Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth | |
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1st hardcover edition, dust cover art |
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Author(s) | Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend |
Cover artist | William Barss (1st hardcover edition, Gambit, 1969); Sara Eisenman (1st paperback edition, 1977) |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject(s) | Mythology and Astronomy |
Genre(s) | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Gambit Incorporated (1969, hardcover, 1st edition, 1st printing); Harvard University Press (1969, hardcover); David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. (1977, softcover) |
Publication date | November 1969 |
Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
Pages |
505 (1st paperback edition; includes the 25 chapters, 39 appendices, bibliography and indices) |
ISBN | ISBN 0876450087 (Harvard) LCCN 69013267 (Gambit) |
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.The book is thematically similar to Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God.
The essential premise of the book 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.
Contents |
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;[1] 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:
Careful examination of the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages"[4] 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..."[5]
The full hardcover title is Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth & The Frame of Time. Later softcover editions would use Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth. 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)[6] 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.
Hamlet's Mill was severely criticized by academic reviewers[7] on a number of grounds: tenuous arguments based on incorrect or outdated linguistic information;[8] lack of familiarity with modern sources;[9] an over-reliance on coincidence or analogy;[10] and the general implausibility of a far-flung and influential civilization existing and not leaving behind solid evidence. At most, it has been 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.”[11]
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."[12]
De Santillana and von Dechend state in the Introduction to Hamlet's Mill 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 Athanasius Kircher and Petavius...". They give reasons throughout the book for preferring the work of older scholars (and the early mythologists themselves) as the proper way to interpret myth; but 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".[13]
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."[14] Nevertheless, the conclusions the authors draw from their data have been "virtually ignored by the scientific and scholarly establishment.”[15]