill which rotates around the pole star, and grinds out the world's salt and soil, and is associated with the maelstrom. The millstone falling off its frame represents the passing of one age's pole star (symbolized by a ruler or king of some sort), and its restoration and the overthrow of the old king of authority and the empowering of the new one the establishment of a new order of the age (a new star moving into the position of pole star). The authors attempt to demonstrate the prevalence of influence of this hypothetical civilization's ideas by analysing the world's mythology (with an eye to revealing mill myths) using
"cosmographic oddments from many eras and climes...a collection of yarns from Saxo Grammaticus, Snorri Sturluson ("Amlodhi's mill" as a kenning for the sea!), Firdausi, Plato, Plutarch, the Kalevala, Mahabharata, and Gilgamesh, not to forget Africa, the Americas, and Oceania..."[3]
[edit] Criticism
Hamlet's Mill was severely criticized by academic reviewers[4] for a number of things, such as tenuous arguments based on incorrect or outdated linguistic information, lack of modern sources[5] and an over-reliance on coincidence, and the general implausibility of such a farflung of influential civilization existing and not leaving behind solid evidence, and at best given a grudging sort of praise. Thus, Jaan Puhvel (1970) concluded that
- "this is not a serious scholarly work on the problem of myth in the closing decades of the twentieth century. There are frequent flashes of insight, for example, on the cyclical world views of the ancients and on the nature of mythical language, as well as genuinely eloquent, quasi-poetic homilies."
Barber (2006), itself a study aiming to "uncover seismic, geological, astrological, or other natural events" from mythology, appreciates the book for its pioneer work in mythography, judging that "Although controversial, [Santillana and von Dechend] have usefully flagged and collected Herculean amounts of relevant data."[6]
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia (1972). ""Review of Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend"". Journal for the History of Astronomy 3: 206–211.
[edit] References
- ^ Compare various statements in Hamlet's Mill to this quote from The Origin of Scientific Thought: "We can see then, how so many myths, fantastic and arbitrary in semblance, of which the Greek tale of the Argonaut is a late offspring, may provide a terminology of image motifs, a kind of code which is beginning to be broken. It was meant to allow those who knew (a) to determine unequivocally the position of given planets in respect to the earth, to the firmament, and to one another; (b) to present what knowledge there was of the fabric of the world in the form of tales about 'how the world began'. There are two reasons why this code was not discovered earlier. One is the firm conviction of historians of science that science did not start before Greece and that scientific results can only be obtained with the scientific method as it is practised today (and as it was foreshadowed by Greek scientists). The other reason is the astronomical, geological, etc., ignorance of most Assyriologists, Aegyptologists, Old Testament scholars, and so on: the apparent primitivism of many myths is just the reflection of the primitive astronomical, biological, etc., etc., of their collectors and translators. Since the discovers of Hawkins, Marshack, Seidenberg, van der Waerden (Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations, New York, 1983) and others we have to admit the existence of an international paleolithic astronomy that gave rise to schools, observatories, scientific traditions, and most interesting theories. These theories, which were expressed in sociological, not in mathematical terms, have left their traces in sagas, myths, legends, and may be reconstructed in a twofold way, by going forward into the present from the material remains of Stone Age astronomy such as marked stones, stone observatories, etc., and by going back into the past from the literary remains which we find in sagas, legends, myths. An example of the first method is A. Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, New York, 1972. An example of the second is de Santillana-von Dechend, Hamlet's mill, Boston, 1969." As quoted in pages 35-36 of Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method, 3rd. ISBN 0-86091-481-X..
- ^ Hamlet's Mill, as quoted in Leach 1970
- ^ Puhvel (1970)
- ^ "The cowed reviewer is soon reduced to wondering whether mere critical prose should even be expended on something that obviously solicits the suspension of disbelief." Puhvel (1970). "As will presently be apparent, my reaction to this book is hostile - so before my prejudices get out of hand, let me try to explain what it is all about." (Leach 9170)
- ^ "..but in all other respects they choose to ignore almost completely nearly everything that has been written about their subject matter over the past forty years...Academic arrogance of this sort is impenetrable; in the certitude of their faith out authors are bound to dismiss all criticism as tendentious, and so, as critic, I have nothing left to say except that I do not believe a word of it." Leach 1970.
- ^ Barber, Elizabeth Wayland and Barber, Paul T., When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth. 2006. Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691127743. p. 185, n.3.
- Leach, Edmund (12 February 1970). ""Bedtime Story"". The New York Review of Books XIV: 36.
- Puhvel, Jaan (December 1970). "Untitled review of Hamlet's Mill. An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time". The American Historical Review 75 (7): 2009–2010. doi:.
