On May 30, 1902 Giorgio De Santillana was born in Rome, author together with the German scholar Hertha von Dechend of the basic work of modern astrotheology: "Hamlet's mill: an essay on the myth and structure of time", published at the end of the years Sixty. For the occasion, we report the introduction in its entirety.
di George De Santillana
Introduction to Hamlet's mill (1969)
This work is intended to be simply an essay: a first reconnaissance of a kingdom almost never explored and recorded on maps. Wherever one enters it, one remains prisoner of the same disconcerting circular complexity, as inside a labyrinth: it does not have, in fact, a deductive order in the abstract sense, but rather resembles an organism tenaciously enclosed in itself or, better, again, Ξ± a monumental Β«Art of escapeΒ». The figure of Hamlet as a propitious starting point came by chance. Many other streets offered themselves, full of strange and tempting symbols for their grandiose images; but the choice fell on Hamlet because it was he who guided the mind in a truly inductive search through a familiar landscape - a landscape which, moreover, has the merit of its literary setting. We have, in Hamlet, a character present in the depths of our awareness, whose ambiguities and uncertainties, whose tormented introspection and dispassionate intellectual penetration foreshadow the modern spirit. His drama was that he had to be a hero while trying to escape the role assigned to him by Destiny. His lucid intellect remained above the conflict of motives: in short, his was and is a truly contemporary consciousness.
Yet this character, who the poet made one of us, the first of the unhappy intellectuals, hid a past of being legendary with predetermined features, preformed by age-old myths. Hamlet was surrounded by a numinous aura, leading to him many clues. However, it was a surprise to find behind the mask an all-embracing ancient cosmic power: the original lord of the longed-for first age of the world. Yet in all aspects of him he remained strangely himself. The original AmlΟΞ΄i - such was his name in Icelandic legend - manifests the same characteristics of melancholy and high intellect; he too is a son devoted to his father's vengeance, a speaker of enigmatic but inevitable truths, an elusive bearer of Fate who, once his mission is accomplished, must surrender his weapons and descend into the concealment of the abysses of time to which he belongs. : Lord of the Golden Age, King in the Past and in the Future. This essay will follow his figure in increasingly distant regions, from the Nordic ones to Rome, from there to Finland, Iran and India; he will unequivocally find it in the Polynesian legends. Many other Dominations and Powers will materialize to place him in the right order.
In the crude and vivid images of the Scandinavian peoples, AmlΟΞ΄i was distinguished by the possession of a fabulous mill from whose millstone in his day peace and abundance emerged. Later, in times of decline, the mill ground salt; now finally, having fallen to the bottom of the sea, it grinds the rocks and sand creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom ("The current that grinds", from the verb mala, "to grind"), considered one of the ways that lead to the land of the dead. This nucleus of images, as a series of facts reveals, represents an astronomical process, the secular movement of the sun through the signs of the zodiac that determines the ages of the world, each adding up to thousands of years. Each age brings with it an Age of the world, a Twilight of the Gods: the great structures collapse, the pillars that supported the great factory falter, floods and cataclysms announce the shaping of a new world. Elsewhere, the image of the mill and its owner has given way to more sophisticated images, closer to celestial events. In Plato's grandiose mind, the figure stood out as the Creator God, the Demiurge, who shaped the heavens; but not even Plato escaped the idea he had inherited, of catastrophes and a periodic reconstruction of the world.
Tradition will show that the measurements of a new world had to be drawn from the depths of the celestial ocean and matched the measurements from above, dictated by what in India and elsewhere are called the "Seven Sages", and who are then the Seven Stars of the Bear, obligatory point of reference in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere. These dominating stars of the far North are linked in a singular but systematic way with what are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets, in the course of their motion in different arrangements and configurations along the zodiac. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their coded language, called the two bears "Rhea's hands", the Lady of the rotating Heaven, and the planets "dogs of Persephone", the Queen of the Underworld. Far south, the mysterious ship Argos with its Pilot star held up the abysses of the past, while the Galaxy was the "bridge" that led out of Time. These notions seem to have been common doctrine in the age preceding history, and in the whole range of higher civilizations around our globe; it also seems to have arisen from the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolithic.
The intensity and richness, as well as the coincidence of details in this stratification of reflections, have led to the conclusion that everything originated in the Near East. It is evident that this fact indicates a diffusion of ideas in too vast a sphere for it to be easily accepted by contemporary anthropology. But this science, despite having unearthed a wonderful profusion of details, has been induced by its modern evolutionary and psychological tendency to forget the main source of the myth, namely astronomy, the Royal Science, an oblivion which is also a recent event. , no older than a century. Today, expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague divinities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets in the "late" period; they accurately distinguish popular origins and "late" derivations, all unaware of the fact that the planetary, sidereal and synodic periods were known and repeated in many ways with already traditional celebrations in the Archaic period. The scholar who of these periods has never even come to know what one learns in the most basic science course is not in the best position to recognize them when they appear in his material.
