Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth

Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend

In 1996-1997 I did a lot of reading in the area of ancient history. This began with a book called Fingerprints of the Gods, continued with The Orion Mystery, Pharaohs and Kings, Hamlet's Mill and Secrets of the Incas. The unifying theme through all of these books (with the possible exception of Pharaohs and Kings) is that a certain cultural arrogance has kept us from realizing the true level of mental and social development that was present in ancient civilization. Fingerprints and Orion propose that certain elements of North and Central American religion and architecture have their origins in Egypt. They speculate on the amount of technology that would have been necessary to build the Giza pyramids. Pharaohs proposes a new view of Egyptian history and ties it back to the biblical account.

As I started into Secrets of the Incas I found that I had to step back and read Hamlet's Mill, which had been alluded to in Fingerprints but was not central to understanding that book.

Hamlet's Mill proposes that the language of mythology is actually a technical language (as technically accurate and specific as the language of physics or computer science today) describing astronomical events occurring in preliterate human cultures. A simple example might be a story of a man who travels to a river and there joins another man. If the two men can be connected with particular gods and then to associated planets, one can imagine two planets in conjunction on the edge of the Milky Way. This is a somewhat contrived and simple example, but it gives you the idea.

The beauty of using myth to transmit complex truth is that you can depend on uneducated people to accurately transmit the information:

"The main merit of this language has turned out to be its built-in ambiguity. Myth can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc. In ancient times, moreover, it allowed the members of the archaic "brain trust" to "talk shop" unaffected by the presence of laymen: the danger of giving something away was practically nil." (page 312)

Because each culture seems to repeat mythological themes present in other cultures, it turns out that we have accurate renditions of many of the astronomical facts being transmitted mythologically even without having a complete understanding of the languages of any of those cultures:

"…one should emphasize that it is, of course, satisfactory to have cuneiform tablets and that it is reassuring that the experts know how to read different languages of the Ancient Near East; but Gilgamesh and his search for immortality was not unknown in times before the deciphering of cuneiform writing [i.e. because the same story is present in other myths but with slightly different characters and details]. This is the result of that particular merit of mythical terminology that is handed down independently from the knowledge of the storyteller. (The obvious drawback of this technique is that the ambiguity persists; our contemporary experts are as quietly excluded from the dialogue as were the laymen of old.) Thus, even if one supposes that Plato was among the last who really understood the technical language, "the stories" remained alive, often enough in the true old wording. Accordingly, one can watch how the hero of the "Romaunt of Alexander," in his own right an undisputed historical personality, slipped on Gilgamesh's equipment, while at the same time slipping off whole chapters of sober history."

The ancients viewed the earth as not just the sphere on which we live, but as the space-time in which we live. The "space" was viewed as extending to the "four corners of the earth." These corners are the points in the sky with respect to which the sun rises on the winter and summer solstice and the spring and fall equinoxes. In many cultures the path to the afterlife was said to be via a gateway in the constellation in which the sun rose at the time of the spring equinox.

As you might be aware, the earth's axis is tilted with respect to the plane in which it orbits. While the tilt is constant, the planet is said to "wobble" on that axis, resulting in the north pole pointing somewhere other than Polaris over a long period of time (over 26,000 years for one complete "wobble"). As the axis wobbles, the constellations at the four corners rotate. (The Fifth Dimension taught us all about this in the famous song "Age of Aquarius" from the 70's musical Hair. We are currently in the age of Pisces (the fish), meaning that the sun rises in the sign of Pisces on the morning of the spring equinox. The coming age will be Aquarius.) This wobbling is called "precession" and the period of time during which the sun rises in the same astrological sign on the spring equinox is the "time" of the current space-time in which we're said to live.

The ancients described precession in stories describing the complete destruction of the heavens and earth. It makes sense… over a period of time the four corners are unhinged and a "new earth" with new corners is established.

"Hamlet's Mill" is one of the common themes running through the world's mythology: that of a mill which turns on a spindle representing the Earth turning under the heavens (or more precisely: the heavens turning over the earth; or more precisely still, the heavens turning over the "four-cornered earth"). Some major event occurs and the mill is destroyed. In the process, a great ruler/king/god is overturned and a new ruler/king/god comes into power. This is not just an adventure story but rather is a scientific explanation of precession. The ruler/king/god associated with the old astrological sign is overthrown by the new one.

I've done a less-than-satisfying job of explaining all this. It's quite fascinating but you need to read it to get the whole story. One of the conclusions is that our cultural arrogance (derived from our belief in evolution) has kept us from admitting that the ancients had this knowledge, and its kept us from understanding our own history. 

"Mistaking cultural history for a process of gradual evolution, we have deprived ourselves of every reasonable insight into the nature of culture. It goes without saying that the still more modern habit of replacing "culture" by "society" has blocked the last narrow path to understanding history. Our ignorance not only remained vast, but became pretentious as well." (page 71)