Hamlet's Mill

An essay on myth and the frame of time

GIORGIO de SANTILLANA

Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science
M.l.T.

and
HERTHA von DECHEND

apl. Professor fur Geschichte der Naturivissenschaften
]. W. Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt

Preface

ASthe senior, if least deserving, of the authors, I shall open the
narrative.

Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and
science join. It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of
science had their deep roots in a particular myth, that of invariance.
The Greeks, as early as the 7th century B.C., spoke of the quest of
their first sages as the Problem of the One and the Many, sometimes
describing the wild fecundity of nature as the way in which the
Many could be deduced from the One, sometimes seeing the Many
as unsubstantial variations being played on the One. The oracular
sayings of Heraclitus the Obscure do nothing but illustrate with
shimmering paradoxes the illusory quality of "things" in flux as
they were wrung from the central intuition of unity. Before him
Anaximander had announced, also oracularly, that the cause of
things being born and perishing is their mutual injustice to each
other in the order of time, "as is meet," he said, for they are bound
to atone forever for their mutual injustice. This was enough to
make of Anaximander the acknowledged father of physical science,
for the accent is on the real "Many." But it was true science after
a fashion.

Soon after, Pythagoras taught, no less oracularly, that "things
are numbers." Thus mathematics was born. The problem of the ori-
gin of mathematics has remained with us to this day. In his high old
age, Bertrand Russell has been driven to avow: "I have wished to
know how the stars shine. I have tried to apprehend the Pytha-
gorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little
of this, but not much, I have achieved." The answers that he found,
very great answers, concern the nature of logical clarity, but not
of philosophy proper. The problem of number remains to perplex

Preface

Vlll

us, and from it all of metaphysics was born. As a historian, I went
on investigating the "gray origins" of science, far into its pre-Greek
beginnings, and how philosophy was born of it, to go on puzzling
us. [ condensed it into a small book, The Origins of Scientific
Thought. For both philosophy and science came from that foun-
tainhead; and it is clear that both were children of the same myth.1
In a number of studies, I continued to pursue it under the name of
"scientific rationalism"; and I tried to show that through all the
immense developments, the "Mirror of Being" is always the object
of true science, a metaphor which still attempts to reduce the
Many to the One. We now make many clear distinctions, and have
come to separate science from philosophy utterly, but what remains
at the core is still the old myth of eternal invariance, ever more
remotely and subtly articulated, and what lies beyond it is a multi-
tude of procedures and technologies, great enough to have changed
the face of the world and to have posed terrible questions. But they
have not answered a single philosophical question, which is what
myth once used to do.

If we come to think of it, we have been living in the age of
Astronomical Myth until yesterday. The careful and rigorous edi-
fice of Ptolemy's Almagest is only window dressing for Plato's
theology, disguised as elaborate science. The heavenly bodies are
moving in "cycle and epicycle, orb in orb" of a mysterious motion
according to the divine decree that circular motions ever more
intricate would account for the universe. And Newton himself,
once he had accounted for it, simply replaced the orbs with the
understandable force of gravitation, for which he "would feign no
hypotheses." The hand of God was still the true motive force;
God's will and God's own mathematics went on, another name for
Aristotle's Prime Mover. And shall we deny that Einstein's space-
time is nothing other than a pure pan-mathematical myth, openly
acknowledged at last as such?

I was at this point, lost between science and myth, when, on the
occasion of a meeting in Frankfurt in 1959,I met Dr. von Dechend,

1 The Pythagorean problem is at the core of my Origins, My efforts came even-
lually to fruition in my Prologue to Parmenides, 1964. (reprinted in Reflections
on Men and Ideas [1968], p. 80).

ix • Preface

one of the last pupils of the great Frobenius, whom I had.known;
and with her I recalled his favorite saying: "What the hell should I
care for my silly notions of yesterday?" We were friends from the
start. She was then Assistant to the Chair of the History of Science,
but she had pursued her lonely way into cultural ethnology, starting
in West Africa on the tracks of her "Chef," which were being
opened up again at the time by that splendid French ethnologist,
the late Marcel Griaule. She too had a sense that the essence of myth
should be sought somewhere in Plato rather than in psychology,
but as yet she had no clue.

By the time of our meeting she had shifted her attention to Poly-
nesia, and soon she hit pay dirt. As she looked into the archaeologi-
cal remains on many islands, a clue was given to her. The moment
of grace came when, on looking (on a map) at two little islands,
mere flyspecks on the waters of the Pacific, she found that a strange
accumulation of maraes or cult places could be explained only one
way: they, and only they, were both exactly sited on two neat
celestial coordinates: the Tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn.

Now let Dechend take over the narrative:

"To start from sheer opposition to ruling opinions is not likely to
lead to sensible insight, at least so we think. But anyhow, I did not
start from there, although there is no denying that my growing
wrath about the current interpretations (based upon discouraging
translations) was a helpful spur now and then. In fact, there was
nothing that could be called a 'start,' least of all the intention to
explore the astronomical nature of myth. To the contrary, on my
side, having come from ethnology to the history of science, there
existed 'in the beginning' only the firm decision never to become
involved in astronomical matters, under any condition. In order to
keep safely away from this frightening field, my subject of inquiry
was meant to be the mythical figure of the craftsman god, the
Demiurge in his many aspects (Hephaistos, Tvashtri, Wayland the
Smith, Goibniu, Ilmarinen, Ptah, Khnum, Kothar-wa-Hasis, Enki/
Ea, Tane, Viracocha, etc.). Not even a whiff of suspicion came
to me during the investigation of Mesopotamian myths—of all cul-
tures!—everything looked so very terrestrial, though slightly pe-
culiar. It was after having spent more than a year over at least

Preface • x

[0,000 pages of Polynesian myths—collected in the 19th century
(there are many more pages available than these)—that the anni-
hilating recognition of our complete ignorance came down upon me
like a sledge hammer: there was no single sentence that could be
understood. But then, if anybody was entitled to be taken seriously,
it had to be the Polynesians guiding their ships securely over the
largest ocean of our globe, navigators to whom our much praised
discoverers from Magellan to Captain Cook confided the steering
of their ships more than once. Thus, the fault had to rest with us,
not with Polynesian myth. Still, I did not then 'try astronomy for a
change'—there was a strict determination on my part to avoid this
field. I looked into the archaeological remains of the many islands,
and there a clue was given to me (to call it being struck by light-
ning would be more correct) which I duly followed up, and then
there was no salvation anymore: astronomy could not be escaped.
First it was still 'simple' geometry—the orbit of the sun, the Trop-
ics, the seasons—and the adventures of gods and heroes did not make
much more sense even then. Maybe one should count, for a change?
What could it mean, when a hero was on his way slightly more
than two years, 'returning' at intervals, 'falling into space,' coming
off the 'right' route? There remained, indeed, not many possible
solutions: it had to be planets (in the particular case of Aukele-nui-
a-iku, Mars). If so, planets had to be constitutive members of every
mythical personnel; the Polynesians did not invent this trait by
themselves."

This text of Professor von Dechend, in its intellectual freedom
and audacity, bears the stamp of her inheritance from the heroic
and innocent and cosmopolitan age of German science around the
eighteen-thirties. Its heroes, Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Woeh-
ler, were the objects of her work done before 1953. Another of
those virtues, scornful indignation, will come to the fore in the
appendices, which are so largely the product of her efforts.

Now I resume:

Years before, I had once looked at Dupuis' L'Origine de tons les
cultes, lost in the stacks of Widener Library, never again consulted.
It was a book in the 18th-century style, dated "An III de la Repu-

xi • Preface

blique." The title was enough to make one distrustful—one of those
"enthusiastic" titles which abounded in the 18th century and prom-
ised far too much. How could it explain the Egyptian system, I
thought, since hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered? (Atha-
nasius Kircher was later to show us how it was done out of Coptic
tradition.) I had dropped the forbidding tome, only jotting down
a sentence: "Le mythe est ne de la science; la science seule l'expli-
quera." I had the answer there, but I was not ready to understand.

This time I was able to grasp the idea at a glance, because I was
ready for it. Many, many years before, I had questioned myself, in
a note, about the meaning of fact in the crude empirical sense, as
applied to the ancients. It represents, I thought, not the intellectual
surprise, not the direct wonder and astonishment, but first of all an
immense, steady, minute attention to the seasons. What is a solstice
or an equinox? It stands for the capacity of coherence, deduction,
imaginative intention and reconstruction with which we could
hardly credit our forefathers. And yet there it was. I saw.

Mathematics was moving up to me from the depth of centuries;
not after myth, but before it. Not armed with Greek rigor, but with
the imagination of astrological power, with the understanding of
astronomy. Number gave the key. Way back in time, before writ-
ing was even invented, it was measures and counting that provided
the armature, the frame on which the rich texture of real myth was
to grow.

Thus we had returned to the true beginnings, in the Neolithic
Revolution. We agreed that revolution was essentially technologi-
cal. The earliest social scientist, Democritus of Abdera, put it in
one striking sentence: men's progress was the work not of the mind
but of the hand. His late successors have taken him too literally,
and concentrated on artifacts. They have been unaware of the
enormous intellectual effort involved, from metallurgy to the arts,
but especially in astronomy. The effort of sorting out and identify-
ing the only presences which totally eluded the action of our hands
led to those pure objects of contemplation, the stars in their courses.
The Greeks would not have misapprehended that effort: they
called astronomy the Royal Science. The effort at organizing the

Preface

xii

cosmos took shape from the supernal presences, those alone which
thought might put in control of reality, those from which all arts
look their meaning.

But nothing is so easy to ignore as something that does not yield
freely to understanding. Our science of the past flowered in the
fullness of time into philology and archaeology, as learned volumes
on ancient philosophy have continued to pour forth, to little avail.
A few masters of our own time have rediscovered these "prelit-
crate" accomplishments. Now Dupuis, Kircher and Boll are gone
like those archaic figures, and are equally forgotten. That is the de-
vouring way of time. The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her
poppies.

It is well known how many images of the gods have to do with
the making of fire, and an American engineer, J. D. McGuire, dis-
covered that also certain Egyptian images, until then unsuspected,
presented deities handling a fire drill. Simple enough: fire itself was
the link between what the gods did and what man could do. But
from there, the mind had once been able to move on to prodigious
feats of intellect. That world of the mind was fully worthy of those
Newtons and Einsteins long forgotten—those masters, as d'Alem-
bert put it, of whom we know nothing, and to whom we owe
everything.

We had the idea. It was simple and clear. But we realized that we
would run into formidable difficulties, both from the point of view
of modern, current scholarship and from the no less unfamiliar ap-
proach needed for method. I called it playfully, for short, "the
cat on the keyboard," for reasons that will appear presently. For
how can one catch time on the wing? And yet the flow of time,
the time of music, was of the essence, inescapable, baffling to the
systematic mind. I searched at length for an inductive way of pre-
sentation. It was like piling Pelion upon Ossa. And yet this "was the
least of our difficulties. For we also had to face a wall, a veritable
Berlin Wall, made of indifference, ignorance, and hostility. Hum-
boldt, that wise master, said it long ago: First, people will deny
a thing; then they will belittle it; then they will decide that it
had been known long ago. Could we embark upon an enormous

xiii • Preface

task of detailed scholarship on the basis of this more than dubious
prospect? But our own task was set: to rescue those intellects of
the past, distant and recent, from oblivion. "Thus saith the Lord
God: 'Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these
slain, that they may live.' " Such poor scattered bones, ossa vehe-
menter sicca, we had to revive.

This book reflects the gradually deepening conviction that, first
of all, respect is due these fathers of ours. The early chapters will
make, I think, for easy reading. Gradually, as we move above tim-
berline, the reader will find himself beset by difficulties which are
not of our making. They are the inherent difficulties of a science
which was fundamentally reserved, beyond our conception. Most
frustrating, we could not use our good old simple catenary logic,
in which principles come first and deduction follows. This was not
the way of the archaic thinkers. They thought rather in terms of
what we might call a fugue, in which all notes cannot be constrained
into a single melodic scale, in which one is plunged directly into the
midst of things and must follow the temporal order created by their
thoughts. It is, after all, in the nature of music that the notes cannot
all be played at once. The order and sequence, the very meaning, of
the composition will reveal themselves—with patience—in due time.
The reader, I suggest, will have to place himself in the ancient
"Order of Time."

Troilus expressed the same idea in a different image: "He that
will have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding."

Giorgio de Santillana

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Illustration from a postcard. Copyright 1962 by Verlag Karl Alber.
Reprinted by permission of Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau.

Figures 1 and 2 on page 21 in "Etudes sur la cosmologie des Dogon et
des Bambara du Soudan Franjais" by D. Zahan and S. de Ganay, Africa,

vol. 21, 1951, copyright 1951 by D. Zahan, S. de Ganay, and the Inter-
national African Institute. Reprinted by permission of the International
African Inst itute, London.

Figure 6 on page 21 in The Catta Marina of Olaus Magnus: Venice
1539 and Rome 1572 by Edward Lynam, Tall Tree Library Publication
12, 1941. Reprinted by permission of Tall Tree Library, Jenkintown, pa.

Illustrations on page 26 and facing page 48 in Gesammelte, Werke, vol.
8, by Johannes Kepler, cd. Franz Hammer, 1963. Reprinted by permis-
sion of C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich.

Illustration on page 179 in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, by Johannes
Kepler, ed. Max Caspar, 1938. Reprinted by permission of C. H. Beck'-
sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich.

Figures 63 and 64 on pages 44 and 45 in The Flammarion Book of As-
tronomy, ed. Camille Flammarion, Simon and Schuster, 1964. Copy-
right 1955 by Librairie Flammarion. Reprinted by permission of Flam-
marion Publishers, Paris.

Figure 177 on page 742 in "Primitive Methods of Drilling" by J. D.
McGuire, Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum, 1894. Re-
printed by permission of the Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington,
D.C.

Figures 724 and 970 on pages 663 and 748 in Gesammelte Abhandlungen,
vol. 4, by E. Seler, i960. Copyright 1960 by Akademische Druck- und
Verlagsanstalt. Reprinted by permission of Akademische Druck- und
Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

xv • Acknowledgments

Illustration on page 96 of the Codices Selecti Phototypice Impressi, vol.
8, ed. Dr. F. Anders, 1967. Copyright 1952 by Akademische Druck-
und Verlagsanstalt. Reprinted by permission of Akademische Druck-
und Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

Illustration on page 434 in L'Uranographie Chinoise by G. Schlegel,
1875. Reprinted by permission of Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.

Figure 104 on page 377 in Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3, by
J. Needham, 1959. Copyright 1959 by Cambridge University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press, New York.

Plate II facing page 22 in Die Geschichte der Sternkunde by E. Zinner,
1931. Reprinted by permission of Springer Verlag, Berlin.

Figures 36, 70, 71, and 75 on pages 91, 117, and 120 in Die Erscheinun-
gen am Sternenhimmel by H. v. Baravalle, 1962. Copyright 1962 by
Verlag Freies Geistesleben. Reprinted by permission of Verlag Freies
Geistesleben, Stuttgart.

Illustration on page 289 in The Dawn of Astronomy by J. N. Lockyer,
1894. Reprinted by permission of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Figure 15 on plate IV in Catalogue of Engraved Gems, Greek, Etruscan
and Roman by G. M. A. Richter, 1956. Reprinted by permission of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 31.11.14, New York.

Figure 70 on page 540 in "Animal Figures on Prehistoric Pottery from
Mimbres Valley, New Mexico" by J. W. Fewkes. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the American Anthropological Association from the American
Anthropologist, vol. 18, 1916, Washington, D.C.

Figures 1427 and 1444 on plates 107 and 109 in La Glyptique Mesopo-
tamienne Archaique by P. Amiet, 1961. Reprinted by permission of the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

Figures 7 and 9 on pages 66 and 69 in Anfange der Astronomie by B. L.
van der Waerden, 1965. Copyright 1965 by N. V. Erben P. Noordhoff's
Uitgcverszaak, renewed 1968 by Birkhauser Verlag. Reprinted by per-
mission of Birkhauser Verlag, Basel.

Acknowledgments

xvi

Figure 17 on page 99 in L'Arbre Cosmique dans la Pensee populaire et
dans la Vie quotidienne du Nord-Ouest Africain by Viviana Paques,
1964, Copyright 1965 by Institut d'Ethnologie. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Institut d'Ethnologie, Paris.

illustrations on pages 67 and 68 in "Ein zweites Goldland Salomos" by
by J. Dahse, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, vol. 43, 1911. Reprinted by per-
mission of Dr. Gunther Hartmann.

Drawing of the Precession of the Equinoxes by Stefan Fuchs. Reprinted
by permission of Stefan Fuchs, University of Frankfurt, Germany.

We are indebted to Mrs. Katharina Lommel, Staatliches Museum fur
Volkerkunde, Munchen, for obtaining most of the illustrations used in
our book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

i.    The Chronicler's Tale

ii.    The Figure in Finland

iii.    The Iranian Parallel

iv.    History, Myth and Reality

Intermezzo: A Guide for the Perplexed

v.    The Unfolding in India

vi.    Amlodhi's Quern

vii.    The Many-Colored Cover

vin.    Shamans and Smiths

ix.    Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

X.    The Twilight of the Gods

xi.    Samson Under Many Skies

xii.    Socrates' Last Tale

xiii.    Of Time and the Rivers

xiv.    The Whirlpool

xv.    The Waters from the Deep

xvi.    The Stone and the Tree

xvii.    The Frame of the Cosmos

xviii.    The Galaxy

xix.    The Fall of Phaethon

xx.    The Depths of the Sea

xxi.    The Great Pan Is Dead

xxii.    The Adventure and the Quest

xxiii.    Gilgamesh and Prometheus
Epilogue: The Lost Treasure

Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Vll

xiv
1

12

26

36

43

56

76

86

96

113

137

149

165

179

192

204

213

225

230

242

250

263

275

288

317

326

344
351
453

485

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations

FFC                         Folklore Fellows Communications

(Helsinki)

FUF                        Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen

GE                            Gilgamesh Epic

11 AOG                      A. Jeremias: Handbuch der Altorien-

talischen Geisteskultur

IIUCA                     Hebrew Union College Annual (Cin-

cinnati)
IAFE                        Internationales Archiv fur Ethnogra-

phie (Leiden)

JAOS                       Journal of the American Oriental So-

ciety

JCS                          Journal of Cuneiform Studies

JNES                     Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JRAS                     Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

JSA                        Journal de la Societe des Africanistes

LCL                       Loeb Classical Library

MAGW                  Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen

Gesellschaft Wien
MAR                      Mythology of All Races (Boston)

MBH.                    Mahabharata

MVAG                   Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen

Gesellschaft

OLZ                        Orientalistische Literaturzeitung

OR.                         Orientalia, New Series (Roma)

PB                          A. Deimel: Pantheon Babylonicum

RA                          Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie

Orientale
RC                          Revue Celtique

RE                          Realencyclopaedie der Klassischen

Altertumswissenschaften (ed. Pauly-
Wissowa)

RH. MUS.             Rheinisches Museum fur Philologie

RLA                       Reallexikon der Assyriologie

ROSCHER             Ausfiihrliches Lexikon der griechis-

chen und romischen Mythologie
RV                          Rigveda

SBAW                    Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Aka-

demie der Wissenschaften

SBF,                        Sacred Books of the East

XXIV

xxv • Abbreviations

SHAW
SOAW
SPAW

TM

WB. MYTH.

WZKM

ZA
ZDMG

ZFE
ZVV

Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger
Akademie der Wissenschaften
Sitzungsberichte der Oesterreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften
Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften
J. Grimm: Teutonic Mythology
Worterbuch der Mythologie

Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des

Morgenlandes

Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie und vor-

derasiatische Archaeologie

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgen-

landischen Gesellschaft

Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie

Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir Volkskunde

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Precession of the Equinoxes, shown in the order of

signs, with the dates marked on the left.                             endpaper

R. Eisler, The Royal Art of Astronomy, Herbert Joseph Ltd., London, 1946.

frontispiece

God creating the stars.

Courtesy Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau.

The Precession of the Equinoxes.

Courtesy Stefan Fuchs, University of Frankfurt.

"The internal motion of the cosmic tree," according to
North-West Africans.

Courtesy Institut d'Ethnologie, Paris.

The ways of the Demiurge during creation.

Courtesy International African Institute, London.

Mount Meru, the world mountain, rising from the sea.

A. Qruenwedel, Altbuddhistische Kultstaetten in Chinesisch Turkestan, D.
Reitner, Berlin,

between
60-61

The collapse of the hourglass-shaped Meru.

A. Gruenwedel, Altbuddhistische Kultstaetten in Chinesisch Turkestan, D.
Reimer, Berlin, 1912.

The Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus.

Courtesy Tall Tree Library, Jenkintoivn, Pa.

The whirlpool, here called "Norvegianus Vortex."

Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, 1665.

The subterranean flow of rivers.
Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, 1665.

How Kronos continually gives to Zeus "all the measures of
the whole creation."

Courtesy C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich.

between
90-91

between
I34~I35

Illustrations

xx

The Precession of the Poles.

Courtesy Flammarion Publishers, Paris.

Horus and Seth in the act of drilling or churning.

Egyptian Mythology, The Hamlyn Group, Middlesex,

. between
142-143

between
162-163

The "incomparably mighty churn" of the Sea of Milk.
A. B. Keith, Indian Mythology, MAR 6, 1917.

The simplified version of the Amritamanthana.
Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

The Maya Codex Tro-Cortesianus presents the same event.
Courtesy Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

The Mesopotamian constellation of Bow and Arrow.               between

Courtesy Birkhduser Verlag, Basel.

The Chinese constellation of Bow and Arrow.

Courtesy Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.

The star maps for the celestial globe.

Courtesy Cambridge University Press, New York.

Drawing the bow at Sirius, the celestial jackal.
J. C. Ferguson, Chinese Mythology, MAR 8, 1917.

The so-called "Round Zodiac" of Dendera.

Courtesy Springer Verlag, Berlin.

The Polyhedra inscribed into the planetary orbits.
Courtesy C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich.

A detailed illustration of the motions of the Trigon of Great

between

222-223

between
268-269

Conjunctions.
Courtesy C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich.

"The shepherd is shown on the left sighting first the pole star." between

R. Eisler, The Royal Art of Astronomy, Herbert Joseph Ltd., London,           

1946.                 .                                   

xxi • Illustrations

The Chinese picture illustrates the surveying of the universe.

Sir Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1928.

A terra-cotta mask of Humbaba/Huwawa.                                between

290—291

S. Langdon, Semitic Mythology, MAR 5, 1931.

Tlaloc, the so-called "rain-god" of Mexico.

Courtesy Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

The movements of the planets Mercury and Saturn.

Courtesy Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart.

The Egyptian goddess Serqet, or Selket.

Courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge.

A green jasper scarab of Greco-Phoenician origin shows the
Scorpion lady.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 31.11.14, New York

The Scorpion goddess in the Maya Codex Tro-Cortesianus.

Courtesy Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

The Mesopotamian cylinder seal shows in the upper part the

"God Boat."                                                                        between

Courtesy Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

The "God Boat" surrounded by the crescent moon, three
single stars, and constellations.

Courtesy Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

The "God Boat" in the Maya Codex Tro-Cortesianus.

Courtesy Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz.

The "God Boat" on the Arabian celestial globe made by Tabari.

P. Casanova, Bulletin of the Institut Frangais d'Archeologie Orientale 2,
Editions A. & J. Picard et Cie., Paris, 1902.

The Pegasus-square, called "I-Iku," with the circumjacent

constellations.                                                                      between

Courtesy Birkhauscr Verlag, Basel.

Illustrations • xxii

The same Babylonian constellation, according to A. Ungnad.
A. Ungnad, Das wiedergefundene Paradies, 1923.

The same square in the round and rectangular zodiacs of Dendera.
A. Ungnad, Das wiedergefundene Paradies, 1923.

A calabash from the Guinea Coast, Africa.

Courtesy Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Muenster/Westfalen.

Another calabash from the Guinea Coast.

Courtesy "Leitschrift fur Ethnologie, Muenster/Westfalen.

The zodiacal Pisces, as drawn by the Toba Batak of Sumatra.

A. Maass, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 64, 66,
1924-26.

A New World picture, described as "composite animal."

Courtesy American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C.

Introduction

The unbreakable fetters which
bound down the Great Wolf
Fenrir had been cunningly
forged by Loki from these: the
footfall of a cat, the roots of a
rock, the beard of a woman, the
breath of a fish, the spittle of a
bird.

The Edda

Toute vue des choses qui n'est
pas etrange est fausse.

Valery

This is meant to be only an essay. It is a first reconnaissance of a
realm well-nigh unexplored and uncharted. From whichever way
one enters it, one is caught in the same bewildering circular com-
plexity, as in a labyrinth, for it has no deductive order in the
abstract sense, but instead resembles an organism tightly closed in
itself, or even better, a monumental "Art of the Fugue."

The figure of Hamlet as a favorable starting point came by
chance. Many other avenues offered themselves, rich in strange
symbols and beckoning with great images, but the choice went to
Hamlet because he led the mind on a truly inductive quest through
a familiar landscape—and one which has the merit of its literary
setting. Here is a character deeply present to our awareness, in
whom ambiguities and uncertainties, tormented self-questioning and
dispassionate insight give a presentiment of the modern mind. His
personal drama was that he had to be a hero, but still try to avoid
the role Destiny assigned him. His lucid intellect remained above
the conflict of motives—in other words, his was and is a truly con-

Hamlet's Mill • 2

temporary consciousness. And yet this character whom the poet
made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual, concealed a past as
a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by long-
standing myth. There was a numinous aura around him, and many
clues led up to him. But it was a surprise to find behind the mask
an ancient and all-embracing cosmic power—the original master of
the dreamed-of first age of the world.

Yet in all his guises he remained strangely himself. The original
Amlodhi,* as his name was in Icelandic legend, shows the same
characteristics of melancholy and high intellect. He, too, is a son
dedicated to avenge his father, a speaker of cryptic but inescapable
truths, an elusive carrier of Fate who must yield once his mission is
accomplished and sink once more into concealment in the depths of
time to which he belongs: Lord of the Golden Age, the Once and
Future King.

This essay will follow the figure farther and farther afield, from
the Northland to Rome, from there to Finland, Iran, and India;
he will appear again unmistakably in Polynesian legend. Many
other Dominations and Powers will materialize to frame him
within the proper order.

Amlodhi was identified, in the crude and vivid imagery of the
Norse, by the ownership of a fabled mill which, in his own time,
ground out peace and plenty. Later, in decaying times, it ground
out salt; and now finally, having landed at the bottom of the sea, it
is grinding rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Mael-
strom (i.e., the grinding stream, from the verb mala, "to grind"),
which is supposed to be a way to the land of the dead. This imagery
stands, as the evidence develops, for an astronomical process, the
secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which
determines world-ages, each numbering thousands of years. Each
age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures
collapse; pillars topple "which supported the great fabric; floods and
cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world.

The image of the mill and its owner yielded elsewhere to more

* The indulgence of specialist's is asked for the form of certain transliterations
throughout the text; for example, Amlodhi instead of Amlodi, Grotte instead of
Grotti, etc. (Ed.)

3

Introduction

sophisticated ones, more adherent to celestial events. In Plato's pow-
erful mind, the figure stood out as the Craftsman God, the Demi-
urge, who shaped the heavens; but even Plato did not escape the
idea he had inherited, of catastrophes and the periodic rebuilding
of the world.

Tradition will show that the measures of a new world had to be
procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the
measures from above, dictated by the "Seven Sages," as they are
often cryptically mentioned in India and elsewhere. They turn out
to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmo-
logical alignments on the starry sphere. These dominant stars of the
Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which
are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the
planets as they move in different placements and configurations
along the zodiac. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their conventional
language, called the two Bears the Hands of Rhea (the Lady of
Turning Heaven), and called the planets the Hounds of Per-
sephone, Queen of the Underworld. Far away to the south, the
mysterious ship Argo with its Pilot star held the depths of the past;
and the Galaxy was the Bridge out of Time. These notions appear
to have been common doctrine in the age before history—all over
the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to
have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolu-
tion of the late Neolithic period.

The intensity and richness, the coincidence of details, in this
cumulative thought have led to the conclusion that it all had its
origin in the Near East. It is evident that this indicates a diffusion
of ideas to an extent hardly countenanced by current anthropology.
But this science, although it has dug up a marvelous wealth of de-
tails, has been led by its modern evolutionary and psychological
bent to forget about the main source of myth, which was astronomy
—the Royal Science. This obliviousness is itself a recent turn of
events—barely a century old. Today expert philologists tell us that
Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or at-
mospheric, superimposed on the planets at a "late" period; they
neatly sort out folk origins and "late" derivations, all unaware that
planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed

Hamlet's Mill • 4

in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic
times. If a scholar has never known those periods even from elemen-
tary science, he is not in the best position to recognize them when
they come up in his material.

Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told
that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was
proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even
if popular fantasy had later obscured this truth. Little as he believed
in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He
could not guess that W. D. Ross, his modern editor, would conde-
SCendingly annotate: "This is historically untrue." Yet we know
that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednes-
day and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old
as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Har-
ranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology.
The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lep-
sius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher
and Petavius, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would
have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but
interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthro-
pology, which has built up its own idea of the "primitive" and what

came after.

One still reads in that most unscientific of records, the Bible, that
God disposed all things by number, weight and measure; ancient
Chinese texts say that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such
a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." People read
it, and think nothing of it. Yet such hints might reveal a world of
vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from
ours. But 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.

In 1959 I wrote:

The dust of centuries had settled upon the remains of this great
world-wide archaic construction when the Greeks came upon the
scene.Yet something of it survived in traditional rites, in myths and
fairy tales no longer understood. Taken verbally, it matured the

5 • Introduction

bloody cults intended to procure fertility, Based on the belief in a
dark universal force of an ambivalent nature, which seems now to
monopolize our interest. Yet its original themes could flash out again,
preserved almost intact, in the later thought of the Pythagoreans and
of Plato.

But they are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one
think of those "mist landscapes" of which Chinese painters are mas-
ters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and
leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded,
when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the
thought of those remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its
symbols.

Their words are no more heard again
Through lapse of many ages ...

We think we have now broken part of that code. The thought
behind these constructions of the high and far-off times is also lofty,
even if its forms are strange. The theory about "how the world
began" seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind
of cosmogonic "original sin" whereby the circle of the ecliptic
(with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the
equator, and the cycles of change came into being.

This is not to suggest that this archaic cosmology will show any
great physical discoveries, although it required prodigious feats of
concentration and computing. What it did was to mark out the
unity of the universe, and of man's mind, reaching out to its farthest
limits. Truly, man is doing the same today.

Einstein said: "What is inconceivable about the universe, is that
it should be at all conceivable." Man is not giving up. When he
discovers remote galaxies by the million, and then those quasi-stellar
radio sources billions of light-years away which confound his specu-
lation, he is happy that he can reach out to those depths. But he
pays a terrible price for his achievement. The science of astro-
physics reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its
footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses
himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself
into the concepts of today's astrophysics short of schizophrenia.
Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however,
kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos

Hamlet's Mill • 6

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.

Not a forgiving universe, not a world of mercy. That surely not.
Inexorable as the stars in their courses, miserationis parcissimae, the
Romans used to say. Yet it was a world somehow not unmindful of
man, one in which there was an accepted place for everything,
rightfully and not only statistically, where no sparrow could fall
unnoted, and where even what was rejected through its own error
would not go down to eternal perdition; for the order of Number
and Time was a total order preserving all, of which all were mem-
bers, gods and men and animals, trees and crystals and even absurd
errant stars, all subject to law and measure.

This is what Plato knew, who could still speak the language of
archaic myth. He made myth consonant with his thought, as he
built the first modern philosophy. We have trusted his clues as
landmarks even on occasions when he professes to speak "not quite
seriously." He gave us a first rule of thumb; he knew what he was
talking about.

Behind Plato there stands the imposing body of doctrine attrib-
uted to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, but rich with
the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregnant with a sci-
ence and a metaphysics that were to flower in Plato's time. From it
come such words as "theorem," "theory," and "philosophy." This
in its turn rests on what might be called a proto-Pythagorean phase,
spread all over the East but with a focus in Susa. And then there
was something else again, the stark numerical computing of Baby-
lon. From it all came that strange principle: "Things are numbers."
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 under-
stood. For there are seeds which propagate themselves along the
jetstream of time.

Introduction

And universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm de-
sign. When something found, say, in China turns up also in Baby-
lonian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant, for
it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could
claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation.

Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may
be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse
places. But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow
pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and
their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel
we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by
internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the
medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before
Columbus, and is linked in both places with certain attributes like
the color red, it can hardly be a coincidence. Generally, there is
little that finds its way into music by chance.

Again, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 X 13, reappearing
under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in
Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Val-
halla, it is not accident.

There is one way of checking signals thus scattered in early data,
in lore, fables and sacred texts. What we have used for sources may
seem strange and disparate, but the sifting was considered, and it
had its reasons. Those reasons will be given later in the chapter
on method. I might call it comparative morphology. The reservoir
of myth and fable is great, but there are morphological "markers"
for what is not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally.
There is also wonderfully preserved archaic material in "secondary"
primitives, like American Indians and West Africans. Then there
are courtly stories and annals of dynasties which look like novels:
the Feng Shen Yen I, the Japanese Nihongi, the Hawaiian Kumu-
lipo. These are not merely fantasy-ridden fables.
In hard and perilous ages, what information should a well-born
man entrust to his eldest son? Lines of descent surely, but what else?
The memory of an ancient nobility is the means of preserving the

Hamlet's Mill

8

arcana imperil, the arcana legis and the arcana mundi, just as it was
in ancient Rome. This is the wisdom of a ruling class. The Poly-
nesian chants taught in the severely rest restricted Whare-wananga were
mostly astronomy. That is what a liberal education meant then.

Sacred texts are another great source. In our age of print one is
tempted to dismiss these as religious excursions into homiletics, but
originally they represented a great concentration of attention on
material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long pe-
riod of time and which was considered worthy of being committed
to memory generation after generation. The tradition of Celtic
Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore
which "was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated
games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand
which became the alphabet.

As we follow the clues—stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms,
verse, music, structures—a huge framework of connections re-
vealed 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 edifice, 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 re-disposed 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 that
provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the
octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals,
to actual weights and sizes. What modern man attempted in the
merely conventional metric system has archaic precedents of great
complexity. Down the centuries there comes an echo of Al-Biruni's
wondering a thousand years ago, when that prince of scientists dis-
covered that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated
aspects and events by means of stars—and were not able to show
him any one star that he asked for. Stars had become items for them,
as they were to become again for Leverrier and Adams, who never
troubled to look at Neptune in their life although they had com-
puted and discovered it in 1847. The Mayas and the Aztecs in their

9 • Introduction

unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes. The con-
nections were what counted. Ultimately so it was in the archaic
universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other,
inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly. And Number ,
dominated them all (appendix # 1).

This ancient world moves a little closer if one recalls two great
transitional figures who were simultaneously archaic and modern in
their habits of thought. The first is Johannes Kepler, who was of
the old order in his unremitting calculations and his passionate de-
votion to the dream of rediscovering the "Harmony of the Spheres."
But he was a man of his own time, and also of ours, when this dream
began to prefigure the polyphony that led up to Bach. In somewhat
the same way, our strictly scientific world view has its counterpart
in what John Hollander, the historian of music, has described as
"The Untuning of the Sky." The second transitional figure is no
less a man than Sir Isaac Newton, the very inceptor of the rigor-
ously scientific view. There is no real paradox in mentioning New-
ton in this connection. John Maynard Keynes, who knew Newton
as well as many of our time, said of him:

Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the
magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great
mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the
same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world rather
less than 10,000 years ago .. . Why do I call him a magician? Because
he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a
secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evi-
dence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to
allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brother-
hood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the
evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that
is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural
philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed
down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original
cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a crypto-
gram set by the Almighty—just as he himself wrapt the discovery of
the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz.
By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed,
would be revealed to the initiate.1

1 "Newton the Man," in The Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (1947), p. 29.

Hamlet's Mill

10

Lord Keynes' appraisal, written ca. 1942, remains both uncon-
ventional and profound. He knew, we all know, that Newton
failed. Newton was led astray by his dour sectarian preconceptions.
But his undertaking was truly in the archaic spirit, as it begins to
appear now after two centuries of scholarly search into many cul-
tures of which he could have had no idea. To the few clues he
found with rigorous method, a vast number have been added. Still,
the wonder remains, the same that was expressed by his great
predecessor Galileo:

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must
have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret
thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time
or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those
who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand
yean? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement
of two dozen Little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the
admirable inventions of man.

Way back in the 6th century a.d., Gregoire de Tours was writ-
ing: "The mind has lost its cutting edge, we hardly understand the
Ancients." So much more today, despite our wallowing in mathe-
matics for the million and in sophisticated technology.

It is undeniable that, notwithstanding our Classics Departments'
labors, the wilting away of classical studies, the abandonment of
any living familiarity with Greek and Latin has cut the ompha-
loessa, the umbilical cord which connected our culture—at least at
its top level—with Greece, in the same manner in which men of the
Pythagorean and Orphic tradition were tied up through Plato and
a few others with the most ancient Near East. It is beginning to
appear that this destruction is leading into a very up-to-date Middle
Ages, much worse than the first. People will sneer: "Stop the
World, I want to get off." It cannot be changed, however; this is
the way it goes when someone or other tampers with the reserved
knowledge that science is, and was meant to represent.

But, as Goethe said at the very onset of the Progressive Age,
"Noch ist es Tag, da ruhre sich der Mann! Die Nacht tritt ein,
wo nicmand wirken kann." ("It is still day, let men get up and

11

Introduction

going—the night creeps in, when there is nothing doing.") There
light come once more some kind of "Renaissance" out of the
hopelessly condemned and trampled past, when certain ideas come
to life again, and we should not deprive our grandchildren of a last
chance at the heritage of the highest and farthest-off times. And if,
as looks infinitely probable, even that last chance is passed up in
the turmoil of progress, why then one can still think with Poli-
ziano, who was himself a master humanist, that there will be men
whose minds find a refuge in poetry and art and the holy tradition
"which alone make men free from death and turn them to eternity,
so long as the stars will go on, still shining over a world made for-
ever silent." Right now, there is still left some daylight in which to
undertake this first quick reconnaissance. It will necessarily leave
out great and significant areas of material, but even so, it will in-
vestigate many unexpected byways and crannies of the past.

Chapter I

The Chronicler's Tale

. . . you of changeful counsel,
undefiled Titan of exceeding
strength, you who consume all
and increase it again, you who
hold the indestructible bond by
the unlimited order of the Aeon,
wily-minded, originator of gen-
eration, you of crooked coun-
sel ...

From the Orphic Hymns

The proper gate through which to enter the realm of pre-
Shakespearean Hamlet is the artless account given by Saxo Gram-
maticus (c. 1150-c. 1216) in books III and IV of his Gesta Dano-
rum. What follows is the relevant part of book III in Elton's
translation, only slightly shortened.

The story begins with the feats of Orvendel, Amlethus' father-
especially his victory over King Koll of Norway—which drove
Orvendel's brother Fengo, "stung with jealousy," to murder him
(appendix #2). "Then he took the wife of the brother he had
butchered, capping unnatural murder with incest." (So Saxo
qualifies it.)

Amleth beheld all this, but feared lest too shrewd a behaviour
might make his uncle suspect him. So he chose to feign dullness, and
pretend an utter lack of wits. This cunning course not only con-
cealed his intelligence, but ensured his safety. Every day he remained
in his mother's house utterly listless and unclean, flinging himself on
the ground and bespattering his person with foul and filthy dirt. His

13 • The Chronicler''s Tale

discoloured face and visage smutched with slime denoted foolish and
grotesque madness. All he said was of a piece with these follies; all
he did savoured of utter lethargy . . .

