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Excerpts from: "Hamlet's Mill"
An essay on myth and the frame of Time
by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend
Gambit Boston 1969
Diane Haugen brought this book to my attention while we worked together on the several 1998 systems papers for ISSS~ISIS 98 (Atlanta) and ICSSSE98 (Beijing). The detail and scholarship of "Hamlet's Mill" is beyond impressive, as reading through it is like wandering the halls of a major art museum of the world. What captured my mind, and the reason I share these excerpts with you, is the sweeping insights the authors express, wrought from a single theme echoed and made variant in cultural imageries planet wide. Universal concerns and observations made relevant and local (over and over again in places and times), then appreciated for their underscoring commonalities once more.
, June 1998
Introduction:
"Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos an order of time and an eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. Yet it was a prodigiously vast theory, with no concessions to merely human sentiments. It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man's role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics." ...
... "Once having grasped a thread going back in time, then the test of later doctrines with their own historical developments lies in their congruence with tradition preserved intact even if half understood. For there are seeds which propogate themselves along with the jetstream of time."
"And universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design."......."As we follow the clues - stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures - a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true ediface, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure. It is measure that provides the countercheck, for there is much that can be identified and redisposed from rules like the old Chinese saying about the pitch pipes and the calendar. When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time ...."
Ch IV. History, Myth and Reality
"What then were "Jamshyd" and "Kai Khusrau"? To the simple, a magic image, a fable. To those who understood, a reflection of Time itself, obviously one of its major aspects. They could be recognized under many names in many places, even comflicting allusions. It was always the same myth, and that was enough. It expressed the laws of the universe, in that specific language - the language of Time. This was a way to talk about the cosmos."
"All that is living reality, 'sub species transeuntis', has a tale, as it appears in awesome, or appalling, or comforting aspects, in the "fearful symmetry" of tigers or theorems, or stars in their courses, but always alive to the soul."Intermezzo. A Guide for the Perplexed
"This book is highly unconventional, and often the flow of the tales will be interrupted to put in words of guidance, in the fashion of the middle Ages, to emphasize salient points."
"To begin with, there is no system that can be presented in modern analytical terms. There is no key,and there are no principles from which a presentation can be deduced. The structure comes from a time when there was no such thing as a system in our sense, and it would be unfair to search for one. There could hardly have been one among people who committed all their ideas to memory."
"It can be considered a pure structure of numbers. From the beginning we considered calling the essay "Art of the Fugue". And that includes any "world-picture," a point tht cannot be stressed strongly enough. Any effort to use a diagram is bound to lead into contradiction. It is a matter of times and rhythms."
"The subject has the nature of a hologram, something that has to be present as a whole to the mind. (In optics, 'hologram' is the interference pattern of light with itself; i.e., every part of an image is displayed at every point, as if every point looked at every source of light.) Archaic thought is cosmological first and last; it faces the gravest implications of a cosmos in ways that reverberate in later classical philosophy. The chief implication is a profound awareness that the fabric of the cosmos is not only determined, but overdetermined and in a way that does not permit the simple location of any of its agents, whether simple magic or astrology, forces, gods, numbers, planetary powers, Platonic Forms, Aristotelian Essences or Stoic Substances. Physical reality here cannot be analytical in the Cartesian sense; it cannot be reduced to concreteness even if misplaced. Being is change, motion and rhythm,the irresistible circle of time, the incidence of the "right moment', as determined by the skies." ...... "(The deep ancient past) was a time, rich in another knowledge which was later lost, that searched for other principles. It gave the 'lingua franca' of the past. Its knowledge was of cosmic correspondences,which found their proof and seal of truth in a specific determinism,nay overdeterminism, subject to forces completely without locality. ... The multiplicity of relations seen or intuited brough the idea to a focus in which the universe appeared determined not on one but one many levels at once. "
Ch VIII Shamans and Smiths
"Memphis (an ancient Roman mime) had, so to speak, a morphological understanding that he could only express in action. (with a closely atuned audience) ... "Dictum sapienti sat", the wise would say. ... Here is a case of true communication which does not need understanding. It takes place only through the form,"morphé". In mystery rites there were things which "could not be said" (arrhéta) but could only be acted out."
"Now that documents of the earliest ages of writing are available, one is struck with a wholly unexpected feature. Those first predecessors of ours, instead of indulging their whims and childlike freedom, behave like worried and doubting commentators: they always try an exegesis of a dimly understood tradition. They move among technical terms whose meaning is half lost to them, they deal with words which appear on this earliest horizon already "tottering with age" as J.H.Breasted says, words soon to vanish from our ken. Long before poetry can begin, there were generations of strange scholiasts."
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