Chapter 30
In their brilliant and far-reaching study Hamlet’s Mill, Professors de Santillana and von Dechend present a formidable array of mythical and iconographic evidence to demonstrate the existence of a curious phenomenon. For some inexplicable reason, and at some unknown date, it seems that certain archaic myths from all over the world were ‘co-opted’ (no other word will really do) to serve as vehicles for a body of complex technical data concerning the precession of the equinoxes. The importance of this astonishing thesis, as one leading authority on ancient measurement has pointed out, is that it has fired the first salvo in what may prove to be ‘a Copernican revolution in current conceptions of the development of human culture.’1
Hamlet’s Mill was published in 1969, more than a quarter of a century ago, so the revolution has been a long time coming. During this period, however, the book has been neither widely distributed among the general public nor widely understood by scholars of the remote past. This state of affairs has not come about because of any inherent problems or weaknesses in the work. Instead, in the words of Martin Bernal, professor of Government Studies at Cornell University, it has happened because ‘few archaeologists, Egyptologists and ancient historians have the combination of time, effort and skill necessary to take on the very technical arguments of de Santillana.’2
What those arguments predominantly concern is the recurrent and persistent transmission of a ‘precessional message’ in a wide range of ancient myths. And, strangely enough, many of the key images and symbols that crop up in these myths – notably those that concern a ‘derangement of the heavens’ – are also to be found embedded in the ancient traditions of worldwide cataclysm reviewed in Chapters Twenty-four and Twenty-five.
In Norse mythology for example, we saw how the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods had so carefully chained up, broke his bonds at last and escaped: ‘He shook himself and the world trembled. The ash-tree Yggdrasil was shaken from its roots to its topmost branches. Mountains crumbled or split from top to bottom … The earth began to lose its shape. Already the stars were coming adrift in the sky.’
In the opinion of de Santillana and von Dechend, this myth mixes the familiar theme of catastrophe with the quite separate theme of precession. On the one hand we have an earthly disaster on a scale that seems to dwarf even the flood of Noah. On the other we hear that ominous changes are taking place in the heavens and that the stars, which have come adrift in the sky, are ‘dropping into the void.’3
Such celestial imagery, repeated again and again with only relatively minor variations in myths from many different parts of the world, belongs to a category earmarked in Hamlet’s Mill as ‘not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally’.4 Moreover the Norse traditions that speak of the monstrous wolf Fenrir, and of the shaking of Yggdrasil, go on to report the final apocalypse in which the forces of Valhalla issue forth on the side of ‘order’ to participate in the terrible last battle of the gods – a battle that will end in apocalyptic destruction:
500 doors and 40 there are
I ween, in Valhalla’s walls;
800 fighters through each door fare,
When to war with the Wolf they go.’5
With a lightness of touch that is almost subliminal, this verse has encouraged us to count Valhalla’s fighters, thus momentarily obliging us to focus our attention on their total number (540 × 800 = 432,000). This total, as we shall see in Chapter Thirty-one is mathematically linked to the phenomenon of precession. It is, unlikely to have found its way into Norse mythology by accident, especially in a context that has previously specified a ‘derangement of the heavens’ severe enough to have caused the stars to come adrift from their stations in the sky.
To understand what is going on here it is essential to grasp the basic imagery of the ancient ‘message’ that Santillana and von Dechend claim to have stumbled upon. This imagery transforms the luminous dome of the celestial sphere into a vast and intricate piece of machinery. And, like a millwheel, like a churn, like a whirlpool, like a quern, this machine turns and turns and turns endlessly (its motions being calibrated all the time by the sun, which rises first in one constellation of the zodiac, then in another, and so on all the year round).