He used at times to sit over the fire, and, raking up the embers with
his hands, to fashion wooden crooks, and harden them in the fire,
shaping at their tips certain barbs, to make them hold more tightly
to their fastenings. When asked what he was about, he said that he
was preparing sharp javelins to avenge his father. This answer was
not a little scoffed at, all men deriding his idle and ridiculous pursuit;
but the thing helped his purpose afterwards. Now it was his craft in
this matter that first awakened in the deeper observers a suspicion of
his cunning. For his skill in a trifling art betokened the hidden talent
of a craftsman . . . Lastly, he always watched with the most punctual
care over his pile of stakes that he had pointed in the fire. Some
people, therefore, declared that his mind was quick enough, and fan-
cied that he only played the simpleton . . . His wiliness (said these)
would be most readily detected, if a fair woman were put in his way
in some secluded place, who should provoke his mind to the tempta-
tions of love . . . , if his lethargy were feigned, he would seize the
opportunity, and yield straightway to violent delights.

So men were commissioned to draw the young man in his rides into
a remote part of the forest, and there assail him with a temptation of
this nature. Among these chanced to be a foster-brother of Amleth,
who had not ceased to have regard to their common nurture . . . He
attended Amleth among his appointed train . . . and was persuaded
that he would suffer the worst if he showed the slightest glimpse of
sound reason, and above all if he did the act of love openly. This was
also plain enough to Amleth himself. For when he was bidden mount
his horse, he deliberately set himself in such a fashion that he turned
his back to the neck and faced about, fronting the tail; which he pro-
ceeded to encompass with the reins, just as if on that side he would
check the horse in its furious pace . . . The reinless steed galloping
on, with the rider directing its tail, was ludicrous enough to behold.

Amleth went on, and a wolf crossed his path amid the thicket; when
his companions told him that a young colt had met him, he retorted
that in Fengo's stud there were too few of that kind fighting. This
was a gentle but witty fashion of invoking a curse upon his uncle's
riches. When they averred that he had given a cunning answer, he
answered that he had spoken deliberately: for he was loth to be
thought prone to lying about any matter, and wished to be held a
stranger to falsehood; and accordingly he mingled craft and candour
in such wise that, though his words did lack truth, yet there was
nothing to betoken the truth and betray how far his keenness went.

Hamlet's Mill • 14

Again, as he passed along the beach, his companions found the rud-
der1 of a ship which had been wrecked, and said they had discov-
ered a huge knife. "This," said he, "was the right thing to carve such
a huge ham"; by which he really meant the sea, to whose infinitude,
he thought, this enormous rudder matched.

Also, as they passed the sandhills, and bade him look at the meal,
meaning the sand, he replied that it had been ground small by the
hoary tempests of the ocean. His companions praising his answer, he
said that he had spoken wittingly. Then they purposely left him, that
he might pluck up more courage to practice wantonness.
The woman whom his uncle had dispatched met him in a dark spot,
as though she had crossed him by chance; and he took her and would
have ravished her, had not his foster-brother, by a secret device, given
him an inkling of the trap . . . Alarmed, and fain to possess his desire
in greater safety, he caught up the woman in his arms and dragged
her off to a distant and impenetrable fen. Moreover, when they had
lain together, he conjured her earnestly to disclose the matter to none,
and the promise of silence was accorded as heartily as it was asked.
For both of them had been under the same fostering in their child-
hood; and this early rearing in common had brought Amleth and the
girl into great intimacy.

So, when he had returned home, they all jeeringly asked him whether
he had given way to love, and he avowed that he had ravished the
maid. When he was next asked where he did it, and what had been
his pillow, he said that he had rested upon the hoof of a beast of
burden, upon a cockscomb, and also upon a ceiling. For, when he was
starting into temptation, he had gathered fragments of all these things,
in order to avoid lying . . .

The maiden, too, when questioned on the matter, declared that he
had done no such thing; and her denial was the more readily credited
when it was found that the escort had not witnessed the deed.
But a friend of Fengo, gifted more with assurance than judgment,
declared that the unfathomable cunning of such a mind could not be
detected by a vulgar plot, for the man's obstinacy was so great that
it ought not to be assailed with any mild measures . . . Accordingly,
said he, his own prof ounder acuteness had hit on a more delicate way,
which was well fitted to be put in practice, and would effectually
discover what they desired to know. Fengo was purposely to absent
himself, pretending affairs of great import. Amleth should be closeted
alone with his mother in her chamber; but a man should first be com-
missioned to place himself in a concealed part of the room and listen
heedfully to what they talked about . . . The speaker, loth to seem

1Saxo, however, wrote gubernaculum, i.e., steering oar (5.6.10; Gesta Danorum,
C. Knabe and P. Herrmann, eds. [1931], p. 79).

15 • The Chronicler's Tale

readier to devise than to carry out the plot, zealously proffered him-
self as the agent of the eavesdropping. Fengo rejoiced of the scheme,
and departed on pretence of a long journey. Now he who had given
this counsel repaired privily to the room where Amleth was shut up
with his mother, and lay down skulking in the straw. But Amleth had
his antidote for the treachery.

Afraid of being overheard by some eavesdropper, he at first resorted
to his usual imbecile ways, and crowed like a noisy cock, beating his
arms together to mimic the flapping of wings. Then he mounted
the straw and began to swing his body and jump again and again,
wishing to try if aught lurked there in hiding. Feeling a lump beneath
his feet, he drove his sword into the spot, and impaled him who lay
hid. Then he dragged him from his concealment and slew him. Then,
cutting his body into morsels, he seethed it in boiling water, and
flung it through the mouth of an open sewer for the swine to eat,
bestrewing the stinking mire with his hapless limbs. Having in this
wise eluded the snare, he went back to the room. Then his mother
set up a great wailing and began to lament her son's folly to his face
but he said: "Most infamous of women! dost thou seek with such
lying lamentations to hide thy most heavy guilt? Wantoning like a
harlot, thou hast entered a wicked and abominable state of wedlock,
embracing with incestuous bosom thy husband's slayer . . ." With
such reproaches he rent the heart of his mother and redeemed her to
walk in the ways of virtue.

When Fengo returned, nowhere could he find the man who had sug-
gested the treacherous espial. . . Amleth, among others, was asked in
jest if he had come on any trace of him, and replied that the man had
gone to the sewer, but had fallen through its bottom and been stifled
by the floods of filth, and that he had then been devoured by the
swine that came up all about that place. This speech was flouted by
those who heard; for it seemed senseless, though really it expressly
avowed the truth.

Fengo now suspected that his stepson was certainly full of guile, and
desired to make away with him, but durst not do the deed for fear of

the displeasure, not only of Amleth's grandsire Rorik, but also of his
own wife. So he thought that the King of Britain should be employed

to slay him, so that another could do the deed, and he be able to feign
innocence . . .

Amleth, on departing, gave secret orders to his mother to hang the
lull with knotted tapestry, and to perform pretended obsequies for
him a year from thence; promising that he would then return.

two retainers of Fengo then accompanied him, bearing a letter
graven in wood . . . ; this letter enjoined the King of the Britons to

Hamlet's Mill • 16

put to death the youth who was sent over to him. While they were
reposing, Amleth searched their coffers, found the letter, and read
the instructions therein. Whereupon he erased all the writing on the
surface, substituted fresh characters, and so, changing the purport of
the instructions, shifted his own doom upon his companions. Nor was
he satisfied with removing from himself the sentence of death and
passing the peril on to others, but added an entreaty that the King of
Britain would grant his daughter in marriage to a youth of great
judgment whom he was sending to him. Under this was falsely marked
the signature of Fengo.

Now when they had reached Britain, the envoys went to the king and
proffered him the letter which they supposed was an implement of
destruction to another, but which really betokened death to them-
selves. The king dissembled the truth, and entreated them hospitably
and kindly. Then Amleth scouted all the splendour of the royal ban-
quet like vulgar viands, and abstaining very strangely, rejected that
plenteous feast, refraining from the drink even as from the banquet.
All marvelled that a youth and a foreigner should disdain the care-
fully cooked dainties of the royal board and the luxurious banquet
provided, as if it were some peasant's relish. So, when the, revel broke
up, and the king was dismissing his friends to rest, he had a man sent
into the sleeping room to listen secretly, in order that he might hear
the midnight conversation of his guests. Now, when Amleth's com-
panions asked him why he had refrained from the feast of yestereve,
as if it were poison, he answered that the bread was flecked with
blood and tainted; that there was a tang of iron in the liquor; while
the meats of the feast reeked the stench of a human carcase, and were
infected by a kind of smack of the odour of the charnel. He further
said that the king had the eyes of a slave, and that the queen had in
three ways shown the behaviour of a bondmaid. Thus he reviled with
insulting invective not so much the feast as its givers. And presently
his companions, taunting him with his old defect of wits, began to
flout him with many saucy jeers . . .

All this the king heard from his retainer; and declared that he who
could say such things had either more than mortal wisdom or more
than mortal folly . . . Then he summoned his steward and asked him
whence he had procured the bread . . . The king asked where the
corn had grown of which it was made, and whether any sign was to
be found there of human carnage? The other answered, that not far
off was a field, covered with the ancient bones of slaughtered men,
and still bearing plainly all the signs of ancient carnage . . . The
king . . . took the pains to learn also what had been the source of the
lard. The other declared that his hogs had, through negligence,
strayed from keeping, and battened on the rotten carcase of a robber,

17 The Chronicler's Tale

and that perchance their pork had thus come to have something of a
corrupt smack. The king, finding that Amleth's judgment was right
in this thing also, asked of what liquor the steward had mixed the
drink? Hearing that it had been brewed of water and meal, he had
the spot of the spring pointed out to him, and set to digging deep
down; and there he found rusted away, several swords, the tang
whereof it was thought had tainted the waters. Others relate that
Amleth blamed the drink because, while quaffing it, he had detected
some bees that had fed in the paunch of a dead man; and that the
taint, which had formerly been imparted to the combs, had reap-
peared in the taste. The king . . . had a secret interview with his
mother, and asked her who his father had really been. She said she
had submitted to no man but the king. But when he threatened that
he would have the truth out of her by a trial, he was told that he was
the offspring of a slave . . . Abashed as he was with shame for his low
estate, he was so ravished with the young man's cleverness that he
asked him why he had aspersed the queen with the reproach that she
had demeaned herself like a slave? But while resenting that the court-
liness of his wife had been accused in the midnight gossip of a guest,
he found that her mother had been a bondmaid . . .

Then the king adored the wisdom of Amleth as though it were in-
spired, and gave him his daughter to wife; accepting his bare word
as though it were a witness from the skies.

Moreover, in order to fulfill the bidding of his friend, he hanged
Amleth's companions on the morrow. Amleth, feigning offence,
treated this piece of kindness as a grievance, and received from the
king, as compensation, some gold which he afterwards melted in the
fire, and secretly caused to be poured into some hollowed sticks.

When he had passed a whole year with the king he obtained leave to
make a journey, and returned to his own land, carrying away of all
his princely wealth and state only the sticks which held the gold. On
reaching Jutland, he exchanged his present attire for his ancient
demeanour, which he had adopted for righteous ends . . .

Covered with filth, he entered the banquet-room where his own
obsequies were being held, and struck all men utterly aghast, rumour
having falsely noised abroad his death. At last terror melted into
mirth, and the guests jeered and taunted one another, that he, whose
last rites they were celebrating as though he were dead, should ap-
pear in the flesh. When he was asked concerning his comrades, he
pointed to the sticks he was carrying, and said, "Here is both the one
and the other." This he observed with equal truth and pleasantry . . .
for it pointed at the weregild of the slain as though it were them-
selves.

Hamlet's Mill

18

Thereon, wishing to bring the company into a gayer mood, he joined
the cupbearers, and diligently did the office of plying the drink.
Then, to prevent his loose dress hampering his walk, he girded his
sword upon his side, and purposely drawing it several times, pricked
his fingers with its point. The bystanders accordingly had both sword
and scabbard riveted across with an iron nail. Then, to smooth the
way more safely to his plot, he went to the lords and plied them
heavily with draught upon draught, and drenched them all so deep
in wine, that their feet were made feeble with drunkenness, and they
turned to rest within the palace, making their bed where they had
revelled . . .

So he took out of his bosom the stakes he had long ago prepared, and
went into the building, where the ground lay covered with the bodies
of the nobles wheezing off their sleep and their debauch. Then, cut-
ling away its Supports, he brought down the hanging his mother had
knitted, which covered the inner as well as the outer walls of the hall.
This he flung upon the snorers, and then applying the crooked stakes,
he knotted and bound them in such insoluble intricacy, that not one
of the men beneath, however hard he might struggle, could contrive
to rise. After this he set fire to the palace. The flames spread, scatter-
ing the conflagration far and wide. It enveloped the whole dwelling,
destroyed the palace, and burnt them all while they were either
buried in deep sleep or vainly striving to arise.

Then he went to the chamber of Fengo, who had before this been
conducted by his train into his pavilion; plucked up a sword that
chanced to be hanging to the bed, and planted his own in its place.
Then, awakening his uncle, he told him that his nobles were perishing
in the flames, and that Amleth was here, armed with his old crooks
to help him, and thirsting to exact the vengeance, now long overdue,
for his father's murder. Fengo, on hearing this, leapt from his couch,
but was cut down while, deprived of his own sword, he strove in
vain to draw the strange one . . . O valiant Amleth, and worthy of
immortal fame, who being shrewdly armed with a feint of folly,
covered a wisdom too high for human wit under a marvellous dis-
guise of silliness! and not only found in his subtlety means to protect
his own safety, but also by its guidance found opportunity to avenge
his father. By this skillful defence of himself, and strenuous revenge
for his parent, he has left it doubtful whether we are to think more
of his wit or his bravery.

It is a far cry from Saxo's tale and its uncouth setting to the
Renaissance refinements of Shakespeare. This is nowhere more ob-
vious than in the scene in the Queen's hall, with its heaped straw

19 . The Chronicler's Tale

on the floor, its simmering caldrons, its open sewer, and the crude
manner of disposing of "Polonius," all befitting the rude Middle
Ages. The whole sad, somber story of the lonely orphan prince is
turned by Saxo into a Narrenspiel, yet a strong tradition permeates
the artless narrative. Hamlet is the avenging power whose superior
intellect confounds evildoers, but his intellect also brings light and
strength to the helpless and ill-begotten who are made to recognize
their misery. There is nothing pleasant in the revelation brought
home to the English king, yet he humbles himself before the ruth-
less insight and "adores" Hamlet's wisdom as "though it were in-
spired." More clearly than in Shakespeare, Hamlet is the ambivalent
power dispensing good and evil. It is clear also that certain episodes,
like the exchange of swords with Fengo, are crude and pointless
devices going counter to the heroic theme. These are set dramati-
cally right only when handled by Shakespeare, but they seem to
indicate an original rigid pattern based on the Ruse of Reason, as
Hegel would say. Evil is never attacked frontally, even when con-
vention would require it. It is made to defeat itself. Hamlet must
not be conceived as a heroic misfit, but as a distributor of justice.
Shakespeare has focused exactly right. He has avoided restoring the
brutal, heroic element required by the saga, and made the drama
instead wholly one of the mind. In the light of a higher clarity, who
can 'scape whipping?

It would be pointless to compare all over again the several ver-
sions of the Hamlet scheme in the north and west of Europe, and
in ancient Rome. This has been done very effectually.2 Thus, it
is possible to rely on the "identity" of the shadowy Icelandic
Amlodhi (in a so-called fairy tale his name is Brjam), who is first
mentioned in the 10th century, and appears anew in Iceland as a

Danish reimport in the "Ambales Saga," written in the 16th or 17th
Century. Parallels to Amlethus' behavior and career have been found

' Besides F. Y. Powell's introduction and appendix to Elton's translation of Saxo
Grammaticus' The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus
(1894), already cited at the opening of the chapter, see the following: P. Herr-
in.inn. Die Heldensagen des Saxo Grammaticus (1922); I. Gollancz, Hamlet in Ice-
land (1898); R. Zcnker, Boeve-Amlethus (1905); E. N. Setala, "Kullervo-Hamlet,"

II  'I'' (1903, 1907, 1910).

Hamlet's Mill

20

21

The Chronicler's Tale

in the Sagas of Hrolf Kraki, of Havelok the Dane, as well as in
several Celtic myths.3

In the version reported by Saxo, Hamlet goes on to reign suc-
cessfully. The sequel of his adventures is taken up in book IV of
the Chronicle, but this narrative shows a very different hand. It is
an inept job, made of several commonplaces from the repertory of
ruse and fable, badly stitched together. When Hamlet, in addition
to the English King's daughter, is made to marry the Queen of
Scotland, and bring his two wives home to live together in har-
mony, we can suspect an incompetent attempt to establish a dynas-
tic claim of the House of Denmark to the realm of Britain. Hamlet
eventually falls in battle, but there is not much in the feats re-
counted to justify Saxo's dithyrambic conclusion that if he had
lived longer he might have been another Hercules. The true per-
sonage has been overlaid beyond recognition, although there still
clings to him a numinous aura. Curiously enough, the misconstruing
of Hamlet's story in the direction of success continues today. In
the recent Russian film version of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet is
shown as a purposeful, devious and ruthless character, bent only on
•carrying off a coup d'etat. Yet, in Saxo's first part, the tragic
meaning is clearly adumbrated when Hamlet's return is timed to
coincide with his own obsequies. The logic requires that he perish
together with the tyrant.

The name Amleth, Amlodhi, Middle English Amlaghe, Irish
Amlaidhe, stands always for "simpleton," "stupid," "like unto a
dumb animal." It also remained in use as an adjective. Gollancz has
pointed out that in "The Wars of Alexander," an alliterative poem
from the north of England largely translated from the Historia de
Preliis, Alexander is twice thus mentioned contemptuously by his

(enemies:

Thou Alexander, thou ape, thou amlaghe out of Greece

Thou little thefe, thou losangere (1), thou lurkare in cities . . .

3 See, for Hrolfssaga Kraki, scil., the youth of Helgi and Hroar, and the related
story of Harald and Haldan (told in Saxo's seventh book): Zenker, Boeve-Amle-
thus, pp. 121-26; Herrmann, Die Heldensagen, pp. 271f.; Setala, "Kullervo-Hamlet,"
FUF 3 (1903), pp. 74f.

Darius, inquiring about Alexander's appearance, is shown by his
courtiers a caricature graphically described:

And thai in parchment him payntid, his person him shewid,
Ane amlaghe, ane asaleny (2), ane ape of all othire,
A wirling (3), a wayryngle (4), a waril-eghid (5) shrewe,
The caitifeste creatour, that cried (6) was evire4

This image of the "caitiffest creature" goes insistently with cer-
tain great figures of myth. With the figure of Hamlet there goes,
too, the "dog" simile. This is true in Saxo's Amlethus, in Ambales, in
the Hrolfssaga Kraki, where the endangered ones, the two princes
Helgi and Hroar (and in Saxo's seventh book Harald and Haldan),
are labeled dogs, and are called by the dog-names "Hopp and Ho."

Next comes what looks at first like the prototype of them all, the
famous Roman story of Lucius Junius Brutus, the slayer of King
Tarquin, as told first by Titus Livius. (The nickname Brutus
again connotes the likeness to dumb brutes.) Gollancz says of it:

The merest outline of the plot cannot fail to show the striking like-
ness between the tales of Hamlet and Lucius Iunius Brutus. Apart
from general resemblance (the usurping uncle; the persecuted
nephew, who escapes by feigning madness; the journey; the oracular
utterances; the outwitting of the comrades; the well-matured plans
for vengeance), there are certain points in the former story which
must have been borrowed directly from the latter. This is especially
true of Hamlet's device of hiding the gold inside the sticks. This
could not be due to mere coincidence; and moreover, the evidence
seems to show that Saxo himself borrowed this incident from the
account of Brutus in Valerius Maximus; one phrase at least from the
passage in the Memorabilia was transferred from Brutus to Hamlet
(Saxo says of Hamlet "obtusi cordis esse," Valerius "obtusi se cordis
esse simulavit"). Saxo must have also read the Brutus story as told by
' Livy, and by later historians, whose versions were ultimately based on
Dionysius of Halicarnassus.5

To juxtapose the twin brothers Hamlet and Brutus, here is the
earlier portion of the tale of Brutus as told by Livy (1.56). The
subsequent events connected with the rape of Lucrece are too well
known to need repeating.

4 (1) liar; (2) little ass; (3) dwarf; (4) little villain; (5) wall-eyed; (6) created.
3Glollancz, pp.xxi xxiv.

Hamlet's Mill

22

While Tarquin was thus employed (on certain defensive measures),
a dreadful prodigy appeared to him; a snake sliding out of a wooden
pillar, terrified the beholders, and made them fly into the palace; and
not only struck the king himself with sudden terror, but filled his
breast with anxious apprehensions: so that, whereas in the case of
public prodigies the Etrurian soothsayers only were applied to, being
thoroughly frightened at this domestic apparition, as it were, he re-
solved to send to Delphi, the most celebrated oracle in the world;
and judging it unsafe to entrust the answers of the oracle to any other
person, he sent his two sons into Greece, through lands unknown at
that time, and seas still more unknown. Titus and Aruns set out, and,
as a companion, there was sent with them Junius Brutus, son to
Tarquinia, the king's sister, a young man of a capacity widely dif-
ferent from the assumed appearance he had put on. Having heard
that the principal men in the state, and among the rest his brother,
had been put to death by his uncle, he resolved that the king should
find nothing in his capacity which he need dread, nor in his fortune
which he need covet; and he determined to find security in contempt
since in justice there was no protection. He took care, therefore, to
fashion his behaviour to the resemblance of foolishness, and submit-
ted himself and his portion to the king's rapacity. Nor did he show
any dislike of the surname Brutus, content that, under the cover of
that appellation, the genius which was to be the deliverer of the
Roman people should lie concealed, and wait the proper season for
exertion . . . He was, at this time, carried to Delphi by the Tarquinii,
rather as a subject of sport than as a companion; and is said to have
brought, as an offering to Apollo, a golden wand inclosed in a staff
of cornel wood, hollowed for the purpose, an emblem figurative of
the state of his own capacity. When they were there, and had exe-
cuted their father's commission, the young men felt a wish to enquire
to which of them the kingdom of Rome was to come; and we are told
that these words were uttered from the bottom of the cave.—"Young
men, whichever of you shall first kiss your mother, he shall possess
the sovereign power at Rome" . . . Brutus judged that the expression
of Apollo had another meaning, and as if he had accidentally stum-
bled and fallen, he touched the earth with his lips, considering that
she was the common mother of all mankind.

For most conventional-minded philologists, Brutus was the an-
swer to a prayer, even to the gold enclosed in a stick. They had the
sound classical source, from which it is reassuring to derive develop-
ments in the outlying provinces. They felt their task to be at an end.
With a few trimmings of seasonal cults and fertility rites, the whole

2 3 • The Chronicler's Tale

Amlethus package was wrapped, sealed and delivered, to join the
growing pile of settled issues.

Yet even the Roman version was not without its disturbing
peculiarities. Livy reports only the answer to the private question
of the two princes. But if Tarquin had sent them to Delphi, it
was to get an answer to his own fears. And the answer is to be
found in Zonaras' compendium of the early section of Dio Cassius'
lost Roman history. Delphic Apollo said that the king would lose
his reign "when a dog would speak with human voice."6 There is
no evidence that Saxo read Zonaras.

There is also a strange variant to Tarquin's prophetic nightmare
reported by Livy. It does not lack authority, for it is mentioned
in Cicero's De divinatione (1.22) and taken from a lost tragedy on
Brutus by Accius, an early Roman poet. Says Tarquin: "My dream
was that shepherds drove up a herd and offered me two beautiful
rams issued of the same mother. I sacrificed the best of the two, but
the other charged me with its horns. As I was lying on the ground,
gravely wounded, and looked up at heaven, I saw a great portent:
the naming orb of the sun coming from the right, took a new course
and melted." Well may the Etruscan soothsayers have been exer-
cised about the rams and the changed course of the sun in the same
image, for they were concerned with astronomy. This problem
will be dealt with later. An interesting variant of this dream is found
in the Ambales Saga, and it can hardly have come from Cicero.7

However all that may be, there is more than enough to suspect
that the story goes back even farther than the Roman kings. Ac-
cordingly scholars undertook to investigate the link with the Per-
sian legend of Kyros, which turned out not to be rewarding. But
Saxo himself, even if he read Valerius- Maximus, contains features
which are certainly outside the classical tradition, and he shows
another way.

From the Narrenspiel the account of Hamlet's ride along the
shore is worth a second look: He notices an old steering oar (guber-

6 Zenker, pp. 149f.
7Gollancz, p. 105.

Hamlet's Mill

24

naculum) left over from a shipwreck, and he asks what it might be.
"Why," they say, "it is a big knife." Then he remarks, "This is
the right thing to carve such a huge ham"—by which he really
means the sea. Then, Saxo goes on, "as they passed the sandhills
and bade him look at the meal, meaning the sand, he replied that it
had been ground small by the hoary tempests of the ocean. His
companions praising his answer, he said he had spoken wittingly."

It is clear that Saxo at this point does not know what to do with
the remarks, for he has always pointed out that Amlethus' answers
were meaningful. "For he was loth to be thought prone to lying
about any matter, and wished to be held a stranger to falsehood,
although he would never betray how far his keenness went." This
being the systematic theme of Hamlet's adventure, a theme worked
out and contrived to show him as a Sherlock Holmes in disguise,
the two remarks quoted are the only ones left to look pointlessly
silly. They do not fit.

In fact, they come from a vastly different story. Snorri Sturluson,
the learned poet of Iceland (1178-1241), in his Skaldskaparmal
("The Language of the Bards") explains many kenningar of famous
bards of the past. He quotes a verse from Snaebjorn, an Icelandic
skald who had lived long before. This kenning has been the despair
of translators, as is the case in any very ancient, partly lost poetic
language. There are no less than three terms in the nine lines that
can be considered hapax legomena, i.e., terms which occur only
once. The most authoritative translation is that of Gollancz and
here it is:

'Tis said, sang Snaebjorn, that far out, off yonder ness, the Nine Maids
of the Island Mill stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern—they who
in ages past ground Hamlet's meal. The good chieftain furrows the
hull's lair with his ship's beaked prow. Here the sea is called Am-
lodhi's mill.8

That is enough. Whatever the obscurities and ambiguities, one
thing is clear: goodbye to Junius Brutus and the safe playgrounds
of classical derivations.

8 Gollancz, p. xi.

25 • The Chronicler's Tale

This deals with the gray, stormy ocean of the North, its huge
breakers grinding forever the granite skerries, and Amlodhi is its
king. The quern has not vanished from our language. It is still the
surf mill. Even the British Island Pilot, in its factual prose, conveys
something of the power of the Nine Maids, whose very name is
echoed in the Merry Men of Mey on Pentland Firth:

When an ordinary gale has been blowing for many days, the whole
force of the Atlantic is beating against the shores of the Orkneys;
rocks of many tons in weight are lifted from their beds, and the roar
of the surge may be heard for twenty miles; the breakers rise to the
height of 60 feet . . .

As the storm heightens, "all distinction between air and water is
lost, everything seems enveloped in a thick smoke." Pytheas, the
first explorer of the North, called it the "sea lung," and concluded
this must be the end of the earth, where sky and water rejoin each
other in the original chaos.

This introduces a much more ancient and certainly independent
tradition, whose sources are in early Norse myth—or at least run
through it from a still more ancient lineage.

Chapter II

The Figure in Finland

N.

Now the discussion leaps, without apologies, over the impas-
sable fence erected by modern philologists to protect the linguistic
family of Indo-European languages from any improper dealings
with strange outsiders. It is known that Finland, Esthonia and Lap-
land are a cultural island, ethnically related to the Hungarians and
to other faraway Asian peoples: Siryenians, Votyaks, Cheremis-
sians, Mordvinians, Voguls, Ostyaks. They speak languages which
belong to the Ugro-Finnish family, as totally unrelated to Ger-
manic as Basque would be. These languages are described as "ag-
glutinative" and often characterized by vowel harmonization, such
as is found in Turkish. These cultural traditions until quite recently
were segregated from the Scandinavian environment. Even if West-
ern culture—and Christianity with it—seeped through among the
literati from the Middle Ages on, their great epic, the Kalevala,
remained intact, entrusted as it was to oral transmission going back
in unchanged form to very early times. It shows arrestingly primi-
tive features, so primitive that they discourage any attempt at a
classical derivation. It was collected in writing only in the 19th
century by Dr. Elias Lonnrot. But even in this segregated tradi-
tion, startling parallels were found with Norse and Celtic myth,
which must go back to times before their respective recorded his-
tories. The main line of the poem will be dealt with later. Here, it
is important to look at the story of Kullervo Kalevanpoika ("the
son of Kaleva"), which has been carefully analyzed by E. N.
Setala in his masterly inquiry "Kullervo-Hamlet."1 His material is
1FUF 3 (1903). pp.- 61-9797, 188-255; 7 (1907), pp. 188-224; 10 (1910), pp. 44-127.

27 • The Figure in Finland

necessary, as well as that collected by Kaarle Krohn,2 in order
to take into account many variants (which Lonnrot has not incor-
porated into the runes 31-36 of the official Kalevala) dealing with
Kullervo.

The first event is the birth of Kullervo's father and uncle, who
are, according to rune 31, swans (or chickens), driven from one
another by a hawk. Usually it is told that a poor man, a plowman,
made furrows around a tree trunk (or on a small hill) which split
open, and out of it were born two boys. One of them, Kalervo,
grew up in Carelia, the other, Untamo, in Suomi-Finland. The
hate between the brothers arises usually in the following manner:
Kalervo sows oats before the door of Untamo, Untamo's sheep eat
them, Kalervo's dog kills the sheep; or there is a quarrel about the
fishing grounds (rune 31.19ff.). Untamo then produces the war.
In fact, he makes the war out of his fingers, the army out of his
toes, soldiers of the sinews of his heel. But there are versions where
Untamo arms trees and uses them as his army. He kills Kalervo and
all his family, except Kalervo's wife, who is brought to Untamo's
home and there gives birth to our hero, Kullervo. The little one
is rocked in the cradle for three days,

when the boy began his kicking,
and he kicked and pushed about him,
tore his swaddling clothes to pieces,
freed himself from all his clothing,
then he broke the lime-wood cradle.3

At the age of three months,

when a boy no more than knee-high,
he began to speak in this wise:
"Presently when I am bigger,
And my body shall be stronger,
I'll avenge my father's slaughter,

2 Kalevalastudien 6. Kullervo (1928).

3 Translated by W. F. Kirby (Everyman's Library). The original rough meter
has been made to sound like a poor man's Hiawatha, but it was the original metric
model for Longfellow.

Hamlet's Mill

28

And my mother's tears atone for."
This was heard by Untamoinen,
And he spoke the words which follow.
"He will bring my race to ruin,
Kalervo reborn is in him."

And the old crones all considered,

how to bring the boy to ruin,

so that death might come upon him.

Untamo tries hard to kill the child, with fire, with water, by hang-
ing. A large pyre is built, Kullervo is thrown into it. When the
servants of Untamo come after three days to look,

knee-deep sat the boy in ashes,
in the embers to his elbows,
in his hands he held a coal-rake,
and was stirring up the fire.

Setala reports a version where the child, sitting in the midst of the
fire, the (golden) hook in his hand, and stirring the fire, says to
Untamo's servants that he is going to avenge the death of his father.4
Kullervo is thrown into the sea; after three days they find him sit-
ting in a golden boat, with a golden oar, or, according to another
version, he is sitting in the sea, on the back of a wave, measuring

the waters                                                           

Which perchance might fill two/ladles,

Or if more exactly measured,
Partly was a third filled also.

Next, they hang the child on a tree, or a gallows is erected—again
with frustrating results;

Kullervo not yet has perished,
Nor has he died on the gallows.
Pictures on the tree he's carving,

4 "Kullervo-Hamlet," FUF 7, p. 192.

29 • The Figure in Finland

In his hands he holds a graver.
All the tree is filled with pictures,
All the oak-tree filled with carvings.

One tradition says that he is carving the names of his parents
with a golden stylus. After this the sequence of events is difficult
to establish. There are variants, where Kullervo performs his re-
venge very soon—he merely goes to a smithy and procures the
arms. Or he is at once sent out of the country to the smith to serve
as cowherd and shepherd. But in rune 5/, he is first given smaller
commissions: to guard and rock a child—he blinds and kills it. Then
he js sent to clear a forest, and to fell the slender birch trees.

Five large trees at length had fallen,
Eight in all he felled before him}

He sits down afterwards and speaks (31.273 ff.).

"Lempo [the Devil] may the work accomplish,

Hiisi now-may-sloape the timber!"

In a stump he struck his axe-blade,

And began to shout full loudly,

And he piped, and then he whistled,

And he said the words which follow:

"Let the woods be felled around me,

Overthrown the slender birch-trees,

Far as sounds my voice resounding,

Far as I can send my whistle.

Let no sapling here be growing,

Let no blade of grass be standing,

Never while the earth endureth,           

5 There is a strange Dindsencha (this word applies to the explanations of place-
names which occur repeatedly in Irish tradition; see W. Stokes, "The Prose Tales
in the Rennes Dindsenchas," RC 16, pp. 278f.) about the felling of five giant trees
—three ash trees, one oak, one yew. "The oak fell to the south, over Mag n-Ailte,
as far as the Pillar of the Living Tree. 900 bushels was its crop of acorns, and three
crops it bore every year . . . apples, nuts, and acorns. The ash of Tortu fell to the
South-east, that from Usnach to the North. The yew north-east, as far as Druinn
Bairr it fell. The ash of Belach Dahli fell upwards as far as Cam Uachtair Bile."

Hamlet's Mill

30

Or the golden moon is shining,
Here in Kalervo's son's forest,
Here upon the good man's clearing."6

In the Kalevala, Untamo next orders Kullervo to build a fence,
and so he does, out of whole pines, firs, ash trees. But he made no
gateway into it, and announced:

He who cannot raise him birdlike,
Nor upon two wings can hover,
Never may he pass across it,
Over Kalervo's son's fencing!

Untamo is taken aback:

Here's a fence without an opening . . .
Up to heaven the fence is builded,
To the very clouds uprising."1

6 The Esthonian Kalevipoeg (= son of Kaleva, the same as Finnish Kalevan-
poika) makes the soil barren wherever he has plowed with his wooden plow
(Setala, FUF 7, p. 215), but he, too, fells trees with noise—as far as the stroke of his
axe is heard, the trees fall down (p. 203). As for Celtic tradition, one of the
Rennes Dindsenchas tells that arable land is changed into woodland because
brother had killed brother, "so that a wood and stunted bushes overspread Guaire's
country, because of the parricide which he committed" (Stokes, RC 16, p. 35).
Whereas J. Loth (Les Mabinogion du Livre Rouge de Hergest, vol. I, p. 272,
n. 6) gives the names of three heroes who make a country sterile: "Morgan
Mwynvawr, Run, son of Beli, and Llew Llaw Gyffes, who turn the ground red.
Nothing grew for a year, herb or plant, where they passed: Arthur was more
'rudvawc' than they. Where Arthur had passed, for seven years nothing would
grow." Rudvawc means "red ravager," as we learn from Rachel Bromwich
(TrioedaYnys Prydein: The Welsh Triads [1961], p. 35). Seven years was the
cycle of the German Wild Hunter; Arthur was a Wild Hunter, too. The "Waste
Land" is, moreover, a standard motif of the legends spun around the Grail and
the Fisher King. All this will make sense eventually.

7 This might originally have been the same story as the one about Romulus
drawing a furrow around the new city and killing Remus for jumping over it.
In the Roman tradition, the murder makes no sense. Without following up this
key phenomenon here, we would like to say that in Finland the stone labyrinth
(the English "Troy town") is called Giant's Fence, and also St. Peter's Game,
Ruins of Jerusalem, Giant's Street, and Stone Fence (see W. H. Matthews,
Mazes and Labyrinths, p. 150). Whereas Al-Biruni (India 1, p. 306), when dealing
with Lanka (Ceylon)—i.e., Ravana's labyrinth that was conquered by Rama and
Hanuman—remarks that in Muslim countries this "labyrinthic fortress is called
Yavana-Koti, which has been frequently explained as Rome."

31 • The Figure in Finland

Kullervo does some more mischief, threshing the grain to mere
chaff, ripping a boat asunder, feeding the cow and breaking its
horn, heating the bath hut and burning it down—these are the usual
feats of the "Strong Boy" (the "Starke Hans" of German tales,
who with us became Paul Bunyan). So, finally, he is sent out of the
country, to the house of Ilmarinen the divine smith, as a cowherd.
There is, however, a remarkable variant where it is said that he
was "sent to Esthonia to bark under the fence; he barked one year,
another one, a little from the third; three years he barked at the
smith as his uncle, at the wife [or servant] of the smith as his
daughter-in-law." This sounds strange indeed, and the translator
himself added question marks. There is a still stranger parallel in
the great Irish hero Cuchulainn, a central figure of Celtic myth,
whose name means "Dog of the Smith Culan." This persistent dog-
gishness will bear investigation at another point and so will Smith
Ilmarinen himself.

The wife of Ilmarinen (often called Elina, Helena) makes Kul-
lervo her herdsman, and maliciously bakes a stone into his lunch
bread so that he breaks his knife, the only heirloom left from his
father. A crow then advises Kullervo to drive the cattle into the
marshes and to assemble all the wolves and bears and change them
into cattle. Kullervo said:

"Wait thou, wait thou, whore of Hiisi,

For my father's knife I'm weeping,

Soon wilt thou thyself be weeping." (33.125ff.)

He acts on the crow's advice, takes a whip of juniper, drives the
cattle into the marshes, and the oxen into the thicket.

Half of these the wolves devoured,
To the bears he gave the others,
And he sang the wolves to cattle,
And he changed the bears to oxen.

Kullervo carefully instructs the wolves and the bears on what they
are expected to do, and

Hamlet's Mill

3 3 • The Figure in Finland

Then he made a pipe of cow-bone,
And a whistle made of ox-horn,
From Tuomikki's leg a cow-horn,
And a flute from heel of Kir jo,
Then upon the horn blew loudly,
And upon his pipe made music.
Thrice upon the hill he blew it,

Six times at the pathway's opening.

\

He drives the "cattle" home, Helena goes to the stables to milk,
and is torn by wolf and bear.

This fierce retaliation gives point to an event that is only a feeble
joke in Saxo's version. A wolf crosses Hamlet's path, and he is told
it is a horse. "Why," he remarks, "in Fengo's stud there are too
few of that kind fighting." Saxo tries to explain: "This was a gentle
but witty fashion of invoking a curse upon his uncle's riches." It
makes little sense. One suspects here instead an echo of the theme
revealed by Kullervo, who drives home wolves and bears in place
of cattle. The hero's mastery of wild beasts evokes memories of
classical myth. This has not escaped Karl Kerenyi,8 whose com-
ment is useful, although not his line of psychological speculation:
"It is impossible to try to derive Finnish mythology from the Greek,
or conversely. Yet it is also impossible not to notice that Kullervo,
who is the Miraculous Child and the Strong Servant in one, shows
himself at last to be Hermes and Dionysos. He appears as Hermes
in the making of musical instruments tied up with the destruction
of cattle . . . He shows himself as Dionysos in what he does with
wild beasts and with his enemy. It is Dionysos-like behavior—if we
see it through the categories of Greek myth—to make wolves and
bears appear by magic as tame animals, and it is again Dionysos-like
to use them for revenge against his enemy. We recognize with awe
the tragic-ironic tone of Euripides' Bacchae, when we read the
dramatic scene of the milking of wild beasts. An even closer analogy
is given by the fate of the Etruscan pirates, Dionysos' enemies, who
are chastised by the intervention of wild animals . . ."

8 K. Kercnyi, "Zum Urikind-Mythologen," Paideuma 1 (1940), p. 255.

In rune 55, Lonnrot makes Kullervo return to his parents and
brothers and sisters. This is unexpected inasmuch as they have been
killed a number of runes earlier, although the crux of the many
rune songs is that the names of the heroes are far from stable and,
as has already been said, the original order of things is impossible
to reconstruct. But one event stands out. A sister is not at home. On
one occasion the hero meets a maiden in the woods, gathering ber-
ries. They lie together and realize later in conversing that they are
brother and sister. The maiden drowns herself, but Kullervo's
mother dissuades him from suicide. So he goes to war, and in so
doing he fulfills his revenge. First he asks the great god Ukko for
the gift of a sword

Then the sword he asked was granted,
And a sword of all most splendid,
And he slaughtered all the people,
Untamo's whole tribe was slaughtered,
Burned the houses all to ashes,
And with flame completely burned them,
Leaving nothing but the hearthstones,
Nought but in each yard the rowan.

