Book Summary | Hamlet's Mill

The GIST

Hamlet's Mill, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, is one of the strangest and most stubbornly influential books ever written by two serious historians of science. First published in 1969 with the subtitle An Essay on Myth & the Frame of Time, it makes a bold claim. The myths of the ancient world are not primitive fancies about fertility, harvests or the moods of the gods. They are a technical language, a code in which an archaic science of the sky was stored and passed down. At its heart is a single astonishing proposal: that the precession of the equinoxes, the slow wobble of Earth's axis usually credited to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, was known thousands of years earlier, in the late Neolithic or before. On this reading, the knowledge travelled across the world inside stories of a great turning mill and the prince who owned it.

The authors came to the subject from different directions. Santillana, born in Rome and trained as a physicist, was a professor at MIT, author of The Origins of Scientific Thought and The Case of Galileo. Von Dechend, born in Heidelberg, had trained as an ethnologist under Leo Frobenius in Frankfurt and later taught at Goethe University. They met at a symposium in 1958 and began working together in 1959, after Santillana was electrified by her research. The book took shape over a decade, much of it during von Dechend's winters at MIT and through Santillana's serious illness in the mid-1960s. Academics savaged it on publication. It has never gone away all the same, and it remains a seminal, maddening, much-reread source for anyone who suspects the ancients watched the sky far more closely than we give them credit for.

The Big Ideas

Start with Hamlet: the mill that grinds at the bottom of the sea

The authors insist their subject has no logical beginning. They describe the ancient worldview they are reconstructing as an "implex" or a fugue (an early working title was The Art of the Fugue), a web of interlocking themes you can enter anywhere. They chose to enter through the Scandinavian legend behind Shakespeare's prince, which they call "a favourable starting point" that "came by chance."

The thread begins with the Icelander Snorri Sturluson. In the Skáldskaparmál, his handbook of poetic language, he records a kenning for a stretch of turbulent sea: Amlóða kvern, "Amlodhi's mill," or the sand and spray as Amlodhi's meal. Amlodhi is the figure also called Amleth, whose tale the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus told around the same era. Saxo's Amleth, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, feigns madness to hide what he knows about his uncle's crime. Walking by the shore, he calls the sand meal, "ground small by the hoary tempest of the ocean." Out in the sea, then, lies Hamlet's mill.

Snorri also gives the fullest account of the mill itself, the magical Grotti. It could grind out whatever it was told to, and only two giant slave-maidens, Fenja and Menja, were strong enough to turn it. Once it ground gold, and a Golden Age of peace followed. Later it was ordered to grind salt aboard a ship. The weight of the salt sank the ship, the mill went to the seabed and kept grinding, and that is why the sea is salt and why a whirlpool churns where it fell. Folk versions of the story survived into modern times. In Orkney the whirlpool called the Swelkie of Stroma was linked to the sunken mill, and South Ronaldsay children were warned about two witches named Grotti Finnie and Grotti Minnie.

The mill is the sky

Why should a mill matter so much? The authors' answer is the book's central image: the mill is the turning heavens. They gather descriptions from very different cultures that picture the sky this way. One Greek writer of around 150 AD describes the far-northern heavens wheeling like a millstone. An Arab astronomer calls a star in the Little Bear the "mill peg." An Indian astronomer compares the wandering starry spheres to the upright axle of a corn mill, circled endlessly by toiling oxen. Put these together, the authors argue, and the mythic mill is the whole rotating dome of stars, with its axle running through the centre of the Earth up to the celestial pole.

Once you see the mill this way, they say, other images fall into place. The mill is bound up with the maelstrom and with the Milky Way. The authors identify a recurring "curious tangle" of three linked elements. A whirlpool connects the world of the living with the world of the dead. A tree, often life-giving or life-saving, grows close beside it. And the whirl came into being because that tree was felled or uprooted, or a mill's axle came unhinged. These motifs turn up again and again, the authors argue, because they all describe the same cosmic machinery.

The broken mill: precession and the ending of ages

If the mill is the heavens, what does it mean when the mill breaks or sinks? Here the authors bring in precession. Earth's axis is tilted, and the planet bulges slightly at the equator. The pull of the sun and moon on that bulge makes the axis wobble slowly, completing a circle in roughly 26,000 years. Over the centuries this shifts which star sits at the pole. Today it is Polaris, at the tip of the Little Bear's tail, but it was not always so. Precession also changes which constellation rises with the sun at the equinoxes. For around two thousand years one sign, such as Aries, holds that place before it gradually gives way to the next, Pisces. These are the astrological ages.

To patient sky-watchers over many generations, the authors argue, this slow change would have felt like the frame of heaven gradually warping until it finally cracked apart. That is the catastrophe the myths describe. The mill wrenched off its axle, the world-tree cut down, the Golden Age ended. It also explains the many succession myths, in which the ruler of one age is overthrown by the one who ushers in the next. The Greek sky-god Zeus, whom one learned poet calls "Zeus the Miller," fought his father Kronos, lord of the Golden Age, and cast him down. Kronos ends up imprisoned in the underworld, exiled to a western island, or asleep in chains in a golden cave. Zeus even kills a giant on Crete named Mylinos, "of a mill." Hamlet himself becomes a version of this pattern: a disinherited heir, a mill-owner whose mill is broken, a figure of one world-age giving way to another.

