THE SECOND BOOK was Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana, a
professor of the History of Science at MIT and Hertha von Dechend, in the
same field at Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. The thrust of this
book was that myth, on one level, represented what they called a "technical
language" designed to record and transmit astronomical observations
of great complexity, particularly those connected with the precession of
the equinoxes. In fact this study--styled by the authors as a "first
reconnaissance" into an ancient philosophical system based on a particular
kind of astronomical knowledge disseminated throughout all areas of "high
culture" around the planet--appeared to describe just that knowledge
whose loss, at about the time of Plato, was lamented by Aristotle.
Again, the evolution of this work is worth recounting. The discoveries
were Dechend's. As a graduate student in the history of science in Frankfurt,
she was interested to learn more about the deus faber, the creator,
or fabricator god found in so many cultures as the genius of civilized arts.
Her particular interest lay in Polynesian myth, and, after making her way
through ten thousand pages of primary materials, she reached a single, immutable
conclusion: that she understood nothing whatsoever of what she had read.
At this point, astronomy was the last topic on Dechend's mind. In fact,
at the time of her graduate work, various scholarly attempts to understand
myth in terms of astronomy had already foundered. For example, Max Muller's
"solar hypothesis," which sought to "explain" the Vedas
in terms of an overarching schema of solar astronomy, was very popular at
first, but soon fell into disrepute when it became obvious that such a structure
could not bear the full weight of the rich Vedic texts. Then there was
the work of Alfred Jeremias (1929). Although Jeremias had a number of uncanny
insights into the astronomical level of myth, his mercurial temperament,
combined with a tendency to state as fact hypothetical dates with which
archaeology could not concur, led to the eclipse not only of his work, but
of the very idea that myth and astronomy had anything to do with each other.
It was in this atmosphere, and with a strict intention to have nothing whatsoever
to do with astronomy, that Dechend persevered with the Polynesian material.
She immersed herself now in the secondary sources, looking for something--anything--that
might provide a way into the Polynesian mind. Then came a day when she
was occupied with trying to understand a minor mystery of Polynesian archaeology:
why two islands, separated by three thousand miles of open water, should
be strewn with dozens of "temples" of a design not found elsewhere.
She consulted an atlas and noticed something that had not been noticed
before--or rather, not for a very long time. One island lay on the Tropic
of Cancer, and the other on the Tropic of Capricorn. It was then that,
with the utmost reluctance, she muttered to herself, "Ech, astronomy!"
Transmission received.
Her subsequent work would lead her to discover an extraordinarily wide distribution
in cultures all over the world of a particular set of verbal conventions
designed to encrypt astronomical observations within myth. She found that
the central preoccupation of those myths was the phenomenon known as the
precession of the equinoxes. The precession is a slow wobble of the earth's
axis that causes the earth slowly but continuously to change its orientation
within the sphere of fixed stars. This motion is very much like that of
a gyroscope, which, after a time, heels over and, spinning all the while,
begins slowly to wobble on its axis. A single such precessional wobble
of the earth's axis requires 26,000 years to complete.
To get an idea how precession might appear to the naked eye, imagine that
some time-traveler had undertaken to photograph the stars rising in the
east just before sunrise on spring equinox in Jerusalem, each year from
the birth of Christ to the present. If those photos were put together in
sequence, one would have a motion picture of the constellation Pisces
setting in the east, with the constellation Aquarius "descending,"
that is, also being pulled eastward to replace Pisces as the constellation
marking the spring equinox (see figures 1.1a and 1.1b). Thus, "this
is the dawning of the age of Aquarius."
Perhaps the most important contribution of Hamlet's Mill is its explication
of the conventions of the technical language whereby myth transmits information
concerning precessional motion. There are three simple rules. First, animals
are stars. (Our word zodiac comes from the Greek meaning "dial of animals.")
Second, gods are planets. And finally, topographic references are metaphors
for locations--usually of the sun--on the celestial sphere.
The very "earth" itself, as we shall see in due course, lies in
the stars, between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. And all the millennia
of myths from around the world recounting the destruction of that world
by flood, fire, earthquake, and so on--far from representing an ignorance
of geological processes--"re-count" the solar year in terms of
the "destruction" (via the passage of precessional time) of the
old stars marking the solstices and equinoxes and the "creation"
of a new "world" whose parameters are determined by the new stars,
or "pillars," now upholding the "earth" at the solstices
and equinoxes. This "earth," of course, is "flat,"
again, not as a matter of ignorance, but of terminology, a means
of describing the ideal plane, the ecliptic, "supported" by the
four "pillars." And all the "animals" in Noah's Ark
did survive the "flood" when they landed on Ararat, the "highest
mountain on earth," itself a term describing a particular position
of the sun on the celestial sphere.
THE IDEAS IN Hamlet's Mill staggered me. The book stood conventional
notions of "prehistory" on their head. For practical purposes,
the definition of prehistory as "before recorded events," has
always hinged on the presence of a written record. Prehistory means pre-writing.
This definition dismisses the possibility of any means other than writing
for transmitting important information from the past, and thereby creates
the impression that such transmission was not a priority for our forebears.
Hamlet's Mill was making the startling assertion that the apparent
gulf between history and prehistory was a figment of the modern imagination,
a failure of faith with those who had gone before, a product of the "deteriorated
expectations of our time."
For me this book was a kind of food, nourishing my all-but-forgotten childhood
intuitions about the interplay between past and present. More than that,
I felt that I was looking--as if through the glass of a museum case--at
the comprehensive tool kit, the very nuts and bolts, used by "prehistoric"
humanity to fashion a critical component of human consciousness and transmit
it unalloyed into the deep future. The implications of Hamlet's Mill
appeared to me nothing short of revolutionary:
* Embedded within myths were astronomical observations at least as accurate
as carbon dates, thus enabling investigators to compare the content of myths
so dated with the archaeological record.
* Was it not possible that myth represented the "software" that
would show us how to run the "hardware" of ancient astronomical
monuments?
* Was it not possible that the term prehistory was a misnomer if
oral tradition possessed the means to transmit not only the seminal philosophical
ideas of the human race, but the precise skies (i.e., time) that inspired
these thoughts?
* And, as a consequence, did not a completely unsuspected history of the
human race--in the form of the recorded myths of ancient and contemporary
"prehistoric" (nonliterate) peoples--lie gathering dust in libraries
around the world?
I simply had to know if these ideas were true.