Returning home, Kullervo finds no living soul; all have died. When
he weeps over his mother's grave, she awakes,

And beneath the mould made answer:
"Still there lives the black dog, Musti,
Go with him into the forest,
At thy side let him attend thee."

There in the thicket reside the blue forest-maidens, and the mother
advises him to try to win their favor. Kullervo takes the black
dog and goes into the forest, but when he comes upon the spot
where he had dishonored his sister, despair overcomes him, and he
throws himself upon his own sword.

Here at last a point is made explicitly which in other stories
remains a dark hint. There is a sin that Hamlet has to atone for.
The knowledge that Kullervo and his sister killed themselves for

Hamlet's Mill

34

unwitting incest calls to mind the fact that in Saxo the adolescent
Prince is initiated to love by a girl who does not betray him "be-
cause she happened to be his foster-sister and playmate since child-
hood." This seems contrived, as if Saxo had found there a theme
he does not grasp. The theme becomes manifest in King Arthur. It
is ambiguous and elusive, but all the more inexorable in Shakespeare.
Hamlet must renounce his true love, as he has to renounce himself
in his predicament:

"Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
. . . What should such fellows as I do nawling between earth and
heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways
to a nunnery."

In the play-within-a-play, the Prince feels free to step out of
character:

Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

No, my lord.

1 mean, my head upon your lap?

Ay, my lord.

Do you think I meant country matters?

I think nothing, my lord.

That is a fair thought to lie between maid's legs.

What is, my lord?

Nothing.

But the die is cast. Ophelia's suicide by drowning, like Kullervo's
sister's, brings about the death of her lover—and of her brother too.
The two aspects join in the final silence. At least Hamlet, ever con-
scious, has had a chance to describe in despair the insoluble knot
of his guilt:

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers

could not with all their quantity of love

make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?"

And now Kullervo. Setala's analysis of the whole parallel goes as
follows:

35 • The Figure in Finland

As concerns generalities: brother kills brother; one son survives,
who sets his mind on revenge from earliest childhood; the uncle
tries to kill him, but he succeeds in achieving his revenge. As con-
cerns details: Setala wants to identify the stakes and hooks, which
the hero in all northern versions shapes or carves, sitting at the
hearth—Brjam does it in a smithy—with the golden hook or rake
that little Kullervo, sitting in the middle of the fire, holds in his
hands, stirring the flames. Each hero (including Kullervo in one of
the versions found by Setala) makes it clear that he means to avenge
his father.

With some puzzlement Setala brings out one other point which
will turn out to be crucial later on. In every northern version there
is some dark utterance about the sea. The words are weird. Hamlet
wants to "cut the big ham" with the steering oar; the child Kullervo
is found measuring the depth of the sea with an oar or with a ladle.
Kalevipoeg, the Esthonian counterpart of Kullervo Kalevanpoika,
measures the depth of lakes with his height. Amlodhi-Ambales, sit-
ting by a bottomless mountain lake, says only: "Into water wind
has come, into water wind will go."

Chapter III

The Iranian Parallel

For from today new feasts and

customs date
Because tonight is born Shah Kai

Khusrau

Shahnama

T.

. he Hamlet theme moves now to Persia. Firdausi's Shahnama,
the Book of Kings, is the national epic of Iran,1 and Firdausi
(ca. a.d. 1010) is still today the national poet. At the time Firdausi
wrote, his protector, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, had shifted the
center of his power to India, and the Iranian empire had long been
only a memory. With prodigious scholarship, Firdausi, like Homer
before him, undertook to organize and record the Zendic tradition,
which extended back from historic times into the purely mythical.
The first section on the Pishdadian and Kaianian dynasties must be
considered mythical throughout, although it does reach into his-
toric times and encompasses four of the nine volumes of the Book
of Kings in the English translation. Khusrau (Chosroes in Greek) is
also the name of a line of historical rulers, one of whom, Khusrau
Anushirvan, gave sanctuary to the last philosophers of Greece, the
members of the Platonic Academy driven out by Justinian in
a.d. 529. But Firdausi's Kai Khusrau is the towering figure of his
own mythical age. Almost one-fifth of the whole work is allotted
to him. He is actually the Haosravah of the Zend Avesta, and also

'We cite here the English translation of Arthur and Edward Warner (1905-
1909).

3 7 • The Iranian Parallel

the Rigvedic Sushravah, an identity which raises again the much
discussed question of a common Indo-European "Urzeit," the time
of origins.

The common features of Saxo's Amlethus and Kai Khusrau are
so striking that Jiriczek, and after him Zenker, undertook detailed
comparative studies.2 But they concluded that the Greek saga of
Bellerophon might provide a common origin, and that was the end
of their quest. Classical antiquity has a magnetic quality for the
scholarly mind. It acts upon it like the Great Lodestone Mountain
in Sindbad. The frail philological bark comes apart as soon as
Greece looms over the horizon. Bellerophon's somber tale would
provide a parallel too, but does that have to be the end of the trail?
As Herodotus ruefully remarks, his own Hellenic antiquity goes
back in recorded memory but a few centuries; beyond that, it
blends with the Indo-European patrimony of legends.

In the vast flow of the Shahnama, one prominent feature is the
perpetual war between "Untamo" and "Kalervo," here the two
rival peoples of Turan and Iran. Because the vicissitudes of the
Kaianian dynasty of Iran are spread over a narrative twice as long
as both epics of Milton combined, it is necessary here to concentrate
on one essential aspect.

The Iranian plot shows some "displacement" in that Afrasiyab
the Turanian kills, instead of his brother, his nephew Siyawush who
is also His son-in-law, so that the "avenger" of this crime is bound
to come forth as the common grandson of the hostile Turanian
Shah Afrasiyab and his brother, the noble Iranian Shah Kai Ka'us
(the same one who plays no small role in the Rigveda as Kavya
Ushanas, and in the Avesta as Kavi Usan). Siyawush, as commander
of his father's army, offers peace to the Turanian Afrasiyab, who
accepts the offer because he has had a catastrophic dream.3 This
dream resembles those of Tarquin and Ambales. Kai Ka'us does not
trust Afrasiyab and declines peace. Siyawush, not wishing to break
his own treaty with Turan, goes to live with Afrasiyab.

0. L. Jiriczek, "Hamlet in Iran," ZVV 10 (1900)pp.353-64; R. Zenker, Boeve-

Amlethus (1905), pp. 207-82.
3Firdausi, Warner trans., vol. 2, pp. 232f.

Hamlet's Mill • 38

Afrasiyab honors the young man in every way, and gives him a
large province which he rules excellently, i.e., in the "Golden Age"
style of his father Kai Ka'us. Siyawush marries first a daughter of
the Turanian Piran, then Shah Afrasiyab gives him his own
daughter Farangis. But there is a serpent in that garden. Afrasiyab's
jealous brother Garsiwas, an early Polonius, plots so successfully
against Siyawush that Afrasiyab finally sends an army against the
blameless young ruler. Siyawush is captured and killed. The wid-
owed Farangis escapes, accompanied by Piran (Siyawush's first
father-in-law) to Piran's home where she gives birth to a boy of
great beauty, Kai Khusrau, Afrasiyab's and Kai Ka'us' common
grandson:

One dark and moonless night, while birds, wild beasts

And cattle slept, Piran in dream beheld

A splendour that outshone the sun itself,

While Siyawush, enthroned and sword in hand,

Called loudly to him saying: "Rest no more!

Throw off sweet sleep and think of times to come.

For from today new feasts and customs date,

Because to-night is born Shah Kai Khusrau!"

The chieftain roused him from his sweet repose:

Gulshahr the sunny-faced woke. Piran

Said unto her: "Arise, Betake thyself

To minister to Farangis, for I

Saw Siyawush in sleep a moment since,

Surpassing both the sun and moon in lustre,

And crying: ''Sleep no more, but join the feast

Of Kai Khusrau, the monarch of the world!' "

Gulshahr came hasting to the Moon and saw

The prince already born; she went with cries

Of joy that made the palace ring again

Back to Piran the chief. "Thou wouldest say"

She cried, "that king and Moon are fairly matched!"4

4 Firdausi, Warner trans., vol. 2, pp.

39

The Iranian Parallel

With this prophetic dream of a great new age begins a long time
of trials for the predestined hero. The boy grows up among the
shepherds; he becomes a great hunter with a crude bow and arrows
that he makes for himself without arrowheads or feathers, like
Hamlet whittling his stakes. Grandfather Afrasiyab, being afraid of
the boy, orders the prince brought to him so that he can convince
himself his victim is harmless. Although Afrasiyab has sworn sol-
emnly not to hurt Khusrau, Piran urges the boy to play the village
idiot for his own safety. When the tyrant questions him with
feigned benevolence, Kai Khusrau answers in the very same style as
Amlethus did, in riddles which sound senseless and indicate that
young Khusrau likens himself to a dog. The usurper feels relieved:
"The fellow is a fool!"

Now, the tale of vengeance, unduly abbreviated by Saxo's report
and in other versions, is told by Firdausi with an appropriately
majestic setting and on a grand scale. The anger of Iran and the
world, stemming from the death of Siyawush, is orchestrated apo-
calyptically into a cosmic tumult:

The world was all revenge and thou hadst said:
"It is a seething sea!" Earth had no room
For walking, air was ambushed by the spears;
The stars began to fray, and time and earth
Washed hands in mischief...5

Still, the two archcriminals manage to escape and hide with inex-
haustible resourcefulness. Afrasiyab even plays Proteus in the waters
of a deep salt lake, constantly assuming new shapes to evade cap-
ture. Finally, two volumes and a multitude of events later, Afrasiyab
and the evil counsellor are caught with a lasso or a net and both
perish.                 

Only by going back to the Avestan tradition can one make sense
of the many vicissitudes to which the Yashts or hymns of the
Avesta allude repeatedly.6 The Shahs Kai Khusrau and Afrasiyab

5Firdausi, Warner trans., vol. 2, p. 342.
6Vasht 5.41-49; 19.56-64,74.

Hamlet's Mill

40

were contending in a quest for the enigmatic Hvarna, rendered as
the "Glory," or the Charisma of Fortune. To obtain it the Shahs
kept sacrificing a hundred horses, a thousand oxen, ten thousand
lambs to the goddess Anahita, who is a kind of Ishtar-Artemis. Now
this Glory "that belongs to the Aryan nations, born and unborn,
and to the holy Zarathustra" was in Lake Vurukasha. Afrasiyab,
Shah of the non-Aryan Turanians, was not entitled to it. But leav-
ing his hiding place in an underground palace of iron "a thousand
times the height of man" and illuminated by artificial sun, moon
and stars, he tried three times to capture the Hvarna, plunging into
Lake Vurukasha. However, "the Glory escaped, the Glory fled
away, the Glory changed its seat." There will be more discussion
of Afrasiyab's attempts and his "horrible utterances," in the chapter
"Of Time and the Rivers." The Glory was, instead, allotted to Kai
Khusrau, and it was bestowed upon him without much ado. At this
point it is fair to say that Hvarna stands for Legitimacy, or
Heavenly Mandate, which is granted to rulers, but is also easily
withdrawn. Yima (Jamshyd), the earliest "world ruler," lost it
three times.

The story of diving Afrasiyab has had many offshoots in Eurasian
folklore. There the Turanian Shah is spelled "Devil," and God
causes him to dive to the bottom of the sea, so that in the meantime
one of the archangels, or St. Elias, can steal a valuable object which
is the legal property of the Devil. Sometimes the object is the sun,
sometimes the "divine power," or thunder and lightning, or even a
treaty between God and Devil which had turned out to be un-
profitable for God.

There remains the essential denouement. During those eventful
years, Kai Ka'us held joint rulership with his grandson, secure in
the Glory. Shortly after the victory over the upstart, Kai Ka'us dies
and Kai Khusrau ascends the Ivory Throne. For sixty years, says
the poem, "the whole world was obedient to his sway." It is strik-
ing that there is no word of any event after Kai Ka'us' death. May-
be it is because all has been achieved. Happy reigns have no history.
But it is told that Kai Khusrau falls into deep melancholy and soul-

41 . The Iranian Parallel

searching.7 He fears he may "grow arrogant in soul, corrupt in
thought" like his predecessors Yima (Jamshyd) and, among others,
Kai Ka'us himself, who had tried to get himself carried to heaven
by eagles like the Babylonian Etana. So he makes the supreme
decision:

"And now I deem it better to depart

To God in all my glory . . .

Because this Kaian crown and throne will pass."

The great Shah, then, who had once stated (at his first joint en-
thronement) :

"The whole world is my kingdom, all is mine
From Pisces downward to the Bull's head,"8

prepares his departure, takes leave of his paladins, waving aside
their supplications and those of his whole army:

A cry rose from the army of Iran:

The sun hath wandered from its way in heaven!

The dream of Tarquin finds here an early echo. The Shah appoints
as his successor Luhrasp and wanders off to a mountaintop, accom-
panied by five of his paladins, to whom he announces in the eve-
ning, before they sit down for the last time to talk of the great past
they have lived together:

"What time the radiant sun shall raise its flag,
And turn the darksome earth to liquid gold,
Then is the time when I shall pass away
And haply with Surush9 for company."

Toward dawn he addresses his friends once more:

"Farewell for ever! When the sky shall bring
The sun again ye shall not look on me

7 Firdausi, Warner trans., vol. 4, pp. 272ff.

8Firdausi, Warner trans., vol. 2, p. 407.

9Surush • Avestic Sraosha, the "angel" of Ahura Mazdah.

Hamlet's Mill • 42

Henceforth save in your dreams. Moreover be not

Here on the morrow on these arid sands,

Although the clouds rain musk, for from the Mountains

Will rise a furious blast and snap the boughs

And leafage of the trees, a storm of snow

Will shower down from heaven's louring rack,

And towards Iran ye will not find the track."

The chieftains' heads were heavy at the news.
The warriors slept in pain, and when the sun
Rose over the hills the Shah had disappeared.

The five paladins are lost and buried in the snowstorm.10

10 This theme of sleep in the "hour of Gethsemane" will occur more than once,
e.g., in Gilgamesh. The myth of Quetzalcouatl is even more circumstantial. The
exiled ruler is escorted by the dwarves and hunchbacks, who are also lost in the
snow along what is now the Cortez Pass, while their ruler goes on to the sea and
departs. But here at least he promises to come back and judge the living and the
dead.

Chapter IV

History, Myth and Reality

"Let us try, then, to set forth in
our statement what things these
are, and of what kind, and how
one should learn them ... It is,
indeed, a rather strange thing to
hear; but the name that we, at
any rate, give it—one that people
would never suppose, from inex-
perience in the matter—is astron-
omy; people are ignorant that he
who is truly an astronomer must
be wisest, not he who is an as-
tronomer in the sense understood
by Hesiod . . . ; but the man who
has studied the seven out of the
eight orbits, each travelling over
its own circuit in such a manner
as could not ever be easily ob-
served by any ordinary nature
that did not partake of a marvel-
lous nature."

Epinomis 989 E—990 b

The strange end of the Iranian tale, which concludes with an
ascent to heaven like that of Elias, leaves the reader wondering. If
this is the national epos (almost one half of it in content), where is
the epic and the tragic element? In fact, there is a full measure of
the Homeric narrative in Firdausi that had to be left aside, there are
great battles as on the windy plains of Troy, challenges and duels,
the incredible feats of heroes like Rustam and Zal, abductions and
intrigues, infinite subplots to the tale, enough for a bard to entertain

Hamlet's Mill

44

his patrons for weeks and to ensure him a durable supply of
haunches of venison. But the intervention of the gods in the tale
is not so humanized as in the Iliad, although it shows through re-
peatedly in complicated symbolism and bizarre fairy tales. The con-
flict of will and fate is not to the measure of man. What has been
traced above is a confusing story of dynastic succession under a
shadowy Glory, a Glory without high events, keyed to a Hamlet
situation and an unexplained melancholy. The essence is an unsub-
stantial pageant of ambiguous abstractions, an elusive ballet of
wildly symbolic actions tied to ritual magic and religious doctrines,
with motivations which bear no parallel to normal ones. The whole
thing is a puzzle to be interpreted through hymns—very much as
in the Rigveda.

But here at last there is given apertis verbis one key to the imag-
ery: Khusrau's crowning words:

"The whole world is my kingdom: all is mine
From Pisces downward to the Bull's head."

If a hero of the western hemisphere were to proclaim: "All of
this continent is mine, from Hatteras to Eastport," he would be
considered afflicted with a one-dimensional fancy. Does that stretch
of coast stand in his mind for a whole continent? Yet here the
words make perfect sense because Kai Khusrau does not refer to the
earth. He designates that section of the zodiac comprised between
Pisces and Aldebaran, the thirty degrees which cover the constel-
lation Aries. It means that his reign is not only of heaven, it is essen-
tially of Time. The dimension of heaven is Time. Kai Khusrau
comes in as a function of time, preordained by events in the zodiac.

"For from today new feasts and customs date .. ."

Why Aries, and what it all imports, is not relevant at this point. It
turns out that "ruler of Aries" was the established title of supreme
power in Iran,1 and it may have meant as much or as little as "Holy

1 Persia "belongs" to Aries according to Paulus Alexandrinus. See Boll's Sphaera,
pp. 296f., where it is stated that this was the oldest scheme. It is still to be found
in the Apocalypse. Moses' ram's horns stand for the same world-age.

45 • History, Myth and Reality

Roman Emperor" in the West. What counts is that Rome is a place
on earth, whose prestige is connected with a certain historical pe-
riod, whereas Aries is a zone of heaven, or rather, since heaven
keeps moving, a certain time determined by heavenly motion in
connection with that constellation. Rome is a historic fact, even
"Eternal Rome," which was once and then is left only to memory.
Aries is a labeled time, and is bound to come back within certain
cycles.

Even if Kai Khusrau is conceived as a worldly ruler in an epos
which prefaces history, it is clear that no modern historical or
naturalistic imagination can provide the key to such minds as those
of the Iranian bards out of whose rhapsodies the learned Firdausi
organized the story. No basis in history can be found, no fertility
or seasonal symbolism can be traced into it, and even the psycho-
analysts have given up trying. This type of thought can be defined
in one way: it is essentially cosmological.

This is not to make things uselessly difficult, but to outline the
real frame of mythical thought, such as is actually quite familiar
and yet by now hardly recognized. It even appears in the mode of
lyrical meditation, at least in the English of Fitzgerald:

Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose

And ]amshyd's Sev'n-ringed Cup where no one knows

But still the Vine her ancient Ruby yields
And still a Garden by the Water blows.

And look—a thousand Blossoms with the Day
Woke—and a thousand scatter'd into Clay

And the first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kai Kubad away.

But come with old Khayyam, and leave the lot
Of Kai Kubad and Kai Khosrau forgot . . .

Omar Khayyam may speak as a weary skeptic or as mystical Sufi,
but all he speaks of is understood as real. The heroes of the past are
II real as the friends for whom he is writing, as the vine and the
roses and the waters, as his own direct experience of flux and im-

Hamlet's Mill • 46

permanence in life. When he makes his earthenware pots to feel
and think, it is no literary trope; it is the knowledge that all tran-
sient things are caught in the same transmutation, that all substance
is one: the stuff that pots and men and dreams are made of.

This is what could be called living reality, and it is singularly
different from ordinary or objective reality. When the poet thinks
that this brick here may be the clay that was once Kai Khusrau, he
rejoins Hamlet musing in the graveyard: "To what base uses we
return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of
Alexander till'a find it stopping a bung-hole?" Here are already
four characters, two of them unreal, two lost in the haze of time,
yet all equally present in our game, whereas most concrete charac-
ters, say the Director of Internal Revenue, are not, however they
may affect us otherwise. In that realm of "true existence" we shall
find stars and vines and roses and water, the eternal forms, and it
will include also the ideas of mathematics, another form of direct
experience. The world of history is outside it as a whole. Khayyam
does not, any more than Firdausi a generation later, mention the
glories of Cyrus and Artaxerxes, but only mythical heroes, just as
our own Middle Ages ignored history and spoke of Arthur and
Gawain. It had been all "once upon a time," and if Dante brings
back myth so powerfully to life, it is because his own contempora-
ries believed themselves truly descended from Dardanus and Troy,
and wondered whether the Lord Ulysses might not still be alive;
whereas Kaiser Barbarossa, asleep in his Kyffhauser mountain—that
must surely be a fable like Snow White. Or is it? Fairy tales are
easily dismissed for their familiar sound. But it might turn out that
such great imperial figures turned into legend have a hidden life of
their own, that they follow the laws of myth laid down long before
them. Even as King Arthur did not really die but lives on in the
depth of the mystic lake, according to Merlin's prophecy, so God-
frey of Viterbo (c. 1190), who had been in Barbarossa's service,
alone brings the "true" version. It is the orthodox one in strangely
preserved archaic language: the Emperor sleeps on in the depth of
the Watery Abyss (cf. chapter XI and appendix #33) where the
retired rulers of the world are.

47 • History, Myth and Reality

Voire, ou sont de Constantinople
Uempereurs aux poings dorez . . .

A distinction begins to appear between myth and fable. Hamlet
is showing himself in the aspect of a true myth, a universal one. He
is still that now. And Khayyam was the greatest mathematician of
his time, the author of a planned calendar reform which turned out
to be even more precise than the one that was adopted later as the
Gregorian calendar, an intellect in whom trenchant skepticism
could coexist with profound Sufi intellection. He knew full well
that Jamshyd's seven-ringed cup is not lost, since it stands for the
seven planetary circles of which Jamshyd is the ruler, just as Jam-
shyd's magic mirror goes on reflecting the whole world, as it is the
sky itself. But it is natural to let them retain their iridescent mys-
tery, since they belong to the living reality, like Plato's whorls and
his Spindle of Necessity. Or like Hamlet himself.

What then were Jamshyd or 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 conflicting al-
lusions. 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 the way to talk about the cosmos.

All that is living reality, sub specie 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. It is a play of transmutations which
include us, ruled by Time, framed in the eternal forms. A thought
ruled by Time can be expressed only in myth. When mythical
languages were universal and self-explanatory, thought was also
sef-sufficient. It could seek no explanation of itself in other terms,
for it was reality expressed as_ living. As Goethe said, "Alles Ver-
gitngliche—ist nur ein Gleichnis."

Men today are trained to think in spatial terms, to localize ob-
jicis. After childhood, the first question is "where and when did it
happen?" As science and history invade the whole landscape of

Hamlet's Mill • 48

thought, the events of myth recede into mere fable. They appear
as escape fantasies: unlocated, hardly serious, their space ubiquitous,
their time circular.

Yet some of those stories are so strong that they have lived on
vividly. These are true myths. These personages are unmistakably
identified, yet elusively fluid in outline. They tell of gigantic figures
and superhuman events which seem to occupy the whole; living
space between heaven and earth. Those figures often lend their
names to historical persons in passing and then vanish. Any attempt
to tie them down to history, even to the tradition of great and
catastrophic events, is invariably a sure way to a false trail. His-
torical happenings will never "explain" mythical events. Plutarch
already knew as much. Instead, mythical figures have invaded his-
tory under counterfeit presentments, and subtly shaped it to their
own ends. This is a ■working rule which was established long ago,
and it has proved constantly valid if one is dealing with true myth
and not with ordinary legends. To be sure, mythical figures are
born and pass on, but not quite like mortals. There have to be char-
acteristic styles for them like The Once and Future King. Were
they once? Then they have been before, or will be again, in other
names, under other aspects, even as the sky brings back forever its
configurations. Surely, if one tried to pinpoint them as persons and
things, they would melt before his eyes, like the products of sick
fantasy. But if one respects their true nature, they will reveal that
nature as junctions.

Functions of what? Of the general order of things as it could be
conceived. These figures express the behavior of that vast complex
of variables once called the cosmos. They combine in themselves
variety, eternity, and recurrence, for such is the nature of the cos-
mos itself. That the cosmos might be infinite seems to have re-
mained beyond the threshold of awareness of humankind up to the
time of Lucretius, of Bruno and Galileo. And Galileo himself, who
had serious doubts on the matter, agreed with all his predecessors
that surely the universe is eternal, and that hence all its changes
come under the law of periodicity and recurrence. "What is eter-
nal," Aristotle said, "is circular, and what is circular is eternal."

49 • History, Myth and Reality

That was the mature conclusion of human thought over millennia.
It was, as has been said, an obsession with circularity. There is
nothing new under the sun, but all things come back in ever-varying
recurrence. Even the hateful word "revolution" referred once only
to those of the celestial orbs. The cosmos was one vast system full
of gears within gears, enormously intricate in its connections, which
could be likened to a many-dialed clock. Its functions appeared and
disappeared all over the system, like strange cuckoos in the clock,
and wonderful tales were woven around them to describe their
behavior; but just as in an engine, one cannot understand each part
until one has understood the way all the parts interconnect in the
system.

Similarly, Rudyard Kipling in a droll allegory, "The Ship That
Found Herself," once explained what happens on a new ship in her
shakedown voyage. All the parts spring into clamorous being as
each plays its role for the first time, the plunging pistons, the groan-
ing cylinders, the robust propeller shaft, the straining bulkheads,
the chattering rivets, each feeling at the center of the stage, each
telling the steam about its own unique and incomparable feats, until
at last they subside into silence as a new deep voice is heard, that
of the ship, who has found her identity at last.

This is exactly what happens with the great array of myths. All
the myths presented tales, some of them weird, incoherent or out-
landish, and some epic and tragic. At last it is possible to understand
them as partial representations of a system, as functions of a whole.
The vastness and complexity of the system is only beginning to take
shape, as the parts fall into place. The only thing to do is proceed
inductively, step by step, avoiding preconceptions and letting the
argument lead toward its own conclusions.

In the simple story of Kai Khusrau, the Hamlet-like features are
curiously preordained, although it is not clear to what end. The
King's power is explicitly linked, in time and space, with the mov-
ing configurations of the heavens. It is common knowledge that
heaven in its motion does provide coordinates for time and place
on earth. The navigator's business is to operate on this connection
between above and below. But in the early centuries, the connect

Hamlet's Mill • 50

tion was infinitely richer in meaning. No historical monarch, how-
ever convinced of his charisma, could have said: "The whole world
is my kingdom, all is mine from Pisces to Aldebaran." Earthly
concepts seem to have been transferred to heaven, and inversely.
In fact, this world of myth imbricates uranography and geography
into a whole which is really one cosmography, and the "geographi-
cal" features referred to can be mystifying, as they may imply
either of these domains or both.

For instance, when the "rivers" Okeanos or Eridanos are men-
tioned, are they not conceived as being first in heaven and then
eventually on earth, too? It is as if any region beyond ancient man's
direct ken were to be found simply "upwards." True events, even
in an official epic like the Shahnama, are not "earth-directed." They
tend to move "upwards." This is the original form of astrology,
which is both vaster and less defined than the later classic form
which Ptolemy set forth. Even as the cosmos is one, so cosmogra-
phy is made up of inextricably intertwined data. To say that events
on earth reflect those in heaven is a misleading simplification to
begin with. In Aristotelian language, form is said to be metaphys-
ically prior to matter, but both go together. It is still necessary to
discover which is the focus of "true" events in heaven.

To recapitulate for clarity, whatever is true myth has no his-
torical basis, however tempting the reduction, however massive and
well armed the impact of a good deal of modern criticism on that
belief. The attempt to reduce myth to history is the so-called "eu-
hemerist" trend, from the name of Euhemeros, the first debunker.
It was a wave of fashion which is now receding, for it was too
simpleminded to last. Myth is essentially cosmological. As heaven in
the cosmos is so vastly more important than our earth, it should not
be surprising to find the main functions deriving from heaven. To
identify them under a variety of appearances is a matter of mytho-
logical judgment, of the capacity to recognize essential forms
through patient sifting of the immense amount of material.

Hamlet "is" here Kullervo, there Brutus or Kai Khusrau, but
always recognizably the same. Jamshyd reappears as Yama among
the Indo-Aryans, as Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, in China, and

51 • History, Myth and Reality

under many other names. There was always the tacit understanding,
for those who spoke the archaic language, who were involved in
the archaic cosmos, that he is everywhere the same function. And
who is the Demiurge? He has many names indeed. Plato does not
care to explain in our terms. Is this personage a semi-scientific fic-
tion, the manufacturer of a planetarium, just as the Lost Continent
of Atlantis is a semi-historical fiction? The author himself says only
that such stories are "not quite serious." Yet they are surely not a
spoof. Plato, who shaped what is called philosophy and its language,
who was the master of its penetrating distinctions, reverts to the
language of myth when he feels he has to; and he uses that ancient
language as if to the manner born.2

In this accounting for past myths, the heart of the problem re-
mains elusive. Kipling was a writer still marvellously attuned to the
juvenile mind that lives in most of us. But the fact is that myth it-
self, as a whole, is a lost world. The last forms—or rehearsals—of
a true myth took place in medieval culture: the Romance of Alex-
ander, and the Arthurian myth as it is found in Malory.*

There are other stories—we call them history—of man's conquest
over nature, the telling of the great adventure of mankind as a
whole. But here it is only faceless social man who is winning man's
victories. It is not the history of technology; it is, if anything,
science fiction that can bring in the adventures of the future. Science
fiction, when it is good, is a wholly valid attempt at restoring a
mythical element, with its adventures and tragedies, its meditations'"
on man's errors and man's fate. For true tragedy is an essential com-
ponent or outcome of myth. Possibly, history can be given a minute

2 In his Seventh Letter (3410-3440) he denies strongly that scientific "names" and
"sentences" (onomata, remata) could assist in obtaining essential insight. Cf. also
Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata 5.9.58.

* Still, there have been modern attempts deserving the name of myth. One, of
course, is Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which has taken on so much meaning through
the centuries. We realize today that it, too, was partly oracular. And we should
not forget Alice in Wonderland, the perfect nonsense myth, as significant and as
nonsensical as the Kalevala itself. This parallel will appear relevant at the end of
the appendices. Today, there is Austin Wright's Islandia, which appeared in 1942,
and its present sequel, The lslar, by Mark Saxton, to be published in the autumn
of 1969.

Hamlet's Mill • 52

of timeliness and then dismissed with its load of interpretations and
apprehensions that last as long as the reading—but the real present,
the only thing that counts, is the eternal Sphinx.

Today's children, that impassive posterity to whom all reverence
is due, know where to look for myths: in animal life, in the Jungle
Books, in the stories of Lassie and Flipper, where innocence is un-
assailable, in Western adventures suitably arranged by grownups
for the protection of law and order. Much of the rest sedulously
built up by mass media is modern prejudice and delusion, like the
glamor of royalty, or the perfection of super-detergents and cos-
metics: super-stitio, leftovers. So one might feel tempted to say:
actually, however, no particle of myth today is left over, and we
have to do only with a deliberate lie about the human condition.
Tolkien's efforts at reviving the genre, whatever the talent em-
ployed, carry as much conviction as the traditional three-dollar bill.

The assumed curious child would have been pleased only if he
had been told the "story" of the engine just as Kipling tells it, which
is hardly the style of a mechanical engineer. But suppose now the
child had been confronted with the "story" of a planet (or comet) as it emerges
from the textbooks of celestial mechanics, and had been asked to
calculate its orbits and perturbations. This would be a task for a
joyless grownup, and a professional one at that. Who else could
face the pages bristling with partial differential equations, with long
series of approximations, with integrals contrived from pointless
quadratures? Truly a world of reserved knowledge. But if, on the
other hand, a person living several thousand years ago had been
confronted with cunningly built tales of Saturn's reign, and of his
exorbitant building and modeling activities—after he had "separated
Heaven and Earth" by means of that fateful sickle, that is, after he
had established the obliquity of the ecliptic ... If he had heard of
Jupiter's ways of command and his innumerable escapades, popu-
lating the earth with gentle nymphs forever crossed in their quest
for happiness, escapades that were invariably successful in spite of
the constant watchfulness of his jealous "ox-eyed" or sometimes
"dog-eyed" spouse ... If this person also learned of the fierce ad-
ventures of Mars, and the complex mutual involvement of gods

53 • History, Myth and Reality

and heroes expressing themselves in terms of action and unvarying
numbers, he would have been a participant in the process of mythi-
cal knowledge. This knowledge would have been transmitted by
his elders, confirmed by holy commands, rehearsed by symbolic
experiences in the form of musical rites and performances involving
his whole people. He would have found it easier to respect than .
comprehend, but it would have led to an idea of the overall texture
of the cosmos. In his own person, he would have been part of a
genuine theory of cosmology, one he had absorbed by heart, that
was responsive to his emotions, and one that could act on his aspira-
tions and dreams. This kind of participation in ultimate things, now
extremely difficult for anyone who has not graduated in astro-
physics, was then possible to some degree for everyone, and no-
where could it be vulgarized.

That is what is meant here by mythical knowledge. It was under-
stood only by a very few, it appealed to many, and it is forever
intractable for those who approach it through "mathematics for the
million" or by speculations on the unconscious. In other words,
this is a selective and difficult approach, employing the means at
hand and much thought, limited surely, but resistant to falsifi-
cation.

How, in former times, essential knowledge was transmitted on
two or more intellectual levels can be learned from Germaine
Dieterlen's introduction to Marcel Griaule's Conversations with
Ogotemmeli, which deals with Dogon education and with the per-
sonal experience of the members of La Mission Griaule, who had to
wait sixteen years before the sage old men of the tribe decided to
"open the door."3 The description is revealing enough to be quoted
in full:

In African societies which have preserved their traditional organiza-
tion the number of persons who are trained in this knowledge is
quite considerable. This they call "deep knowledge" in contrast with
"simple knowledge" which is regarded as "only a beginning in the
understanding of beliefs and customs" that people who are not fully
instructed in the cosmogony possess. There are various reasons for
the silence that is generally observed on this subject. To a natural

3M. Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli (1965), pp. xiv-xvii.

Hamlet's Mill

54

reserve before strangers who, even when sympathetic, remain un-
consciously imbued with a feeling of superiority, one must add the
present situation of rapid change in African societies through con-
tact with mechanization and the influence of school teaching. But
among groups where tradition is still vigorous, this knowledge, which
is expressly characterized as esoteric, is only secret in the following
sense. It is in fact open to all who show a will to understand so long
as, by their social position and moral conduct, they are judged worthy
of it. Thus every family head, every priest, every grown-up person
responsible for some small fraction of social life can, as part of the
social group, acquire knowledge on condition that he has the pa-
tience and, as the African phrase has it, "he comes to sit by the side
of the competent elders" over the period and in the state of mind
necessary. Then he will receive answers to all his questions, but it
will take years. Instruction begun in childhood during assemblies
and rituals of the age-sets continues in fact throughout life.

These various aspects of African civilization gradually became clear
in the course of intensive studies undertaken among several of the
peoples of Mali and Upper Volta over more than a decade. In the
case of the Dogon, concerning whom there have already been nu-
merous publications, these studies have made possible the elaboration
of a synthesis covering the greater part of their activities.

We should now record the important occurrence during the field
expedition of 1947 which led to the writing of this particular study.
From 1931 the Dogon had answered questions and commented on
observations made during previous field trips on the basis of the in-
terpretation of facts which they call "la parole de face"; this is the
"simple knowledge" which they give in the first instance to all
enquirers. Publications of information obtained before the studies in
1948 relate to this first level of interpretation.

But the Dogon came to recognize the great perseverance of Marcel
Griaule and his team in their enquiries, and that it was becoming in-
creasingly difficult to answer the multiplicity of questions without
moving on to a different level. They appreciated our eagerness for
an understanding which earlier explanations had certainly not satis-
fied, and which was clearly more important to us than anything else.
Griaule had also shown a constant interest in the daily life of the
Dogon, appreciating their efforts to exploit a difficult country where
there was a serious lack of water in the dry season, and our relation-
ships, which had thus extended beyond those of ethnographical en-
quiry, became more and more trusting and affectionate. In the light
of all this, the Dogon took their own decision, of which we learned
only later when they told us themselves. The ciders of the lineages

55 • History, Myth and Reality

of the double village of Ogol and the most important totemic priests
of the region of Sanga met together and decided that the more eso-
teric aspects of their religion should be fully revealed to Professor
Griaule. To begin this they chose one of their best informed mem-
bers, Ogotommeli, who, as will be seen in the introduction, arranged
the first interview. This first exposition lasted exactly the number of
days recorded in Dieu d'Eau, in which the meandering flow of in-
formation is faithfully reported. Although we knew nothing of it at
the time, the progress of this instruction by Ogotemmeli was being
reported on daily to the council of elders and priests.

The seriousness and importance of providing this expose of Dogon
belief was all the greater because the Dogon elders knew perfectly
well that in doing so they were opening the door, not merely to these
thirty days of information, but to later and more intensive work
which was to extend over months and years. They never withdrew
from this decision, and we should like to express here our grateful
thanks to them. After Ogotemmeli's death, others carried on the
work. And since Professor Griaule's death they have continued with
the same patience and eagerness to complete the task they had under-
taken. These later enquiries have made possible the publication of the
many further studies cited in the bibliography, and the preparation
of a detailed treatise entitled Le Renard Pale, the first part of which
is now in press. And in 1963, as this is written, the investigation still
continues.

Intermezzo

A Guide for the Perplexed

Tout-puissants etrangers, inevitables astres . . .
Valery, La Jeune Parque

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 mod-
ern 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 this essay "Art of the Fugue."
And that excludes any "world-picture," a point that 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.1 Archaic thought is cosmological
first and last; it faces the gravest implications of a cosmos in ways
which reverberate in later classic 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

1 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.

57 • A Guide for the Perplexed '

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.

There are many events, described with appropriate terrestrial
imagery, that do not, however, happen on earth. In this book there
is mention of floods. In tradition, not one but three floods are
registered, one being the biblical flood, equivalents of which are
mentioned in Sumerian and Babylonian annals. The efforts of pious
archaeologists to connect the biblical narrative with geophysical
events are highly conjectural. There have been floods in Mesopo-
tamia causing grievous loss of life. There still are in the river plains
of China and elsewhere, but none of the total nature that the Bible
describes.                                                                     

There are tales, too, of cataclysmic deluges throughout the great
continental masses, in Asia and America, told by peoples who have
never seen the sea, or lakes, or great rivers. The floods the Greeks
described, like the flood of Deucalion, are as "mythical" as the
narrative of Genesis. Greece is not submersible, unless by tsunamis.
Deucalion and his wife landed on Mount Parnassus, high above
Delphi, the "Navel of the Earth," and were the only survivors of
this flood, the second, sent by Zeus in order to destroy the men of
one world-age. Classical authors disagreed on the specification of
which world-age. Ovid voted for the Iron Age. Plato's Solon keeps
his conversation with the Egyptian priest on a mythical level, and
his discussion of the two types of world destruction, by fire or
water, is astronomical.

The "floods" refer to an old astronomical image, based on an ab-
stract geometry. That this is not an "easy picture" is not to be
wondered at, considering the objective difficulty of the science of
astronomy. But although a modern reader does not expect a text on
celestial mechanics to read like a lullaby, he insists on his capacity
to understand mythical "images" instantly, because he can respect
as "scientific" only page-long approximation formulas, and the like.

Hamlet's Mill • 58

He does not think of the possibility that equally relevant knowledge
might once have been expressed in everyday language. He never
suspects such a possibility, although the visible accomplishments of
ancient cultures—to mention only the pyramids, or metallurgy—
should be a cogent reason for concluding that serious and intelli-
gent men were at work behind the stage, men who were bound to
have used a technical terminology.