The four key points of the year are the spring and summer equinoxes and the winter and summer solstices. At each point, naturally, the sun is seen to rise in a different constellation (thus if the sun rises in Pisces at the spring equinox, as it does at present, it must rise in Virgo at the autumn equinox, in Gemini at the winter solstice and in Sagittarius at the summer solstice). On each of these four occasions for the last 2000 years or so, this is exactly what the sun has been doing. As we have seen, however, precession of the equinoxes means that the vernal point will change in the not so distant future from Pisces to Aquarius. When that happens, the three other constellations marking the three key points will change as well (from Virgo, Gemini and Sagittarius to Leo, Taurus and Scorpius) – almost as though the giant mechanism of heaven has ponderously switched gears …
Like the axle of a mill, Santillana and von Dechend explain, Yggdrasil ‘represents the world axis’ in the archaic scientific language they have identified: an axis which extends outwards (for a viewer in the northern hemisphere) to the North Pole of the celestial sphere:
This instinctively suggests a straight, upright post … but that would be an oversimplification. In the mythical context it is best not to think of the axis in analytical terms, one line at a time, but to consider it, and the frame to which it is connected, as a whole: … As radius automatically calls circle to mind so axis should invoke the two determining great circles on the surface of the sphere, the equinoctial and solstitial colures.6
These colures are the imaginary hoops, intersecting at the celestial North Pole, which connect the two equinoctial points on the earth’s path around the sun (i. e. where it stands on 20 March and 22 September) and the two solstitial points (where it stands on 21 June and 21 December). The implication, is that: ‘The rotation of the polar axis must not be disjointed from the great circles that shift along with it in heaven. The framework is thought of as all one with the axis.’7
Santillana and von Dechend are certain that what confronts us here is not a belief but an allegory. They insist that the notion of a spherical frame composed of two intersecting hoops suspended from an axis is not under any circumstances to be understood as the way in which ancient science envisaged the cosmos. Instead it is to be seen as a ‘thought tool’ designed to focus the minds of people bright enough to crack the code upon the hard-to-detect astronomical fact of precession of the equinoxes.
It is a thought tool that keeps on cropping up, in numerous disguises, all over the myths of the ancient world.
At the mill with slaves
One example, from Central America (which also provides a further illustration of the curious symbolic ‘cross-overs’ between myths of precession and myths of catastrophe), was summarized by Diego De Landa in the sixteenth century:
Among the multitude of gods worshipped by these people [the Maya] were four whom they called by the name Bacab. These were, they say, four brothers placed by God when he created the world at its four corners to sustain the heavens lest they fall. They also say that these Bacabs escaped when the world was destroyed by a deluge.8
It is the opinion of Santillana and von Dechend that the Mayan astronomer-priests did not subscribe for a moment to the simple-minded notion that the earth was flat with four corners. Instead, they say, the image of the four Bacabs is used as a technical allegory intended to shed light on the phenomenon of precession of the equinoxes. The Bacabs stand, in short, for the system of coordinates of an astrological age. They represent the equinoctial and solstitial colures, binding together the four constellations in which the sun continues to rise at the spring and autumn equinoxes and at the winter and summer solstices for epochs of just under 2200 years.
Of course it is understood that when the gears of heaven change, the old age comes crashing down and a new age is born. All this, so far, is routine precessional imagery. What stands out, however, is the explicit linkage to an earthly disaster – in this case a flood – which the Bacabs survive. It may also be relevant that relief carvings at Chichen Itza unmistakably represent the Bacabs as being bearded and of European appearance.9
Be that as it may, the Bacab image (linked to a number of badly misunderstood references to ‘the four corners of heaven’, ‘the quadrangular earth’, and so on) is only one among many that seem to have been designed to serve as thought tools for precession. Archetypal among these is, of course, the ‘Mill’ of Santillana’s title – Hamlet’s Mill.
It turns out that the Shakespearean character, ‘whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual’, conceals a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth.10 In all his many incarnations, this Hamlet remains strangely himself. The original Amlodhi (or sometimes Amleth) as his name was in Icelandic legend, ‘shows the same characteristics of melancholy and high intellect. He, too, is a son dedicated to avenge his father, a speaker of cryptic but inescapable truths, an elusive carrier of Fate who must yield once his mission is accomplished …’11
In the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, Amlodhi was identified with the ownership of a fabled mill, or quern, which, in its time, ground out gold and peace and plenty. In many of the traditions, two giant maidens (Fenja and Menja) were indentured to turn this great contraption, which could not be budged by any human strength. Something went wrong, and the two giantesses were forced to work day and night with no rest:
Forth to the mill bench they were brought,
To set the grey stone in motion;
He gave them no rest nor peace,
Attentive to the creak of the mill.
Their song was a howl,
Shattering silence;
‘Lower the bin and lighten the stones!’
