Hamlet's Mill
An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge
and Its Transmission Through Myth
by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha Von Dechend
(505 pages, pb, $18.95)
Nonpareil Books, 1969
ISBN 0-87923-215-3
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A seminal work. So many of the other books make reference to this one that
it is a must-read. For serious researchers. This book alludes to many wonderful
things, leaving it to the reader to synthesize the appropriate understanding
of the incredible implications of the data.
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Chapter Titles
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Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
i. The Chronicler's Tale
ii. The Figure in Finland
iii. The Iranian Parallel
iv. History, Myth and Reality
Intermezzo: A Guide for the Perplexed
v. The Unfolding in India
vi. Amlodhi's Quern
vii. The Many-Colored Cover
viii. Shamans and Smiths
ix. Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top
x. The Twilight of the Gods
xi. Samson Under Many Skies
xii. Socrates' Last Tale
xiii. Of Time and the Rivers
xiv. The Whirlpool
xv. The Waters from the Deep
xvi. The Stone and the Tree
xvii. The Frame of the Cosmos
xviii. The Galaxy
xix. The Fall of Phaethon
xx. The Depths of the Sea
xxi. The Great Pan Is Dead
xxii. The Adventure and the Quest
xxiii. Gilgamesh and Prometheus
Epilogue: The Lost Treasure
Conclusion
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From the Preface
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Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and science join.
It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of science had their
deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance. The Greeks, as early
as the 7th century B.C., spoke of the quest of their first sages as the
Problem of the One and the Many, sometimes describing the wild fecundity
of nature as the way in which the Many could be deduced from the One, sometimes
seeing the Many as unsubstantial variations being played on the One, The
oracular sayings of Heraclitus the Obscure do nothing but illustrate with
shimmering paradoxes the illusory quality of "things" in flux
as they were wrung from the central intuition of unity. Before him Anaximander
had announced, also oracularly. that the cause of "things" being
born and perishing is their mutual injustice to each other in the order
of time, "as is meet," he said, for they are bound to atone forever
for their mutual injustice. This was enough to make of Anaximander the acknowledged
father of physical science, for the accent is on the real "Many."
But it was true science after a fashion.
Soon after, Pythagoras taught, no less oracularly, that "things are
numbers." Thus mathematics was born. The problem of the origin of mathematics
has remained with us to this day. In his high old age, Bertrand Russell
has been driven to avow: "I have wished to know how the stars shine.
I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway
above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved." The
answers that he found, very great answers, concern the nature of logical
clarity, but not of philosophy proper. The problem of number remains to
perplex us, and from it all of metaphysics was born. As a historian, I went
on investigating the "gray origins" of science, far into its pre-Greek
beginnings, and how philosophy was born of it, to go on puzzling us. I condensed
it into a small book, The Origins of Scientific Thought. For both
philosophy and science came from that fountainhead; and it is clear that
both were children of the same myth. In a number of studies, I continued
to pursue it under the name of "scientific rationalism"; and I
tried to show that through all the immense developments, the "Mirror
of Being" is always the object of true science, a metaphor which still
attempts to reduce the Many to the One. We now make many clear distinctions,
and have come to separate science from philosophy utterly, but what remains
at the core is still the old myth of eternal invariance, ever more remotely
and subtly articulated, and what lies beyond it is a multitude of procedures
and technologies, great enough to have changed the face of the world and
to have posed terrible questions. But they have not answered a single philosophical
question, which is what myth once used to do.
If we come to think of it, we have been living in the age of Astronomical
Myth until yesterday. The careful and rigorous edifice of Ptolemy's Almagest
is only window dressing for Plato's theology, disguised as elaborate science.
The heavenly bodies are moving in "cycle and epicycle, orb in orb"
of a mysterious motion according to the divine decree that circular motions
ever more intricate would account for the universe. And Newton himself,
once he had accounted for it, simply replaced the orbs with the understandable
force of gravitation, for which he "would feign no hypotheses."
The hand of God was still the true motive force; God's will and God's own
mathematics went on, another name for Aristotle's Prime Mover. And shall
we deny that Einstein's spacetime is nothing other than a pure pan-mathematical
myth, openly acknowledged at last as such?
I was at this point, lost between science and myth, when, on the occasion
of a meeting in Frankfurt in 1959, I met Dr. von Dechend, one of the last
pupils of the great Frobenius, whom I had known; and with her I recalled
his favorite saying: "What the hell should I care for my silly notions
of yesterday?" We were friends from the start. She was then Assistant
to the Chair of the History of Science, but she had pursued her lonely way
into cultural ethnology, starting in West Africa on the tracks of her "Chef,"
which were being opened up again at the time by that splendid French ethnologist,
the late Marcel Griaule. She too had a sense that the essence of myth should
be sought somewhere in Plato rather than in psychology, but as yet she had
no clue.
By the time of our meeting she had shifted her attention to Polynesia, and
soon she hit pay dirt. As she looked into the archaeological remains on
many islands, a clue was given to her. The moment of grace came when, on
looking (on a map) at two little islands, mere flyspecks on the waters of
the Pacific, she found that a strange accumulation of maraes or cult
places could be explained only one way: they, and only they, were both exactly
sited on two neat celestial coordinates: the Tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn.
[...]
We had the idea. It was simple and clear. But we realized that we would
run into formidable difficulties, both from the point of view of modern,
current scholarship and from the no less unfamiliar approach needed for
method. I called it playfully, for short, "the cat on the keyboard,"
for reasons that will appear presently. For how can one catch time on the
wing? And yet the flow of time, the time of music, was of the essence, inescapable,
baffling to the systematic mind. I searched at length for an inductive way
of presentation. It was like piling Pelion upon Ossa. And yet this was the
least of our difficulties. For we also had to face a wall, a veritable Berlin
Wall, made of indifference, ignorance, and hostility. Humboldt, that wise
master, said it long ago: First, people will deny a thing; then they will
belittle it; then they will decide that it had been known long ago. Could
we embark upon an enormous task of detailed scholarship on the basis of
this more than dubious prospect? But our own task was set: to rescue those
intellects of the past, distant and recent, from oblivion. "Thus saith
the Lord God: 'Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these
slain, that they may live.'" Such poor scattered bones, ossa
vehementer sicca, we had to revive.
This book reflects the gradually deepening conviction that, first of all,
respect is due these fathers of ours. The early chapters will make, I think,
for easy reading. Gradually, as we move above timberline, the reader will
find himself beset by difficulties which are not of our making. They are
the inherent difficulties of a science which was fundamentally reserved,
beyond our conception. Most frustrating, we could not use our good old simple
catenary logic, in which principles come first and deduction follows. This
was not the way of the archaic thinkers. They thought rather in terms of
what we might call a fugue, in which all notes cannot be constrained into
a single melodic scale, in which one is plunged directly into the midst
of things and must follow the temporal order created by their thoughts.
It is, after all, in the nature of music that the notes cannot all be played
at once. The order and sequence, the very meaning, of the composition will
reveal themselves - with patience - in due time. The reader, I suggest,
will have to place himself in the ancient "Order of Time."
Troilus expressed the same idea in a different image: "He that will
have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding."