Thus, archaic "imagery" is strictly verbal, representing a specific
type of scientific language, which must not be taken at its face
value nor accepted as expressing more or less childish "beliefs."
Cosmic phenomena and rules were articulated in the language, or
terminology, of myth, where each key word was at least as "dark"
as the equations and convergent series by means of which our
modern scientific grammar is built up. To state it briefly, as we are
going to do, is not to explain it—far from it.

First, what was the "earth"? In the most general sense, the
"earth" was the ideal plane laid through the ecliptic. The "dry
earth," in a more specific sense, was the ideal plane going through
the celestial equator. The equator thus divided two halves of the
zodiac which ran on the ecliptic, 23.5 deg. inclined to the equator, one
half being "dry land" (the northern band of the zodiac, reaching
from the vernal to the autumnal equinox), the other representing
the "waters below" the equinoctial plane (the southern arc of the
zodiac, reaching from the autumnal equinox, via the winter solstice,
to the vernal equinox). The terms "vernal equinox," "winter
solstice," etc., are used intentionally because myth deals with time,
periods of time which correspond to angular measures, and not with
tracts in space.

This could be neglected were it not for the fact that the equi-
noctial "points"—and therefore, the solstitial ones, too—do not re-
main forever where they should in order to make celestial goings-on
easier to understand, namely, at the same spot with respect to the
sphere of the fixed stars. Instead, they stubbornly move along the
ecliptic in the opposite direction to the yearly course of the sun,
that is, against the "right" sequence of the zodiacal signs (Taurus->
Aries-»Pisces, instead of Pisces->Aries-»Taurus).

59 • A Guide for the Perplexed

This phenomenon is called the Precession of the Equinoxes, and
it was conceived as causing the rise and the cataclysmic fall of ages
of the world. Its cause is a bad habit of the axis of our globe, which
turns around in the manner of a spinning top, its tip being in the
center of our small earth-ball, whence our earth axis, prolonged to
the celestial North Pole, describes a circle around the North Pole
of the ecliptic, the true "center" of the planetary system, the radius
of this circle being of the same magnitude as the obliquity of the
ecliptic with respect to the equator: 23.5 deg.. The time which this
prolonged axis needs to circumscribe the ecliptical North Pole is
roughly 26,000 years, during which period it points to one star after
another: around 3000 b.c. the Pole star was alpha Draconis; at the
time of the Greeks it was beta Ursae Minoris; for the time being it
is alpha Ursae Minoris; in a.d. 14,000 it will be Vega. The equi-
noxes, the points of intersection of ecliptic and equator, swinging
from the spinning axis of the earth, move with the same speed of
26,000 years along the ecliptic.

The sun's position among the constellations at the vernal equinox
was the pointer that indicated the "hours" of the precessional cycle
—very long hours indeed, the equinoctial sun occupying each zodi-
acal constellation for about 2,200 years. The constellation that rose
in the east just before the sun (that is, rose heliacally) marked the
"place" where the sun rested. At this time it was known as the
sun's "carrier," and as the main "pillar" of the sky, the vernal
equinox being recognized as the fiducial point of the "system,"
determining the first degree of the sun's yearly circle, and the first
day of the year. (When we say, it was "recognized," we mean that
it was spelled "carrier" or "pillar," and the like: it must be kept in
mind that we are dealing with a specific terminology, and not
with vague and primitively rude "beliefs.") At Time Zero (say,
5000 b.c.—there are reasons for this approximate date), the sun
was in Gemini; it moved ever so slowly from Gemini into Taurus,
then Aries, then Pisces, which it still occupies and will for some
centuries more. The advent of Christ the Fish marks our age. It was
hailed by Virgil, shortly before Anno Domini: "a new great order
of centuries is now being born . . ." which earned Virgil the

                               Hamlet's Mill • 60

strange title of prophet of Christianity. The preceding age, that of
Aries, had been heralded by Moses coming down from Mount Sinai
as "two-horned," that is, crowned with the Ram's horns, while his
flock disobediently insisted upon dancing around the "Golden
Calf" that was, rather, a "Golden Bull," Taurus.

Thus, the revolving heavens gave the key, the events of our globe
receding into insignificance. Attention was focused on the supernal
presences, away from the phenomenal chaos around us. What
moved in heaven of its own motion, the planets in their weeks and
years, took on ever more awesome dignity. They were the Persons
of True Becoming. The zodiac was where things really happened,
for the planets, the true inhabitants, knew what they were doing,
and mankind was only passive to their behest. It is revealing to look
at the figure drawn by a West Sudanese Dogon at the request of
Professor Zahan, showing the world egg, with the "inhabited world"
between the tropics, "le cylindre ou rectangle du monde."2 The
Dogon are fully aware of the fact that the region between the ter-
restrial tropics is not the best of inhabitable quarters, and so were
their teachers of far-off times, the archaic scientists who coined the
terminology of myth. What counted was the zodiacal band be-
tween the celestial tropics, delivering the houses, and the inns, the
"masks" (prosopa), and the disguises to the much traveling and
"shape-shifting" planets.

How far this point of view was from modern indifference can
hardly be appreciated except by those who can see the dimensions
of the historical chasm that opened with the adoption of the Coper-
nican doctrine. What had been for Sir Thomas Browne an o alti-
tudo crowded with religious emotions, presences and presentiments
has become a platitude that could at best inspire a Russian cosmo-
naut with the triumphant observation: "I have been up in the sky,
and nowhere did I find God." Astronomy has come down into the
realm of exterior ballistics, a subject for the adventures of the Space
Patrol.

2 D. Zahan and S. de Ganay, "Etudes sur la cosmologie des Dogon," Africa 21
(1951), p. 14.

61 • A Guide for the Perplexed

One might say that it takes a wrenching effort of the imagination
to restore in us the capacity for wonder of an Aristotle. But it
would be misleading to talk of "us" generally, because the average
Babylonian or Greek showed as little inclination to wonder at order
and law in nature as our average contemporaries do. It has been and
will be the mark of a true scientific mind to search for, and to
wonder at, the invariable structure of number behind the manifold
appearances. (It needs the adequate "expectation," the firm con-
fidence in "sense"—and "sense" does mean number and order for us,
since the birth of high civilization—to discover the periodical sys-
tem of the elements or, further on, Balmer's series.) Whence it is
much easier for a great scientist—for instance, Galileo, Kepler, or
Newton—to appreciate master feats of early mathematicians than
it is for the average humanist of all ages. No professional historian
of culture is likely to understand better the intellectual frame of
mind of the Maya than the astronomer Hans Ludendorff has done.

It is not so much the enormous number of new facts established
by scientists in the many centuries between antiquity and the 20th
century which separates us from the outlook of our great scientific
ancestors but the "deteriorated" expectations ruling our time.
Kepler's quest, were he living today, would be to discover a modi-
fied perspective from which to rediscover the Harmonice Mundi
on another scale. But, after all, what else if not such a quest for the
establishment of a new kind of cosmos is the work on the "general
field formula"? This time, the cosmos, as covered by the coming
to-be formula, will be understandable and will make "sense" only
for the best mathematicians, to the complete exclusion of the com-
mon people, and it will hardly be a "meaningful" universe such as
the archaic one had been.

To come back to the key words of ancient cosmology: if the
words "flat earth" do not correspond in any way to the fancies of
the flat-earth fanatics who still infest the fringes of our society
and who in the guise of a few preacher-friars made life miserable
for Columbus, so the name of "true earth" (or of "the inhabited
world") did not in any way denote our physical geoid for the

Hamlet's Mill

62

archaics. It applies to the band of the zodiac, two dozen degrees
right and left of the ecliptic, to the tracks of the "true inhabitants"
of this world, namely, the planets. It comprises their various oscilla-
tions and curlicues from their courses, and also the "dragon," well
known from very early times, which causes eclipses by swallowing
the sun and moon.

On the zodiacal band, there are four essential points which domi-
nate the four seasons of the year. They are, in fact, in church
liturgy the quatuor tempora marked with special abstinences. They
correspond to the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The solstice
is the "turning back" of the sun at the lowest point of winter and at
the highest point of summer. The two equinoxes, vernal and
autumnal, are those that cut the year in half, with an equal balance
of night and day, for they are the two intersections of the equator
with the ecliptic. Those four points together made up the four
pillars, or corners, of what was called the "quadrangular earth."

This is an essential feature that needs more attention. We have
said above that "earth," in the most general sense, meant the ideal
plane laid through the ecliptic; meanwhile we are prepared to im-
prove the definition: "earth" is the ideal plane going through the
four points of the year, the equinoxes and the solstices. Since the
four constellations rising heliacally at the two equinoxes and the
two solstices determine and define an "earth," it is termed quad-
rangular (and by no means "believed" to be quadrangular by
"primitive" Chinese, and so on). And since constellations rule the
four corners of the quadrangular earth only temporarily, such an
"earth" can rightly be said to perish, and a new earth to rise from
the waters, with four new constellations rising at the four points of
the year. Virgil says: "I am redit et Virgo . . ." (already the Virgin
is returning). (It is important to remember the vernal equinox as the
fiducial point; it is from this fact that a new earth is termed to rise
from the waters. In reality, only the new vernal equinoctial con-
stellation climbs from the sea onto the dry land above the equator3—
the inverse happens diametrically opposite. A constellation that

3 In a similar sense, Petronius' Trimalchio says about the month of May: "totus
coelus taurulus fiat" ("the whole sky turns into a little bull").

63 • A Guide for the Perplexed

ceases to mark the autumnal equinox, gliding below the equator, is
drowned.) This "formula" will make it easier to understand the
myth of Deucalion, in which the devastating waves of the flood
were ordered back by Triton's blowing the conch: the conch had
been invented by Aigokeros, i.e., Capricornus, who ruled the win-
ter solstice in the world-age when Aries "carried" the sun.

At Time Zero, the two equinoctial "hinges" of the world had
been Gemini and Sagittarius, spanning between them the arch of
the Milky Way: both bicorporeal signs4—and so were Pisces, and
Virgo with her ear of wheat, at the two other corners—to mark
the idea that the way (the Milky Way itself) was open between
earth and heaven, the way up and the way down where men and
gods could meet in that Golden Age. As will be shown later, the
exceptional virtue of the Golden Age was precisely that the cross-
roads of ecliptic and equator coincided with the crossroads of
ecliptic and Galaxy, namely in Gemini and Sagittarius, both con-
stellations "standing" firmly at two of the four corners of the
quadrangular earth.

At the "top," in the center high above the "dry" plane of the
equator, was the Pole star. At the opposite top, or rather in the
depth of the waters below, unobserved from our latitudes, was the
southern pole, thought to be Canopus, by far the brightest star of
these regions, more remarkable than the Southern Cross.

This brief sketch of archaic theory indicates—to repeat—that
geography in our sense was never meant, but a cosmography of the
kind needed even now by navigators. Ptolemy, the great geogra-
pher of antiquity, had been thinking of nothing else. His Geog-
raphy is a set of coordinates drawn from the skies, and transferred
onto an uncouth outline map of our globe, with a catalogue of
earthly distances added on by sailors and travelers to pinpoint, or
confirm, the positions of countries around the Mediterranean world.
It was an uncouth outline map, for it covered only a few countries
known around the Mediterranean region. Nothing was shown be-
yond the latitude 16 deg. south of the equator and 63° north, cor-

4 These constellations were, originally, called "bicorporeal" for reasons very
different from those given by Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos 1.11

Hamlet's Mill

64

responding to Iceland. Nothing west beyond the Canary Islands or
east of the easternmost city of China, an arc of longitude fixed for
simplicity at 180 deg., twelve equinoctial hours from end to end, the
breadth over the whole latitudes being nine equinoctial hours. A
large part of the space is blank and the limits are assigned, as they
should be, astronomically. This is what the ancients knew after a
thousand years of exploration, and they handed it down to the
Renaissance. They called it the oikoumene, the inhabited earth.

One may well understand how the archaics gave this name for
purely astronomical reasons to the zodiacal band, about as wide in
degrees but embracing the whole globe. The world, the cosmos,
■was above, revolving majestically in twenty-four hours, and it lent
itself to the passionate exploration of cosmographers through the
starlit night. Astrology was the inevitable outcome of astronomy
through those ages. The early Greeks derived their mathematics
from astronomy. In those centuries, their insatiable curiosity de-
veloped a knowledge of our earth and the events on it which drove
them to create the beginnings of our science. But soon after Aris-
totle, the Stoics reverted to the oriental pattern and reinstalled
astrology. Three centuries of pre-Socratic thought had equipped
them with an interest in physics, but with it they had nowhere to
go. They still had no experimental science as we mean it. What
they needed was an interpretation of influences, to go with the
all-in-all that the cosmos has to be. Stoic physics was a seductive
presentment of a field theory, but it was a counterfeit. Nothing
was to come of it because the true implications of the archaic
cosmos, no less than those of the Platonic, were incompatible with
anything that our physics can think of. In Stoic physics there is no
simple location, no analytical space.

It should be understood once and for all that the gulf between
the archaic world and ours was as wide as science itself. Prodigies
of exactitude and computation could not bridge it. Only the astro-
nomical map could. Whitehead has summed it up succinctly: "Our
science has been founded on simple location and misplaced con-
creteness." Modern physics has turned the original words into

It

65 A Guide for the Perplexed

queries. For Newton, it had the force of evidence: "No person
endowed with a capacity of rational understanding will believe that
a thing acts where it is not." Newton himself put the first query,
by stating the theory of gravitation—mathematically irresistible,
physically unexplainable. He could only accept it: "I do not under-
stand it, and I am going to feign no suppositions." The answer was
to come only with Einstein. It amounted to pure mathematical
rationalization, which did away with simple location, and with
concreteness altogether. The edifice of Descartes lay in ruins.
Nonetheless, the mind of civilized man clung to both principles
invincibly, as being equal to common sense. It was a model case of
habit having become second nature. The birth of experimental
physics was a decisive factor in the change.

No such common sense obtained once upon a time, when time
was the only reality, and space had still to be discovered—or in-
vented—by Parmenides after 500 b.c. (See G. de Santillana, "Pro-
logue to Parmenides," in Reflections on Men and Ideas [1968], pp.
82-119.)

The task then was to recover from the remote past an utterly
lost science, linked to an equally lost culture—one in which an-
thropologists\have seen only illiterate "primitive man." It was as if
the legendary "Cathedrale Engloutie" emerged from the depth of
prehistory with its bells still ringing.

The problem was also clear: this lost science, immensely sophis-
ticated, had no "system," no systematic key that could be a basis
for teaching. It existed before systems could be thought of. It was,
to repeat, a spontaneously generated "Art of the Fugue." That is
why it took us so many years to work it out.

The archaics' vision of the universe appears to have left out all
ideas of the earth suspended, or floating, in space. Whether or not
this was really so cannot be decided yet: there are peculiar rumors
to be heard about innumerable "Brahma-Eggs," that is, spheres like
our own, in India. The Maori of New Zealand claimed, as the
Pythagoreans had done, that every star had mountains and plains,
and was inhabited like the earth. Varahamihira (5th century a.d.)

Hamlet's Mill • 66

even stated that the earth was suspended between magnets.5 For
the time being, one must continue to assume that the earth was
simply the center of the world, and a sphere, and that there was no
trace of Galilean relativism which is so natural to us, posing so
many problems of motion. The Greeks still had the old idea, but
they asked themselves questions about it. What moved was the sky,
but questions about the sky posed abstruse problems. The greatest
one was, of course, the slow motion of the tilt of the sky, described
above, which went through a Great Year of 26,000 years.

The Greek astronomers had enough instrumentation and data to
detect the motion, which is immensely slow, and they saw that it
applied to the whole of the sky. Hipparchus in 127 b.c. called it
the Precession of the Equinoxes. There is good reason to assume
that he actually rediscovered this, that it had been known some
thousand years previously, and that on it the Archaic Age based its
long-range computation of time. Modern archaeological scholars
have been singularly obtuse about the idea because they have cul-
tivated a pristine ignorance of astronomical thought, some of them
actually ignorant of the Precession itself. The split between the two
cultures begins right here. But apart from this, although the schol-
ars unanimously cling to the accepted conventions about the tempo
of historical evolution, they widely disagree when it comes to
judging the evidence in detail. The verdicts concerning the famil-
iarity of ancient Near Eastern astronomers with the Precession
depend, indeed, on arbitrary factors: namely, on the different
' scholarly opinions about the difficulty of the task. Ernst Dittrich,
for instance, remarked that one should not expect much astronomi-
cal knowledge from Mesopotamians around 2000 b.c. "Probably
they knew only superficially the geometry of the motions of sun
and moon. Thus, if we examine the simple, easily observable mo-
tions by means of which one could work out chronological deter-
minants with very little mathematical knowledge, we find only the

5 Pancasiddhantika, chapter JXII (Thibaut trans., p. 69): "The round ball of the
earth, composed of the five elements, abides in space in the midst of the starry
sphere, like a piece of iron suspended between magnets."

67 • A Guide for the Perplexed

Precession."6

There was also a learned Italian Church dignitary,
Domenico Testa, who snatched at this curious argument to prove

that the world had been created ex nihilo, as described in the first
book of Moses, an event that supposedly happened around 4000
B.C. If the Egyptians had had a background of many millennia to
reckon with, who, he asked, could have been unaware of the Pre-
cession? "The very sweepers of their observatories would have
known."7 Hence time could not have begun before 4000, Q.E.D.

The comparison of the views just quoted with those upheld by
the majority of modern scholars shows that one's own subjective
opinions about what is easy and what is difficult might not be the
most secure basis for a serious historiography of science. As Hans
Ludendorff once pointed out, it is an unsound approach to Maya
astronomy to start from preconceived convictions about what the
Maya could have known and what they could not possibly have
known: one should, instead, draw conclusions only from the data
as given in the inscriptions and codices.8 That this had to be stressed
explicitly reveals the steady decline of scientific ethics.

We today are aware of the Precession as the gentle tilting of our
globe, an irrelevant one at that. As the GI said, lost in the depth of
jungle misery, when his friends took refuge in their daydreams:
"When I close my eyes, I see only a mule's behind. Also when I
don't." This is, as it were, today's vision of reality. Today, the Pre-
cession is a well-established fact. The space-time continuum does
not effect it. It is by now only a boring complication. It has lost
relevance for our affairs, whereas once it was the only majestic
secular motion that our ancestors could keep in mind when they
looked for a great cycle which could affect humanity as a whole.
But then our ancestors were astronomers and astrologers. They
believed that the sliding of the sun along the equinoctial point af-

fected the frame of the cosmos and determined a succession of

6"Gibt es astronomische Fixpunkte in der altesten babylonischen Chronologie?"
OLZ 15 (1912), col. 104.

7 Il Zodiaco di Dendera lllustrato (1822), p. 17.
8"Zur astronomischen Deutung der Maya-Inschriften," SPAW (1936), p. 85.

Hamlet's Mill

68

world-ages under different zodiacal signs. They had found a large
peg on which to hang their thoughts about cosmic time, which
brought all things in fateful order. Today, that order has lapsed,
like the idea of the cosmos itself. There is only history, which has
been felicitously defined as "one damn thing after another."

And yet, were history really understood in this admittedly flat
sense of things happening one after another to the same stock of
people, we should be better off than we are now, when we almost
dare not admit the assumption from which this book starts, that our
ancestors of the high and far-off times were endowed with minds
wholly comparable to ours, and were capable of rational processes
—always given the means at hand. It is enough to say that this flies
in the face of a custom which has become already a second nature.
Our period may some day be called the Darwinian period, just as
we talk of the Newtonian period of two centuries ago. The simple
idea of evolution, which it is no longer thought necessary to ex-
amine, spreads like a tent over all those ages that lead from primitiv-
ism into civilization. Gradually, we are told, step by step, men
produced the arts and crafts, this and that, until they emerged into
the light of history.

Those soporific words "gradually" and "step by step," repeated
incessantly, are aimed at covering an ignorance which is both vast
and surprising. One should like to inquire: which steps? But then
one is lulled, overwhelmed and stupefied by the gradualness of it
all, which is at best a platitude, only good for pacifying the mind,
since no one is willing to imagine that civilization appeared in a
thunderclap.

One could find a key in a brilliant TV production on the Stone-
henge problem given a few years ago. With the resources of the
puissant techniques of ubiquity, various authorities were called to
the screen to discuss the possible meaning of the astronomical align-
ments and polygons discovered in the ancient Megalith since 1906,
when Sir Norman Lockyer, the famous astronomer, published the
results of his first investigation. Specialists, from prehistorians to
astronomers, expressed their doubts and wonderments down to the
last one, a distinguished archaeologist who had been working on

69 • A Guide for the Perplexed

the monument itself for many years. He had more fundamental
doubts. How could one not realize, he said, that the builders of
Stonehenge were barbarians, "howling barbarians" who were, to
say the least, utterly incapable of working out complex astronomi-
cal cycles and over many years at that? The uncertain coincidences
must be due to chance. And then, with perverse irony, the mid-
winter sun of the solstice appeared on the screen rising exactly be-
hind the Heel Stone, as predicted. The "mere" coincidences had
been in fact ruled out, since Gerald Hawkins, a young astronomer
unconcerned with historical problems, had run the positions
through a computer and discovered more alignments than had been
dreamed of. Here was the whole paradox. Howling barbarians
who painted their faces blue must have known more astronomy
than their customs and table manners could have warranted. The
lazy word "evolution" had blinded us to the real complexities of
the past.

That key term "gradualness" should be understood to apply to a
vastly different time scale than that considered by the history of
mankind. Human history taken as a whole in that frame, even ra-
dation itself, is only an evolutionary episode. In that whole, Cro-
Magnon man is the last link. All of protohistory is a last-minute
flickering.

But while the biologists were wondering, something great had
come upon the scene, arriving from unexpected quarters. Sir James
George Frazer was a highly respected classical scholar who, while
editing the Description of Greece by Pausanias, was impressed with
the number of beliefs, practices, cults and superstitions spread over
the classical landscape of Greece in classical times. This led him to
search deeper into the half-forgotten strata of history, and out of
it came his Golden Bough. The historian had turned ethnologist,
and extended his investigations to the whole globe. Suddenly, an
immense amount of material became available about fertility cults
as the universal form of earliest religion, and about primitive magic
connected with it. This appeared to be the humus from which
civilization had grown—simple deities of the seasons, a dim multi-
tude of peasants copulating in the furrows and building up rituals

Hamlet's Mill

70

of fertility with human sacrifice. Added to this, in political circles,
there came the vision of war as both inherent in human nature and
ennobling—the law of natural selection applied to nations and
races. Thus, many materials and much history went to build the
temple of evolutionism. But as the theory moved on, its high-
minded aspects began to wane; psychoanalysis moved in as a tidal
wave. For if the struggle for life (and the religions of the life force)
can explain so much, the unconscious can explain anything. As we
know today only too well.

The universal and uniform concept of gradualness thus defeated
itself. Those key words (gradualness and evolution) come from the
earth sciences in the first place, where they had a precise meaning.
Crystallization and upthrust, erosion and geosynclinals are the re-
sult of forces acting constantly in accordance with physical laws.
They provided the backdrop for Darwin's great scenario. When it
comes to the evolution of life, the terms become less precise in
meaning, though still acceptable. Genetics and natural selection
stand for natural law, and events are determined by the rolling of
the dice over long ages. But we cannot say much about the why
and the how of this instead of that specific form, about where spe-
cies, types, cultures branched off. Animal evolution remains an
overall historical hypothesis supported by sufficient data—and by
the lack of any alternative. In detail, it raises an appalling number
of questions to which we have no answer. Our ignorance remains
vast, but it is not surprising.

And then we come to history, and the evolutionary idea reap-
pears, coming in as something natural, with all scale lost. The
accretion of plausible ideas goes on, its flow invisibly carried by
"natural law" since the time of Spencer. It all remains within an
unexamined kind of Naturphilosophie. For if we stopped to think,
we would agree that as far as human "fate" is concerned organic
evolution ceased before the time when history, or even prehistory,
began. We are on another time scale. This is no longer nature act-
ing on man, but man on nature. People like to think of a constancy
of laws which apply to us. But man is a law unto himself.

71 • A Guide for the Perplexed

When, riding on the surf of the general "evolutionism," Ernst
Haeckel and his faithful followers proposed to solve the "world
riddles" once and for all, Rudolf Virchow9 warned time and again
of an evil "monkey wind" blowing round; he reminded his col-
leagues of the index of excavated "prehistoric" skulls and pointed
to the unchanged quantity of brain owned by the species Homo
sapiens. But his contemporaries paid no heed to his admonitions;
least of all the humanists who applied, without blinking, the strictly
biological scheme of the evolution of organisms to the cultural
history of the single species Homo sapiens.

In later centuries historians may declare all of us insane, because
this incredible blunder was not detected at once and was not re-
futed with adequate determination. Mistaking cultural history for
a process of gradual evolution, we have deprived ourselves of every
reasonable insight into the nature of culture. It goes without saying
that the still more modern habit of replacing "culture" by "society"
has blocked the last narrow path to understanding history. Our
ignorance not only remained vast, but became pretentious as well.

A glimpse at some Pensees might show the abyss that yawns
between us and a serious thinker of those golden days before the
outbreak of "evolution." This is what Pascal asked: "What are our
natural principles but principles of custom? In children they are
those which they have received from the habits of their fathers, as
hunting in animals. A different custom will cause different natural
principles." And: "Custom is a second nature which destroys the
former. But what is nature? For is custom not natural? I am much
afraid that nature is itself only a first custom, as custom is a second
nature."10

This kind of question, aimed with precision at the true problem-
;iiie;il spots, would have been enough to make hash of social an-
ihropology two centuries ago, and also of anthropological sociol-
ogy. Although fully aware of the knot of frightening problems

"In several of his addresses to the "Versammlungen deutscher Naturforscher und
Arzte."                                                   

10Pensees, nos. 92, 93 (Trotter trans. [1941}, p. 36).

Hamlet's Mill • 72

arising from the results of the most modern neurophysiology—the
building up of microneurons in the brain after birth, etc.—we are
by no means entitled to feign any hypotheses beyond saying that
the master brain who will, sooner or later, fashion a new philo-
sophical anthropology deserving the title, one that will account for
all the new implications, will find himself up against these same few
questions of Pascal.

Some words have still to be said about the problem that is at the
very root of the many misunderstandings, that of translation. Most
of the texts were written—if they were ever originally written—
in remote and half-obliterated languages from the far past. The
task of translation has been taken over by a guild of dedicated,
highly specialized philologists who have had to reconstruct the dic-
tionaries and grammars of these languages. It would be bad grace
to dismiss their efforts, but one must take into account several layers
of error: (1) personal or systematic errors, arising from their pre-
conceptions and from well-implanted prejudices (psychological
and philosophical) of their age; (2) the very structure of our own
language, of the architecture of our own verbal system, of which
very few individuals are aware. There was once a splendid article
by Erwin Schroedinger, with the title "Are there quantum jumps?"
which laid bare many such misunderstandings inside the well-
worked area of modern physics.11 And all this ties up with another
major source of error that comes from the underestimation of the
thinkers of the far past. We instinctively dismiss the idea that five
to ten thousand years ago there may very well have been thinkers
of the order of Kepler, Gauss, or Einstein, working with the means
at hand.

In other words, we must take language seriously. Imprecise lan-
guage discloses the lack of precision of thought. We have learned to
take the language of Archimedes or Eudoxos seriously, simply be-
cause it can translate directly into modern forms of thought. This
should extend to forms of thought utterly different from ours in
appearance. Take that great endeavor on the hieroglyphic language,

11 British Journal for the Philosophy of Science j (1952), pp. 112ff.

73 'A Guide for the Perplexed

embodied in the imposing Egyptian dictionary of Erman-Grapow.
For our simple word "heaven" it shows thirty-seven terms whose
nuances are left to the translator and used according to his lights.
So the elaborate instructions in the Book of the Dead, referring to
the soul's celestial voyage, translate into "mystical" talk, and must
be treated as holy mumbo jumbo. But then, modern translators be-
lieve so firmly in their own invention, according to which the
underworld has to be looked for in the interior of our globe—in-
stead of in the sky—that even 370 specific astronomical terms
would not cause them to stumble.

One small example may indicate the way in which texts are "im-
proved." In the inscriptions of Dendera, published by Dumichen,
the goddess Hathor is called "lady of every joy." For once, Dumi-
chen adds: "Literally . . . 'the lady of every heart circuit.' "12
This is not to say that the Egyptians had discovered the circulation
of the blood. But the determinative sign for "heart" often figures
as the plumb bob at the end of a plumb line coming from a well-
known astronomical or surveying device, the merkhet. Evidently,
"heart" is something very specific, as it were the "center of grav-
ity."13 And this may lead in quite another direction. The Arabs
preserved a name for Canopus—besides calling the star Kalb at-tai-
man ("heart of the south"):14 Suhail el-wezn, "Canopus Pondero-
sus," the heavy-weighing Canopus, a name promptly declared
meaningless by the experts, but which could well have belonged to
:m archaic system in which Canopus was the weight at the end of
the plumb line, as befitted its important position as a heavy star at
the South Pole of the "waters below." Here is a chain of inferences
which might or might not be valid, but it is allowable to test it,
and no inference at all would come from the "lady of every
joy." The line seems to state that Hathor (= Hat Hor, "House of
Horus") "rules" the revolution of a specific celestial body—
whether or not Canopus is alluded to—or, if we can trust the trans-

12Hon-t, rer het-neb; see J. Duemichen, "Die Bauurkunde der Tempelanlagen
von Edfu," Aeg.Z. p (1871), p. 28.

13See Aeg.Wb. 2, pp.55f. for the sign of the heart (ib) as expressing generally
"the middle, the center."

14 S. Mowinekcl, Die Sternnamen im Alien Testament (1928), p. 12.

Hamlet's Mill

74

lation "every," the revolution of all celestial bodies. As concerns the
identity of the ruling lady, the greater possibility speaks for Sirius,
but Venus cannot be excluded; in Mexico, too, Venus is called
"heart of the earth." The reader is invited to imagine for himself
what many thousands of such pseudo-primitive or poetic interpre-
tations must lead to: a disfigured interpretation of Egyptian in-
tellectual life.

The problem of astrology—The greatest gap between archaic
thinking and modern thinking is in the use of astrology. By this is
not meant the common or judicial astrology which has become
once again a fad and a fashion among the ignorant public, an escape
from official science, and for the vulgar another kind of black art
of vast prestige but with principles equally uncomprehended. It is
necessary to go back to archaic times, to a universe totally unsus-
pecting of our science and of the experimental method on which it
is founded, unaware of the awful art of separation which distin-
guishes the verifiable from the unverifiable. This 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 fascination and rigor of
Number made it mandatory that the correspondences be exact in
many forms (Kepler in this sense is the last Archaic). The multi-
plicity of relations seen or intuited brought the idea to a focus in
which the universe appeared determined not on one but on many
levels at once. This was the signature of "panmathematizing idea-
tion." This idea may well have led up to a pre-established harmony
on an infinite number of levels. Leibniz has shown us how far
it could go, given modern tools: the universe conceived all at once,
complete with its individual destinies for all time, out of an "efful-
guration" of the divine mind. Some prehistoric or protohistoric Py-
thagorean Leibniz, whose existence is far from inconceivable, may
■well have cherished this impossible dream, going to the limit more
innocently than our own historic sage. Starting from the power of

75 • A Guide for the Perplexed

Number, a whole logic is thinkable in this view. Fata regunt orbem,
certa stant omnia lege.

The only thinker of Antiquity who could be proof against this
temptation was Aristotle, for he thought that forms were only
potential in the beginning, and came into actualization only in the
course of their lifetime, thus undergoing their fate as individuals.
But that is because Aristotle refused mathematics from the start.
He had the grounds for opposing universal synchronicity (the word
and the idea were invented by C. G. Jung, replacing space with
time, which goes to show that the archaic scheme has more lives
than a cat).

Yet, here again, Dante comes to the fore as a witness; for, by art
of Gramarye, as the simple used to say, he spans the whole itinerary,
of shall we say the cheminement de la pensee, between two world
epochs. An Aristotelian to the core, steeped in the discipline of
Thomism, hence by inheritance anti-mathematical, his spirit in its
sweep understands the stars, in the sense of their Pythagorean im-
plications. In his ascent to the realm of heaven, he encounters his
friend and onetime companion of his wanton and romantic youth,
Charles Martel (Paradiso, viii.34-37), who tells him what it means
to be of the elect: "We circle in one orbit, at one pace, with one
thirst, along with the heavenly Princes whom thou didst once ad-
dress from the world"—"You Who by Understanding Move the
Third Heaven." This is one of his early poems, a celebrated one
at that, and it relates to the heavenly intelligences in a spirit of
unrestrained Platonic worship. The progress of his song through
the three realms will show him more and more wrapped in Platonic
harmonies, much as he had dreamed of in his youth, and it will
actually confirm his belief in astrology as a divine grant which keeps
nature in order. Thus, the requirements of both doctrines have been
laved: the arrangement of nature by genus and species (Aristotle)
and the free development of one's own self (Aquinas) in a kind of
Plotinian compromise overshadowed by the "Harmony of the
Spheres." Such was Dante's own inimitable "art of Gramarye."

Chapter V

The Unfolding in India

They reckon ill who leave me

out.
When Me they fly, I am the

wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Emerson, Brahma

The parallel between the Tale of Kai Khusrau and the final
plot of the vast Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, has received attention
for over a century. It was noticed by the great Orientalist James
Darmesteter. The translators of Firdausi are not unaware of it, and
they analyze the last phase of events as follows:

The legend of Kai Khusrau's melancholy, his expedition into the
mountains, and his attainment to heaven without having tasted death
has its parallel in the Mahabharata, where Yudhishthira, the eldest of
the five Pandavas, becoming weary of the world, resolves to retire
from the sovereignty and acquire merit by pilgrimage. On hearing of
his intentions his four brothers—Bhima, Arjuna, and the twins Na-
kula and Sahadeva—resolve to follow his example and accompany
him. Yudhishthira appoints successors to his various kingdoms. The
citizens and the inhabitants of the provinces, hearing the king's
words, became filled with anxiety and disapproved of them. "This
should never be done"—said they unto the king. The monarch, well
versed with the changes brought about by time, did not listen to
their counsels. Possessed of righteous soul, he persuaded the people
to sanction his views . . . Then Dharma's son, Yudhishthira, the King
of Pandavas, casting off his ornaments, wore barks of trees . . . The
five brothers, with Draupadi forming the sixth [she was the joint
wife of the brothers], and a dog forming the seventh, set out on their
journey. The citizens and the ladies of the royal household followed

77 • The Unfolding in India

them for some distance . . . The denizens of the city then returned
[exactly as Kai Khusrau's subjects had done]. The seven pilgrims
meanwhile had set out upon their journey. They first wandered east-
ward, then southward, and then westward. Lastly they faced north-
ward and crossed the Himalaya. Then they beheld before them a
vast desert of sand and beyond it Mount Meru. One by one the pil-
grims sank exhausted and expired, first Draupadi, then the twins, then
Arjuna, then Bhima; but Yudhishthira, who never even looked back
at his fallen comrades, still pressed on and, followed by the faithful
dog who turns out to be Dharma (the Law), in disguise, entered
Heaven in his mortal body, not having tasted death.

Among minor common traits, Warner stresses particularly these:

Both journey into the mountains with a devoted band, the number
of them is the same in both cases, and both are accompanied by a
divine being, for the part of the dog in the Indian legend is indicated
in the Iranian as being taken by Surush, the angel of Urmuzd. In
both, the leaders pass deathless into Heaven, and in both their mor-
tal comrades perish. One legend therefore must be derived from the
other, or else, and this seems to be the better opinion, they must be
referred to a common origin of great antiquity.1

Of great antiquity these legends must be, indeed; otherwise there
would not be a very similar end ascribed to Enoch and to Quetzal-
couatl. In fact, just as Kai Khusrau's paladins did not listen to the
Shah's advice not to remain with him until his ascension—the crowd
had been left behind, anyhow—so Enoch

urged his retinue to turn back: "Go ye home, lest death overtake you,
if you follow me farther." Most of them—800,000 there were—
heeded his words and went back, but a number remained with him
for six days. . . On the sixth day of the journey, he said to those still
accompanying him, "Go ye home, for on the morrow I shall ascend
to heaven and whoever will then be near me, he will die." Neverthe-
less, some of his companions remained with him, saying: "Whither-
soever thou goest, we will go. By the living God, death alone shall
part us." On the seventh day Enoch was carried into the heavens in
a fiery chariot drawn by fiery chargers. The day thereafter, the kings
who had turned back in good time sent messengers to inquire into the
fate of the men who had refused to separate themselves from Enoch,
for they had noted the number of them. They found snow and great
hailstones upon the spot whence Enoch had risen, and, when they
searched beneath, they discovered the bodies of all who had remained

1 Firdausi, Shahnama (Warner trans.), vol. 4, pp. 136

Hamlet's Mill • 78

behind with Enoch. He alone was not among them; he was on high
in heaven.2

Quetzalcouatl's paladins, "the slaves, the dwarves, the hunch
backed . . . they died there from the cold . . ., upon all of them fell
the snow," in the mountain pass between Popocatepetl and Iztacte-
petl.3 Quetzalcouatl, lamenting, and utterly lonely, had some more
stations to pass, before he took off on his serpent raft, announcing
he would come back, someday, "to judge the living and the dead"
(appendix #3).

Were it only the dry fact of Yudhishthira's ascension, and the
end of his companions high up in the mountains, we might have
avoided the maze of the Mahabharata altogether. But, labyrinthine
as this epic of twelve volumes truly is—and the same goes for the
Puranas—Indian myth offers keys to secret chambers to be had
nowhere else. The Mahabharata tells of the war of the Pandavas
and the Kauravas, that is the Pandu brothers and the Kuru brothers,
who correspond to the Iranians and Turanians, to the sons of Ka-
leva and the people of Untamo, etc. Thus far the general situation
is not foreign to us. But the epic states unmistakably that (this tre-
mendous war was fought during the interval between the Dvapara
and the Kali Yuga.4

This "dawn" between two world-ages can be specified further.
The real soul and force on the side of the Pandavas is Krishna—in
the words of Arjuna: "He, who was our strength, our might, our
heroism, our prowess, our prosperity, our brightness, has left us, and
departed."5 Now Krishna ("the Black") is the most outstanding
avatar of Vishnu. And it is only when Krishna has been shot in the
heel (or the sole of his foot), the only vulnerable spot of his body,
by the hunter Jara (= old age) that the Pandavas, too, resolve to
depart—just as Kai Khusrau did after the death of Kai Ka'us. There
was Kai Khusrau's statement: "And now I deem it better to de-

2 L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (1954), vol. 1, pp. 129ff.

3E. Seler, Einige Kapitel aus dem Geschichtswerk des Fray B. de Sahagun
(1927), p. 290.
4Mbh. 1.2 (Roy trans., vol. 1, p. 18). See H. Jacobi's Mahabharata (1903), p. 2.

3  Vishnu Purana 1.38 (trans. H. H. Wilson [1840; 3d cd. 1961], p. 484).

79 • The Unfolding in India

part . . . Because this Kaian crown and throne will pass." And this
happens at the following crucial point:

When that portion of Vishnu (that had been born by Vasudeva and
Devaki) returned to heaven, then the Kali age commenced. As long
as the earth was touched by his sacred feet, the Kali age could not
affect it. As soon as the incarnation of the eternal Vishnu had de-
parted, the son of Dharma, Yudhishthira, with his brethren, abdicated
the sovereignty . . . The day that Krishna shall have departed from
the earth will be the first of the Kali age ... it will continue for
360,000 years of mortals.6

And as Krishna is reunited with Vishnu, as Arjuna returns into
Indra,7 and Balarama into the Shesha-Serpent, so it will happen to
the other heroes. Thus, when Yudhishthira is finally rejoined with
his whole Pandu-Family in heaven, the poet Sauti explains,

"That the various heroes, after exhausting their Karma, become re-
united with that deity of which they were avatars."8

Yudhishthira is reunited with Dharma, disguised as a faithful dog.9
Seen from this vantage point, the Finnish epic appears as a last dim
and apparently meaningless reflection. Kullervo goes with the black
dog Musti, the only living soul left from his home, into the forest
where he throws himself upon his sword.

