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TRAVEL TIPS 
RESOURCES HAMLET'S MILL
Dr Sullivan's research into Andean mythology began as a test case of a
book: Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time. (The
title comes from a character in Norse mythology called Amlodhi, who
owned a mill that once ground out gold, but which now lies at the
bottom of the sea, grinding out salt.See 'Resources')

First published in 1969 and written by two professors of the history
of science - the late Giorgio de Santillana of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Hertha von Dechend of Wolfgang Goethe
University in Frankfurt - it proposes the startling hypothesis that
ancient myths from all over the world contain, on one level, a
sophisticated technical language encrypting complex astronomical
observations.

Times out of joint
According to the authors, thinkers throughout the ancient world - from
Sumer to Egypt, China to Mesoamerica and India to Ireland - were aware
of an astronomical phenomenon known as the precession of the
equinoxes. Precession is the slow wobble of the Earth's axis, much
like the slow swing of the axis of a spinning gyroscope once it has
begun to wind down. It takes the Earth's axis 26,000 years to complete
a single such cycle.

From the point of view of naked-eye astronomy, precession makes stars
rise 'late' in relation to given solar dates, such as solstices and
equinoxes. Thus, as the poets write, 'the times are out of joint' and
'worlds' - or, more properly, 'world ages' - 'come and go'.

Father Time and the Grim Reaper
In the ancient world, the planets were understood to be, in Plato's
phrase, 'the instruments of time'. What this idea indicates, says Dr
Sullivan, is that the ancients, having discovered precessional motion,
sought a means of 'calibrating' the rate of precessional drift by
referring to the longest reliable time spans available to their
observation: the regular periods during which various planets appeared
in the night sky.

The longest of these 'periodicities' was the orbit of Saturn - some 30
years. Saturn thus became the old god, the father of time. In his
benign aspect, he has come down to us as 'Father Time', and in his
fearsome aspect, he is the 'Grim Reaper'. In both cases, he carries a
staff (with the Grim Reaper, this ends with a scythe). The staff
represents the precessing axis of the earth, and for this reason,
Saturn was said to be the owner of a mill - Hamlet's Mill.

The image of the grindstone (the earth's equator) hafted upon an axle
(the pole) became a way of describing precession. By ascribing
'control' of the mill to the planet Saturn, the ancients were
encrypting the information that, by using the long time frame of
Saturn's orbit, they could control their own data on precessional
time.

The space-time frame
Myths from all over our planet speak of 'floods' and 'earthquakes'
that destroy the 'entire world', only to yield to the creation of the
next 'world'. In fact, according to the authors of Hamlet's Mill, the
myths are describing the destruction (caused by precession) of the
'space-time frame' of a world age - that is, the stars rising at the
times of solstices and equinoxes. For instance, a myth may describe
four 'pillars' (constellations) being 'pulled down' (below the horizon
at the given solar dates, due to precession) and the 'world' being
destroyed.

The myths of the world's people have, from time immemorial, taken
place in the sky.

Colossal blunder
So unexpected is this point of view, and so at odds with pat versions
of the story of progress under which Westerners are raised, that
Hamlet's Mill has been and remains ignored by all branches of
academia, says Dr Sullivan. Perhaps the single most trenchant
observation made by the authors of this book - for they understood
full well their efforts would be dismissed - is that, one day, our
descendants may look back on our time and wonder how we could have
made the colossal blunder of applying the model of biological
evolution to the development of human culture.

Evolution requires unimaginably long periods of time to work its
effects, whereas human culture, stretching back as it does perhaps
50,000 years, represents a nano-second of the evolutionary clock. Yet
because our models of human culture speak with confidence of its
'evolution', we remain steadfast in our belief that the life of the
mind and even human intelligence itself is a recent development,
separating us absolutely from the 'primitive beliefs' of our
ancestors. Yet the 'primitive' myths of our ancestors encrypt an
ancient understanding of astronomical events.

Message in a bottle
Like Alexander Thom's pioneering work on British megalithic stone
circles, says Dr Sullivan, Hamlet's Mill remains one of those rare
holes in the dike that three generations of scholars have felt
resolutely compelled to plug. When this particular structure bursts,
as one day it must, the vast sea of time upon which myth has been cast
will find its proper shore and perhaps deliver to us the message in a
bottle our ancestors intended us to receive.

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