Yet he would have them grind more.12
Rebellious and angry, Fenja and Menja waited until everyone was asleep and then began to turn the mill in a mad whirl until its great props, though cased in iron, burst asunder.13 Immediately afterwards, in a confusing episode, the mill was stolen by a sea king named Mysinger and loaded aboard his ship together with the giantesses. Mysinger ordered the pair to grind again, but this time they ground out salt. At midnight they asked him whether he was not weary of salt; he bade them grind longer. They had ground but a little longer when down sank the ship:
The huge props flew off the bin,
The iron rivets burst,
The shaft tree shivered,
The bin shot down.14
When it reached the bottom of the sea, the mill continued to turn, but it ground out rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom.15
Such images, Santillana and von Dechend assert, signify precession of the equinoxes.16 The axis and ‘iron props’ of the mill stand for:
a system of coordinates in the celestial sphere and represent the frame of a world age. Actually the frame defines a world age. Because the polar axis and the colures form an invisible whole, the entire frame is thrown out of kilter if one part is moved. When that happens a new Pole star with appropriate colures of its own must replace the obsolete apparatus.17
Furthermore, the engulfing whirlpool:
belongs to the stock-in-trade of ancient fable. It appears in the Odyssey as Charybdis in the Straits of Messina, and again in other cultures in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It is found there, too, curiously enough, with an overhanging fig-tree to whose boughs the hero can cling as the ship goes down, whether it be Satyavrata in India or Kae in Tonga … The persistence of detail rules out free invention. Such stories have belonged to the cosmographical literature since antiquity.18
The appearance of the whirlpool in Homer’s Odyssey (which is a compilation of Greek myths more than 3000 years old), should not surprise us, because the great Mill of Icelandic legend appears there also (and does so, moreover, in familiar circumstances). It is the last night before the decisive confrontation. Odysseus, bent on revenge, has landed in Ithaca and is hiding under the magic spell of the goddess Athena, which protects him from recognition. Odysseus prays to Zeus to send him an encouraging sign before the great ordeal:
Straightaway Zeus thundered from shining Olympus … and goodly Odysseus was glad. Moreover, a woman, a grinder at the mill, uttered a voice of omen from within the house hard by, where stood the mills of the shepherd of the people. At these handmills twelve women in all plied their task, making meal of barley and of wheat the marrow of men. Now all the others were asleep, for they had ground out their task of grain, but this one alone rested not yet, being the weakest of all. She now stayed her quern and spake the word … ‘May the [enemies of Odysseus] on this day, for the last time make their sweet feasting in his halls. They that have loosened my knees with cruel toil to grind their barley meal, may they now sup their last!’19
Santillana and von Dechend argue that it is no accident that the allegory of the ‘orb of heaven that turns around like a millstone and ever does something bad’20 also makes an appearance in the biblical tradition of Samson, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’.21His merciless captors unbind him so that he can ‘make sport’ for them in their temple; instead, with his last strength, he takes hold of the middle pillars of that great structure and brings the whole edifice crashing down, killing everybody.22 Like Fenja and Menja, he gets his revenge.
The theme resurfaces in Japan,23 in Central America,24 among the Maoris of New Zealand,25 and in the myths of Finland. There the Hamlet/Samson figure is known as Kullervo and the mill has a peculiar name: the Sampo. Like Fenja and Menja’s mill it is ultimately stolen and loaded on board a ship. And like their mill, it ends up being broken in pieces.26
It turns out that the word ‘Sampo’ has its origins in the Sanskrit skambha, meaning ‘pillar or pole’.27 And in the Atharvaveda, one of the most ancient pieces of north Indian literature, we find an entire hymn dedicated to the Skambha:
In whom earth, atmosphere, in whom sky is set, where fire, moon, sun, wind stand fixed … The Skambha sustains both heaven and earth; the Skambha sustains the wide atmosphere; the Skambha sustains the six wide directions; into the Skambha entered all existence.
Whitney, the translator (Atharvaveda 10:7) comments in some perplexity: ‘Skambha, lit, prop, support, pillar, strangely used in this hymn as frame of the universe’.28 Yet with an awareness of the complex of ideas linking cosmic mills, and whirlpools and world trees and so on, the archaic Vedic usage should not seem so strange. What is being signalled here, as in all the other allegories, is the frame of a world age – that same heavenly mechanism that turns for more than 2000 years with the sun rising always in the same four cardinal points and then slowly shifts those celestial coordinates to four new constellations for the next couple of thousand years.
This is why the mill always breaks, why the huge props always fly off the bin in one way or another, why the iron rivets burst, why the shaft-tree shivers. Precession of the equinoxes merits such imagery because, at widely separated intervals of time it does indeed change, or break, the stabilizing coordinates of the entire celestial sphere.