Ancient historians would have been horrified if they had known that very obvious things would have ended up going unnoticed. Aristotle was proud to claim as a known fact that the gods were originally celestial bodies, although later popular imagination had clouded this truth. However little he believed in progress, he felt that this, at least, was a given for future times. He would never have imagined that WD Ross, his current curator, would have deignedly noted: "This is historically false." Yet we know that Saturday and Saturday they had to do with Saturn, as well as Wednesday and Wednesday they had to do with Mercury; such names are as old as time, undoubtedly as old as HarrΔn's planetary heptagram, and date back to far more distant times than those reached by Professor Ross's Greek philology. The investigations of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, going further back, of Athanasius Kircher and Denys Petau, if only they had been carefully read and remembered, would have taught many useful lessons to historians of civilization; instead the interest has shifted to other goals, as demonstrated by contemporary anthropology, which has built its own idea of ββthe "primitive" and of what followed.
In what is the least scientific of the testimonies, the Bible, we still read that God arranged everything according to number, weight and measure; ancient Chinese texts say that "between the calendar and the pitches of the sounds of the ritual flutes there is such a perfect agreement that you could not even put a hair in the middle". These are phrases that people read without giving them any importance. Yet these clues could reveal a world of vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from ours; today, however, experts are darkened by the current popular imagination, by the belief, that is, that these are all things now out of date - and they are very serious and extremely wise critics. In 1959 I wrote:
Β«The dust of the centuries had settled on the ruins of this great archaic world building when the Greeks entered the scene; yet something of it survived in traditional rites, in myths, in fairy tales no longer understood. Taken literally, it matured the bloodthirsty cults aimed at procuring fertility, based on the belief in an obscure universal force of an ambivalent nature, which today seems to monopolize our interests. Yet his original themes could still send flashes of light, preserved almost intact, even after some time, in the thought of the Pythagoreans and Plato. These, however, are the fragments of a lost whole, alluring and elusive at the same time; they suggest those βfog landscapesβ of which Chinese painters are masters, who show here a boulder, there the gable of a roof, there the top of a tree, leaving the rest to the imagination. Even when the code has been deciphered and the techniques are known to us, we cannot expect to measure the thinking of those distant ancestors of ours, enveloped as it is in its symbols. Their words are no longer heard for the many ages that have passed ... "
We believe we have now partially cracked this code. The thought behind those great remote ages is also exalted, despite the strangeness of its forms. The theory of "how the world began" seems to involve the breaking of a harmony, a sort of cosmogonic "original sin" as a result of which the circle of the ecliptic (together with the zodiac) was inclined with respect to the equator and the cycles of change. This is not meant to suggest that this archaic cosmology will reveal great discoveries in the physical field, even if it required prodigious efforts of concentration and calculation; rather, it delineated the unity of the universe (and of the human mind) by pushing itself towards its furthest borders. Indeed, man is doing the same thing today. Einstein said: "What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is conceivable." Man does not give up. When he discovers millions and millions of remote galaxies, and then the quasistellar radio sources billions of light years away that overwhelm his mind, he is happy to be able to tap into such depths. But he pays a terrible price for his successes. The science of astrophysics stretches out on ever larger orders of magnitude without losing its point of support; to man as such this is not possible: in the depths of space he loses himself and all sense of his own importance.
It is impossible for him to place himself within the concepts of modern astrophysics, except in schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the inconceivable; Archaic man, on the other hand, maintained a firm grip on the conceivable by framing in his own cosmos a temporal order and an eschatology that had a meaning for him and reserved a destiny for his soul. Yet it was an extraordinarily vast theory, conceding nothing to merely human feelings; it too expanded the mind beyond the limits of the tolerable, but it did not destroy man's role in the cosmos. It was a merciless metaphysics. It was not a merciful universe, a world of mercy, definitely not. Relentless like the stars in their course, miserationis parcissimae, the Romans said. And yet, in a certain way, it was a world not forgetful of man, a world where everything found, by right and not only statistically, its recognized place, where not even the fall of a sparrow went unnoticed and where even what he was rejected by mistake he did not sink into eternal perdition; because the order of Number and Time was a total order that kept everything and to which all - gods, men and animals, trees and crystals, the same absurd wandering stars - belonged, all subject to law and measure.