Now what about Krishna, most beloved deity of the Hinduistic
Pantheon? Some of his innumerable deeds and victorious adventures
before his "departure" will look familiar.

6 Vishnu Purana 4.24 (Wilson trans., p. 390). Cf. 5.38, pp. 481f.: "and on the same
day that Krishna departed from the earth the powerful dark-bodied Kali age
descended. The ocean rose, and submerged the whole of Dvaraka," i.e., the town
which Krishna himself had built, as told in Vishnu Purana 5.23, p. 449.

7 See Vishnu Purana 5.12 (Wilson trans., p. 422), where Indra tells Krishna, "A
portion of me has been born as Arjuna."

8 Mbh. 18.5 (Swargarohanika Parva) (Roy trans., vol. 12, pp. 287-90). See also
Jacobi, p. 191.

• Arrived at the last stage of deterioration, we find Dharma, the Dog, in a fairy
tale from Albania: The youngest daughter of a king—her two sisters resemble
Regan and Goneril—offers to go to war in her father's place, asking for three suits
only, and for the paternal blessing. "Then the king procured three male suits, and
gave her his blessing, and this blessing changed into a little dog and went with the
princess." (J. G. von Hahn: Griechische und Albanische Marchen [1918], vol. 2,

p.146.).

Hamlet's Mill

80

81 • The Unfolding in India

Young Krishna is the persecuted nephew of a cruel uncle, Kansa
(or Kamsa), both being, as Keith10 styles it, "protagonists in a ritual
contest." This is not modestly understating it, but grossly mislead-
ing. Kansa is an Asura (appendix #4), and Krishna is a Deva, and
that means, again, that the affair concerns the great divine "Parties"
(Iranians-Turanians, and the like). The uncle, warned beforehand
through prophecies about the danger coming from the eighth son
of Devaki and Vasudeva, kills six children of this couple, but the
seventh (Balarama) and eighth (Krishna) are saved and live with
herdsmen. There young Krishna performs some of the deeds of the
"Strong Boy."

If Kullervo, three days old, destroyed his cradle, we might ex-
pect something spectacular from Krishna, and we are not disap-
pointed:                                                                 

On one occasion, whilst Madhusudana was asleep underneath the
wagon, he cried for the breast, and kicking up his feet he overturned
the vehicle, and all the pots and pans were upset and broken. The
cowherds and their wives, hearing the noise, came exclaiming: "Ah!
ah!" and they found the child sleeping on his back. "Who could have
upset the wagon?" said the cowherds. "This child," replied some
boys, who witnessed the circumstance; "we saw him," said they,
"crying, and kicking the wagon with his feet, and so it was over-
turned: no one else had any thing to do with it." The cowherds were
exceedingly astonished at this account.11

One day the child repeatedly disobeyed his mother and she
became angry.

Fastening a cord round his waist, she tied him to the wooden mortar
Ulukhala, and being in a great passion, she said to him, "Now, you
naughty boy, get away from hence if you can." She then went to her
domestic affairs. As soon as she had departed, the lotus-eyed Krishna,
endeavouring to extricate himself, pulled the mortar after him to the
space between the two ariuna trees that grew near together. Having
dragged the mortar between these trees, it became wedged awry
there, and as Krishna pulled it through, it pulled down the trunks of
the trees. Hearing the crackling noise, the people of Vraja came to
see what was the matter, and there they beheld the two large trees,

10 A. B. Keith, Indian Mythology (1917), p. 126. For the deeds of Krishna, see
pp. 174ff.

11  Vishnu Purana 5.6 (Wilson trans., p. 406f.).

with shattered stems and broken branches, prostrate on the ground,
with the child fixed between them, with a rope round his belly,
laughing, and showing his little white teeth, just budded . The
elders of the cowherds . . . looked upon these circumstances with
alarm, considering them of evil omen. "We cannot remain in this
place," said they, "let us go to some other part of the forest."

Thus, they go to Vrindavana, exactly where the child had
wished. The Harivamsha explains the move to Vrindavana in this
way:

Krishna converts the hairs of his body into hundreds of wolves, who
so harass and alarm the inhabitants of Vraja—the said cowherds—,
that they determine to abandon their homes.12

In the Indian myth, for once, the episode of Krishna's hairs turn-
ing into hundreds of wolves seems a mere trifle, compared with
Kullervo's wolves which "he sang to cattle, and he changed the
bears to oxen," the more so, as Krishna's only "harass and alarm"
the cowherds. These wild beasts, however, indispensable to the
"Urkind," whether Kullervo or Dionysos—see above, p. 30—are
present in Krishna's story, and this is remarkable enough.

Kansa,13 hearing of the deeds of Krishna and Rama, determines to
have the boys brought to his capital Mathura and there to procure
their death, if he cannot slay them before. Needless to say, all is in
vain: Krishna kills Kansa and all his soldiers, and places Kansa's
father on the throne.

Krishna does not pretend to be a fool, the smiling one. He merely
insists again and again on being a simple mortal when everybody
wishes to adore him as the highest god, which he is. Nor is he
known particularly as an "avenger." He was delegated from higher
quarters to free the earth—"overburdened" as it was with Asura—
as he had done time and again in his former avatars. Krishna belongs
here, however, because Indian tradition has preserved the con-
sciousness of the cosmic frame, and it is this alone that gives mean-

12 Vishnu Purana 5.6 (Wilson trans., pp. 406f.).

"That "uncle"—really "the great Asura Kalanemi who was killed by the power-
ful Vislini .. . revived in Kansa, the son of Ugrasena" (Vishnu Purana 5.1 [Wilson

trans., p.396).

Hamlet's Mill

82

ing to the incidence of war and the notion of crime and punishment
as they appear in myth.

It is useful to keep philosophy and mythology carefully sepa-
rated, and yet the many gods and heroes who avenge their fathers
—beginning with "Horus-the-avenger-of-his-father" and "Ninurta
who has avenged his father"—have their function destined to them,
as has the long line of wicked uncles. These figures pay reparation
and atonement to each other for their mutual injustice in the order
of time, as Anaximander said. Anaximander was a philosopher.
Despite its fantastic language the Indian epic has an affinity with his
thought. Vishnu returns regularly in his capacity of "avenger,"
collecting the "reparations" of the bad uncle "according to the
order of time." In the Mahabharata he does so under the name of
Krishna, but he will come again in the shape of another avatar to
clean the earth of the Asura who overburden it. The Asura, too,
grow into "overbearing characters" strictly according to the order
of time. Under the name of Kalki the Vishnu figure is expected to
introduce a new Krita Yuga (Golden Age), when our present Kali
Yuga has come to its miserable end.

It is this regular returning of avatars of Vishnu which helps
clarify matters. Because it is Vishnu's function to return as avenger
at fixed intervals of time, there is no need in the epic to emphasize
the revenge taken by Krishna on Uncle Kansa. But in the West,

where the continuity of cosmic processes as told by myth has been

forgotten—along with the knowledge that gods are stars (or comets)—the very

same revenge is given great importance because it is an unrepeated
event accomplished by one figure, whether hero or god, and this
hero or god is, moreover, understood to be the creation of some
imaginative poet. The introduction of Indian tradition makes it
possible to rediscover the context in which such characters as
Saxo's Amlethus, such typically unlucky fellows as Kullervo, have
significance. Once it is fully realized that "the day Krishna shall
have departed from the earth will be the first of the Kali Yuga,"
the proper perspective is established. Our hero stands precisely on
the threshold between a closed age and a new Time Zero. In fact,
he closes the old one.

83 • The Unfolding in India

The most inconspicuous details become significant when ob-
served from this point of view. For instance Saxo, without giving
it much thought, divided the biography of Amlethus in two parts
(incidentally involving the hero in bigamy), in the same way as
Firdausi told us nine-tenths of Kai Khusrau's adventures in the
book on Kai Ka'us. This is actually the more puzzling of the two
as Firdausi states: "For from today new feasts and customs date
Because tonight is born Shah Kai Khusrau." Firdausi, who was well
versed in astrology, insisted on the Shah's birthday because, in the
astrological sense, birth is the decisive moment. But here, and in
related cases where chronology is at issue, it is the moment of
death, of leaving the stage, that counts. Krishna's departure gives
the scheme away. Al-Biruni, in his chapter on "The Festivals of
the Months of the Persians," describing the festival Nauroz ("New
Day") in the first month of spring, writes:

On the 6th day of Farwardin, the day Khurdadh, is the Great Nau-
roz, for the Persians a feast of great importance. On this day—they
say—God finished the creation, for it is the last of the six days . . .
On this day God created Saturn, therefore its most lucky hours are
those of Saturn. On the same day—they say—the Sors Zarathustrae
came to hold communion with God, and Kaikhusrau ascended into
the air. On the same day the happy lots are distributed among the
people of the earth. Therefore the Persians call it "the day of hope."14

The so-called Kaianian Dynasty—the "Heroes" according to
Al-Biruni's Chronology15—succeeding the first Pishdadian Dynasty
("the Just"), is supposed to have started with Kai Kubad, his son
Kai Ka'us, and the latter's grandson Kai Khusrau, and to have
ended with Sikander, Alexander the Great, with whose death a new
era actually began. But it is obvious that something new begins
with Kai Khusrau's assumption into heaven. Thus, the Warners
state that with our Shah "the old epic cycle of the poem comes to
an end, and up to this point the Kaianian may be regarded as the
complement of the Pishdadian dynasty."16

14 Al-Biruni, The Chronology of Ancient Nations (trans. C. E. Sachau [1879],

p.201).

l5p. 112.

16Firdausi, Shahnmna (Warner trans.), vol. 2, pp. 8f.

Hamlet's Mill • 84

In his introduction to the Firdausi translation, however, the
Warners claim that the poem is divided into two periods, one
mythic, the other historic: 17

This distinction is based not so much on the nature of the subject-
matter as on the names of the chief characters. At a certain point in
the poem the names cease to be mythic and become historic. The
mythic period extends from the beginning of the narrative down to
the reigns of the last two Shahs of the Kaianian dynasty . . . The
Shahs in question are Dara, son of Darab, better known as Darius
Codomanus, and Sikander (Alexander)."18

Firdausi makes it clear that the mythic period ends only with the
death of Alexander, the two last Shahs being Darius Codomanus
and Alexander who overcame him. After him begins the "historic"
period of the poem. In other words, "history" begins only when the
Iranian empire vanishes from the scene, to be replaced by the suc-
cessors of Alexander. To remove from history the great and solidly
historical feats of Darius I, Xerxes, Cambyses, etc., is paradoxical
for a poem which is meant to celebrate the Iranian empire. Pre-
sumably Firdausi meant that so long as the Zoroastrian religion
reigned, time was holy and thus belonged to myth rather than
ordinary history. This is confirmed by a strange statement of the
Warners: "Rightly or wrongly, Zoroastrian tradition couples Alex-
ander with Zahhak and Afrasiyab as one of the three arch-enemies
of the faith."19

The great myths of the Avestan religion have overcome chronol-
ogy and reshaped it to their purpose. The true kings of Persia have
disappeared notwithstanding their glory, and are replaced by myth-
ical rulers and mythical struggles. Kai Khusrau rehearses a "Jam-
shyd" role in his beginnings, and with his ascent to heaven—the
date of "which marks New Year from now on—the Holy Empire

17 The time structure is a very complicated one, and we cannot manage with a
subdivision of two "periods" at all, the less so, as the reigns of the Shahs overlap
with the rather miraculous lifetimes of the "heroes" or Paladins (Rustam, Zal, etc.).
The same goes for the "primordial" emperors of China and their "vassals." But
God protect us from meddling with lists of alleged "kings" from whichever area,
but particularly from the Iranian tables!

18 Firdausi, vol. 1, pp. 49f.

19 Firdausi, vol. 1, p. 59.

85 • The Unfolding in India

really comes to a close. The struggle has been between gods and
demons throughout)

We have been following the story of powers coming to an end,
embodied first in the Iranian then in the Indian "kings," a story
which is differently emphasized by two different legends. Each
legend has a disturbing similarity to the other, and each removes
the narration from any known classic pattern, forcing the events
to a catastrophic conclusion which is clearly commanded by Time
itself, and by a very different chain of causes than that indicated
by the actual sequence of events in the texts.

To avoid misunderstanding it should be emphasized that it is not
possible yet to know precisely who is who, or to make positive
identifications such as saying that Brjam is Yudhishthira or Krishna.
But the hints provided by Iranians and Indians may lead to a better
understanding of Kullervo ("Kaleva is reborn in him"), and may
indicate that the feat of the doggish fool Brutus in driving out the
Kings was significant on a higher level than the political. This is
not to deny that the Kings were expelled, but rather to point to
a special set of firmly coined "figures of speech" derived from
"large" changes or shifts (such as the onset of Kali Yuga) that
could be, and were, applied to minor historical events.

Chapter VI

Amlodhi's Quern

The stone which the builders refused
is become the head stone of the corner.

Psalm cxviii.2 2; Luke xx.17

Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken,

but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

Luke xx. 18

With suggestive insights from other continents, it is time to
take a fresh look at Shakespeare's Gentle Prince, a cultivated,
searching intellectual, the glass of fashion and the mold of form
in the Danish Court, who was known once upon a time as a per-
sonage of no ordinary power, of universal position, and, in the
North, as the owner of a formidable mill.

Well trained by the Church, Saxo could write excellent and
ornate Latin, a rare achievement in his time. Though inspired by
his patriotism to write the great chronicles of his own country, he
was in Denmark an isolated if respectable fish in a small provincial
pond. He remained oriented to the cultural pole of his times, which
was Iceland. From there he had to draw most of his materials even
if he helped to Danicize them, as we see in the story of Hamlet
where all the features point toward a local dynastic story. But what
he drew from Iceland were pieces of already "historical" lore. He
could not draw, as did Snorri Sturluson, on the resources of a high
position at the very center of Iceland's rich bilingual culture, and
on the experience of a wide-ranging and adventurous life. He could
never have formed, like Snorri, the great project of reorganizing

87 • Amlodhi's Quern

the corpus of pagan and skaldic tradition inside an already Christian
frame. Saxo seems to have known Icelandic fairly well, but not
enough to understand the precious and convoluted language of
ancient poetry. He was unsure of his bearings and simply arranged
his story as best he could even though the name of Hamlet's father,
Orvendel (see appendix #2), should have been sufficient to warn
him of its derivation from high myth. It is Snorri who provides a
piece of decisive information: and it appears, as earlier noted, in
chapter 16 of his Skaldskaparmal ("Poetical Diction"), a collection
of kenninear, or turns of speech from ancient bards. It is couched
in a language that even modern scholars can translate only tenta-
tively. Appendix #5 contains a discussion of the many versions.
The one quoted again here is that of Gollancz (p. xi), which ap-
pears to be the most carefully translated:

T'is said, sang Snaebjorn, that far out, off yonder ness, the Nine
Maids of the Island Mill stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern—they
who in ages past ground Hamlet's meal. The good chieftain furrows
the hull's lair with his ship's beaked prow. Here the sea is called
Amlodhi's Mill.

The Mill is thus not only very great and ancient, but it must also
be central to the original Hamlet story. It reappears in the Skalds-
kaparmal, where Snorri explains why a kenning for gold is "Fro-
dhi's meal."1 Frodhi appears in the chronicles, but his name is really
an alias of Freyr, one of the great Vanir or Titans of Norse myth.
But Snorri, who likes to give things a historical ring as befits his
Christian upbringing, fixed his Frodhi to "the same time when Em-
peror Augustus established peace in the whole world, and when
Christ was born." Under King Frodhi the general state of things
was similar to that of the Golden Age, and it was called "Frodhi's
peace." Saxo follows suit and attributes unsuspectingly a duration
of thirty years to this peace.2

1 Skaldskap. 42, according to Brodeur (1929), pp. 163-69, and Neckel and
Niedner (Thule 20 [1942]), pp. 195f. The other translators of Snorri's Edda
cannot agree on the manner of dividing the work into chapters, if they do not
desist from doing so at all, as R. B. Anderson (1880), pp. 206-13, parts of whose
translation we quote here. (Simrock [n.d.], pp. 89-93, makes it chapter 63.)

2 P. Herrmann, Die Heldensagen des Saxo Grammaticus (1922), pp. 376ff.

Hamlet's Mill

88

89 • Amlodhi's Quern

Now Frodhi happened to be the owner of a huge mill, or quern,
that no human strength could budge. Its name was Grotte, "the
crusher." We are not told how he got it, it just happened, as in a
fairy tale. He traveled around looking for someone who could work
it, and in Sweden he recruited two giant maidens, Fenja and Menja,
who were able to work the Grotte. It was a magic mill, and Frodhi
told them to grind out gold, peace and happiness. So they did. But
Frodhi in his greed drove them night and day. He allowed them
rest only for so long as it took to recite a certain verse. One night,
when everybody else was sleeping, the giantess Menja in her anger
stopped "work, and sang a dire song.

This obscure prophetic imprecation, as Muellenhoff has shown,
is the oldest extant document of skaldic literature, antedating
Snorri's tale by far. It contains the biography of the grim sisters:

Frode! you were not / Wary enough,—

You friend of men,— / When maids you bought!

At their strength you looked, / And at their fair faces,

But you asked no questions / About their descent.

Hard was Hrungner / And his father;

Yet was Thjasse / Stronger than they,

And Ide and Orner / Our friends, and

The mountain-giants' brothers, / Who fostered us two.

Not would Grotte have come / From the mountains gray,
Nor this hard stone / Out from the earth;

The maids of the mountain-giants / Would not thus be grinding
If we two knew / Nothing of the mill.

Such were our deeds / In former days,

That we heroes brave / Were thought to be.

With spears sharp / Heroes we pierced,

So the gore did run / And our swords grew red.

Now we are come / To the house of the king,
No one us pities. / Bond-women are we.
Dirt eats our feet / Our limbs are cold,
The peace-giver we turn. / Hard it is at Frode's.

Now hold shall the hands / The lances hard,

The weapons bloody,— / Wake now, Frode! Wake now, Frode!

If you would listen / To our songs,—

To sayings old.

Fire I see burn / East of the burg,—

The war news are awake. / That is called warning.

A host hither / Hastily approaches

To burn the king's / Lofty dwelling.

No longer you will sit / On the throne of Hleidra

And rule o'er red / Rings and the mill.

Now must we grind / With all our might,

No warmth will we get / From the blood of the slain.

Now my father's daughter / Bravely turns the mill.
The death of many / Men she sees.
Now broke the large / Braces 'neath the mill,—
The iron-bound braces. / Let us yet grind!

Let us yet grind! / Yrsa's son

Shall on Frode revenge / Halfdan's death.

He shall Yrsa's / Offspring be named,

And yet Yrsa's brother. / Both of us know it.

However obscure the prophecy, it brought its own fulfillment.
The maidens ground out for Frodhi's "a sudden host," and that
very day Mysingr, the Sea-King, landed and killed Frodhi. Mysingr
("son of the Mouse"—see appendix #6) loaded Grotte on his ship,
and with him he also took the giantesses. He ordered them to grind
again. But this time they ground out salt.

"And at midnight they asked whether Mysingr were not weary
of salt. He bade them grind longer. They had ground but a little
while, when down sank the ship,"

"the huge props flew off the bin,
the iron rivets burst,
the shaft tree shivered,

Hamlet's Mill • 90

the bin shot down,

the massy mill-stone rent in twain"3

"And from that time there has been a whirlpool in the sea where
the water falls through the hole in the mill-stone. It was then that
the sea became salt."

Here ends Snorri's tale (appendix #7). Three fundamental and
far-reaching themes have been set: the broken mill, the whirlpool,
the salt. As for the curse of the miller women, it stands out alone
like a megalith abandoned in the landscape. But surprisingly it can
also be found, already looking strange, in the world of Homer, two
thousand years before.4

It is the last night, in the Odyssey (20.103-19, Rouse trans.),
which precedes the decisive confrontation. Odysseus has landed in
Ithaca and is hiding under Athena's magic spell which protects him
from recognition. Just as in Snorri, everybody sleeps. Odysseus
prays to Zeus to send him an encouraging sign before the great
ordeal.

Straightaway he thundered from shining Olympus, from on high
from the place of the clouds; and goodly Odysseus was glad. More-
over, a woman, a grinder at the mill, uttered a voice of omen from
within the house hard by, where stood the mills of the shepherd of
the people. At these handmills twelve women in all plied their task,
making meal of barley and of wheat, the marrow of men. Now all the
others were asleep, for they had ground out their task of grain, but
one alone rested not yet, being the weakest of all. She now stayed her
quern and spake a word, a sign to her Lord [epos phato sema anakti].
"Father Zeus, who rulest over gods and man, loudly hast thou thun-
dered from the starry sky, yet nowhere is there a cloud to be seen:
this is surely a portent thou art showing to some mortal. Fulfil now, I
pray thee, even to miserable me, the word that I shall speak. May the
wooers, on this day, for the last and latest time make their sweet
feasting in the halls of Odysseus! They that have loosened my knees
■with cruel toil to grind their barley meal, may they now sup their
last!"

"The weakest of all," yet a giant figure in her own right. In the
tight and shapely structure of the narrative, the episode is fitted

3 These five verses are taken from Gollancz (p. xiii), the three previous and
the two last lines from Brodeur (pp. 162f.); otherwise, we followed the Anderson
translation.

4It was J. G. von Hahn (Sagwissenschaftliche Studien [ 1876], pp. 401f.) who
first pointed to the similarity of the episodes in Snorri's Edda and in the Odyssey.

91 . Amlodhi's Quern

with art, yet it stands out like a cyclopean stone embedded in a
house. There are many such things in Homer.

Going back to Grotte, the name has an interesting story. It is
still used today in Norwegian for the "axle-block," the round
block of wood which fills the hole in the millstone, and in which
the end of the mill axle is fixed. In the Faroer as well as in the
Shetland dialect, it stands for "the nave in the millstone." The
original Sanskrit nabhi covers both "nave" and "navel," and this
point should be kept in mind. In the story, it is obviously the nave
that counts, for it created a hole when the mill tree sprang out of
it, and the whirlpool formed in the hole. But "navel of the sea" was
an ancient name for great whirlpools. Gollancz, with sound instinct,
saw the connection right away:

Indeed, one cannot help thinking of a possible reference to the mar-
vellous Maelstroem, the greatest of all whirlpools, one of the wonders
of the world; Umbilicus marls according to the old geographers,
"gurges mirabilis omnium totius orbis terr arum celeberrimus et maxi-
mus" as Fr. Athanasius Kircher describes it in his fascinating folio
"Mundus Subterraneus." According to Kircher, it was supposed that
every whirlpool formed around a central rock: a great cavern opened
beneath; down this cavern the water rushed; the whirling was pro-
duced as in a basin emptying through a central hole. Kircher gives a
curious picture of this theory, with special reference to the Mael-
stroem.5

Clearly, the Mill is not a "chose transitory," as lawyers say in
their jargon. It must belong to the permanent equipment of the
ancient universe. It recurs all the time, even if its connotations are
rarely pleasant. From another corner of memory, there come the
lines of Burns' "John Barleycorn":

They wasted o'er a scorching flame

The marrow of his bones
But a miller used him worst of all

For he crushed him between two stones.

The mock tragedy of the yearly rural feast is part of the immense
lore on fertility rites that Frazer has unfolded, with the ritual
lamentations over the death of Tammuz, Adonis, the "Grain-
Osiris" of Egypt; and no one would deny that the Tammuz festival

5 I. (Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (1898), p. xiv.

Hamlet's Mill

92

was a seasonal ritual celebrating the death and rebirth of vegetation.
It has entered the commonplaces of our knowledge. But was this
the original meaning? An irresistible preconception leads to the
thought that when peasant rites are found tied to vegetation, there
is the most elementary and primitive level of myth from which all
others derive. It carries, too, its own moral tidings: "if the grain die
not . . . ," which led on to higher religious thought.

In truly archaic cults, however, such as that of the Ssabians of
Harran, reflected also in Ibn Wa'shijja's "Book of Nabataean Agri-
culture," the death and grinding up of Tammuz is celebrated and
lamented by the images of all the planetary gods gathered in the
temple of the Sun suspended "between earth and heaven," in the
same way as they once cried and lamented over the passing of
Jamshyd (or Jambushad as they then called him). This is a strange
and unusual note, very un-agrarian, which deserves more careful
study.

But this leads back to the Norse myth of the Mill, and in fact
to Snorri himself, who in his "Fooling of Gylfi" commented on a
verse from the Vafthrudnismal which has been much discussed
since. In this ancient poem, the end of Ymer is recounted. Ymer is
the "initial" world giant from whose scattered body the world was
made. Snorri states that Ymer's blood caused a flood which
drowned all giants except Bergelmer, who, with his wife, "betook
himself upon his ludr and remained there, and from there the race
of giants are descended." The word ludr, as Snaebjorn said, stands
for Mill. But in Vafthrudnismal (ch. 35), Odin asks the wise giant
Vafthrudner of the oldest event he can think of, and gets this
answer: "Countless ages ere the earth was shapen, Bergelmer was
born. The first thing I remember—is when he a var ludr um lagidr"
(appendix #8). Rydberg renders the words as "laid on a mill," and
understands them as "laid under a millstone." Accordingly, he ex-
plains Snaebjorn's lidmeldr, which the great mill grinds, as "limb
grist."6 As will appear later, there is a different interpretation to
propose.

6 V. Rydbcrg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), p. 575.

93 • Amlodhi's Quern

The problem, however, keeps turning up. In the Lokasenna
(43ff.), Freyr, the original master of Grotte, is brought directly
into action. The occasion is a banquet to which Aegir invited the
gods. Loke uninvited made his appearance there to mix harm into
the ale of the gods and to embitter their pleasure. But when Loke
taunts Freyr, Byggver, the faithful retainer, becomes angry on his
master's behalf:

- "Had I the ancestry
of Ingunar Freyr
and so honoured a seat
know I would grind you
finer than marrow, you evil crow,
and crush you limb by limb.''

To which Loke replies:

"What little boy is that

whom I see wag his tail

and eat like a parasite?

Near Freyr's ears

always you are

and clatter 'neath the mill-stone."

There are several more clues which hint that this mill upon which
Bergelmer was "heaved" was a very distinct if unattractive mytho-
logical feature, and they cannot be dealt with here. But if it should
be remarked that Bergelmer was not in a state to produce offspring
for the giants, if he really was laid under the millstone, there is
also an example from Mexico, the "jewel-bone" or "sacrificial
bone" which Xolotl or Quetzalcouatl procures from the "under-
world," bringing it to Tamoanchan (the so-called "House of de-
scending"). There, the goddess Qua couatl or Quilaztli grinds the
precious bone on the grindstone, and the ground substance is put
into the jewel bowl (chalchiuhapaztli). Several gods maltreat
themselves, making blood flow from their penises on the "meal."
Out of this mixture mankind is fashioned.

Hamlet's Mill

94

These stories may not be in exquisite taste, but at least they are
grotesque and contorted enough to rid us of reliance on the natural
or intuitive understanding of artless tales sung by rustics dancing
on the green. Real cosmological similes are anything but intuitive.

One question remains from this discussion. Who was Snaebjorn,
that dim figure, a few of whose lines have revealed so much? The
scholars have gone searching, and have unearthed a veritable trea-
sure in the ancient "Book of Iceland Settlements." It links the poet
with the first discovery of America. In that book, writes Gollancz:

There is a vivid picture of a tenth-century Arctic adventurer, Snae-
bjorn by name, who went on a perilous expedition to find the un-
known land, "Gunnbjorn's Reef," after having wrought vengeance,
as became a chivalrous gentleman of the period, on the murderer of a
fair kinswoman. It is generally accepted, and there can be little doubt,
that this Snaebjorn is identical with the poet Snaebjorn.

His family history is not without interest. His great-grandfather,
Eywind the Easterling, so called because he had come to the Hebrides
from Sweden, married the daughter of Cearbhall, Lord of Ossory,
who ruled as King of Dublin from 882 to 888, "one of the principal
sovereigns of Europe at the time when Iceland was peopled by the
noblemen and others who fled from the tyranny of Harold Harfagr."
Cearbhall was descended from Connla, the grandson of Crimhthann
Cosgach, the victorious King of Ireland, who is said to have flourished
about a century before the Christian era. Lann or Flann, the half-
sister of Cearbhall, was married to Malachy I., King of Ireland, whose
daughter Cearbhall had married. Flann was the mother of King
Sionna and of the Lady Gormflaith, whom a cruel fate pursued; a
king's daughter, the wife of three kings, [she was] forced at last to
beg for bread from door to door. About the date of Snaebjorn's
Arctic expedition (circa 980), his cousin, Ari Marson, is said to have
landed on "White Man's band," or "Great Iceland,"—that part of
the coast of North America which extends from Chesapeake Bay,
including North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida,—and
became famous as one of the earliest discoverers of the New World.7

Thus Snaebjorn, as a member of an Irish royal family, typifies
the mutual influence of Celtic and Scandinavian culture, between
a.d. 800 and 1000, that influence which has been traced into the
Eddic songs by Vigfusson in his Corpus Poeticum Boreale. The

7 Gollancz, pp. xviif.

95 • Amlodhi's Quern

Hamlet story itself typifies that exchange. For an earlier and simpler
form of it may have been brought to Iceland from Ireland, whither
the Vikings had originally taken the story of the great Orvendel's
son.

This places Hamlet within the circle not only of Norse tradition,
but of that prodigious treasury of archaic myth which is Celtic
Ireland, from which many lines have been traced to the Near
East. The universality of the Hamlet figure becomes more under-
standable.

Chapter VII

The Many-Colored Cover

There is a mill which grinds by
itself, swings of itself, and scat-
ters the dust a hundred versts
away. And there is a golden pole
with a golden cage on top which
is also the Nail of the North.
And there is a very wise tomcat
which climbs up and down this
pole. When he climbs down, he
sings songs; and when he climbs
up, he tells tales.

Tale of the Ostyaks of the lrtysh

The Kalevala is vaguely known by the general public as the
national epic of Finland. It is a tale of wild fancy, enticing absurdity
and wonderfully primitive traits, actually magical and cosmological
throughout. It is all the more important in that the Ugro-Finnic
tradition has different roots from Indo-European ones.

Until the 19th century the epic existed only in fragments en-
trusted to oral transmission among peasants. From 1820 to 1849,
Dr. Elias Lonnrot undertook to collect them in writing, wander-
ing from place to place in the most remote districts, living with the
peasantry, and putting together what he heard into some kind of
tentative sequence. Some of the most valuable songs ■were discov-
ered in the regions of Archangel and Olonetz in the Far North,
which now belong again to Russia. The 1849 final edition of Lonn-
rot comprises 22,793 verses in fifty runes or songs. A large amount
of new material has been discovered since.

The poem has taken its name from Kaleva, a mysterious ancestral
personage who appears nowhere in the tale. The heroes arc his

97 • The Many-Colored Cover

three sons: Vainamoinen,1 "old and truthful," the master of magic
song; Ilmarinen, the primeval smith, the inventor of iron, who can
forge more things than are found on land or sea; and the "beloved,"
or "lively," Lemminkainen, a sort of Arctic Don Juan. Kullervo,
the Hamlet-like one whose story was told earlier, fair-haired Kul-
lervo "with the bluest of blue stockings," is another "son of Kaleva,"
but his adventures seem to unfold separately. They tie up only at
one point with Ilmarinen, and seem to belong to a different frame
of time, to another world-age.

It is time now to deal with the main line of events. The epic opens
with a very poetical theory of the origin of the World. The virgin
daughter of the air, Ilmatar, descends to the surface of the waters,
where she remains floating for seven hundred years until Ukko, the
Finnish Zeus, sends his bird to her. The bird makes its nest on
the knees of Ilmatar and lays in it seven eggs, out of which the
visible world comes. But this world remains empty and sterile until
Vainamoinen is born of the virgin and the waters. Old since birth,
he plays the role, as it were, of "midwife" to nature by causing
her to create animals and trees by his magic song. An inferior
magician from Lapland, Youkahainen, challenges him in Song and is
sung step by step into the ground, until he rescues himself by
promising Vainamoinen his sister, the lovely Aino. But the girl
will not have Vainamoinen, he looks too old. She wanders off in
despair and finally comes to a lake. She swims to a rock, seeking
death; "when she stood upon the summit, on the stone of many
colors, in the waves it sank beneath her." Vainamoinen tries to
fish for her, she swims into his net as a salmon, mocks him for not
recognizing her, and then escapes forever. Vainamoinen decides
to look for another bride, and embarks upon his quest. His goal is
the country of Pohjola, the "North country," a misty land "cruel
to heroes," strong in magic, vaguely identified with Lapland. Events
unfold as in a dream, with surrealistic irrelevance. The artlessness,
the wayward charm and the bright nonsense suggest Jack and the
Beanstalk, but behind them appear the -fossil elements of a tale
as old as the world—at least the world of man's consciousness—

Hamlet's Mill

98

whose meaning and thread were lost long ago. The pristine archaic
themes remain standing like monumental ruins.

The main sequence is built around the forging and the conquest
of a great mill, called the Sampo (rune 10 deals with the forging,
runes 39-42 with the stealing of the Sampo).

Comparetti's studies have shown that the Sampo adventure is a
distinct unit (like Odysseus' voyage to the underworld), "a mythic
formation which has remained without any action that can be nar-
rated" and which was then fitted more or less coherently into the
rest of the tradition.2 Folk legend has lost its meaning, and treats the
Sampo as some vague magic dispenser of bounty, a kind of Cornu-
copia, but the original story is quite definite.

Vainamoinen, "sage and truthful," conjurer of highest standing,
is cast upon the shore of Pohjola much as Odysseus lands on Skyra
after his shipwreck. He is received hospitably by Louhi, the Mis-
tress (also called the Whore) of Pohjola, who asks him to build for
her the Sampo, without explanation. He tells her that only Ilmari-
nen, the primeval smith, can do it, so she sends Vainamoinen home
on a ship to fetch him. Ilmarinen, who addresses his "brother" and
boon companion rather flippantly as a liar and a vain chatterer, is
not interested in the prospect, so Vainamoinen, ancient of days and
wise among the wise, has recourse to an unworthy trick. He lures
the smith with a story of a tall pine, which, he says, is growing

Near where Osmo's field is bordered.
On the crown the moon is shining,
In the boughs the Bear is resting.

Ilmarinen does not believe him; they both go there, to the edge of
Osmo's field,

Then the smith his steps arrested,
In amazement at the pine-tree,
With the Great Bear in the branches,
And the moon upon its summit.

Ilmarinen promptly climbs up the tree to grasp the stars.

2 D.C. Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns (1898).

99 • The Many-Colored Cover

Then the aged Vainamoinen,
Lifted up his voice in singing:
"Awake, oh Wind, oh Whirlwind
Rage with great rage, oh heavens,
Within thy boat, wind, place him
Within thy ship, oh east wind
With all thy swiftness sweep him
To Pohjola the gloomy."s

Then the smith, e'en Ilmarinen
Journeyed forth, and hurried onwards,
On the tempest forth he floated,
On the pathway of the breezes,
Over moon, and under sunray,
On the shoulders of the Great Bear
Till he reached the halls of Pohja,
Baths of Sariola the gloomy.

In this utterly unintended manner, Ilmarinen lands in Pohjola, and
not even the dogs are barking, which astonishes Louhi most of all.
She showed herself hospitable,

Gave the hero drink in plenty,
And she feasted him profusely,

then spoke to him thus:

"O thou smith, 0 Ilmarinen,

Thou the great primeval craftsman,

If you can but forge a Sampo,

With its many-coloured cover,

From the tips of swan's white wing-plumes,

From the milk of barren heifer,

From a little grain of barley

From the wool of sheep in summer,4

Will you then accept this maiden

As reward, my charming daughter?"

3 The Magic Spell, published in the Variants and translated by Comparetti, was
sung by Ontrei in 1855.

See the epigraph to the Introduction, p. 1.

Hamlet's Mill • 100

Ilmarinen agrees to the proposal, and looks around three days for a
proper spot on which to erect his smithy, "in the outer fields of
Pohja." The next three days his servants keep working the bellows.

On the first day of their labour
He himself, smith Ilmarinen,
Stooped him down, intently gazing,
To the bottom of the furnace,
If perchance amid the fire
Something brilliant had developed.
From the flames there rose a crossbow,
Golden bow from out the furnace;

'Twas a gold bow tipped with silver,

And the shaft shone bright with copper.

And the bow was fair to gaze on,

But of evil disposition

And a head each day demanded,

And on feast-days two demanded,

He himself, smith Ilmarinen,

Was not much delighted with it,

So he broke the bow to pieces,

Cast it back into the furnace.

The next day, Ilmarinen looks in anew,

And a boat rose from the furnace,
From the heat rose up a red boat,
And the prow was golden-coloured,
And the rowlocks were of copper.

And the boat was fair to gaze on,

But of evil disposition;

It would go to needless combat,

And would fight when cause was lacking.

Ilmarinen casts the boat back into the fire, and on the following day
he gazes anew at the bottom of the furnace,

101 • The Many-Colored Cover

And a heifer then rose upward;
With her horns all golden-shining,
With the Bear-stars on her forehead;
On her head appeared the Sun-disc.

And the cow was fair to gaze on,
But of evil disposition;
Always sleeping in the forest,
On the ground her milk she wasted.
Therefore did smith Ilmarinen
Take no slightest pleasure in her,
And he cut the cow to fragments,
Cast her back into the furnace.

The fourth day:

And a plough rose from the furnace,
With the ploughshare golden-shining,
Golden share, and frame of copper,
And the handles tipped with silver.
And the plough was fair to gaze on,
But of evil disposition,
Ploughing up the village cornfields,
Ploughing up the open meadows,
Therefore did smith Ilmarinen
Take no slightest pleasure in it.
And he broke the plough to pieces,
Cast it back into the furnace,
Called the winds to work the bellows
To the utmost of their power.

Then the winds arose in fury,
Blew the east wind, blew the west wind,
And the south wind yet more strongly,
And the north wind howled and blustered.

Thus they blew one day, a second,
And upon the third day likewise.
Fire was flashing from the windows,

Hamlet's Mill • 102

From the doors the sparks were flying
And the dust arose to heaven,
With the clouds the smoke was mingled.
Then again smith Ilmarinen,
On the evening of the third day,
Stooped him down, and gazed intently
To the bottom of the furnace,
And he saw the Sampo forming,
With its many-coloured cover.

Thereupon smith Ilmarinen,
He the great primeval craftsman,
Welded it and hammered at it,
Heaped his rapid blows upon it,
Formed with cunning art the Sampo.

And on one side was a corn-mill,
On another side a salt-mill,
And upon the third a coin-mill.

Now was grinding the new Sampo,
And revolved the pictured cover,
Chestfuls did it grind till evening,
First for food it ground a chestful,
And another ground for barter,
And a third it ground for storage.

Now rejoiced the Crone of Pohja,
And conveyed the bulky Sampo,
To the rocky hills of Pohja,
And within the Mount of Copper,
And behind nine locks secured it.

There it struck its roots around it,
Fathoms nine in depth that measured,
One in Mother Earth deep-rooted,
In the strand the next was planted,
In the nearest mount the third one.

103 • The Many-Colored Cover

Ilmarinen does not gain his reward, not yet. He returns without
a bride. For a long while we hear nothing at all about the Sampo.
Other things happen: adventures, death, and resuscitation of Lem-
niinkainen, then Vainamoinen's adventures in the belly of the ogre.
This last story deserves telling. Vainamoinen set about building a
boat, but when it came to putting in the prow and the stern, he
found he needed three words in his rune that he did not know,
however much he sought for them. In vain he looked on the heads
of the swallows, on the necks of the swans, on the backs of the
geese, under the tongues of the reindeer.5 He found a number of
words, but not those he needed. Then he thought of seeking them
in the realm of Death, Tuonela, but in vain. He escaped back to the
world of the living only thanks to potent magic. He was still miss-
ing his three runes. He was then told by a shepherd to search in the
mouth of Antero Vipunen, the giant ogre. The road, he was told,
went over swords and sharpened axes.