Openers of the way
What is remarkable about all this is the way that the mill (which continues to serve as an allegory for cosmic processes) stubbornly keeps on resurfacing, all over the world, even where the context has been jumbled or lost. Indeed, in Santillana and von Dechend’s argument, it doesn’t really matter if the context is lost. ‘The particular merit of mythical terminology,’ they say, ‘is that it 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.’29 What matters, in other words, is that certain central imagery should survive and continue to be passed on in retellings, however far these may drift from the original storyline.
An example of such drift (coupled with the retention of essential imagery and information) is found among the Cherokees, whose name for the Milky Way (our own galaxy) is ‘Where the Dog Ran’. In ancient times, according to Cherokee tradition, the ‘people in the South had a corn mill’, from which meal was stolen again and again. In due course the owners discovered the thief, a dog, who ‘ran off howling to his home in the North, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day … “Where the Dog Ran”.’30
In Central America, one of the many myths concerning Quetzalcoatl depicts him playing a key role in the regeneration of mankind after the all-destroying flood that ended the Fourth Sun. Together with his dog-headed companion Xolotl, he descends into the underworld to retrieve the skeletons of the people killed by the deluge. This he succeeds in doing, after tricking Miclantechuhtli, the god of death, and the bones are brought to a place called Tamoanchan. There, like corn, they are milled into a fine meal on a grindstone. Upon this ground meal the gods then release blood, thus creating the flesh of the current age of men.31
Santillana and von Dechend do not think that the presence of a canine character in both the above variants of the myth of the cosmic mill is likely to be accidental. They point out that Kullervo, the Finnish Hamlet, is also accompanied by ‘the black dog Musti’.32Likewise, after his return to his estates in Ithaca, Odysseus is first recognized by his faithful dog,33 and as anyone who has been to Sunday school will remember, Samson is associated with foxes (300 of them to be precise34), which are members of the dog family. In the Danish version of the Amleth/Hamlet saga, ‘Amleth went on and a wolf crossed his path amid the thicket.’35 Last but not least an alternative recension of the Kullervo story from Finland has the hero (rather weirdly) being ‘sent to Esthonia to bark under the fence; he barked one year …’36
Santillana and von Dechend are confident that all this ‘doggishness’ is purposive: another piece of the ancient code, as yet unbroken, persistently tapping out its message from place to place. They list these and many other canine symbols among a series of ‘morphological markers’ which they have identified as likely to suggest the presence, in ancient myths, of scientific information concerning precession of the equinoxes.37 These markers may have had meanings of their own or been intended simply to alert the target audience that a piece of hard data was coming up in the story being told. Beguilingly, sometimes they may also have been designed to serve as ‘openers of the way’ – conduits to enable initiates to follow the trail of scientific information from one myth to another.
Thus, even though none of the familiar mills and whirlpools is in sight, we should perhaps sit up and pay attention when we learn that Orion, the great hunter of Greek myth, was the owner of a dog. When Orion tried to ravish the virgin goddess Artemis she produced a scorpion from the earth which killed him and the dog. Orion was transported to the skies where he became the constellation that bears his name today; his dog was transformed into Sirius, the Dog Star.38
Precisely the same identification of Sirius was made by the ancient Egyptians,39 who linked the Orion constellation specifically to their god Osiris.40 It is in Ancient Egypt too that the character of the faithful celestial dog achieves its fullest and most explicit mythical elaboration in the form of Upuaut, a jackal-headed deity whose name means ‘Opener of the Ways’.41 If we follow this way opener to Egypt, turn our eyes to the constellation of Orion, and enter the potent myth of Osiris, we find ourselves enveloped in a net of familiar symbols.
The reader will recall that the myth presents Osiris as the victim of a plot. The conspirators initially dispose of him by sealing him in a box and casting him adrift on the waters of the Nile. In this respect does he not resemble Utnapishtim, and Noah and Coxcoxtli and all the other deluge heroes in their arks (or boxes, or chests) riding out the waters of the flood?
Another familiar element is the classic precessional image of the world-tree and/or roof-pillar (in this case combined). The myth tells us how Osiris, still sealed inside his coffer, is carried out into the sea and washed up at Byblos. The waves lay him to rest among the branches of a tamarisk tree, which rapidly grows to a magnificent size, enclosing the coffer within its trunk.42 The king of the country, who much admires the tamarisk tree, cuts it down and fashions the part which contains Osiris into a roof pillar for his palace. Later Isis, the wife of Osiris, removes her husband’s body from the pillar and takes it back to Egypt to undergo rebirth.43
The Osiris myth also includes certain key numbers. Whether by accident or by design, these numbers give access to a ‘science’ of precession, as we shall see in the next chapter.