This is what was known to Plato, who could still speak the language of the archaic myth; in constructing the first modern philosophy, he made the myth in keeping with his own thinking. We have confidently accepted his clues as points of reference even where he claims to express himself "not entirely seriously". Plato gave us a first empirical norm, and he knew what he was saying. Behind Plato stands the imposing corpus of doctrines attributed to Pythagoras, partly crude formulation, yet rich in the prodigious content of primitive mathematics, pregnant with a science and metaphysics destined to blossom in Plato's time; hence words such as "theorem", "theory" and "philosophy" come from. All this rests, in turn, on what we could define as a protopitagoric phase, widespread throughout the East, but with a focal point in Susa. And finally, there was more: the strict numerical calculation of the Babylonians. From all this derives the strange principle that "things are numbers".
Once the thread that goes back in time has been grasped, the proof of later doctrines and their historical developments lies in their congruence with a tradition that has remained intact even if only half understood. There are in fact seeds that propagate along the currents of time. And universality, when combined with a precise design, is already a proof on its own. When, for example, an element present in China also appears in Babylonian astrological texts, it must be considered pertinent, since it reveals a complex of unusual images to which no one could attribute an independent genesis by spontaneous generation. Let's take the origin of the music. Orpheus and his heartbreaking death could be a poetic creation that arose repeatedly in different places. But when characters who play not the lyre, but the flute, end up skinned alive for absurd reasons of various kinds, and when their identical end is repeated and recalled in different continents, then we feel we have got our hands on something, since similar stories they cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper appears both in the medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico, in an age long before the Conquest, and in both places he is connected with certain attributes such as the color red, it is very difficult that it is a coincidence. There are usually very few things that enter music by pure chance.
Similarly, it is not accidental that numbers such as 108, or 9 X 13 are found, repeated in various multiples, in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in the obscure sayings of Heraclitus and also in the Norse ValhΓΆll. There is a way to control the signals so scattered in the ancient data, in the traditions, in the fables, in the sacred texts. The materials we used as sources may seem strange and disparate, but the sifting was shrewd and had reasons for him, which we will discuss later in the chapter on methodology. I could define it as a comparative morphology: the reservoir of myths and fairy tales is very vast, but there are morphological "signs" for everything that is not a simple spontaneous narrative. Furthermore, marvelously well preserved archaic material is found among the primitive "secondary", such as the Amerindians and the indigenous peoples of West Africa. Finally, we have courteous tales and dynastic annals that look like novels: the Feng-shen Yan-yi, the Japanese Nihongi, the Hawaiian Kumulipo, which are not only fables full of fantastic beliefs.
What information should a man of good family entrust to his firstborn in hard and perilous times? Undoubtedly the family tree, but then what? The memory of an ancient nobility is the way to preserve the arcana imperii, the arcana legis and the arcana mundi, as it was in ancient Rome: this is the wisdom of the ruling class. The Polynesian chants taught in the highly reserved wharewΔnanga were largely astronomy: this is what was then meant by liberal education. Another great source are the sacred texts. In the current era of print media it is tempting to see them as mere religious sorties in the field of homiletics, but originally they represented a strong concentration of attention on materials distilled for their importance over a long period of time, and considered worthy of being memorized generation after generation. The Celtic druidic tradition was transmitted not only through song, but also through a doctrine of the tree very similar to a code; in the East, a kind of shorthand developed from complex games based on astronomy which later became the alphabet.
As we follow the clues - stars, numbers, colors, plants, shapes, poetry, music, structures - we discover the existence of a vast framework of relationships that spans many levels. We find ourselves within an echoing multiplicity, where everything reacts and has its own place and time. It is a real building, a kind of mathematical matrix, an Image of the World that is in accord with each of the many levels, regulated in every part by a rigorous measure. It is the measure that provides the counter-proof; many things, in fact, can be identified and recombined according to rules similar to the old Chinese saying about ritual flutes and the calendar. When we talk about measures, what gives them is always some form of Time, starting with the two fundamental measures, the solar year and the octave, and from there, through many periods and intervals, down to the weights and the dimensions strictly speaking. What was attempted by modern man with the mere convention of the metric system has archaic precedents of great complexity. From a centuries-old past comes the echo of the amazement of al-BirΕ«nΔ«, prince among scientists, when he discovered, a thousand years ago, that the Indians, by now become extremely mediocre astronomers, calculated aspects and events using the stars, but were not able to show him just one of the stars he wanted. The stars had become pure objects of calculation for them, just as they would have become for Le Verrier and Adams, who never in their lives bothered to observe Neptune although they had calculated and discovered it in 1847.