Ilmarinen made shoes, shirt and gloves of iron for him, but
warned him that he would find the great Vipunen dead. Neverthe-
less, the hero went. The giant lay underground, and trees grew
over his head. Vainamoinen found his way to the giant's mouth,
and planted his iron staff in it. The giant awoke and suddenly
opened his huge mouth. Vainamoinen slipped into it and was swal-
lowed. As soon as he reached the enormous stomach, he thought
of getting out. He built himself a raft and floated on it up and down
inside the giant. The giant felt tickled and told him in many and no
uncertain words where he might go, but he did not yield any runes.
Then Vainamoinen built a smithy and began to hammer his iron on
an anvil, torturing the entrails of Vipunen, who howled out magic
songs to curse him away. But Vainamoinen said, thank you, he was
very comfortable and would not go unless he got the secret words.
Then Vipunen at last unlocked the treasure of his powerful runes.

1 In the Eddie lay of Sigrdrifa, the valkyria enumerates the places where can be
found hugruna, i.e., the runes that give wisdom and knowledge, among which are
the following: the shield of the sun, the ear and hoof of his horses, the wheel of
Rognir's chariot, Sleipnir's teeth and Bragi's' tongue, the beak of the eagle, the
clutch of the bear, the paw of the wolf, the nail of the Norns, the head of the
bridge, etc. (Sigrdr. vs. 13-17).

Hamlet's Mill

104

Many days and nights he sang, and the sun and the moon and the
waves of the sea and the waterfalls stood still to hear him. Vaina-
moinen treasured them all and finally agreed to come out. Vipunen
opened his great jaws, and the hero issued forth to go and build his
boat at last.

The story then switches abruptly to introduce Kullervo, his ad-
ventures, incest and suicide. When Kullervo incidentally kills the
wife that Ilmarinen had bought so dearly in Pohjola, the tale re-
turns again to Ilmarinen's plight. He forges for himself "Pandora,"
a woman of gold. Finding no pleasure with her, he returns to
Pohjola and asks for the second daughter of Louhi. He is refused.
Ilmarinen then captures the girl, but she is so spiteful and unfaith-
ful that he changes her into a gull. Then he visits Vainamoinen,
who asks for news from Pohjola. Everything is fine there, says
Ilmarinen, thanks to the Sampo. They decide, therefore, to get hold
of the Sampo, even against Louhi's will. The two of them go by
boat, although Ilmarinen is much more in favor of the land route,
and Lemminkainen joins them. The boat gets stuck on the shoulder
of a huge pike. Vainamoinen kills the fish and constructs out of his
jawbones (appendix #10) the Kantele, a harp which nobody can
play properly except Vainamoinen himself. There follows a com-
pletely Orphic chapter about Vainamoinen's Kantele music, the
whole world falling under its spell. Finally, they arrive at Pohjola,
and Louhi, as was to be expected, will not part with the Sampo, nor
will she share it with the heroes. Vainamoinen then plays the Kan-
tele until all the people of Pohjola are plunged in sleep. Then the
brothers go about stealing the Sampo, which turns out to be a diffi-
cult task.

Then the aged Vainamoinen
Gently set himself to singing
At the copper mountain's entrance,
There beside the stony fortress,
And the castle doors were shaken,
And the iron hinges trembled.

105 • The Many-Colored Cover

Thereupon smith Ilmarinen,
Aided by the other heroes,
Overspread the locks with butter,
And with bacon rubbed the hinges,
That the doors should make no jarring,
And the hinges make no creaking.
Then the locks he turned with fingers,
And the bars and bolts he lifted,
And he broke the locks to pieces,
And the mighty doors were opened.

Then the mighty Vainamoinen
Spoke aloud the words that follow:
"O thou lively son of Lempi,
Of my friends the most illustrious,
Come thou here to take the Sampo,
And to seize the pictured cover.''

Then the lively Lemminkainen,
He the handsome Kaukomieli,
Always eager, though unbidden,
Ready, though men did not praise him,
Came to carry off the Sampo,
And to seize the pictured cover . . .

Lemminkainen pushed against it,
Turned himself, and pushed against it,
On the ground his knees down-pressing,
But he could not move the Sampo,
Could not stir the pictured cover,
For the roots were rooted firmly,
In the depths nine fathoms under.

There was then a bull in Pohja,
Which had grown to size enormous,
And his sides were sleek and fattened,
And his sinews from the strongest;

Hamlet's Mill

Horns he had in length a fathom,
One half more his muzzle's thickness,
So they led him from the meadow,
On the border of the ploughed field,
Up they ploughed the roots of Sampo
Those which fixed the pictured cover,
Then began to move the Sampo,
And to sway the pictured cover.

Then the aged Vainamoinen,
Secondly, smith llmarinen,
Third, the lively Lemminkainen,
Carried forth the mighty Sampo,
Forth from Pohjola's stone mountain,
From within the hill of copper,
To the boat away they bore it,
And within the ship they stowed it.

In the boat they stowed the Sampo,
In the hold the pictured cover,
Pushed the boat into the water,
In the waves its sides descended.

Asked the smith, said llmarinen,
And he spoke the words which follow:
u Whither shall we bear the Sampo,
Whither now we shall convey it,
Take it from this evil country,
From the wretched land of Pohja?"

Vainamoinen, old and steadfast,
Answered in the words which follow:
"Thither will we bear the Sampo,
And will take the pictured cover,
To the misty island's headland,
At the end of shady island.
There in safety can we keep it,

106

107 • The Many-Colored Cover

There it can remain for ever,

There's a little spot remaining,

Yet a little plot left over,

Where they eat not and they fight not,

Whither swordsmen never wander.

The Sampo, then, is brought on board the ship—just as Mysingr
the pirate brought Grotte on board his boat—and the heroes row
away as fast as possible. Lemminkainen wants music—you can row
far better with it, he claims. Vainamoinen demurs, so Lempi's son
sings quite by himself, with a voice loud but hardly musical, indeed,
for

On a stump a crane was sitting,
On a mound from swamp arising,
And his toe-bones he was counting,
And his feet he was uplifting,
And was terrified extremely
At the song of Lemminkainen.

Left the crane his strange employment,

With his harsh voice screamed in terror,

Over Pohjola in terror,

And upon his coming thither,

When he reached the swamp of Pohja,

Screaming still, and screaming harshly,

Screaming at his very loudest,

Waked in Pohjola the people,

And aroused the evil nation.

Thus, pursuit begins; impediment after magic impediment is thrown
across their path by Louhi, wretched hostess of Pohjola, but Vaina-
moinen overcomes them. He causes her warship to be wrecked
upon a cliff which he has conjured forth, but on that occasion his
beloved Kantele, the harp, sinks to the bottom of the sea. Finally,
Louhi changes herself into a huge eagle which fills all the space
between waves and clouds, and she snatches the Sampo away.

Hamlet's Mill • 108

From the boat she dragged the Sampo,
Down she pulled the pictured cover,
From the red boat's hold she pulled it,
'Mid the blue lake's waters cast it,
And the Sampo broke to pieces,
And was smashed the picture cover.

Fragments of the colored cover are floating on the surface of the
sea. Vainamoinen collects many of them, but Louhi gets only one
small piece; hence Lapland is poor, Suomi (Finland) well off and
fertile. Vainamoinen sows the fragments of Sampo, and trees came
out of it:

From these seeds the plant is sprouting
Lasting welfare is commencing,
Here is ploughing, here is sowing,
Here is every kind of increase.
Thence there co?nes the lovely sunlight,
O'er the mighty plains of Suomi,
And the lovely land of Suomi.

Vainamoinen constructs a new Kantele, of birchwood this time,
and with the hairs of a young maiden as strings—but the strings
come last. Before that he asks,

"Now the frame I have constructed,
From the trunk for lasting pleasure,
Whence shall now the screws be fashioned,
Whence shall come the pegs to suit me?

'Twas an oak with equal branches,
And on every branch an acorn,
In the acorns golden kernels,
On each kernel sat a cuckoo.
When the cuckoos all were calling,
In the call five tones were sounding
Gold from out their mouths was flowing,
Silver too they scattered round them,

109 • The Many-Colored Cover

On a hill the gold was flowing,
On the ground there flowed the silver,
And from this he made the harp-screws,
And the pegs from that provided."

Once more, Vainamoinen begins to play on his irresistible instru-
ment, but this time Louhi manages to capture sun and moon. She
was able to do so because

. . . the moon came from his dwelling,

Standing on a crooked birch-tree,

And the sun came from his castle,

Sitting on a flr-tree's summit,

To the kantele to listen,

Filled with wonder and rejoicing.

The grasping Louhi hides sun and moon in an iron mountain.
Ilmarinen forges a substitute sun and moon, but they will not shine
properly. Eventually, Louhi sets free the luminaries, since she has
become afraid of the heroes; repeatedly she complains that her
strength has left her with the Sampo.

But time is running out, too, on the ancient Vainamoinen. All that
is left for him to do is kindle a new fire, and he does. Beginning
far back, he had sung all there was to sing.

Day by day he sang unwearied,
Night by night discoursed unceasing,
Sang the songs of by-gone ages,
Hidden words of ancient wisdom,
Songs which all the children sing not,
All beyond men's comprehension,
In these ages of misfortune,
When the race is near its ending.

Now a Miraculous Child was born, heralding a new era. Vaina-
moinen knew that there was not room for both of them in the
world. If the child lived, he must go. He said good-bye to his
country,

Hamlet's Mill

110

111

The Many-Colored Cover

And began his songs of magic,
For the last time sang them loudly,
Sang himself a boat of copper,
With a copper deck provided.
In the stern himself he seated,
Sailing o'er the sparkling billows,
Still he sang as he was sailing:

"May the time pass quickly o'er us,
One day passes, comes another,
And again shall I be needed,
Men will look for me and miss me,
To construct another Sampo,
And another harp to make me,
Make another moon for gleaming,
And another sun for shining.
When the sun and moon are absent,
In the air no joy remaineth."

Then the aged Vainamoinen
Went upon his journey singing,
Sailing in his boat of copper,
In his vessel made of copper,
Sailed away to loftier regions,
To the land beneath the heavens.

Actually, there are more runes which tell of Vainamoinen's de-
parture, as we learn from Haavio. He plunges

to the depths of the sea;

to the lowest sea

to the lowest bowels of the earth

to the lowest regions of the heavens

to the doors of the great mouth of death.

Or, he sailed

into the throat of the maelstroem
into the mouth of the maelstroem,
into the gullet of the maelstroem,
into the maw of the monster of the sea.

This is the Vortex that swallows all waters, the one that comes
of the destruction of Grotte, which must be dealt with later. Its
Norse name is Hvergelmer; its most ancient name is Eridu. But
that name belongs to another story and world.

It is difficult for moderns to grasp the quality of that ancient
recitation, the laulo, of only a few notes going on interminably
with freely improvised verbal "cadenzas," yet with a core of for-
mulas rigidly preserved in the canonic form. It is not actually folk
poetry in the accepted sense even though its "copyists," its "print-
ers" and its "publishers" are only peasants with an iron memory.6
An old laulaja who recited the origin of the world told Lonnrot:
"You and I know that this is the real Truth about how the world
began." He said this after centuries of Christendom, never doubt-
ing, for the essence of the rune was an incantation, sung or mur-
mured (cf. the German raunen), which brings things back to their
actual beginning, to the "deep origins." To heal a wound from a
sword, the laulaja had to sing the rune of the "origin of iron," and
one wrong word would have ruined its power. In this way frag-
ments of ageless antiquity remained embedded in living folk poetry.
Those whom the Greeks called the "nameless ones," typhlos aner,
who had preserved the epic rhapsodies, reach out to meet us almost
in our days, in those humble villages of the Far North, their names
of our own time: Arhippa Perttunen, Simana of Mekrijarvi, Okoi
of Audista, Ontrei, the Pack Peddler.

Out of the whole bewildering story, one thing is established
beyond controversy, that the Sampo is nothing but heaven itself.
The fixed adjective kirjokansi, "many-coloured," did apply to the
cover of the heavenly vault in Finnish folk poetry, as Comparetti
and others showed long ago. As for the name Sampo, it resisted the
efforts of linguists, until it was found that the word was derived
from the Sanskrit skambha, pillar, pole.7 Because it "grinds,"
Sampo is obviously a mill. But the mill tree is also the world axis,
so the inquiry returns to the Norse mill, and to the complex of
meanings involved in the difficult word ludr (with radical r) which

6M. Haavio, Vainamoinen, Eternal Sage (1952), p. 40 (quoting Setala).
7See Chapter VIII.

Hamlet's Mill

112

stands for the timbers of the mill and reappears as "loor," a
wind instrument. This involves time both ways: the setting and the
scansion of time. This does not present embarrassing ambiguity, but
a richer meaning, which must have appeared heaven-sent to early
thinkers.

The Sampo is—or was—the dispenser of all good things and this
is delightfully underscored by the many variants which insist that
because most of it fell into the sea, the sea is richer than the land.
Men were bound to compare the teeming life of Arctic waters with
the barren land in the Far North. But the Sampo did undergo a
catastrophe as it was being moved, and that clinches the parallel
with Grotte. The astronomical idea underlying these strange repre-
sentations has been described in the Intermezzo, and will be taken
up again in chapter IX.

Chapter VIII

Shamans and Smiths

■/

Of this base metal may be filed a

key
That will unlock the door they

howl without.

Omar Khayyam

In addition to the Sampo, there are many myths embedded in
the Kalevala's narrative sequence whose analysis would yield sur-
prises. There was the contest of Vainamoinen with Youkahainen
(see p. 97), a malevolent Lapp magician who seems to be his con-
stant opponent. Youkahainen tries to overcome the ancient sage by
asking cosmogonic riddles, but Vainamoinen "sings" the Lapp step
by step into the bog up to his throat, and sings his magic formulae
"backwards" to free him only when the Lapp has promised him
Aino, his only sister. There was also the tale of Vainamoinen
searching in the dead giant's belly for three lost runes. These, unless
they are treated as "just so stories," look very much like "erratic
boulders" deposited in Finland by the glacial movement of time.
For once, it is possible to trace the archaic formation back to
Egypt.1 A young Egyptian called Setna (or Seton Chamwese)
wanted to steal the magic book of Thoth from the corpse of Nefer-ka
Ptah, one of the great Egyptian gods, who was often portrayed as a
mummy. Ptah, however, was awake and asked him: "Are you able
to take this book away with the help of a knowing scribe, or do you
want to overcome me at checkerboards? Will you play 'Fifty-
Two'?" Setna agreed, and the board with its "dogs" (pieces) being

1 G. Roeder, Altaegyptische Erzahlungen und Marchen (1927), p. 149; A. Wiede-
mann, Herodots Zweites Buch(1890), p, 455.

Hamlet's Mill

114

brought up, Nefer-ka Ptah won a game, spoke a formula, laid the
checkerboard upon Setna's head and made him sink into the ground
up to his hips. On the third time, he made him sink up to his ears;
then Setna cried aloud for his brother, who saved him.

There is also a Finnish folktale which repeats the well-known
Babylonian story of Etana and the Eagle.2 Here, instead of the
King, it is the "Son of the Widow" (no reason is given for this
epithet, which appears to belong to Perceval in the first line, but
we find it again in later Masonic tradition)3 who is taken up into
the air by a griffin and sees the earth growing smaller and smaller
under him. When the earth appears "no bigger than a pea" (analo-
gous similes are to be found also in Etana), the griffin plunges
straightaway to the bottom of the sea, where the hero finds a cer-
tain object for which he had looked everywhere, and finally he is
restored to land. This looks like the full story of what in the Baby-
lonian cuneiform is interrupted halfway through because the tablet
is broken off: it might be the first version of the legend of Alex-
ander exploring the Three Realms.

The anomalous position of Kullervo in the Kalevala remains a
puzzle. Where Lonnrot put him in the sequence, he remains a
displaced person, seeming to come, as was noted, from another
age. There are many such incongruities. On the basis of the
variants discovered, it has been boldly suggested that he was sup-
posed to appear only after the departure of Vainamoinen—in fact,
that he himself is the nameless Miraculous Child who compelled
Vainamoinen to quit the scene, and that would be why the two
never met. The people now understand the Child to be Christ him-
self, but that is the normal transforming influence of the Church.
The Child in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue was also later thought to be
Christ, and Virgil earned a reputation as a magician on the strength

2 See M. Haavio, Der Etanamythos in Finnland (1955), pp. 8-12; also S. Langdon,
The Legend of Etana and the Eagle (1932), pp. 46-50.

3 Such words have long lives. At the height of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg,
the first man over the wall was Gen. Armistead, who fell into the breach mortally
wounded. To those who picked him up, the general kept repeating: "I am a Son
of the Widow"—obviously the password of a secret military brotherhood that his
captors did not understand, nor the historian either.

115 * Shamans and Smiths

of his supposed prophecy. Actually, the mother says of Vaina-
moinen's and her illegitimate little son (50.199f): "He shall be a
mighty conqueror, strong as even Vainamoinen." This struck the
English editor of the Kalevala, the more so as the baby is also called
"the two-week-old Kaleva." For Kullervo is both in Finnish and in
Estonian tradition the son of Kaleva—"Kalevanpoika" or "Kale-
vipoeg"—much more explicitly than the other heroes, who are
' 'sons", only generically. It would fit into the mythical picture, for
reasons which will soon be evident, to have a time-bound tragic
avatar of Vainamoinen, following upon the timeless sage.

But then, who is Kaleva? He is a mysterious entity that shines
by his absence, and yet is the eponymous presence through the
whole poem. The connotation of "giant" is attached to him: in some
of the Finnish versions of the Old Testament, the gigantic Rephaim
and Enakim are called "children of Kaleva." But there are many
reasons for understanding the word as smith.4 Kaleva might be a
smith even more primeval than Ilmarinen. There is a strange line
in the spell describing the origin of iron: "Poor Iron, man Kaleva,
at that time thou wast neither great nor small." In any case, the
current notion that Kaleva is a "personification" of Finland, a sort
of Britannia with her trident, can be dismissed as unserious. Those
were no times for rhetorical figures. Kaleva remains for the present
a significant void. But Setala notes that the Russian by lini, the
close neighbors of the Estonian runes, sing the feats of Koly-
vanovic, the son of Kolyvan, and say next to nothing of Kolyvan
himself.

The Russian texts give the full name as Samson Kolyvanovic,
just as in Finland it is Kullervo Kalevanpoika. Here perhaps by
chance a name turns up which runs like a barely visible thread
through the whole tradition. We have Samson in the Kalevala right
in the first rune; his name is Sampsa Pellervoinen, who "sows the
trees" and also helps Vainamoinen to cut them down.5 His name,

4 E. N. Setala, "Kullervo-Hamlet," FUF 7 (1907), p. 249. See also K. Krohn,
Kalevalastudien 1. Einleitung (1924), pp. 93-101.

5 Krohn suggests deriving Sampsa from Sampo. Comparetti would like it the
Other way around. Neither is convinced or convincing, but they both show that
the name of Samson is a rarity which has to be accounted for.

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117

Shamans and Smiths

"the man of the field" or the "earth-begotten," shows him to be
a rural deity, which might translate into the Greek Triptolemus, or
the Etruscan Aruns Velthymnus. One can no longer tell what his
role was in the original order of the poem. It is enough that he is
there. The lore of the Mill begins to extend beyond reach. It will be
no surprise, then, to find Lykophron, the master mythologist, speak-
ing of Zeus the Miller (435). With it, paradoxically, goes again
the name of Mylinos, "Miller," given to the leader of the Battle of
the Giants against the Gods. The struggle was seen obviously as one
for the control of the Mill of Heaven.

It is, then, maybe not by chance that the name of Samson appears
in the Far North. For Samson himself, Samson Agonistes, should
have a place of honor among the giant Heroes of the Mill. He is in
fact the first one in our literature. We are told (Judges xvi.21) how
he ground away, "eyeless in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves," until
his cruel captors unbound him to "make sport" for them in their
temple, and with his last strength he took hold of the middle pillars
and brought the temple crushing down on the heads of the Philis-
tines. Like Menja, he had taken his revenge.

But Samson leads beyond the confines of this topic into a world-
wide context. He brings more abstruse concepts into play. He had
better be reserved for the next chapter.

Now, at the end of the strange story of the Sampo, one is en-
titled to ask: does all this make much sense by itself? Is it relevant
at all beyond literary history? Comparetti, the great old scholar
who in the last century tackled the difficult study of Finnish poetry,
set himself a neat and classic philological question. Would it help
us to understand the birth of the Homeric poems? Yes, he says. Yet
he admits that the Homeric question remains open. In other words,
the famous "commission of Orphic and Pythagorean experts set up
by Pisistratus to collect the scattered rhapsodies" can hardly have
produced by itself any more than Lonnrot could, such works as
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hence in conclusion there must still have
been a Homer. Which goes to show that the conventional idea of
epic genius ends up in mystery even for the comparative philologist.
But Comparetti is prompt to point out that those experts were no

scholars in today's sense, belonging as they did to a period when
myth, poetry and intellectual creation were all one.

It might have been better perhaps to take the question from the
other end. Supposing that Lonnrot had been himself some kind of
"Orphic and Pythagorean" in the old sense, might he not have pro-
duced a better reconstruction than the—surely intelligent—stitch-
ing together to which he had to limit himself? Was he not hampered
by his ignorance of the archaic background? Firdausi did actually
know the astrological doctrines through which his scattered sources
made coherent sense, and this is undoubtedly what allowed him to
weld his Shahnama into a real whole. Lonnrot was not, but the
"short songs" of Finnish peasant tradition were too far removed
from the original thought for anyone to recapture it. His successors
who unearthed a bewildering number of variants to every single
rune have left the confusion intact. Instead of forcing the bulky
piece into an arbitrary whole, the Finnish Folklore Fellows (F. F.
for short) have taken up comparative mythology, the only means
by which order can be established eventually.

As concerns Homer and the presupposed Homeric rhapsodies,
this is dangerous territory. Not so much because Homer belongs in
fee simple to the redoubtable guild of Homeric scholars—Compa-
retti as a respectable member of the guild could afford deviations—
but essentially because it is not fitting to try to reduce to a "scheme"
what remains a prodigious and subtle work of art, the limpidity and
immediacy of which should not be spoiled. It is unfortunately a
common prejudice that to work out high theoretical allusions con-
tained in the text reduces the text to an irrelevant conundrum,
whereas, for instance, the Catalogue of Ships studied literally re-
veals hidden beauties to the reader. It is enough to suggest here that
Homer found pre-existent materials at hand, squared blocks and
well-cut ashlars, which he transformed into poetry. One of those
prefabricated pieces, the Curse of the Miller Woman, is located
in chapter VI, and there is more such evidence to come. Homer's
Craft lay really in reshaping and humanizing these materials so well
that they became inconspicuous. In the case of the Greek tragedies
more is known, thanks to Apollodorus. His "Library" of myths,

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Shamans and Smiths

supplemented by Frazer's wonderful notes, shows that the "Li-
brary" provided the "book" for every tragedy, those that we have
and those that are lost, those written and those never written. Yet it
took an Aeschylus or a Sophocles to transform the meaning, to
make out of it a work of art.

Much closer to hand, and better known, are the sources of the
Divine Comedy—history, philosophy and myth, measures and inter-
vals—which provide a virtually complete structure without gaps.
Yet because of this, Dante is all the more a true creator. Clearly, it
is the very idea of "poet," poietes, which has to be redefined in
moving closer to traditional sources. Veteres docti poetae as Ovid
said, himself not the least of them. "Learned" is the key word, not
in theoretical tropes and allegories, but in the living substances of
mythical doctrine.

But here again common usage is misleading. Today, a learned
man is usually one who understands what it is all about. Dante was
certainly one. But was it so in remote ages? There is reason to doubt
it. An esoteric doctrine, as defined by Aristotle, is one which is
learned long before being understood. Much of the education of
Chinese scholars was until very recently along those lines. Under-
standing remained something apart. It might never come at all, and
at best would come when the learning was complete. There were
other ways.

One can give an extreme case from Rome. Athenaeus6 says that
there was a much-applauded mime, Memphis by name, who in a
brief dance was said to convey faultlessly the whole essence of the
Pythagorean doctrine. It is not said that he understood it: he may
have had an inkling, and the rest was his extraordinarily sharpened
sense of expression. He had, so to speak, a morphological under-
standing that he could only express in action. His public understood
surely no more than he: but they would be strict and unforgiving
judges. Dictum sapienti sat, the wise would say. But here even the
one word was missing. His spectators would shout deliriously none-
theless, in their own demotic language: "I dig you, Jack." And for

6 Deipnosophistai 1.2od. Sec also Lucian's De Saltatione p.70.

the slightest lapse from the exact form, they were ready with eggs
and overripe tomatoes. Here is a case of true communication which
does not need understanding. It takes place only through the form,
morphe. In mystery rites there were things which "could not be
said" (arrheta) but could only be acted out.

Such happenings must be kept in mind when trying to determine
how well the poet understood the material handed on to him. Cre-
ative misunderstanding may have been of the essence of his "free-
dom": but strict respect was there nonetheless. The rune of the
"origin of iron" (the ninth of the Kalevala) was incomprehensible
to the laulaja, yet he knew he had to recite this "deep origin" to
control the lethal powers of cold iron. Magic and mantic implica-
tions were present always in the grim business of the smith, as they
were in the high business of the poet. Understanding lay beyond
them.

Every era, of course, has freely invented its own ballads, ro-
mances, songs and fables to entertain it. That is another matter.
This concerns the poet, poietes, as he was understood in early times.
There was an original complex of meaning which comprised the
words poet, vates, prophet, seer. Every knowledge and law, Vico
wrote with a flash of genius two centuries ago, must once upon a
time have been "serious poetry," poesia seriosa. It is in this sense
that Aristotle in a sophisticated age still refers respectfully to "the
grave testimony of [early] poets."

Now that documents of the earliest ages of writing are available,
one is struck with a wholly unexpected feature. Those first prede-
cessors of ours, instead of indulging their whims with 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.

The experts have noted the uncertainty prevailing in the succes-
sors of old texts, the attempts in them to establish correct names

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and their significance from obsolete formulas and ideograms.
S. Schott, dealing with early star lists of Egypt,7 points to the per-
plexity of later generations concerning the names of constellations,
even those of the "greatest gods of the Decans, Orion and Sothis,
who in Ancient Egyptian are called by the names of old hiero-
glyphs, without anybody knowing, in historical times, what these
hieroglyphs had meant, once upon a time. During the whole long
history of these names we meet attempts at interpretation." This
last sentence goes for every ancient text, not only for the names
contained therein: there is no end of commentaries on the Pyramid
Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead,8 on the Rigveda,
the I Ching, just as in the Old Testament.9 W. von Soden regrets
that we depend on the documents of the "Renaissance of Sumerian
culture" (around 2100 b.c.) instead of having the real, old material
at our disposal.10 The mere fact that Sumerian was the language of
the educated Babylonian and Assyrian, the existence of the many
Sumerian-Akkadian "dictionaries" and the numerous translations
of the Gilgamesh epic betray the activity of several academies re-
sponsible for the officially recognized text editions. One can almost
see the scholars puzzling and frowning over the texts. And in
Mexico it was the same. In Chimalpahin's Memorial Breve we find
notes such as "In the year '5-house' certain old men explained some
pictographs to the effect that king Hueymac of Tollan [the mythi-
cal Golden Age city] had died."11 This took place before the com-
ing of the Spaniards. The Greek "Renaissance," no less than those
of the previous millennia in the Near East, was the result of such
an antiquarian effort. Hesiod still bears the mark of it.

These few notions should be present in any ideas about "trans-
mission." The word need in no way imply "understanding" on

7 W. Gundel, Dekane und Dekansternbilder (1936), p. 5.

8 See, for example, G. Roeder, Urkunden zur Religion des Alten Aegypten
(1915), pp. 185f., 199f., 224.

9 J. Dowson (A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology, p. 60) bluntly calls
the Brahmanas "a Hindu Talmud."

10 "Licht und Finsternis in der sumerischen und babylonisch-assyrischen Reli-
gion," Studium Generate 13 (1960), p. 647.

11 Chimalpahin, Memorial Breve, trans. W. Lehmann and G. Kutscher (1958),
p. 10.

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Shamans and Smiths

the part of those who transmit, and this is true from early ages
down to contemporary minstrels. As has been pointed out, it is easy
to slip into ordinary literary history if the origins are not seriously
investigated. Does the tale of the Sampo have a wider interest than
this? A few handsome cosmic motifs scattered through the tale of
magic might still have reached Finland through the "corridors of
Time" from other cultures without any meaning attached. In short,
it might all be "folk poetry" in the usual sense.

The editors of the Kalevala themselves insistently described the
background as "shamanistic," by which they simply understood
some kind of primitive "religion." It corresponded in their minds
to primeval, instinctive magic, to be found in all five continents,
associated with the tribal "medicine man." Then came Frazer to
introduce the cleavage between "magic" and "religion" as distinct
forms, to complicate matters further. Shamanism remained until
recently a catchword of an uncertain sort—a portmanteau term for
specialists, a vague notion for the public, of the kind that gives one
the pleasant impression of understanding what it is all about—like
that other too-famous term, mana. One of the present authors is
willing to admit ruefully that he once stressed the link of Pytha-
goras and Epimenides with Thracian shamans, with no more
thought than to show that there was much in them of the ageless
medicine man.12 This was several years ago, and it seemed to cor-
respond to the state of the art. It is no longer so. To have uncovered
the inadmissibility of the general usage of the term is the merit of
Laszlo Vajda's short but dense and logical study on the subject.13
Vajda has shown that no historical verdict based on such generali-
ties is valid. It is inadmissible to reduce shamanism to memories of
Eskimo angekoks or to a "technique of induced ecstasy," or to
derive such phenomena from the Asiatic North where, undeniably,
this particular kind of queerness is fostered.

"Shaman" is a Tungusian word. Shamanism has its epicenter in
Ural-Altaic Asia, but it is a very complex phenomenon of culture

12 G. de Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought (1961), p. 54.
13 "Zur Phaseologischen Stellung des Schamanismus," in Ural-Altaische Jahr-
bulcher 3`(1959), pp.456-85.

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Shamans and Smiths

which can be explained neither by psychologists nor by sociologists,
but only by way of historical ethnology. To put it in a few words,
a shaman is elected by spirits, meaning that he cannot choose his
profession. Epileptics and mentally unhinged persons are obvious
privileged candidates. Once elected, the future shaman goes to
"school." Older shamans teach him his trade, and only after the
concluding ceremony of his education is he accepted. This is, so
to speak, the visible part of his education. The real shamanistic ini-
tiation of the soul happens in the world of spirits—while his body
lies unconscious in his tent for days—who dismember the candidate
in the most thorough and drastic manner and sew him together
afterwards with iron wire, or reforge him, so that he becomes a
new being capable of feats which go beyond the human. The duties
of a shaman are to heal diseases which are caused by hostile spirits
who have entered the body of the patient, or which occur because
the soul has left the body and cannot find the way back. Often
the shaman is responsible for guiding the souls of the deceased to
the abode of the dead, as he also escorts the souls of sacrificed ani-
mals to the sky. His help is needed, too, when the hunting season
is bad; he must find out where the game is. In order to find out all
the things which he is expected to know, the shaman has to ascend
to the highest sky to get the information from his god—or go into
the underworld. On his way he has to fight hostile spirits, and/or
rival shamans, and tremendous duels are fought. Both combatants
have with them their helping spirits in animal form, and much
shape-shifting takes place. In fact, these fantastic duels form the
bulk of shamanistic stories. The last echoes are the so-called "magic-
flights" in fairy tales. The shaman's soul ascends to the sky when he
is in a state of ecstasy; in order to get into this state, he needs his
drum which serves him as a "horse," the drumstick as a "whip."14
Now, the "frame" within which the shaman proper acts, that is, the

14 The shamans also use as a "main artery" a stream flowing through all levels of
the sky, and they identify it with the Yenissei—a conception which will become
clearer at a later point of this inquiry. (U. Holmberg, Finno-Ugric and Siberian
Mythology [1964], pp. 307f).

world conception of Ural-Altaic shamanism, has been successfully
traced back to India (under its Hinduistic and Buddhistic aspects,
including Tibetan Lamaism and Bon-po) as well as to Iran. When
reading Radloff's many volumes, one runs into insufficiently dis-
guised Bodhisatvas at every corner (Manjirae = Manjusri; Mait-
erae, or Maidere = Maitreya, etc.), but the best organized material
has been provided by Uno Holmberg (Uno Harva) ,15 who has been
quoted here and will be quoted frequently.

This world conception, however, with its three "domains," with
seven or nine skies, one above the other, and with corresponding
"underworlds," with the "world-pillar" running through the cen-
ter of the whole system, crowned by the "north Nail," or "World
Nail" (Polaris), goes farther back than Indian and Iranian culture,
namely to the most ancient Near East, whence India and Iran de-
rived their idea of a "cosmos"—a cosmos being in itself by no
means an obvious assumption. The shaman climbing the "stairs" or
notches of his post or tree, pretending that his soul ascends at the
same time to the highest sky, does the very same thing as the Meso-
potamian priest did when mounting to the top of his seven-storied
pyramid, the ziggurat, representing the planetary spheres.16

15 See the bibliography.

16 Nine skies, instead of seven, within the sphere of fixed stars, result from the
habit of including among the planets the (invisible) "head" and "tail" of the
"Dragon," which is to say the lunar nodes, conjunctions or oppositions in the
vicinity of which cause the eclipses of Sun and Moon; the revolution of these
"draconitic points" is c. 18.5 years. This notion, upheld in medieval Islamic astrol-
ogy, is Indian, but apparently not of Indian origin, as will come out eventually.
Reuter, Germanische Himmelskunde (1934), pp. 291ff., thinks that the Teutonic
idea of nine planets including the draconitic points goes back to the common "Ur-
zeit" of Indo-Europeans, and refers to Luise Troje, Die 13 und 12 im Traktat Pelliot
(1925), pp. 7f., 25, 149f. Even if the "Dragon" should go back to this time, we do
not take the Indo-Europeans, whether united or not, for the inventors of this idea.
As concerns Islamic and Indian tradition, see the most thorough and thoughtful
inquiries by Willy Hartner, "The Pseudoplanetary Nodes of the Moon's Orbit in
Hindu and Islamic Iconographies," in Ars lslamica 5 (1938), Pt. 1; Le Probleme de
la planete Kaid (1955); "Zur Astrologischen Symbolik des 'Wade Cup'," in Fest-
schrift Kuchnel (1959), pp. 234-43. Whether we shall find the time to deal in
the appropriate form with the tripartite Universe in this essay remains doubtful.

This much can be safely stated: it goes back to "The Ways of Anu, Enlil, and
Ea" in Babylonian astronomy.

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124

From the majestic temple at Borobudur in Java to the graceful
stupas which dot the Indian landscape, stretches a schematized re-
minder of the seven heavens, the seven notches, the seven levels.
Says Uno Holmberg: "This pattern of seven levels can hardly be
imagined as the invention of Turko-Tatar populations. To the in-
vestigator, the origin of the Gods ruling those various levels is no
mystery, for they point clearly to the planetary gods of Babylon,
which already in their far-away point of origin, ruled over seven
superposed starry circles."17 This was also the considered conclusion,
years ago, of Paul Mus. To have taken the conception of several
skies and underworlds as natural, ergo primitive, was a grievous
blunder which distorted the historical outlook of the last two cen-
turies. It stems from the fact that philologists and Orientalists have
lost all contact with astronomical imagination, or even the funda-
mentals of astronomy. When they find something which savors
undeniably of astronomical lore, they find a way to label it under
"prelogical thought" or the like.

But even apart from the celestial "ladder," and the sky-travel of
the shaman's soul, a close look at shamanistic items always discloses
very ancient patterns. For instance, the drum, the most powerful
device of the shaman, representing the Universe in a specific way,
is the unmistakable grandchild of the bronze lilissu drum of the
Mesopotamian Kalu-priest (responsible for music, and serving the
god Enki/Ea).18 The cover of the lilissu drum must come from a
black bull, "which represents Taurus in heaven," says Thureau-
Dangin.19 Going further, W. F. Albright and P. E. Dumont20

17 Der Baum des Lebens (1922), p. 123.

18 See B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien (1925), vol. 2, p. 66.

19Rituels accadiens (1921), p. 2. See also E. Ebeling, Tod und Leben nach den
Vorstellungen der Babylonier (1931), for a cuneiform text in which the hide is
explicitly said to be Anu (p. 29), and C. Bezold, Babylonisch-Assyrisches Glossar
(1926), p. 210 s.v. "sugugalu, 'the hide of the great bull,' an emblem of Anu." We
might point, once more, to the figure of speech used by Petronius' Trimalchio,
who, talking of the month of May, states: "Totus coelus taurulus fiat" ("the whole
heaven turns into a little bull").

20 "A Parallel between Indian and Babylonian Sacrificial Ritual," JAOS 54 (1934),
pp. 107-28.

• Shamans and Smiths

compared the sacrifice of the Mesopotamian bull, the hide of which
was to cover the lilissu drum, with the Indian Ashvamedha, a huge
horse sacrifice which only the most successful king (always a
Kshatrya) could afford. They found that the Indian horse must
have the Krittika, the Pleiades, on his forehead, and this too, accord-
ing to Albright, is what the Akkadian text prescribes concerning
the bull. This should be enough to indicate the level of phenomena
brought into play.

The striking of the drum covered with that specific bull hide was
meant as a contact with heaven at its most significant point, and in
the Age of Taurus (c. 4000-2000 b.c.) this was also explicitly said
to represent Anu, now casually identified as "God of Heaven." But
Anu was a far more exact entity. In cuneiform script, Anu is writ-
ten with one wedge, which stands for the number 1 and also for 60
in the sexagesimal system (the Pythagoreans would have said, he
stands for the One and the Decad). All this does not mean some
symbolic or mystical, least of all magical quality or quantity, but
the fundamental time measure of celestial events (that is, motions) .21
Striking the drum was to involve (this time, yes, magically) the
essential Time and Place in heaven.

It is not clear whether or not the Siberian shamans were still
aware of this past. The amount of highly relevant star lore collected
by Holmberg, and the innumerable figures of definitely astronomi-
cal character found on shamanistic drums could very well allow
for much more insight than the ethnologists assume, but this is
irrelevant at this point. What is plain and relevant is that the Si-
berian shamans did not invent the zodiac, and all that goes with it.

There is no need for a detailed inspection of Chinese mythical
drums, merely a few lines from an "Ocean of Stories":

In the Eastern Sea, there is to be found an animal which looks like an
ox. Its appearance is green, and it has no horns. It has one foot only.
When it moves into the water or out of it, it causes wind or rain. Its

21 Compare the sexagesimal round of days in customary notation of the oracle
bones of Shang China, 15th century B.C., about which Needham states that it is
"probably an example of Babylonian influence on China" (Science and Civilisation
in China [1962], vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 181).

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Shamans and Smiths

shining is similar to that of the sun and the moon. The noise it makes

is like the thunder. Its name is K'uei. The great Huang-ti, having

captured it, made a drum out of its skin.22

This looks prima facie like the description of an ancient case of
delirium tremens, but the context makes it sober enough. This is a
kind of Unnatural Natural History which has small regard for living
species, but deals with events from another realm. The One-Legged
Being, in particular, can be followed through many appearances
beginning with the Hunrakan of the Mayas, whose very name
means "one-leg." From it comes our "hurricane," so there is no
wonder that he disposes of wind, rain, thunder and lightning in
lavish amounts. But he is not for all that a mere weather god, since
he is one aspect of Tezcatlipoca himself, and the true original One-
Leg that looks down from the starry sky—but his name is not
appropriate yet.

