and after the last Ice Age, which drew the series of highly accurate and
technically advanced world maps reviewed in Part I? And might not that
same hand have left its ghostly fingerprints on another body of universal
myths? those concerning the death and resurrection of gods, and great
trees around which the earth and heavens turn, and whirlpools, and
churns, and drills, and other similar revolving, grinding contrivances?
According to Santillana and von Dechend, all such images refer to
celestial events5 and do so, furthermore, in the refined technical language
of an archaic but ‘immensely sophisticated’ astronomical and
mathematical science:6 ‘This language ignores local beliefs and cults. It
4 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.
5 Ibid.; Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.
6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 65.
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concentrates on numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas—
on the structure of numbers, on geometry.’7
Where could such a language have come from? Hamlet’s Mill is a
labyrinth of brilliant but deliberately evasive scholarship, and offers us no
straightforward answer to this question. Here and there, however, almost
with embarrassment, inconclusive hints are dropped. For example, at one
point the authors say that the scientific language or ‘code’ they believe
they have identified is of ‘awe-inspiring antiquity’.8 On another occasion
they pin down the depth of this antiquity more precisely to a period at
least ‘6000 years before Virgil’9—in other words 8000 years ago or more.
What civilization known to history could have developed and made use
of a sophisticated technical language more than 8000 years ago? The
honest answer to this question is ‘none’, followed by a frank admission
that what is being conjectured is nothing less than a forgotten episode of
high technological culture in prehistoric times. Once again, Santillana and
von Dechend are elusive when it comes to the crunch, speaking only of
the legacy we all owe to ‘some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization’
that ‘first dared to understand the world as created according to number,
measure and weight.’10
The legacy, it is clear, has to do with scientific thinking and complex
information of a mathematical nature. Because it is so extremely old,
however, the passage of time has dissipated it:
When the Greeks came upon the scene the dust of centuries had already settled
upon the remains of this great world-wide archaic construction. Yet something of
it survived in traditional rites, in myths and fairy-tales no longer understood ...
These are tantalising fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those
‘mist landscapes’ of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock,
here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when
the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot
expect to gauge the thought of these remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in
its symbols, since the creating, ordering minds that devised the symbols have
vanished forever.’11
What we have here, therefore, are two distinguished professors of the
History of Science, from esteemed universities on both sides of the
Atlantic, claiming to have discovered the remnants of a coded scientific
language many thousands of years older than the oldest human
civilizations identified by scholarship. Moreover, though generally
cautious, Santillana and von Dechend also claim to have ‘broken part of
that code’.12
This is an extraordinary statement for two serious academics to have
7 Ibid., p. 345.
8 Ibid., p. 418.
9 Ibid., p. 245.
10 Ibid., p. 132.
11 Ibid., pp. 4-5,348.
12 Ibid., p. 5.
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made.
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Chapter 30
The Cosmic Tree and the Mill of the Gods
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 ‘coopted’ (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 Twentyfour 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
1 Livio Catullo Stecchini, ‘Notes on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great
Pyramid’, in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 381-2.
2 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vintage
Books, London, 1991, p. 276.
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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 cele
stial 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 x 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
3 The reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five how Yggdrasil, the world tree itself, was
not destroyed and how the progenitors of future humanity managed to shelter within its
trunk until a new earth emerged from the ruins of the old. How likely is it to be pure
coincidence that exactly the same strategy was adopted by survivors of the universal
deluge as described in certain Central American myths? Such links and crossovers in
myth between the themes of precession and global catastrophe are extremely common.
4 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.
5 Grimnismol 23, the Poetic Edda, p. 93, cited in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 199;
Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162; Elsa Brita Titchenell, The Masks of Odin, Theosophical University
Press, Pasadena, 1988, p. 168.
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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
6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 232-3.
7 Ibid., p. 231.
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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
su
rvive. 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
8 Yucatan before and after the Conquest, p. 82.
9 See, for example, The God-Kings and the Titans, p. 64. It may also be relevant that
other versions of ‘the Bacabs’ myth tell us that ‘their slightest movement produces an
earth tremor or even an earthquake’ (Maya History and Religion, p. 346).
10 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.
11 Ibid.
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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