A similar attitude also seems to have been of the Mayans and Aztecs, with their endless calculations: only relationships mattered. Ultimately this was also the case in the archaic universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscriptions in the hologram, to be divined with subtlety. And over all the number dominated (see Appendix 1). This ancient world draws a little closer when one thinks of two great transitional characters, who were both archaic and modern in their habits of thought. The first is Kepler, who with his tireless calculations and his passionate devotion to the dream of rediscovering the "Harmony of the Spheres" belonged to the ancient order. But he was a man of his time, and also of ours, when his dream began to foreshadow the polyphony that he was to lead to Bach. In a somewhat analogous way, our rigidly scientific worldview finds its counterpart in what music historian John Hollander has called the "Scordazione del Cielo". The second transitional character is none other than Sir Isaac Newton, the initiator even of the strictly scientific conception. Referring to Newton in this regard is not so paradoxical. John Maynard Keynes, who knew Newton well, said of him:
"Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason, but the last of the wizards, the last of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, the last sublime mind who looked at the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world a good little less than ten thousand years ago [β¦]. Why do I call him a wizard? Because he looked at the entire universe and everything in it as an enigma, a secret that could be read by applying pure thought to certain facts, certain mystical clues that God had placed here and there in the world so that the esoteric brotherhood could try its hand in a kind of philosophical treasure hunt. He believed that these clues were traceable partly in celestial facts and in the constitution of the elements (hence the false impression that he was an experimental physicist), but partly also in certain documents and traditions passed from hand to hand in an unbroken chain. of initiates dating back to the original revelation, manifested in Babylon in cipher language. Newton considered the universe as a cryptogram prepared by the Almighty, just as he himself, by corresponding with Leibniz, wrapped the discovery of infinitesimal calculus in a cryptogram. The enigma would be revealed to the initiate through the application of pure thought and mental concentration. "
Lord Keynes's judgment, written around 1947, is both unconventional and profound. Keynes knew - we all know - that Newton had failed him, that he had been misled by his stubborn sectarian prejudices. But, as we are only now beginning to discover, after two centuries of studying many civilizations of which he could not know anything, his enterprise really partook of the archaic spirit. To the few clues he discovered with rigorous methodology, many others were added, but the astonishment remains, the same astonishment manifested by his great predecessor, Galileo:
"But above all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was that of he who imagined he could find a way of communicating his innermost thoughts to any other person, albeit distant for a very long interval of place and time?" To speak to those who are in India, to speak to those who are not yet born, nor will they be but here in a thousand and ten thousand years? And with what ease? With the various combinations of twenty characters on a card. Let this be the seal of all admirable human inventions Β».
Long ago, in the sixth century AD, Gregory of Tours wrote: "The blade of the mind has lost its thread, we hardly understand the Ancients." This is all the more true today, despite our wallowing in math for the masses and high technology. It cannot be denied that, despite all the efforts of our Departments of Ancient Letters, the withering of classical studies and the abandonment of any lively familiarity with Greek and Latin have severed the ΟΞΌΞ¦aΞ»ΟΞ΅ΟΟΞ±, the umbilical cord that connected the our civilization - at least at the highest level - with Greece, just as the members of the Pythagorean and Orphic tradition reconnected, through Plato and a few others, with the more ancient Near East. We are beginning to understand that this destruction is leading to a very modern Middle Ages, much worse than the first. "Stop the world, I want to get off!" people will say with a chuckle, but now it is done: this is what happens when it is tampered with - no matter by whom - that knowledge reserved for a few that science is and intended to be. But, as Goethe said at the dawn of the Age of Progress, " Noch ist es Tag, from rΓΌhre sich 'der Mann! / Die Nacht tritt ein, wo niemand wirken kann "(" It is still day, let man get busy! / The night is coming, in which no one can work ").
It is perhaps possible that from the irremediably condemned and trampled past there will once again be some "Renaissance" in which certain ideas will come back to life; and we must not deprive our children's children of the last chance to take possession of the inheritance that comes to us from the most ancient and most distant times. And if, as seems infinitely probable, even this last possibility is ignored in the tumult of progress, well, it will be possible at least to believe again, with Poliziano, also a sublime humanist, that there will be men whose minds will find refuge in poetry, in the art and in the holy tradition that only free man from death and turn him to eternity, as long as the stars continue to shine on a world forever reduced to silence. Now, we still have a little light left to undertake this first brief patrol. It will have to forcibly neglect large and important areas; nevertheless, he will explore many unexpected paths and recesses of the past.