And so back by unexpected ways to mythical drums and their
conceivable use. A lot more might be found by exploring that
incredible storehouse of archaic thought miraculously preserved
among the Mande peoples of West Sudan.23 In the large and com-
plicated creation myth of the Mande, there are two drums. The
first was brought down from heaven by the bardic ancestor, shortly
after the Ark (with the eight twin-ancestors) had landed on the
primeval field. This drum was made from Faro's skull and was
used for producing rain. (The experts style Faro usually "le Moni-

22 M. Granet, Danses et Legendes de la Chine ancienne (1959), p. 509. Such
imagery is by no means unique. E.g., the Taittiriya Sanhita says: "The pressing
stone [of the Soma-press] is the penis of the sacrificial horse, Soma is his seed;
when he opens his mouth, he causes lightning, when he shivers, it thunders, when
he urinates, it rains" (7.5.25.2 = Shatapatha Brahmana 10.6.4.1 =Brihad Aranyaka
Upanishad 1.1; see R. Pischel and K. F. Geldner, Vedische Studien, vol. 1, p. 86).

It will come out later why it is important to supplement these strange utterances
with the statement of the Shatapatha Brahmana: "In the water having its origin
is the horse," which sounds ever so inconspicuous until E. Sieg (Die Sagen-
stoffe des Rigveda, p. 98) obliges the non-Sanskritist by giving the Sanskrit words
in transcription, i.e., "apsuyumi va asvah"; apsu is something more specific than
just water; it is, in fact, the very same topos as the Babylonian apsu (Sumerian:

abzu).

23 In East Africa, the drum occupied the place that the Tabernacle had in the
Old Testament, as Harald von Sicard has shown in Ngoma Lungundu: Eine afri-
kanische Bundeslade (1952).

teur," thus avoiding mislabeling him as culture hero, savior or god.)
The first sanctuary was built, and the "First Word" revealed (30
words there were) to mankind through the mouth of one of the
twin-ancestors, who "talked the whole night, ceasing only when
he saw the sun and Sirius rising at the same time." When the "Second
Word" was to be revealed (consisting of 50 words this time), and
again connected with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the ancestor "de-
cided to sacrifice in the sanctuary on the hill the first twins of mixed
sex. He asked the bard to make an arm-drum with the skin of the
twins.24 The tree, from which he carved the drum, grew on the hill
and symbolized Faro's only leg."25

Here again are important one-legged characters, of whom there
are a bewildering number with various functions all over the world.
It is not necessary to enter that jungle, except to note that the tem-
porary mock-king of Siam, who was set up for yearly expiatory
ceremonies, also had to stand on one leg upon a golden dais during
all the coronation ceremonies, and he had the fine-sounding title of
"Lord of the Celestial Armies."26 The Chinese K'uei is then no iso-
lated character. The Chinese myth is more explicit than the others
and becomes more understandable because the Chinese were ex-
tremely sky-conscious. Their sinful monsters are thrown into pits
or banished to strange mountain regions for the sin of having upset
the calendar.

As for K'uei himself, engagingly introduced as a green oxlike crea-
ture of the Eastern Sea, he will grow more bewildering as his nature
unfolds. Marcel Granet writes that the Emperor Shun made K'uei
"master of music"—actually ordered no less a power than the
Sun (Chong-li) to fetch him from the bush and bring him to
court, because K'uei alone had the talent to bring into harmony

24 It is an hourglass-shaped drum, with two skins, said "to recall the two geo-
graphic areas, Kaba and Akka, and the narrow central part of the drum is the
river itself [Niger] and hence Faro's journey."

25 Germaine Dieterlen, "The Mande Creation Story," Africa 27 (1957), pp. 124-
38; cf. JSA 25 (1955), pp. 39-76. See also Marcel Griaule, "Symbolisme des tam-
bours soudanais," Melanges historiques offerts a M. Masson 1 (1955), pp. 79-86;
Griaule and Dieterlen, Signes Graphiques Soudanais (1951), p. 19.

20 W. Deonna, Un divertissetment de table "a cloche-pied'" (1959), p. 33. See
J. Frazier, The Dying God (Pt. Ill of The Golden Bough), pp.149f

Hamlet's Mill

128

the six pipes and the seven modes, and Shun, who wanted to bring
peace to the empire, stood by the opinion that "music is the essence
of heaven and earth."27 K'uei also could cause the "hundred animals"
to dance by touching the musical stone, and he helped Yu the
Great, that indefatigable earth-mover among the Five First Em-
perors, to accomplish his labor of regulating the "rivers." And it
turns out that he was not only Master of the Dance, but Master of
the Forge as well. He must have been a remarkable companion for
Yu the Great, whose dancing pattern (the Step of Yu) "per-
formed" the Big Dipper.28

Enough of drums, and of their shamanic use. They have at least
ceased to seem like tribal tom-toms. They are connected with time,
rhythm and motion in heaven.

Moving now to another great theme, in fact a very great one, it
is possible to trace back the significance of the blacksmith in Asiatic
shamanism, particularly the celestial blacksmith who is the legiti-
mate heir to the divine "archi-tekton" of the cosmos. Several repre-
sentatives of this type, whom we call Deus Faber, still have both
functions, being architects and smiths at the same time, e.g., the
Greek Hephaistos, who builds the starry houses for the gods and
forges masterworks, and the Koshar-wa-Hasis of Ras Shamra, who
builds Baal's palace and forges masterworks also.

The Yakuts claim: "Smith and Shaman come from the same
nest," and they add: "the Smith is the older brother of the Sha-
man,"29 which might be valid also for Vainamoinen, coupled with
Ilmarinen, who is said to have "hammered together the roof of the
sky." It is the primeval Smith who made the Sampo, as we know,
and forged sky and luminaries in Estonia. It is no idle fancy that
the representative of the celestial smith, the King, is himself fre-
quently titled "Smith." Jenghiz Khan had the title "Smith"30 and

27Granet, Danses et Legendes, pp. 311, 505-508.

28 We are indebted for this last piece of information to Professor N. Sivin.

29 P. W. Schinldt, Die asiatischen Hirtenvolker (1954), pp. 346f. Concerning the
terrestrial blacksmith: the many iron pieces which belong to the costume of a
shaman can be forged only by a blacksmith of the 9th generation, i.e., eight of his
direct ancestors must have been in the profession. A smith who dared forge a
shamanistic outfit without having those ancestors would be torn by bird spirits.

30 A. Alfoldi, "Smith As a Title of Dignity" (in Hungarian), in Magyar Nyelv
28 (1952), pp. 205-20.

129

Shamans and Smiths

the standard of the Persian Empire was the stylized leather apron
of the Smith Kavag (appendix #11). The Chinese mythical em-
perors Huang-ti and Yin are such unmistakable smiths that Marcel
Granet drew historic-sociological conclusions all the way, forget-
ting the while that Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, is acknowl-
edged to be Saturn. And just as the Persian Shahs held their royal
jubilee festival after having reigned thirty years, which is the Satur-
nian revolution, so the Egyptian Pharaoh also celebrated his jubilee
after thirty years, true to the "inventor" of this festival, Ptah, who
is the Egyptian Saturn, and also Deus Faber. It was necessary to
enter this subject in depth abruptly and lay stress on these few
selected data, because otherwise the charming and harmless-looking
Finnish runes would not be seen for what they are, the badly dam-
aged fragments of a once whole and "multicolored cover." It does
no harm to stamp Vainamoinen a "shaman" as long as one remains
aware of the background of shamanism. In fact, there is again a
vision in depth from seeing that Vainamoinen has discarded the
drum which remains the one instrument of his Lapp cousins; he has
created the harp, and this means that he must be seen as the Orpheus
of the North.

Last survivals are not easily recognized. It needs experience, and
it cannot be expected that an unsuspecting reader of "folk poetry"
would spot well-known divine characters when they come his way
clad in Longfellow's meter. For instance, in reading Kalevala
9.107ff., it is not easy to discover the mighty Iranian God of Time,
Zurvan akarana, who is portrayed as standing upon the world egg,
Carrying in his hands the tools of the architect:

Then was born smith Ilmarinen

Thus was born and thus was nurtured

Born upon a hill of charcoal,

Reared upon a plain of charcoal,

In his hands a copper hammer,

And his little pincers likewise.

Ilmari was born at night time,

And at day he built his smithy.

Since Christendom was very successful in destroying old traditions,
Altaic and Siberian survivals are often found in far better shape

Hamlet's Mill

130

than Finnish runes, but even the Lapps still speak of " Waralden ol-
may, 'World Man' . . . and this is the same as Saturnus."31 Nor are
Jupiter and Mars absent, the former being called Hora Galles
(Thorkarl), the latter Bieka Galles, the "Wind Man."32 Voguls,
Yakuts and Mongols tell of God's seven sons, or seven gods (or
nine), among whom are a "Scribe Man,"33 and a "Man observing the
World." The latter has been compared straightaway with Kullervo
by Karl Kerenyi,34 who claims his name to be the literal translation
of Avalokiteshvara, the very great Bodhisatva, known in China as
Kuan-yin, literally "deserving (musical) modes." One wonders
whether this "World-observer" does not go back much farther:
to Gilgamesh. We have to keep in mind that the Babylonians called
their texts after their opening words; e.g., the Creation Epic they
called Enuma elish, i.e., "When above"; accordingly, what we call
the Epic of Gilgamesh was with them Sha naqba imuru, "Who saw
everything." Such are the bewildering changes rung by time on
great and familiar themes. And there is more. Actually, when still
young, this Vogulian "World-observing Man"—Avalokiteshvara
himself, this great and worshiped deity of Buddhist countries—
was, like Kullervo, a much-plagued orphan, first in the house of
his uncle, then in the house of "the Russian" and in that "of the
Samoyed." After years of misery—quite specific "measured" mis-
ery35—he kills all his tormentors. The revenge he takes is for

31 This information comes from Johan Radulf (1723), quoted by K. Krohn,
"Priapkultus," FUF 6 (1906), p. 168, who identifies Waralden olmay with Freyr.
G. Dumezil, La Saga de Hadingus (1950), identifies him with Njordr.

32 K. Krohn, "Windgott und Windzauber," FUF 7 (1907), pp. 1731"., where the
god is once called Ilmaris.

33 The Ostyaks talk even of a golden Book of Destiny, and Holmberg points out
that the Ostyaks who have no writing are not likely to have hit upon such notions
by themselves. (Holmberg, Der Baum des Lebens, p. 97). Cf. the entire chapter,
"The Seven Gods of Fate" (pp. 113-33 of the same work) and Holmberg's Finno-
Ugric and Siberian Mythology, p. 415.

34 "Zum Urkind-Mythologem," in Paideuma 2 (1940), pp. 245ff. See now C. G.
Jung and K. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology (1949), pp. 30-39.

35 E.g., in the house of "the Russian," he is kept in the door hinge (in the English
translation this and other details are blurred to insignificance), and dishwater is
emptied upon him. To be damned to play door hinge is one of the hellish punish-
ments in Egypt, because the hinge is supposed to turn in the victim's eye. As con-
cerns the heart-warming custom of abusing One's celestial fellow travelers as sink

131 * Shamans and Smiths

himself. His father, who had lowered down the beloved son from
the sky in a cradle, remained aloft.

These hints will suffice for the time being. It does not matter
whether or not pieces, or even the whole, of cosmological tradition
came late to the Ural-Altaic populations, that is, whether Mani-
cheism had a part in their propagation. The Manicheans took over
the whole parcel of old traditions, changing only the signs, as hap-
pens with every Gnostic system. Gnostics never have been of the
inventive sort. Their very title, derived from their key word, gives
the scheme away, gnosis tes hodou = knowledge of the way. The
"Way" which had to be learned by heart is that which leads out-
wards-upwards through the planetary spheres, past the threatening
"watchtowers" of the zodiac to the desired timeless Light be-
yond the sphere of fixed stars, above the Pole star: beyond and
above everything, where the unknown god (agnostos theos) resides
eternally.36

This "Way" is not exactly the same for everybody, and the larg-
est highroads are not everlasting, but the principle remains un-

Or toilet: we find this in the Eddie Lokasenna (34), where Loke says of Njordr
that he was used as chamber pot by Hymir's daughters; with the Polynesian case
of Tawhaki, whose father Hema is abused in the very same manner, we deal in the
chapter on Samson (see p. 175); this model of a "Horus-avenger-of-his-father"
fulfills not only his filial duty, he does it by means of Amlethus' own "Net-trick."
The Samoyed binds the pitiable "World-observing Man" to his sledge with an
iron wire of thirty fathoms length. We do not know yet what this means precisely.
We know that victorious characters use the vanquished as this or that vehicle,
saddle horse, etc.—Marduk uses Tiamat as "ship," as does Osiris with Seth; Ninur-
ta's "Elamitic chariot, carrying the corpse of Enmesharra" is drawn by "horses
Who are the death-demon of Zu" (Ebeling, Tod und Leben, p. 33); Tachma Rupa
rides on Ahriman for thirty years around the two ends of the earth (Yasht 19.29;

Yasht 19, the Zamyad Yasht, is the one dedicated to Hvarna)—but these code
formulae have not yet been broken.

36Absurd as it sounds, the many Gnostic sects who hated nothing more than
philosophers and mathematicians have never denied or doubted the validity of
their "evil" teachings. Sick with disgust, they learned the routes of ascension
through (or across) those abominable spheres ruled by number, created by the
evil powers. Surely, their "Father of Greatness" would not have created such a
thing as a cosmos. Tradition does use the most peculiar vehicles for its motion

through historical time. Or should one say, tradition did use? Face to face with

the outbreaking revolution of "simple souls" against whichever rational thought,
there is small reason for hope that our contemporary gnostics will hand down any

tradition at all.

Hamlet's Mill

132

changed. The shaman travels through the skies in the very same
manner as the Pharaoh did, well equipped as he was with his Pyra-
mid Text or his Coffin Text, which represented his indispensable
timetable and contained the ordained addresses of every celestial
individual whom he was expected to meet.37 The Pharaoh relied
upon his particular text as the less distinguished dead relied upon
his copy of chapters from the Book of the Dead, and he was pre-
pared (as was the shaman) to change shape into the Sata serpent,
a centipede, or the semblance of whatever celestial "station" must
be passed, and to recite the fitting formulae to overcome hostile
beings.38

To sum it up—whether Shamanism is an old or a relatively young
offshoot of ancient civilization is irrelevant. It is not primitive at all,
but it belongs, as all our civilizations do, to the vast company of
ungrateful heirs of some almost unbelievable Near Eastern ancestor
who first dared to understand the world as created according to
number, measure and weight.

If the Finnish runes and Altaic legends sound harmless enough,
so do the popular traditions of most of the European countries, in-
cluding Greece: the kind of mythology known through Bulfinch.
But here at least there are additional less popular traditions which
have preserved more of the severe spirit and style of old. So the
(13th) Orphic Hymn to Kronos addresses the god as "Father of

37 The ephemerides on the inner side of the coffin lids of the Middle Kingdom,
and the astronomical ceilings in tombs of the New Kingdom, as well as the
"Ramesside Star Clocks," made navigation still easier for the royal soul.

38 Many of the heavenly creatures do all the damage they possibly can; they try,
for instance, to rob the dead of his text without which he would be helpless, and
generally their conduct, as described in the literature of the Hereafter, is weird.
Thus, in chapter 32 of the Book of the Dead, the crocodile of the West is accused
of eating certain stars; the properly equipped soul, however, knows how to play up
to the celestial monsters, and the traveler addresses the Northern crocodile with
the words: "Get thee back, for the goddess Serqet is in my interior and I have not
yet brought her forth." The goddess Serqet is the constellation Scorpius. As con-
cerns the Sata serpent, "whose years are infinite . . . who dwells at the farthest
ends of the earth . . . who renews his youth everyday" (Book of the Dead, ch. 87),
he makes himself suspect of representing the sphere of Saturn, whereas the centi-
pede is not likely to fit any "body" besides Moon or Mercury; that it is no con-
stellation is certain.

133

Shamans and Smiths

the blessed gods as well as of man, you of changeful counsel, . . .
strong Titan who devours all and begets it anew [lit. "you who
consume all and increase it contrariwise yourself"], you who hold
the indestructible bond according to the apeirona (unlimited) order
of Aion, Kronos father of all, wily-minded Kronos, offspring of
Gaia and starry Ouranos . . . venerable Prometheus." Such sayings
suddenly thrust information out of the usual patterns and show the
true professional minds of ancient mythology working out their
theorems. The only conventional attribute is "Son of Ouranos and
Gaia." Kronos is termed a Titan, because the word "God" belongs
properly to the Olympian generation, whereas Saturn's empire is
not of "this world," any more than that of the Indian Asura and
the king of the golden Krita Yuga, Varuna; and the formula is
found still in the medieval "Kaiser-Sage." At the end of Thidrek's
(Theodoric's) reign when there are only corpses left, a dwarf ap-
pears and asks the king to follow him; "your empire is no more in
this world."39 More puzzling, Kronos "is" that other Titan, Prome-
theus, that other adversary of the "gods," the Lighter of Fire. He
"is" many more characters, too, but it will take some time to clear

this up. We are at the heart of an "implex."

"Who holdest the unbreakable bond . . ." Assyrian Ninurta, too,
holds "the bond of heaven and earth." We shall also hear of a magi-
cal invocation (see p. 147) that addresses Kronos as "founder of the
world we live in." These words are, however, insufficient and
ambiguous. Not only are translations imprecise generally, but in
our times of accelerated decay of language even the best-intentioned
reader is likely to overlook such words as "bond" or "to found."

if   instead he were to read "inch scale" and "to survey"—a divine
foundation is every time a "temenos"—he would promptly react
in a different manner. Kronos-Saturn has been and remains the one
who owns the "inch scale," who gives the measures, continuously,
because he is "the originator of times," as Macrobius says, although

39W. Grimm, Die Deutsche Heldensage (1957), p. 338: "Du solt mit mir gan.dyn
reich ist nit me in dieser welt." The corresponding most popular folktale shows
Theodoric of Verona ravished by a demon horse and cast headlong into the crater
of Etna.

Hamlet's Mill • 134

the poor man mistakes him for the sun for this very reason.40 But
"Helios the Titan" is not Apollo, quite explicitly.

Apart from this, apart also from Plutarch's report, according to
which Kronos, sleeping in that golden cave in Ogygia, dreams what
Zeus is planning,41 there is an Orphic fragment of greater weight,
preserved in Proclus' commentary on Plato's Cratylus.42 The Orphic
text being one of the delicate sort, we quote some sentences only:

The greatest Kronos is giving from above the principles of intelligi-
bility to the Demiurge [Zeus], and he presides over the whole "crea-
tion" [demiourgia]. That is why Zeus calls him "Demon" according
to Orpheus, saying: "Set in motion our genus, excellent Demon!"
And Kronos seems to have with him the highest causes of junctions
and separations ... he has become the cause of the continuation of
begetting and propagation and the head of the whole genus of Titans
from which originates the division of beings [diairesis ton onton].

The passage ends thus: "Also Nyx prophesies to him [i.e., occa-
sionally] but the father does so continuously [prosechos], and
he gives him all the measures of the whole creation."43

In Proclus' style, the same phenomena which look simply flat and
childish, mere "etymologizing," when handled by others, sound
extremely difficult—which they actually are. So let us shortly com-
pare how Macrobius deals with the responsibility of Kronos for the
"division of beings" (Sat. 7.8.6-7). After having mentioned the cur-
rent identification of Kronos (Saturn) and Chronos (Time), so
often contested by philologists, Macrobius states:

They say, that Saturn cut off the private parts of his father Caelus
[Ouranos], threw them into the sea, and out of them Venus was born
who, after the foam [aphros] from which she was formed, accepted
the name of Aphrodite. From this they conclude that, when there
was chaos, no time existed, insofar as time is a fixed measure derived
from the revolution of the sky. Time begins there; and of this is be-

40 Sat.1.22.8: Saturnus ipse, qui auctor est temporum.

41 De facie in orbe lunae 941: "Hosa gar ho Zeus prodianoeitai, taut' oneiropolein
ton Kronon."

42 Fr. 155, Kern, p. 194.

43 Kai panta ta metra tes holes demiourgias endidosin. We might even say:
Kronos "grants" him all the measures.

135 . Shamans and Smiths

lieved to have been born Kronos who is Chronos, as was said before
[see appendix #12].44

The fact is that the "separation of the parents of the world,"
accomplished by means of the emasculation of Ouranos, stands for
the establishing of the obliquity of the ecliptic: the beginning of
measurable time. (The very same "event" was understood by Mil-
ton as the expulsion from Paradise [appendix #13].) And Saturn
has been "appointed" to be the one who established it because he is
the outermost planet, nearest to the sphere of fixed stars.45 "This
planet was taken for the one who communicated motion to the
Universe and who was, so to speak, its king"; this is what Schlegel
reports of China L'Uranographie Chinoise, pp. 628ff.).

Saturn does give the measures: this is the essential point. How are
we to reconcile it with Saturn the First King, the ruler of the
Golden Age who is now asleep at the outer confines of the world?
The conflict is only apparent, as will be seen. For now it is essential
to recognize that, whether one has to do with the Mesopotamian
Saturn, Enki/Ea, or with Ptah of Egypt, he is the "Lord of
Measures"—spell it me in Sumerian, parshu in Akkadian, maat in
Egyptian. And the same goes for His Majesty, the Yellow Emperor
of China—yellow, because the element earth belongs to Saturn—
"Huang-ti established everywhere the order for the sun, the moon
and the stars."46 The melody remains the same. It might help to

44 Ex quo intellegi volunt, cum chaos esset, tempora non fuisse, siquidem tempus
est certa dimensio quae ex caeli conversione colligitur. Tempus coepit inde; ab
ipso natus putatur Kronos qui, ut diximus, Chronos est.

45 It is not hidden from us that the indestructible laws of philology do not allow
for the identification of Kronos and Chronos, although in Greece to do so "was
customary at all times" (M. Pohlenz, in RE 11, col. 1986). We have, indeed, no acute
reason to insist upon this generalizing identification—the "name" of a planet is a
function of time and constellation—yet it seems advisable to emphasize, on the
one hand, that technical terminology has its own laws and is not subject to the
jurisdiction of linguists, and to point, on the other hand, to one of the Sanskrit
names of Saturn, i.e., "Kala," meaning "time" and "death," and "blue-black" (A.
Scherer, Gestirnnamen bei den indogermanischen Volkern [1953], pp. 84f)—a
Color which suits the planet perfectly, all over the world—and to point, moreover,
to a passage from the Persian Minokheird (West trans, in R. Eisler, Weltenmantel
and Himmelszelt [1910], p. 410): "The creator, Auharmazd (Jupiter) produced
his creation . . . with the blessing of Unlimited Time (Zurvan akarana)."

46M. Granet, Chinese Civilization (1961), p. 12.

Hamlet's Mill

136

understand the general idea, but particularly the lucubration of
Proclus, to have a look at the figure drawn by Kepler, which
represents the moving triangle fabricated by "Great Conjunctions,"
that is, those of Saturn and Jupiter. One of these points needs
roughly 2,400 years to move through the whole zodiac. The next
chapter will show why this is of high importance: here it suffices to
point to one possible manner in which measures are given "con-
tinuously."

Saturn, giver of the measures of the cosmos, remains the "Star
of Law and Justice" in Babylon,47 also the "Star of Nemesis" in
Egypt,48 the Ruler of Necessity and Retribution, in brief, the Em-
peror.49 In China, Saturn has the title "Genie du pivot," as the god
who presides over the Center, the same title which is given to the
Pole star.50 This is puzzling at first, and so is the laconic state-
ment coming from Mexico: "In the year 2-Reed Tezcatlipoca
changed into Mixcouatl, because Mixcouatl has his seat at the North
pole and, being now Mixcouatl, he drilled fire with the fire sticks
for the first time." It is not in the line of modern astronomy to
establish any link connecting the planets with Polaris, or with any
star, indeed, out of reach of the members of the zodiacal system.
Yet such figures of speech were an essential part of the technical
idiom of archaic astrology, and those experts in ancient cultures
who could not understand such idioms have remained completely
helpless in the face of the theory. What has Saturn, the far-out
planet, to do with the pole? Yet, if he cannot be recognized as the
"genie of the pivot," how is it possible to support Amlodhi's claim
to be the legitimate owner of the Mill?

47P. Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier (1890), p. 115; Meissner, Babylonien
und Assyrien (1925), vol. 2, pp. 145, 410; P. F. Gossmann, Planetarium Babylonicum
(1950), 230.

48 Achilles Tatius, see A. Bouche-Leclerq, L'Astrologie Grecque (1899), p. 94;
W. Gundel, Neue Astrologische Texte des Hermes Trismegistos (1936), pp. 260,
316.

49 "The title basileus is stereotyped with Kronos" (M. Mayer, in Roscher s.v.
Kronos, col. 1458; see also Cornford in J. E. Harrison's Themis, p. 254). For
China, see G. Schlegel, L'Uranographie Chinoise (1875), pp. 361, 63off. Even the
Tahitian text "Birth of the Heavenly Bodies" knows it: "Saturn was king" (T.
Henry, Ancient Tahiti [1928], pp. 359ff.).

50 Schlegel, L'Uranographie Chinoise, pp. 525, 628ff.

Chapter IX

Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

Tops of different sorts, and jointed dolls,

and fair golden
apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides . . .

Orpheus the Thracian

Though I am not by nature rash or splenetic

Yet there is in me something dangerous

Which let thy wisdom fear . . .

Hamlet, Act V

A reasonable case has been made for the extreme antiquity
and continuity of certain traditions concerning the heavens. Even if
Amlodhi's Quern, the Grotte and the Sampo as individual myths
cannot be traced back beyond the Middle Ages, they are derived
in different ways from that great and durable patrimony of astro-
nomical tradition, the Middle East.

Now it is time to locate the origin of the image of the Mill, and
further, what its alleged breakup and the coming into being of the
Whirlpool can possibly mean.

The starting place is Greece. Cleomedes (c. a.d. 150), speaking
of the northern latitudes, states (1.7): "The heavens there turn
around in the way a millstone does." Al-Farghani in the East takes
up the same idea, and his colleagues will supply the details. They
call the star Kochab, beta Ursae Minoris, "mill peg," and the stars
of the Little Bear, surrounding the North Pole, and Fas al-rahha
(the hole of the mill peg) "because they represent, as it were, a hole
(the axle ring) in which the mill axle turns, since the axle of the
equator (the polar axis) is to be found in this region, fairly close

Hamlet's Mill

138

to the star Al-jadi (he-goat, Polaris: alpha Ursae Minoris)." These
are the words of the Arab cosmographer al-Kazvini. Ideler com-
ments:1

Kotb, the common name of the Pole, means really the axle of the
movable upper millstone which goes through the lower fixed one,
what is called the "mill-iron." On this ambiguity is founded the anal-
ogy mentioned by Kazvini. The sphere of heaven was imagined as a
turning millstone, and the North Pole as the axle bearing in which the
mill-iron turns ... Fas is explained by Giggeo ... as rima, scissura etc.
. . . The Fas al-rahha of our text, which stands also in the Dresden
globe beside the North Pole of the Equator, should therefore repre-
sent the axle bearing.

Farther to the east, in India, the Bhagavata Purana tells us how
the virtuous prince Dhruva was appointed as Pole star.2 The par-
ticular "virtue" of the prince, which alarmed even the gods, is
worth mentioning: he stood on one leg for more than a month,
motionless. This is what was announced to him: "The stars, and
their figures, and also the planets shall turn around you." Accord-
ingly, Dhruva ascends to the highest pole, "to the exalted seat of
Vishnu, round which the starry spheres forever wander, like the
upright axle of the corn mill circled without end by the labouring
oxen."

The simile of the oxen driven around is not alien to the West. It
has remained in our languages thanks to the Latin Septemtriones,
the seven threshing oxen of Ursa Major: "that we are used to call-
ing the Seven Oxen," according to Cicero's translation of Aratus.

On a more familiar level there is a remark by Trimalchio in Pe-
tronius (Satyricon 39): "Thus the orb of heaven turns around like
a millstone, and ever does something bad." It was not a foreign idea

1 Ludwig Ideler: Untersuchung uber den Ursprung und die Bedeutung der Stern-
namen (1809), pp. 4, 17.

2F. Normann, Mythen der Sterne (1925), p. 208. See now The Srimad-Bhaga-
vatam of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa 5.3 (trans. J. N. Sanyal, vol. 2, pp. 248f.):
"Just as oxen, fastened to a post fixed in the center of a threshing floor, leaving
their own station, go round at shorter, middle or longer distances, similarly fixed
on the inside and outside of the circle of time, stars and planets exist, supporting
themselves on Dhruva; and propelled by the wind, they range in every direction
till the end of a Kalpa."

139 • Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

to the ancients that the mills of the gods grind slowly, and that the
result is usually pain.

Thus the image travels far and wide by many channels, reaches
the North by way of Celtic-Scandinavian transmission and appears
in Snaebjorn's account of his voyage of discovery in the Arctic.
There should be added to those enigmatic lines of his what is known
now of the background in Scandinavian lore. The nine grim god-
desses who "once ground Amlodhi's meal," working now that
"host-cruel skerry quern" beyond the edge of the world, are in
their turn only the agents of a shadowy controlling power called
Mundilfoeri, literally "the mover of the handle" (appendix #15).
The word mundil, says Rydberg, "is never used in the old Norse
literature about any other object than the sweep or handle with
which the movable millstone is turned,"3 and he is backed by
Vigfusson's dictionary which says that "mundil" in "Mundilfoeri"
clearly refers to "the veering round or revolution of the heavens."

The case is then established. But there is an ambiguity here
which discloses further depths in the idea. " 'Moendull' comes from
Sanskrit 'Manthati,' " says Rydberg, "it means to swing, twist, bore
(from the root manth-, whence later Latin mentula), which occurs
in several passages in the Rigveda. Its direct application always
refers to the production of fire by friction."4

So it is, indeed. But Rydberg, after establishing the etymology,
has not followed up the meaning. The locomotive engineers and
airplane pilots of today who coined the term "joy stick" might have
guessed. For the Sanskrit Pra-mantha is the male fire stick, or churn
stick, which serves to make fire. And Pramantha has turned into
the Greeks' Prometheus, a personage to whom it will be necessary

3V. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), pp. 581ff. Webster's New Interna-
tional Dictionary, 2d ed., lists "mundle": A stick for stirring. Obsolete except for
dialectical use. (We are indebted for this reference to Mrs. Jean Whitnack.)

4 To term it "friction" is a nice way to shut out dangerous terms: actually, the
Sanskrit radical math, manth means drilling in the strict sense, i.e., it involves al-
ternate motion (see H. Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda [1955], pp. 976L)
as we have it in the famous Amritamanthana, the Churning of the Milky Ocean,
and this very quality of India's churn and fire drill has had far-reaching influence
on cosmological conceptions.

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140

to come back frequently. What seems to be deep confusion is in
reality only two differing aspects of the same complex idea. The
lighting of fire at the pole is part of that idea. But the reader is not
the first to be perplexed by an imagery which allows for the pres-
ence of planets at the pole, even if it were only for the purpose of
kindling the "fire" which was to last for a new age of the world,
that world-age which the particular "Pramantha" was destined to
rule. The handle, "moendull," and the fire drill are complemen-
tary: both have had great developments which superimpose on each
other and on a multitude of myths. The obstacles which imagina-
tion has to overcome are the associations which are connected spon-
taneously with "fire," that is, the real burning fire in chimney or
hearth, and the kind of "fire" associated with the mentioned "joy
stick." Both are irrelevant as far as cosmological terminology is
concerned, but they lent the linguistic vehicle which was used to
carry the ideas of astronomy and alchemy.

It should be stated right flow that "fire" is actually a great circle
reaching from the North Vole of the celestial sphere to its South
Pole, whence such strange utterances as Rigveda 5.13.6: "Agni!
How the felly5 the spokes, thus you surround the gods." (Agni is
the so-called "fire-god," or the personified fire.) The Atharva Veda
says, moreover, that the fire sticks belong to the skambha6 the
world's axis, the very skambha from which the Sampo has been
derived (see above, p. 111).

The identity of the Mill, in its many versions, with heaven is
thus universally understood and accepted. But hitherto nobody
seems to have wondered about the second part of the story, which
also occurs in the many versions. How and why does it always
happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked
or unhinged? Once the archaic mind had grasped the forever-
enduring rotation, what caused it to think that the axle jumps out
of the hole? What memory of catastrophic events has created this

5 The rim of the wheel in which the spokes fit.

6 10.8.20. Cf. RV 10.24.4 and 10.184.3 with Geldner's remark that in this stanza of
the Atharva Veda the fire sticks are treated as a great secret and attributed to
skambha.

141 • Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

story of destruction? Why should Vainamoinen (and he is not the
only one) state explicitly that another Mill has to be constructed
(see p. 110) ? Why had Dhruva to be appointed to play Pole star—
and for a given cycle?7 For the story refers in no way to the crea-
tion of the world. One might even ask, as the alternative solution
to Rydberg's challenging "limb-grist," whether Bergelmer was not
heaved in the same manner "upon the millstone," that is, appointed
to play Pole stair (see above, p. 92).

The simple answer lies in the facts of the case. The Pole star
does get out of place, and every few thousand years another star
has to be chosen which best approximates that position. It is well
known that the Great Pyramid, so carefully sighted, is not oriented
at our Pole Star but at alpha Draconis, which occupied the position
at the pole 5,000 years ago. But, as has been mentioned above (In-
termezzo, p. 66), it is the more difficult for moderns to imagine
that in those far-off ages men could keep track of such impercep-
tible shifting, as many of them are not aware of the mere facts. As
Dr. Alexander Pogo, the Palomar astronomer, has written in frus-
tration: "I give up quoting further examples of the obstinate belief
of our Egyptologists in the immobility of the heavenly pole."8

Yet there is quite a collection of myths to show that once upon
a time it was realized that the sphere of fixed stars is not meant to
circle around the same peg forever and ever. Several myths tell how
Polaris is shot down, or removed in some other way. That is re-
served for an appendix (#15).

Most of these myths, however, come under a misleading name.
They have been understood to deal with the end of the world. But
there are extremely few "eschatological" myths entitled to this
label. For example, the Twilight of the Gods is understood as the
world's end, yet there is unambiguous testimony to the contrary
from the Voluspa and other chapters of the Edda. What actually
comes to an and is a world, in the sense of a world-age. The catas-

7 The Vishnu Purana 1.12 (cf. 2.8, p. 187 of the Wilson translation) betrays the
Indian predilection for huge and unrealistic numbers and periods: Dhruva is meant
to last one kalpa-—4,320,000 years.

8"Zuin Problem der Identification der nordlichen Sternbilder der alten Aegyp-

ter," isis 16 (1931), p. 105.

Hamlet's Mill

142

trophe cleans out the past, which is replaced by "a new heaven
and a new earth," and ruled by a "new" Pole star. The biblical
flood was also the end of a world, and Noah's adventure is re-
hearsed in many traditions and many forms all over the planet. The
Greeks knew of three successive destructions.

Coherence will be re-established in this welter of traditions if it
is realized that what is referred to is that grandest of heavenly
phenomena, the Precession of the Equinoxes. The phenomenon has
been dealt with in the Intermezzo already, but it is essential enough
to be taken up more than once. Being so slow, and in a man's age so
imperceptible, it has been taken for granted9 that no one could have
detected the Precession prior to Hipparchus' alleged discovery
of the phenomenon, in 127 b.c. Hipparchus discovered and proved
that the Precession turns around the pole of the ecliptic.10 It is said
that it must have taken an almost modern instrumentation to detect
the motion over the brief space of a century, and this is certainly
correct. Nobody claims, however, that the discovery was deduced
from observations during one century. And the shift of 1 degree in
72 years, piling up over centuries, will produce appreciable shifts
in certain crucial positions, if the observers have enough intentness
of mind and know how to keep records. The technique of observa-
tion was relatively simple. It was based on the heliacal rising of
stars, which remained a fundamental feature in Babylonian astron-
omy. The telescope of early times, as Sir Norman Lockyer has said,
was the line of the horizon. If you came to realize that a certain star,
which was wont to rise just before the equinoctial sun, was no
longer visible on that day, it was clear that the gears of heaven
had shifted. If that star was the last one of a given zodiac figure, it
meant that the equinox was moving into a new figure. Nor is there
any doubt—as was already said—that far antiquity was already
aware of the shifting of the Pole star. But was it capable of con-

9 I.e., during the last hundred years, at least. In former times, when the Humani-
ties had not yet been "infected" by the biological scheme of evolution, the
scholars showed better confidence in the capacities of the creators of high civili-
zation.

10 Sec Ptolemy, Syntaxis 7.3 (Manitius trans., vol. 2, pp. 16f.). The magnitude
calculated by Hipparchus and accepted by Ptolemy was 1 degree in 100 years.

143 • Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

necting both motions? This is where modern specialists, operating
each from his own special angle of vision, have long hesitated.

What is the Precession? Very few have troubled to learn about
it, yet to any man of our time, who knows the earth to be spinning
around on her axis, the example of a spinning top with its inclined
axis slowly shifting around in a circle makes the knowledge intui-
tive. Anyone who has played with a gyroscope will know all about
the Precession. As soon as its axis is deflected from the vertical, the
gyroscope will start that slow and obstinate movement around the
compass which changes its direction while keeping its inclination
constant. The earth, a spinning top with an axis inclined with re-
spect to the sun's pull, behaves like a giant gyroscope, which per-
forms a full revolution in 25.920 years.

Antiquity was not likely to grasp this, since dynamics came into
this world only with Galileo. Hipparchus and Ptolemy could not
understand the mechanism. They could only describe the motion.
We must try to see through their eyes, and think only in terms of
kinematics. Over a period of a thousand years ancient observers
could discern in the secular shifting of the Great Gyroscope (it is
here in fact that the word "secular" now used in mechanics origi-
nates) a motion through about ten degrees. Once attuned to the
secular motion, they were able to detect, in the daily whirring of
heaven around the pole, in its yearly turning in the round of the
seasons, in the excruciatingly slow motion of the pole over the
years, a point which seemed intrinsically more stable than the pole
itself. It was the pole of the ecliptic,11 often referred to as the Open
Hole in Heaven because in that region there is no star to mark it.
The symmetries of the machine took shape in their minds. And
truly it was the time machine, as Plato understands it, the "moving
image of eternity." The "mighty marching and the golden burn-
ing," cycle upon cycle, even down to shifts barely perceptible over
the centuries, were the Generations of Time itself, the cyclical sym-

11 See A. Bouche-Leclerq, L'Astrologie Grecque (1899), p. 122: "On sait que le
pole par excellence etait pour les Chaldeans 1e pole de l'ecliptique, lequel est dans
la constellation du Dragon." Cf. also A. Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1653), vol.
2. p2., p. 205: "Ponebant Aegyptii non Aequarorem, sed Zodiacum basis loco; ita
in centrum hemispherii utriusque non polum Mundi, sed polum Zodiaci referret."

Hamlet's Mill

144

bol of everlastingness: for, as Aristotle says, what is eternal is circu-
lar, and what is circular is eternal.

Yet this uniformly working time machine could be marked
with important stations. The gyroscopic tilt causes a continual
shifting of our celestial equator, which cuts the inclined circle of
the ecliptic along a regular succession of points, moving uniformly
from east to west. Now the points where the two circles cross are
the equinoctial points. Hence the sun, moving on the ecliptic
through the year, meets the equator on a point which shifts steadily
with the years along the ring of zodiacal signs. This is what is meant
by the Precession of the Equinoxes. They "precede" because they
go against the order of the signs as the sun establishes this in its
yearly march. The vernal equinox—we called it the "fiducial point"
previously—which was traditionally the opening of spring and the
beginning of the year, will take place in one sign after another. This
gives great meaning to the change of signs in which the equinoctial
sun happens to rise.

Some additional words of guidance may be called for here, where
"signs" are mentioned—those "in" which the sun rises. For roughly
two thousand years official terminology has used only zodiacal
"signs," each of which occupies 30 degrees of the 360 degrees of the
whole circle. These signs have the names of the zodiacal constella-
tions, but constellations and signs are not congruent, the equinoctial
sign (= 1 deg. — 30 deg.) being called Aries regardless of the constellation
that actually rises before the equinoctial sun. In our time, the constel-
lation rising heliacally on March 21 is Pisces, but the "sign" preserves
the name Aries, and will continue to do so when in the future
Aquarius rules the vernal equinox. So much for sign versus constel-
lation.12 As concerns the second ambiguous expression, namely, the

12 Here, we leave out of consideration the much discussed question of exactly
when signs of equal length were first introduced; allegedly it was very late (see be-
low, p. 431, n. 1). The actual constellations differ widely in length—the huge Scor-
pion, e.g., covers many more degrees than 30, whereas the Ram is of modest dimen-
sions. One would think that this lack of uniformity would have so hampered the
ancient astronomers in making their calculations that they would have worked out
a more convenient frame of coordinates in sheer self-defense.