The same logic extends to flood myths. The authors read them not as memories of literal deluges but as astronomical metaphors for the shifting of the celestial frame, the old world drowned when one age's stars sank below the horizon.

A lost archaic science of "number, measure and weight"

The boldest thesis is historical. Spotting precession takes long, careful, recorded observation. So the authors propose a long-lived megalith-building civilization of the late Neolithic, centred in the Near East, that achieved it. They then argue that its cosmology spread, in mythic form, across most of the civilized and proto-civilized world between roughly 4000 BC and 100 AD.

To make the case, they range across a huge body of sources. They draw on the Persian Shahnameh, the Finnish Kalevala, the Norse Eddas, the Hindu Mahabharata, Vedas and Upanishads, Babylonian astrology, the Sumerian Gilgamesh and King List, the Greek writings of Plato, Pindar and Plutarch, and the African material gathered by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule among the Dogon. Polynesian, Siberian and North American traditions appear too. Their claim is that the same astronomical symbols recur everywhere: heavenly mills, heavenly milk-churns, successions and floods.

This is also an argument about how we tell the story of science. The authors attack the habit of treating everything early as primitive. They are equally scornful of the scholarly reverence for Classical Greece as the birthplace of real thought: "Classical antiquity has a magnetic quality for the scholarly mind. It acts upon it like the Great Lodestone Mountain in Sinbad. The frail philological bark comes apart as soon as Greece looms over the horizon." Their hero is instead an anonymous archaic genius. Shamanism, they conclude, "is not primitive at all." It belongs, like all civilizations, to the "ungrateful heirs of some almost unbelievable Near Eastern ancestor who first dared to understand the world as created according to number, measure and weight." The book closes, fittingly, with Prometheus, the bringer of fire and knowledge.

Myth as code, and the case against modern readings

Underneath everything is a theory of what myth is. Santillana had already sketched it in The Origins of Scientific Thought. There he suggested that seemingly arbitrary tales, the Greek story of the Argonauts among them, preserve a vocabulary of image-motifs, a code that let those in the know fix the positions of planets and convey their picture of the world as stories of how it began. Hamlet's Mill sets out to sift the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages" and read them as that code.

The authors openly reject, and often mock, interpretations of these myths in terms of fertility or agriculture. They mostly ignore the newer schools of their day as well, dismissing modern experts as "critics without nonsense and extremely wise" who are blind to what is in front of them. Instead they lean on older, painstaking scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson and Boll, and further back Athanasius Kircher and Petavius. Much of the book is a dense web of etymologies, footnotes and no fewer than 39 appendices spread over about a hundred pages.

Critics pounced on exactly this. Edmund Leach, writing in The New York Review of Books, called the single archaic system "pure fantasy" and the method an intellectual game built on old-fashioned etymology. Jaan Puhvel denied it was serious scholarship, though he granted it flashes of insight into ancient cyclical worldviews and the nature of mythic language. H. R. Ellis Davidson faulted its reliance on the nineteenth-century Norse theorist Viktor Rydberg. Others disagreed. The astrophysicist Philip Morrison called it "a book for the wise," and the classicist Harald Reiche carried its methods further into Greek myth. Later mythographers credited the authors with collecting "Herculean amounts of relevant data."

Putting It to Work

• Read myths for their content, not just their mood. The book's lasting challenge is to ask whether an old story might be recording something observed, especially in the sky, rather than merely expressing a feeling or a ritual.
• Treat mills, whirlpools, trees and fallen kings as possible clues. Wherever a mill or miller turns up in folklore, the authors urge you to ask whether it is incidental or structural.
• Learn the sky that the ancients saw. Understanding the celestial pole, the equinoxes and precession makes many old images suddenly legible. Watching how the stars wheel around Polaris is the best way into the book.
• Question the myth of primitive ancestors. The authors argue that "early" does not mean "less sophisticated." That is a useful corrective whether or not you accept their lost civilization, and later work on ancient astronomical sites has made the question feel less fringe.
• Hold the strongest claims lightly. Even sympathetic readers suggest a softer version of the thesis: myth sometimes stored and transmitted observations in symbolic form. That version keeps the insight without the overreach the critics attacked.
• Expect to reread. Admirers say the book makes more sense the second and third time through. Dip in anywhere and follow a thread, as its fugue-like structure invites.

Who Should Read It

This is for curious, patient readers who love mythology, the history of astronomy, or big, unclassifiable books in the spirit of Robert Graves's The White Goddess. If you want tidy proofs, its tangled etymologies and scholarly feuds will exasperate you. If you want a tapestry of Norse, Greek, Indian, Babylonian and African stories rewoven into a vision of the sky as a great turning mill, it may change how you read every myth you meet. Admirers say it rewards rereading and sends you off on your own explorations.

This has been a summary of Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.