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:
12 Grottasongr, ‘The Song of the Mill’, in The Masks of Odin, p. 198.
13 Ibid., p. 201.
14 Grottasongr, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 89-90.
15 Ibid., p. 2.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 232.
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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 figtree 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’.21 His 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
18 Ibid., p. 204.
20 Trimalcho in Petronius, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 137.
21 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1:41.
22 Judges, 16:25-30.
23 In Japanese myth the Samson character is named Susanowo. See Post Wheeler, The
Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese, New York, 1952, p. 44ff.
24 In slightly distorted form in the Popol Vuh’s account of the Twins and their 400
companions (see Chapter Nineteen). Zipcana, son of Vucub-Caquix sees the 400 youths
dragging a huge log they want as a ridgepole for their house. Zipcana carries the tree
without effort to the spot where a hole has been dug for the post to support the
ridgepole. The youths try to kill Zipcana by crushing him in the hole, but he escapes and
brings down the house on their heads, killing them all. Popol Vuh, pp. 99-101.
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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 shafttree 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. Ind
eed, 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
25 In Maori traditions the Samson character is known as Whakatu. See Sir George Grey,
Polynesian Mythology, London, 1956 (1st ed. 1858), p. 97ff.
26 Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 104-8.
27 Ibid., p. 111.
28 Ibid., 233.
29 Ibid., 312.
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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 dogheaded 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’.32 Likewise, 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
30 James Mooney, ‘Myths of the Cherokee’, Washington, 1900, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp.
249, 389; Jean Guard Monroe and Ray A. Williamson, They Dance in the Sky: Native
American Star Myths, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1987, pp. 117-18.
31 The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, p. 70.
32 Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 33.
33 Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17.
34 Judges, 15:4.
35 Saxo Grammaticus, in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 13.
36 Ibid., p. 31.
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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 worldtree 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
37 Ibid., pp. 7, 31.
38 World Mythology, p. 139. It should also be noted that, like Samson, Orion was blind—
the only blind figure in constellation mythology. See Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 177-8.
39 Mercer, The Religion of Ancient Egypt, London, 1946, pp. 25, 112.
40 Ibid. Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 39: ‘the ancient Egyptians are known to have
identified Orion with Osiris’.
41 Also rendered Wapwewet and Ap-uaut. See, for example, E. A. Wallis Budge, Gods of
the Egyptians, Methuen and Co., London, 1904, vol. II, pp. 366-7.
42 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. L.
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husband’s body from the pillar and takes it back to Egypt to undergo
rebirth.43
The Osiris myth also inclu
des 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.
43 Ibid. Though a mill, as such, is nowhere to be seen, many Ancient Egyptian reliefs
depict two of the principal characters in the Osiris myth (Horus and Seth) jointly
operating a giant drill, again a classic symbol of precession. Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162: ‘This
feature is continuously mislabelled the “uniting of the two countries” whether Horus and
Seth serve the churn or, as is more often the case, the so-called Nile Gods.’
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Chapter 31
The Osiris Numbers
Archaeo-astronomer Jane B. Sellers, who studied Egyptology at the
University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, spends her winters in Portland,
Maine, and summers at Ripley Neck, a nineteenth-century enclave
‘downcast’ on Maine’s rocky coast. ‘There,’ she says, ‘the night skies can
be as clear as the desert, and no one minds if you read the Pyramid Texts
out loud to the seagulls ...1
One of the few serious scholars to have tested the theory advanced by
Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, Sellers has been hailed for
having drawn attention to the need to use astronomy, and more
particularly precession, for the proper study of ancient Egypt and its
religion.2 In her words: ‘Archaeologists by and large lack an
understanding of precession, and this affects their conclusions
concerning ancient myths, ancient gods and ancient temple alignments ...
For astronomers precession is a well-established fact; those working in
the field of ancient man have a responsibility to attain an understanding
of it.’3
It is Sellers’s contention, eloquently expressed in her recent book, The
Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, that the Osiris myth may have been
deliberately encoded with a group of key numbers that are ‘excess
baggage’ as far as the narrative is concerned but that offer an eternal
calculus by which surprisingly exact values can be derived for the
following:
1 The time required for the earth’s slow precessional wobble to cause
the position of sunrise on the vernal equinox to complete a shift of
one degree along the ecliptic (in relation to the stellar background);