Hamlet's Mill

Argument

Santillana had previously published, in 1961, The Origins of Scientific Thought, on which Hamlet's Mill is substantially based. Compare various statements in Hamlet's Mill to this quotation from The Origin of Scientific Thought: "We can see then, how so many myths, fantastic and arbitrary in semblance, of which the Greek tale of the Argonaut is a late offspring, may provide a terminology of image motifs, a kind of code which is beginning to be broken. It was meant to allow those who knew (a) to determine unequivocally the position of given planets in respect to the earth, to the firmament, and to one another; (b) to present what knowledge there was of the fabric of the world in the form of tales about 'how the world began'."

Feyerabend (2000) explains: "There are two reasons why this code was not discovered earlier. One is the firm conviction of historians of science that science did not start before Greece and that scientific results can only be obtained with the scientific method as it is practised today (and as it was foreshadowed by Greek scientists). The other reason is the astronomical, geological, etc., ignorance of most Assyriologists, Aegyptologists, Old Testament scholars, and so on: the apparent primitivism of many myths is just the reflection of the primitive astronomical, biological, etc., etc., knowledge of their collectors and translators. Since the discoveries of Hawkins, Marshack, Seidenberg, van der Waerden (Geometry and Algebra in Ancient Civilizations, New York, 1983) and others we have to admit the existence of an international paleolithic astronomy that gave rise to schools, observatories, scientific traditions and most interesting theories. These theories, which were expressed in sociological, not in mathematical terms, have left their traces in sagas, myths, legends, and may be reconstructed in a twofold way, by going forward into the present from the material remains of Stone Age astronomy such as marked stones, stone observatories, etc., and by going back into the past from the literary remains which we find in sagas, legends, myths. An example of the first method is A. Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, New York, 1972. An example of the second is de Santillana-von Dechend, Hamlet's mill, Boston, 1969." Further influences can be found in the work of Leo Frobenius. Leach 1970 mentions particularly Die Mathematik der Oceaner (1900) and Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904).

The main argument of the book may be summarized as the claim of an early (Neolithic) discovery of the precession of the equinoxes (usually attributed to Hipparchus, 2nd century BCE), and an associated very long-lived Megalithic civilization of "unsuspected sophistication" that was particularly preoccupied with astronomical observation. The knowledge of this civilization about precession, and the associated astrological ages, would have been encoded in mythology, typically in the form of a story relating to a millstone and a young protagonist—the "Hamlet's Mill" of the book's title, a reference to the kenning Amlóða kvren recorded in the Old Icelandic Skáldskaparmál. The authors indeed claim that mythology is primarily to be interpreted as in terms of archaeoastronomy ("mythological language has exclusive reference to celestial phenomena"), and they mock alternative interpretations in terms of fertility or agriculture.

The book's project is an examination of the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages". In particular, the book reconstructs a myth of a heavenly mill which rotates around the celestial pole 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 especially to all "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..."

Santillana and Dechend state in their introduction to Hamlet's Mill that they are well aware of modern interpretations of myth and folklore but 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, Santillana and Dechend 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".

Reception

Hamlet's Mill was severely criticized by academic reviewers on a number of grounds: tenuous arguments based on incorrect or outdated linguistic information; lack of familiarity with modern sources; an over-reliance on coincidence or analogy; 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.”

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."

In contrast the classical scholar Harald Reiche positively reviewed Hamlet's Mill. Reiche was a colleague of Santillana at MIT, and himself developed the archaeoastronomical interpretation of ancient myth in a series of lectures and publications similar to Hamlet's Mill (dealing more specifically with Greek mythology), including an interpretation of "the layout of Atlantis as a sort of map of the sky".

The Swedish astronomer Peter Nilson, while recognizing that Hamlet's Mill does not qualify as a work of science, expressed admiration for it as well as it being a source of inspiration when he wrote his own book on classic mythologies based on the night sky: Himlavalvets sällsamheter (1977).

Barber & 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." Nevertheless, the conclusions the authors draw from their data have been "virtually ignored by the scientific and scholarly establishment.”

Publishing history

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 five years prior to Santillana's death. Hertha von Dechend (who is generally held to have written more of the book) prepared an expanded second edition several years later. The essay was reissued by David R. Godine, Publisher in 1992. The German translation, which appeared in 1993, is slightly longer than the original. The 8th Italian edition of 2000 was substantially expanded.