Hamlet's Mill

Infobox Book
name = Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth
title_orig =


image_caption =
author = Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend
illustrator =
cover_artist = Sara Eisenman (1st paperback edition; 1977)
country = United States
language = English
subject = Mythology and Astronomy
genre = Non-fiction
publisher = Harvard University Press (1969; possibly also published by
Gambit); David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. (1977)
release_date = November 1969
english_release_date =
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" (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969) by Giorgio de Santillana (a professor of the history of science at MIT) and Hertha von Dechend (a scientist at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität) 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 (who is generally held to have written more of the book) ["The mass of the book, including thirty-nine appendices, is clearly von Dechend's work." White, pg 541] 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.

Background

Santillana had previously published, in 1961, "The Origins of Scientific Thought" which greatly influenced "Hamlet's Mill" - indeed, it could be considered a sequel or elaboration of the 1961 work [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 ofcite book| title=Against Method |edition=3rd |last=Feyerabend
first=Paul|authorlink=Paul Feyerabend |isbn=0-86091-646-4
isbn=0-86091-481-X.] ; 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:
# "Our ancestors of the high and far-off times were endowed with minds wholly comparable to ours, and were capable of rational processes-always given the means at hand" ["Hamlet's Mill", pg 68]
# That they were particularly fascinated by astronomical observations, and that they made many discoveries, particularly:
# 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 (per #1).
# 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.
# And indeed, the majority of myths have to do with astronomy, and are not principally related to sex or the weather ["Nevertheless, the expression of this proto-scientific vision of the cosmos was not mathematical but mythological. All the gods are stars, and mythological language has exclusive reference to celestial phenomena: for example, "earth" in myth means only "the ideal plane laid through the ecliptic" (p. 58); all stories of floods "refer to an old astronomical image" (p. 57). Without bothering to refute alternative positions which hold that some, at least, of the gods and myths stemmed from concern with fertility or meteorological phenomena, the authors merely mock "the fertility addicts" (p. 308) and "the Fecundity-'Trust" (p. 381)." White, pg 541] .

Careful examination of the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages" ["Hamlet's Mill", as quoted in Leach 1970] 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..." [Puhvel (1970)]

Criticism

"Hamlet's Mill" was severely criticized by academic reviewers ["The cowedreviewer is soon reduced to wondering whether mere critical prose should even beexpended on something that obviously solicits the suspension of disbelief." Puhvel(1970). "As will presently be apparent, my reaction to this book is hostile - sobefore my prejudices get out of hand, let me try to explain what it is all about."(Leach 1970) "De Santillana has served us well once more by underscoring a pioneering idea, but von Dechend's implementation of that idea will prevent many scholars from recognizing its validity." White 1970] for a number of things, such as tenuous arguments based on incorrect or outdated linguistic information ["The long-forgotten period-piece etymologies of Max Muller and Adalbert Kuhn("surely a great scholar", p. 381) are blithely resurrected (for example, Sanskrit"Pramantha" matching Greek "Prometheus", p. 139), while more up-to-dateauthorities are caricatured as "severe philologists, slaves to exact 'truth'" (p.294)." Puhvel (1970)] , lack of familiarity with modern sources ["..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.] and an over-reliance on coincidence or analogy ["Her only proofs are analogy, often strained. On a single page (425) she connects myths of Greece, Japan, Egypt, Iceland, the Marquesas, and the Cherokee Indians. On page 309, a rabbinical and a Pawnee tradition show "mistakable" identity. On page 320 we read "here ancient Greek myth suddenly emerges in full light among Indian tribes in America, miraculously preserved." One might quote such passages indefinitely." White 1970. pg 541] and the general implausibility of such a far-flung and 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."

Writing in "The New York Review" (of Books), Edmund Leach noted:

“ [The] authors’ insistence that between about 4000 B.C. and 100 A.D. a single archaic system prevailed throughout most of the civilized and proto-civilized world is pure fantasy. Their attempt to delineate the details of this system by a worldwide scatter of random oddments of mythology is no more than an intellectual game. . . . Something like 60 percent of the text is made up of complex arguments about Indo-European etymologies which would have seemed old-fashioned as early as 1870.” [Edmund Leach (1970). Review of "Hamlet's Mill", "The New York Review", February 12, 1970, p. 36.]

H. R. Ellis Davidson referred to "Hamlet’s Mill" as

"amateurish in the worst sense, jumping to wild conclusions without any knowledge of the historical value of the sources or of previous work done. On the Scandinavian side there is heavy dependence on the fantasies of Rydberg, writing in the last [19th] century, and apparent ignorance of progress made since his time." [H. R. Ellis Davidson (1974). Review of "Hamlet's Mill", "Folklore" 85:282-283.]

De Santillana and von Dechend state in the Introduction to "Hamlet's Mi"ll that they are well aware of modern interpretations of myth and folklore but they find them shallow and lacking insight: "...the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this - critics without nonsense and extremely wise". Consequently, de Santillana and Deschend prefer to rely on the work of "meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go farther back, of Anthanasius Kircher and Petavius...". They give many reasons throughout the book for preferring the work of older scholars (and the early mythologists themselves) as the proper way to interpret myth but unfortunately this viewpoint did not sit well with their modern critics schooled in the "current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the primitive and what came after". (All quotes are from the Introduction to Hamlet's Mill, first edition).

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." [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. ] Nevertheless, the conclusions the authors draw from their data have been "virtually ignored by the scientific and scholarly establishment.” [Roy G Willis and Patrick Curry (2004), "Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon", p.45.]

ee also

* Athanasius Kircher
* Charles François Dupuis
* Marcel Griaule

Further reading

* cite journal
url=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972JHA.....3..206P
last=Payne-Gaposchkin
first=Cecilia
title = "Review of "Hamlet's Mill", by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend"
journal = Journal for the History of Astronomy
year = 1972
volume = 3
pages = 206–211

References

* cite journal
last=Leach
first=Edmund
authorlink=Edmund Leach
date=12 February 1970
title="Bedtime Story"
journal=The New York Review of Books
volume=XIV
pages=36
url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11061
accessdate=2007-01-11
* cite journal
last=Puhvel
first=Jaan
year=1970
month=December
title=Untitled review of "Hamlet's Mill. An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time"
journal=The American Historical Review
volume=75
issue=7
pages=2009–2010
url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28197012%2975%3A7%3C2009%3AHMAEOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X
accessdate=2007-01-10
doi=10.2307/1848027
* cite journal
last=White, Jr.
first=Lynn
year=1970
month=Winter
title=Untitled review of "Hamlet's Mill. An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time"
journal=Isis
volume=61
issue=4
pages=540-541
url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28197024%2961%3A4%3C540%3AHMAEOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F
accessdate=2007-01-10

External links

* [http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamlets_mill/hamletmill.htm The text of "Hamlet's Mill"]
* [http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/santillana.htm Excerpts from "Hamlet's Mill"]
* [http://edj.net/mc2012/mill1.htm "Commentary on Hamlet's Mill"]
* [http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gtosiris/page9j.html "Critics and Criticisms of "Hamlet's Mill"]