145 • Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

sun's rising "in" a constellation (or a sign)—this means that the sun
rises together with this constellation, making it invisible. There are
several reasons for assuming that a constellation (and a planet which
happened to be there), "in" which the equinoctial sun rose, was
termed to be "sacrificed," "bound to the sacrificial post," and the
like; and this might explain eventually why Christ, who opened the
world-age in which Pisces rose heliacally in the spring, was under-
stood as the sacrificed lamb. When Pisces is the last constellation
visible in the east before sunrise, the sun rises together, i.e., "in," the
constellation following next, the Ram.

Since the beginning of history, the vernal equinox has moved
through Taurus, Aries, and Pisces. This is all that historic experi-
ence has shown mankind: a section of about one-quarter of the
whole main circle of the machine. That it would come back full
circle was at best an inference. It might also, for all men knew,
have been part of an oscillation, back and forth, and in fact there
were two schools of thought about it, and the oscillation theory
seems to have exercised a greater attraction upon the mythographers
of old.

For us, the Copernican system has stripped the Precession of its
awesomeness, making it a purely earthly affair, the wobbles of an
average planet's individual course. But if, as it appeared once, it
was the mysteriously ordained behavior of the heavenly sphere, or
the cosmos as a whole, then who could escape astrological emotion?
For the Precession took on an overpowering significance. It became
the vast impenetrable pattern of fate itself, with one world-age suc-
ceeding another, as the invisible pointer of the equinox slid along
the signs, each age bringing with it the rise and downfall of astral
configurations and rulerships, with their earthly consequences.
Tales had to be told for the people about how successions of ruler-
ships arose from an origin, and about the actual creation of the
world, but for those in the know the origin was only a point in
the precessional circle, like the 0 = 24 of our dials. Our clocks today
show two pointers only; but the tale-tellers of those bygone days,
facing the immense and slow-moving machine of eternity, had to

Hamlet's Mill

146

keep track of seven planetary pointers besides the daily revolution
of the fixed sphere and of its secular motion in the opposite direc-
tion. All these motions meant parts of time and fate.

That things are not as they used to be, that the world is obvi-
ously going from bad to worse, seems to have been an established
idea through the ages. The unhinging of the Mill is caused by the
shifting of the world axis. Motion is the medium by which the
wrecking is brought about. The Mill is "transported," be it Grotte
or Sampo. The Grotte Song says explicitly that the giantesses first
ground forth enemy action whereby the Mill was carried away and
then, shortly afterwards, ground salt and wrecked the machine. It
was the end of "Frodhi's peace"—the Golden Age. Even in Snaeb-
jorn's famous lines, the grim goddesses "out at the edge of the world"
are those "who ground Amlodhi's meal in ages past." They can
hardly be doing it now, because the wrecked millstone is at the bot-
tom of the sea, with its hole become the funnel of the whirlpool. So
that Mill has been transferred to the waters, and it is now the sea
itself which has become "Amlodhi's churn." The heavenly Mill has
been readjusted, it goes on working in a new age. It churned once
gold, then salt, and today sand and stones. But one cannot expect the
rough Norse mythography to follow it in these legends, which are
centered upon storm and wreck, the end of that first age.

Even Hesiod is far from clear about the early struggles and cata-
clysms; it is enough that in his Works and Days he marks a succes-
sion of five ages. A more coherent picture can only be built out of
the convergence of several traditions, and this shall be the task of
further chapters. But right now, there is at least one age designated
as the first, when the Mill ground out peace and plenty. It is the
Golden Age, in Latin tradition, Saturnia regna, the reign of Saturn;
in Greek, Kronos. In this dim perplexing figure there is an extraordi-
nary concordance throughout world myths. In India it was Yama;
in the Old Persian Avesta it was Yima Xsaeta,13 a name which became
in New Persian Jamshyd; in Latin Saeturnus, then Saturnus. Saturn

13See H. Collitz, "Konig Yima und Saturn," Festschrift Pavry (1933), pp. 86-108.
See also A. Scherer, Gestirnnamen bei den indogermanischen Volkern (1953),
p. 87.

147 • Amlodhi the Titan and His Spinning Top

or Kronos in many names had been known as the Ruler of the
Golden Age, of that time when men knew not war and bloody
sacrifices not the inequality of classes—Lord of Justice and Mea-
sures, as Enki since Sumerian days, the Yellow Emperor and legis-
lator in China.

If one wants to find the traces of his sunken Mill in classical
mythology, they are not lacking.14 The oldest is to be found where
one would not expect it, in the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris,
which is dated about the first half of the fourth century a.d.15 In
its recipes is the "much demanded Oracle of Kronos, the so-called
Little Mill":

Take two measures of sea salt and grind it with a handmill, repeating
all the while the prayer that I give you, until the God appears. If you
hear while praying the heavy tread of a man and the clanking of
irons, this is the god that comes with his chains, carrying a sickle. Do
not be afraid, for you are covered by the protection that I give you.
Be wrapped in white linen such as the priests of Isis wear [here fol-
low a number of magic rites]. The prayer to be said while grinding
is as follows: I call upon thee, great and holy One, founder of the
whole world we live in, who sufferest wrong at, the hands of thy own
son, thee whom Helios bound with iron chains, so that All should not
come to confusion. Man-Woman, father of thunder and lightning,
thou who rulest also those below the earth. [There follow more rites
of protection, then the formula of dismissal]: Go, Lord of the World,
First Father, return to your own place, so that the All remain well
guarded. Be merciful, O Lord.16

14 Although the Telchines are entitled to be investigated thoroughly, we can only
mention them here: this strange family of "submarine magic spirits" and "demons
of the depth of the sea"—they are followers of Poseidon in Rhodes—have invented
the mill ; i.e., their leader did so—Mylas, "the miller." Knowing beforehand, it was
said, of the predestined flood which was to destroy Rhodes, these former inhabi-
tants left for Lycia, Cyprus and Crete, the more so, as they also knew that Helios
was going to take over the island after the flood. On the other hand, these envious
creatures—they have the "evil eye," too—are accused of having ruined the whole
vegetation of Rhodes by sprinkling it with Styx-water. As will come out later
(see "Of Time and the Rivers," p. 200), the waters of Styx are not so easily
to be had; that the Telchines, the "mill gods" (theoi mylantioi) had access to Styx
proves beyond doubt that these earliest defoliators had turned, indeed, into citizens
of the deep sea. See Griechische Mythologie, Preller-Robert (1964), vol. 1, pp.
650ff.; M. Mayer, Giganten und Titanen in der antiken Sage und Kunst (1887),
pp. 45, 98, 101; H. Usener, Gotternamen (1948), pp. 198f.

15 K. Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae (1928), vol. 1, p. 64.
10 4.308ff., Preisendanz, vol. 1, p. 173.

Hamlet's Mill

148

Sorcerers and conjurors are the most conservative people on
earth. Theirs is not to reason why; they call upon the Power in
terms they no longer understand, but they have to give an exact list
of the archaic attributes of the fallen god, and even grind out sea
salt from the Little Mill, the model of the whirlpool that marked his
downfall. What had once been science has become with them pure
technology, bent on preservation. A. Barb once coined a simile—
he had revealed religion in mind, however, not science; dealing with
the relation between magic practices and religion, he pointed to
Matt. xxiv.28, Luke xvii.37: "Wheresoever the carcase is, there will
the eagles be gathered together," and "Too many critical scholars
have been ready to assume that the carcase is therefore a creation
of the eagles. But eagles do not create; they disfigure, destroy and
dispense what life has left, and we must not mistake the colourful
display of decay for the blossoms and fruit of life."17 Poignant as
this image is, namely, in establishing the proper consecutio tem-
porum, it leaves out of consideration the preserving function of
magic and superstition: where would the historian of culture be
left without those "eagles"?

For all the titles and attributes here listed, there is justification in
archaic myth. Right here, only one point is of importance. The
Lord of the Mill is declared to be Saturn/Kronos, he whom his
son Zeus dethroned by throwing him off his chariot, and banished
in "chains" to a blissful island, where he dwells in sleep, for being
immortal he cannot die, but is thought to live a life-in-death,
wrapped in funerary linen, until his time, say some, shall come to
awaken again, and he will be reborn to us as a child.

17 "St. Zacharias," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948),
p. 95. It has not escaped his attention, by the way, that it should be vultures.

Chapter X

The Twilight of the Gods

There was once, then, a Golden Age. Why, how, did it come
to an end? This has been a deep concern of mankind over time,
refracted in a hundred myths, explained in so many ways which
always expressed sorrow, nostalgia, despondency. Why did man
lose the Garden of Eden? The answer has always been, because of
some original sin. But the idea that man alone was able to commit
sin, that Adam and Eve are the guilty ones, is not very old. The
authors of the Old Testament had developed a certain conceit.
Christianity then had to come to rescue and restore cosmic propor-
tions, by insisting that God alone could offer himself in atonement.

In archaic times, this had seemed to be self-evident. The gods
alone could run or wreck the universe. It is there that we should
search for the origin of evil. For evil remains a mystery. It is not
in nature. The faultless and all-powerful machine of the heavens
should have yielded only harmony and perfection, the reign of
justice and innocence, rivers flowing with milk and honey. It did,
but that time did not last. Why did history begin to happen? His-
tory is always terrible. Philosophers from Plato to Hegel have
offered their own lofty answer: pure Being was confronted of a
necessity with Non-Being, and the result was Becoming, which is
an uninsurable business. This was substantially the original answer
of archaic times, but because of the lack of abstractions, it had to be
derived in terms of heavenly motions.

Aristotle, the Master of Those Who Know, has cleared up this
matter in a most important, yet little noted passage of Book Lambda

Hamlet's Mill

150

of Metaphysics (1074b) where he talks about Kronos, Zeus, Aphro-
dite, etc.:

Our forefathers in the most remote ages [archaioi kai panpalaioi]
have handed down to their posterity a tradition, in the form
[schema] of a myth, that these bodies are gods and that the divine
encloses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added
later in mythical form . . . ; they say that these gods are in the form
of men or like some of the other animals . . . But if one were to
separate the first point from these additions and take it alone—that
they thought the first substances to be gods, one must regard this as
an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and
each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again
perished, these opinions, with others, have been preserved until the
present like relics [leipsana] of the ancient treasure.

Aristotle, being a true Greek, cannot conceive of progress in our
sense. Time proceeds for him in cycles of flowering and decay.
But this absence of modern preconceptions had left his mind open
to an ancient certainty. This certainty is what shines through the
mist of ages and through a language dimly understood. It was atten-
tion to the events of heaven which shaped men's minds before re-
corded history; but since there was as yet no writing, these thoughts
have receded, as astrophysicists would say, over the "event hori-
zon." They can survive only through fragments of tale and myth
because these made up the only technical language of those times.

Yet an enormous intellectual achievement is presupposed in this
organization of heaven, in naming the constellations and in tracing
the paths of the planets. Lofty and intricate theories grew to ac-
count for the motions of the cosmos. One would wonder about this
obsessive concern with the stars and their motion, were it not the
case that those early thinkers thought they had located the gods
which rule the universe and with it also the destiny of the soul
down here and after death.

In modern language, they had found the essential invariants
where Being is. In paying respect to those forefathers, Aristotle
shows himself clearly aware that his philosophical quest started with
them.

One should pay attention to the cosmological information con-
tained in ancient myth, information of chaos, struggle and violence.

151 • The Twilight of the Gods

They are not mere projections of a troubled consciousness: They
are attempts to portray the forces which seem to have taken part
in the shaping of the cosmos. Monsters, Titans, giants locked in
battle with the gods and trying to scale Olympus are functions and
components of the order that is finally established.

A distinction is immediately clear. The fixed stars are the essence
of Being, their assembly stands for the hidden counsels and the
unspoken laws that rule the Whole. The planets, seen as gods,
represent the Forces and the Will: all the forces there are, each of
them seen as one aspect of heavenly power, each of them one
aspect of the ruthless necessity and precision expressed by heaven.
One might also say that while the fixed stars represent the kingly
power, silent and unmoving, the planets are the executive power.

Are they in total harmony? This is the dream that the contem-
plative mind has expressed again and again, that Kepler tried to fix
by writing down the notes of his "Harmony of the Spheres," and
that was consecrated in the "turning over" of the sky. This is the
faith expressed by ancient thinkers in a Great Year, in which all the
motions brought back all the planets to the same original configura-
tion. But the computations created doubt very early and with it
anxiety. Only rarely is there an explicit technical statement of those
views. Here is one from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Osiris
speaking:

"Hail, Thoth! What is it that hath happened to the divine children of
Nut! They have done battle, they have upheld strife, they have made
slaughter, they have caused trouble: in truth, in all their doing the
mighty have worked against the weak. Grant, BO might of Thoth, that
that which the God Atum hath decreed (may be accomplished)! And
thou regardest not evil nor art thou provoked to anger when they
bring their years to confusion and throng in and push to disturb their
months; for in all that they have done unto thee, they have worked
iniquity in secret."1

Thoth is the god of science and wisdom; as for Atum, he precedes,
SO to speak, the divine hierarchy. Described only in metaphysical
terms, he is the mysterious entity from which the All sprang: his

1 Chapter 179, 1-8, W. Budge trans. The italics are ours.

Hamlet's Mill • 152

name might be Beginning-and-End. He is thus the Presence and the
secret Counsel whom one feels tempted to equate with the starry
sky itself. His decree must be of immutable perfection. But here it
appears that there are forces which have worked iniquity in secret.
They appear everywhere, these forces, and regularly they are de-
nounced as "overbearing," or "iniquitous," or both. But these
"forces" are not iniquitous right from the beginning: they turn out
to be, they become overbearing in the course of time. Time alone
turns the Titans, who once ruled the Golden Age, into "workers of
iniquity" (compare appendix #12). The idea of measure stated or
implied will show the basic crime of these "sinners": it is the over-
reaching, overstepping of the ordained degree, and this is meant
literally.2 Says the Mahabharata about the Indian Titans, the Asura:
"assuredly were the Asura originally just, good and charitable, knew
the Dharma and sacrificed, and were possessed of many other vir-
tues . . . But afterwards as they multiplied in number, they became
proud, vain, quarrelsome . . . they made confusion in everything.
Thereupon in the course of time . . ." they were doomed.3

Thus severe consequences must be expected when Gen. vi.i com-
mences with the formula, "when men began to multiply on the
face of the earth . . ." And sure enough, ten verses later, Gen. vi.11,
the time for grave decisions has come: "And God said to Noah,
'I have determined to make an end of all flesh!' " More outspoken
is the 18th chapter of the Book of Enoch, where an Angel acts as
Enoch's guide through the celestial landscape. In showing him the
quarters destined for iniquitous personalities, the Angel tells Enoch:
"These stars which roll around over the fire are those who, at rising
time, overstepped the orders of God: they did not rise at their ap-

2 It is only the careless manner in which we usually deal with precise terms that
blocks the understanding: e.g., Greek moira, also written moros, is translated as
"fate," "destiny," sometimes as "doom"; moira is one degree of the 360 deg. of the
circle; when we keep this in mind we understand better such lines as Od. 1.
34-35, where Aegisthus is accused twice of having done deeds "hyper moron,"
beyond degree. How could one overstep one's destiny? How could one be over-
measured against fate? This would invalidate the very concept of "destiny."

3 V. Fausboll, Indian Mythology according to the Mahabharata (1902), pp. 40f.

153 • The "Twilight of the Gods"

pointed time. And He was wroth with them, and He bound them
for 10,000 years until the time when their sin shall be fulfilled."4

Yet one must beware of simplifications. The wording, "assuredly
were the Asura originally just, good and charitable," goes for the
Titans, too, the forces of the first age of the world. But seen
through the "eyeglasses" of the preceding state of things, Titans,
Asura and their like had committed atrocities first. And so did
Saturn, the "originator of times," and in the drastic measure he
took to accomplish the "separation of the parents of the world,"
which stands for the falling apart of the axes of equator and
ecliptic. Before this separation time did not exist. These "united
parents"—heartlessly called "chaos" by Macrobius—resented the
breaking up of the original eternity by the forces which worked
iniquity in secret.5 These forces as they appear in the Enuma elish,
the so-called Babylonian Creation Epic, are the children of Apsu
and Tiamat and they crowded in between their parents. "They
disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth; yea, they troubled
the mood of Tiamat. Apsu could not lessen their clamor . . . Un-
savory were their ways, they were overbearing."6

Not having "multiplied" yet, this first generation of the world
established the Golden Age under the rule of Him of many names
—Enki, Yima, Freyr and many more. "But these sons whom he
begot himself, great Heaven [megas Ouranos] used to call Titans
[Strainers] in reproach, for he said that they strained and did pre-
sumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come
afterwards," as Hesiod has it (Theogony 207-10).7 And so it
would, after their "multiplication," when they overstrained the

4 E. Kautzsch, ed., Die Apokryphen und Pseudoepigraphen des Alien Testaments
(1900)Vol. 2, pp. 249f.

5 There is no complete unanimity among mythographers, though; in Hesiod's
Theogony, Gaia "rejoiced greatly in spirit" (173) when Kronos promised to do
away with Father Ouranos according to Gaia's very own plan and advice.

6EE Tabl. 1 .22-28 (E. Speiser trans.), ANET, p. 61.

7 This translation by H. G. Evelyn-White (LCL) pays no regard to a "pun," a
rather essential one, indeed. Hesiod makes use, side by side in these few lines, of
both radicals from which "Titan" was supposed to have been derived: titaino, "to
strain," and tisis, "vengeance."

Hamlet's Mill

measure. And it was bound to happen again when future genera-
tions would construct "forbidden ways to the sky,"8 or build a
tower which happened to be too high. The one secure measure, the
"golden rope" of the solar year,9 is stretched beyond repair. The
equinoctial sun had been gradually pushed out of its Golden Age
"sign," it had started on the way to new conditions, new configura-
tions. This is the frightful event, the inexpiable crime that was
ascribed to the Children of Heaven. They had nudged the sun out
of place, and now it was on the move, the universe was out of kilter
and nothing, nothing—days, months or years, the rising or setting of
stars—was going to fall into its rightful place any more. The equi-
noctial point had nudged and nuzzled its way forward, in the very
same way as a car with automatic gearshift will nuzzle its way for-
ward unless we put it in neutral—and there was no way of putting
the equinox in neutral. The infernal pushing and squeezing of the
Children of Heaven had separated the parents, and now the time
machine had been set rolling forever, bringing forth at every new
age "a new heaven and a new earth," in the words of Scripture. As
Hesiod says, the world had entered now the second stage, that of
the giants, who were to wage a decisive battle with the restraining
forces before their downfall.

The vision of a whole world-age with its downfall is given by
the Edda. It comes in the very first poem, the Song of the Sibyl, the
Voluspa, in which the prophetess Vala embraces past and future in
adequately strange and obscure language. At the beginning of the
Age of the Aesir, the gods gather in council, and give names to
sun and moon, days and nights and seasons. They order the years
and assign to the stars their places. On Idavollr (the "whirl-field";
ida = eddy), they establish their seat "in the Golden Age" and play
checkers with golden pieces, and all is happiness until "the three
awful maidens" come (this is another mystery).10 But once before,

8 Claudianus 26.69-71, speaking of the Aloads, who piled Ossa upon Olympus.

9 See e.g., RV 5.85.5: "This great feat of the famous Asurian Varuna I shall pro-
claim who, standing in the air, using the Sun as an inch scale, measured the earth."

10 The three maidens from Jotunheimr are not the Norns, this much can be safely
said, but should be Gulveig the "thrice born," whom the Aesir killed "thrice, and
still she is living" (Voluspa 8): one more "iniquity" asking for vengeance.

155 • The Twilight of the Gods

it is hinted, there has been a "world war" between Aesir and Vanir,
which was terminated by a sharing of power. In a vision in which
past and future blend in a flash, Vala sees the outcome and an-
nounces it to the "high and low children of Heimdal," that is, to
all men. She asks them to open their eyes, to understand what the
gods had to know: the breaking of the peace, the murder of Thjassi,
Odin himself abetting the crime and nailing Thjassi's eyes to
heaven. With this a curtain is lifted briefly over a phase of the
past. For Thjassi belongs to the powers that preceded the Aesir.
In Greek terms, the Titans came before the gods. The main Vana
or Titanic powers (in Rydberg's thoughtful reconstruction) are
the three brothers, Thjassi/Volund, Orvandil/Eigil, and Slagfin:
the Maker, the Archer, and the Musician. This finally locates Or-
vandil the Archer, the father of Amlethus. He is one of the three
"sons of Ivalde," just as their counterparts in the Finnish epic are
the "sons of Kaleva."11 And Ivalde, like Kaleva, is barely mentioned,
never described, at least not under the name Ivalde: there is a
glimpse at him under his other name, Wate. Like Kaleva, he is a
meaningful void. But all this is of the past. The Sibyl's vision is
projected toward the onrushing end. True, Loke has been chained
in Hell since he brought about the death of Balder, the great Fenrir
wolf is still fettered with chains, once cunningly devised by Loke
himself, and they are made up of such unsubstantial things as the
footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the breath of a fish, the spittle
of a bird.12

Now the powers of the Abyss are beginning to rise, the world is
coming apart. At this point Heimdal comes to the fore. He is the
Warner of Asgard, the guardian of the Bridge between heaven and
earth, the "Whitest of the Aesir," but his role, his freedom of
action, is severely limited. He has many gifts—he can hear grass
grow, he can see a hundred miles away—but these powers seem to

11 Strange to say, the three brothers, Volund, Eigil and Slagfin, are called "synir
Finnakonungs," i.e., "sons of a Finnish king" (J. Grimm, TM, p. 380).

12 Again, strange to say, this very kind of "un-substance"— including the milk of
Mother Eagle, and the tears of the fledglings—had to be provided for by Tibetan
Bogda Gesser Khan, who also snared the sun.

154

Hamlet's Mill

156

remain ineffectual. He owns the Gjallarhorn, the great battle horn
of the gods; he is the only one able to sound it, but he will blow it
only once, when he summons the gods and heroes of Asgard to
their last fight.

Nordic speculation down to Richard Wagner has dwelt with
gloomy satisfaction on Ragnarok,13 the Twilight of the Gods, which
will destroy the world. There is the prediction in the Song of
the Sibyl, and also in Snorri's Gylfaginning: when the great dog
Garni barks in front of the Gnipa cave, when the Fenrir wolf
breaks his fetters and comes from "the mouth of the river,"14 his
jaws stretching from heaven to earth, and is joined by the Midgard
Serpent, then Heimdal will blow the Gjallarhorn, the sound of
which reaches through all the worlds: the battle is on. But it is
written that the forces of order will go down fighting to atone for
the initial wrong done by the gods. The world will be lost, good
and bad together. Naglfar, the ship of the dead, built with the
nail parings of the living, will sail through the dark waters and
bring the enemy to the fray. Then, adds Snorri:

The heavens are suddenly rent in twain, and out ride in shining squad-
rons Muspel's sons, and Surt with his flaming sword, at the head of
the fylkings.15

13 For the etymology of ragnarok, see Cleasby-Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English
Dictionary, in which regin (whence ragna) is defined as "the gods as the makers
and rulers of the universe"; rok as "reason, ground, origin" or "a wonder, sign,
marvel"; and ragna rok as "the history of the gods and the world, but especially
with reference to the last act, the last judgment." The word rdkr, a possible alter-
nate to rok, is defined as "the twilight . . . seldom of the morning twilight," and
"the mythological phrase, ragna rokr, the twilight of gods, which occurs in the
prose Edda (by Snorri), and has since been received into modern works, is no
doubt merely a corruption from rok, a word quite different from rokr."

Taking into consideration that the whole war between the Pandavas and the
Kauravas, as told in the Mahabharata, takes place in the "twilight" between
Dvapara and Kali Yuga, there is no cogent reason to dismiss Snorri's ragna rokr
as a "corruption." But then, the experts also condemned Snorri's comparison be-
tween Ragnarok and the Fall of Troy: the logical outcome of their conviction that
"poetry" is some kind of creatio ex nihilo, whence the one question never raised
is whether the poets might not be dealing with hard scientific facts.

14Lokasenna 41; see also V. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), p. 563.

15 Gylf. 51.

157 • The Twilight of the Gods

All-engulfing flames come out with Surt "the Black," Who kills
Freyr, the Lord of the Mill. Snorri makes Surt "Lord of Gimle"
and likewise the king of eternal bliss "at the southern end of the
sky."16 He must be some timeless force which brings destructive
fire to the world; but of this later.

Hitherto all has been luridly and catastrophically and murkily
confused as it should be. But the character of Heimdal raises a
number of sharp questions. He has appeared upon the scene as "the
son of nine mothers"; to be the son of several mothers is a rare dis-
tinction even in mythology, and one which Heimdal shares only
with Agni in the Rigveda,17 and with Agni's son Skanda in the
Mahabharata. Skanda (literally "the jumping one" or "the hopping
one") is the planet Mars, also called Kartikeya, inasmuch as he was
borne by the Krittika, the Pleiades. The Mahabharata18 insists on
six as the number of the Pleiades as well as of the mothers of Skanda
and gives a very broad and wild description of the birth and the
installation of Kartikeya "by the assembled gods ... as their gen-
eralissimo," which is shattering, somehow, driving home how little
one understands as yet.19

The nine mothers of Heimdal bring to mind inevitably the nine
goddesses who turn the mill. The suspicion is not unfounded. Two
of these "mothers," Gjalp and Greip, seem to appear with changed

16 Gylf. 17;,cf. R. B. Anderson, The Younger Edda (1880), p. 249. That Surt is
Lord of Gimle is a particularly important statement; it will not be found in the
current translations of Snorri, but only in the Uppsala Codex: "there are many
good abodes and many bad; best it is to be in Gimle with Surt" (Rydberg, p. 651).

17 RV 10.45.2 points to nine births, or mothers; 1.141.2 tells of the seven mothers
of Agni's second birth. Most frequently, however, Agni has three "mothers," cor-
responding to his three birthplaces: in the sky, on the earth, in the waters.

18Mbh. 9.44-46 (Roy trans, vol. 7, pp. 130-43). It should be emphasized, aloud
and strongly, that in Babylonian astronomy Mars is the only planetary representa-
tive of the Pleiades. See P. F. Gossmann, Planetarium Babylonicum (1950), p. 279:
"In der Planetenvertretung kommt fur die Plejaden nur Mars in Frage."

19The least which can be said, assuredly: Mars was "installed" during a more or
less close conjunction of all planets; in Mbh. 945 (p. 133) it is stressed that the
powerful gods assembled "all poured water upon Skanda, even as the gods had
poured water on the head of Varuna, the lord of waters, for investing him with
dominion." And this "investiture" took place at the beginning of the Krita Yuga,
the Golden Age.

Hamlet's Mill

158

names or generations as Fenja and Menja.20 Rydberg claims Heim-
dal to be the son of Mundilfoeri. The story is then astronomical.
Where does it lead? Thanks to the clues provided by Jacob Grimm,
Rydberg and O. S. Reuter, and thanks to many hints hidden in the
Rigveda, Atharva Veda and at other unexpected places, one can
offer a probable conclusion: Heimdal stands for the world axis,
the skambha. His head is the "measurer" (mjotudr) of the same
measures that the Sibyl claims to understand: "Nine worlds I know,
nine spaces of the measure-tree which is beyond (fyr) the earth."
"Measure-tree" is the translation of mjowidr,21 which so-called
poetic versions usually render as "world tree." The word fyr ap-
pears here again; it connotes priority; in this verse 2 of Voluspa it
is translated as "below" in most of the cases. The question "who
measures what?" would require an extensive analysis; here, with
no need for so many details, it is important only to learn that Heim-
dal is honored by a second name, Hallinskidi (appendix #16).
This name is said to mean a bent, bowed or slanted stake or post.
To be bent or inclined befits the world axis and all that belongs
to it, with the one exception of the observer who stands exactly at
the terrestrial North Pole. Why not call it "oblique" or slanting
right away?22 Whether bent or oblique, Grimm rightly says that it

20 For the names of these mothers, see Hyndluljod 38; for Gjalp and Greip,
daughters of the giant Geirroed, see Snorri's Skaldskaparmal 2, and Thorsdrapa,
broadly discussed by Rydberg (pp. 932-52), who established Greip as the mother
of the "Sons of Ivalde." R. Much claims the identity of Geirroed with Surt ("Der
germanische Himmelsgott," in Ablandlungen zur germemische Philologie [1898],
p. 221). The turning up of a plurality of mothers in the ancient North, and in India
(see also J. Pokorny, "Ein neun-monatiges Jahr im Keltischen," OLZ 21 [1918],
pp. 130-33) might induce the experts eventually to reopen the trial of those per-
fectly nonsensical seven or nine, even fourteen, "motherwombs" which haunt the
Babylonian account of the creation of man. (Cf. E. Ebeling, Tod und Leben
[1931], pp. 172-77; E. A. Speiser (trans.), "Akkadian Myths and Epics," ANET,
pp. 99f.; W. von Soden, Or. 26, pp. 309ff.)

21 O. S. Reuter, Germanische Himmelskunde (1934), pp. 236, 319. As concerns
mjotudr (measurer) and its connection with Sanskrit matar and with meter, men-
sar, etc., see Grimm, TM, pp. 22, 1290. Reuter (p. 236) quotes Lex. Poet. Boreale
408, where mjotudr = fate.

22 We have more of this mythological species of oblique posts or trees—e.g., the
Rigvedic "sacrificial post"—and even Bears are not afraid to inhabit the one or the
other. See F. G. Speck and J. Moses, The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth:
The Bear Sacrifice Ceremony of the Munsee-Mohican in Canada (1945).

159 • The Twilight of the Gods

is "worthy of remark that Hallinskidi and Heimdal are quoted
among the names for the Ram.23 Heimdal is the "watcher" of the
much-trodden bridge of the gods which finally breaks down at
Ragnarok; his "head" measures the crossroads of ecliptic and
equator at the vernal equinox in Aries,24 a constellation which is
called "head" also by Cleomedes,25 and countless astromedical illus-
trations show the Ram ruling the head (Pisces the feet). Accord-
ingly, one might say that the Sibyl addresses herself to "the high
and low children of Aries."

Recalling Rigvedic Agni, son of seven to nine mothers like Heim-
dal, and remembering what has been said of "fire," that it means
a great circle connecting the celestial poles, the scheme becomes
more understandable. Heimdal stands for the equinoctial colure
which "accompanies" the slowly turning, wholly abstract and invis-
ible axis along the surface of the sphere. It will emerge presently
that "axis" always means the whole "frame" of a world-age, given
by the equinoctial and solstitial colures.26 More understandable also
becomes another epithet of Heimdal, namely, Vindler, of which
Rydberg states (p. 595): "The name is a subform of vindill and
comes from vinda, to twist or turn, wind, to turn anything around
rapidly. As the epithet 'the turner' is given to that god who
brought friction-fire (bore-fire) to man, and who is himself the
personification of this fire, then it must be synonymous with 'the
borer.' "

23 TM, p. 234. Rydberg (p. 593) spells it: "In the old Norse poetry Vedr (wether,
ram) Heimdal and the Heimdal epithet hallinskidi, are synonymous."

24 A. Ohlmarks, Heimdalls Horn und Odins Auge (1937), p. 144, makes the god
a he-goat. That would not be bad, either, if he is right, since Capella, alpha
Aurigae, "capricious" all over, whether male or female, has the name "asar bar-
dagi = Fight of the Aesir" (Reuter, p. 279). Of Auriga-Erichthonios we shall hear
more in the future.                                                                                                         

25 Instead of "head" (kephalos), Nonnos calls Aries mesomphalos, "midnavel,"
of Olympus.

26 It should be remarked that Snorri's identification (Glyf.13) of the bridge
Bifroest with the rainbow made scholars rush to rescue a definitely regular phenom-
enon from the hazardous existence which is allotted to a rainbow; they voted for
the Milky Way instead. With this we are not likely to agree. See A. Ohlmarks,
"Stellt die mythische Bifroest den Regenbogen oder die Milchstrasse dar?" Medd.
Lunds Astron. Observ. (1941), scr. II, no. 110, and Router, p. 284, quoting addi-
tional literature.

Hamlet's Mill

160

The Sibyl's prophecy does not end with the catastrophes, but it
moves from the tragic to the lydic mode, to sing of the dawning of
the new age:

Now do I see

the Earth anew

Rise all green

from the waves again . . .

Then fields unsowed

bear ripened fruit

All ills grow better.

Even if that generation of gods has perished, the younger ones re-
main: Balder and Hoder, also the two sons of Thor, and Vidar the
son of Odin. The House of the Wise Vanir is not affected as a
whole, even if Freyr fell in battle. As the Vanir belong to a past age,
this crisis apparently does not concern them. There is in fact a cer-
tain perversely nightmarish or neurotic unreality about the tragedy
as a whole. The Wolf's fetters were made of nothing but he was
able to snap them only when the time came, when Odin and the
Sun had to be devoured. The next instant, young Vidar kills the
monster simply by thrusting his shoe down his throat (he has one
shoe only, just like Jason). It is guilt and the ensuing chaos, more
than actual forces, which dragged down the Establishment once
the appointed time came, as decreed by fate and sounded on the
Gjallarhorn.

What happens after (or happened, or will happen sometime, for
this myth is written in the future tense), is told in the Voluspa, but
it is also amplified in Snorri's Gylfaginning (53), a tale of a strange
encounter of King Gylfi with the Aesir themselves, disguised as
men, who do not reveal their identity but are willing to answer
questions: "What happens when the whole world has burned up,
the gods are dead, and all of mankind is gone? You have said earlier,
that each human being would go on living in this or that world."
So it is, goes the answer, there are several worlds for the good and
the bad. Then Gylfi asks : "Shall any gods be alive, and shall there
be something of earth and heaven?" And the answer is:

161 • The Twilight of the Gods

"The earth rises up from the sea again, and is green and beautiful and
things grow without sowing. Vidar and Vali are alive, for neither the
sea nor the flames of Surt have hurt them and they dwell on the
Eddyfield, where once stood Asgard. There come also the sons of
Thor, Modi and Magni, and bring along his hammer. There come
also Balder and Hoder from the other world. All sit down and con-
verse together. They rehearse their runes and talk of events of old
days. Then they find in the grass the golden tablets that the Aesir once
played with. Two children of men will also be found safe from the
great flames of Surt. Their names, Lif and Lifthrasir, and they feed
on the morning dew and from this human pair will come a great
population which will fill the earth. And strange to say, the sun, be-
fore being devoured by Fenrir, will have borne a daughter, no less
beautiful and going the same ways as her mother."

Then, all at once, concludes Snorri's tale wryly, a thunderous
cracking was heard from all sides, and when the King looked again,
he found himself on the open plain and the great hall had vanished.

The times and tenses are deliberately scrambled, but the state-
ments, even if elliptical, are pregnant with ancient meaning. The
rediscovery of the pieces of the game lying around in the grass,
already told in the Voluspa, becomes clearer if one thinks of the
Rigveda, where the gods themselves are said to go around like
ay as, that is, casts of dice.27 It becomes more understandable still
when one considers that the name of the Indian world-ages (Yuga)
has been taken from the idiom of dicing.28 But both data could be
dismissed as unrevealing were it forgotten that in several kinds of
"proto-chess"—to use an expression of J. Needham—board garner
and dicing were combined: the number of eyes thrown by the dice
determined the figure which was to be moved.29 That this very rule
was also valid for tafl, the board game mentioned in the Voluspa,
has been shown by A. G. van Hamel.30 Thus, the dice forced the
hands of the chess player—a game called "planetary battles" by the
Indians, and in 16th-century Europe still termed "Celestial War, or

27 RV 10.116.9; in 10.34.8, the dice are called vrata, i.e., an organized "gang"
under a king; the king is Rudra.

28 Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali, this last one being the worst cast (which the
Greeks termed "dog"). See H. Luders, Das Wurfelspiel im Alten lndien (1907),
pp. 41,63f.

W. H. Luders, p. 69; see also S. Culin, Chess and Playing Cards (1898), p. 857.

30 "The Game of the Gods," Arkiv fur Nor disk Filologi 50 (1934), p, 230.

Hamlet's Mill • 162

Astrologer's Game,"31 whereas the Chinese chessboard shows the
Milky Way dividing the two camps. Which goes to show that the
Icelanders knew what they were talking about.

Finally, there is one remarkable and disturbing coincidence from
the same direction. It is known that in the final battle of the gods,
the massed legions on the side of "order" are the dead warriors, the
"Einherier" who once fell in combat on earth and who have been
transferred by the Valkyries to reside with Odin in Valhalla—a
theme much rehearsed in heroic poetry. On the last day, they issue
forth to battle in martial array. Says the Grimnismal (23): "Five
hundred gates and forty more—are in the mighty building of Wal-
halla—eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate—on
the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."

That makes 432,000 in all, a number of significance from of old.

This number must have had a very ancient meaning, for it is also
the number of syllables in the Rigveda. But it goes back to the basic
figure 10,800, the number of stanzas in the Rigveda (40 syllables
to a stanza) which, together with 108, occurs insistently in Indian
tradition. 10,800 is also the number which has been given by Hera-
clitus for the duration of the Aion, according to Censorinus (De die
natali 18), whereas Berossos made the Babylonian Great Year to
last 432,000 years. Again, 10,800 is the number of bricks of the
Indian fire-altar (Agnicayana).32

"To quibble away such a coincidence," remarks Schroder, "or
to ascribe it to chance, is in my opinion to drive skepticism beyond
its limits."33 Shall one add Angkor to the list? It has five gates, and
to each of them leads a road, bridging over that water ditch which
surrounds the whole place. Each of these roads is bordered by a row
of huge stone figures, 108 per avenue, 54 on each side, altogether
540 statues of Deva and Asura, and each row carries a huge Naga

31 A. Bernhardi, "Vier Konige," BA 19 (1936), pp. 171f. See J. Needham, Science
and Civilization in China, vol. 4, Pt. I: Physics (1962), p. 325, about a book on
chess published in 1571 under the title Uranomachia seu Astrologorum Ludus.

32 See J. Filliozat, "L'Inde et les echanges scientifiques dans l'antiquite," Cahiers
d'histoire mondiale 1 (1953), pp. 358f.

33 F. R. Schroder, Altgermcmische Kulturprobleme (1929), pp. 80f.

163 • The Twilight of the Gods

serpent with nine heads. Only, they do not "carry" that serpent,
they are shown to "pull" it, which indicates that these 540 statues
are churning the Milky Ocean, represented (poorly, indeed) by the
water ditch,34 using Mount Mandara as a churning staff, and Vasuki,
the prince of the Nagas, as their drilling rope. (Just to prevent mis-
understanding: Vasuki had been asked before, and had agreeably
consented, and so had Vishnu's tortoise avatar, who was going to
serve as the fixed base for that "incomparably mighty churn," and
even the Milky Ocean itself had made it clear that it was willing to
be churned.) The whole of Angkor thus turns out to be a colossal
model set up for "alternative motion" with true Hindu fantasy and
incongruousness to counter the idea of a continuous one-way
Precession from west to east.

Now there is a last paragraph in the Gylfaginning, which is usu-
ally considered an afterword, and its authorship is in doubt, for it is
supposed that Snorri's Edda was completed by Olaf Hvitaskald
(d. 1259), Snorri's nephew. In any case, this addition is somewhat
out of the previous context, but it reinforces it:

The Aesir now sat down to talk, and held their counsel, and remem-
bered all the tales that were told to Gylfi. They gave the very same
names that had been named before to the men and places that were
there. This they did for the reason that, when a long time had elapsed,
men should not doubt that those to whom the same names were
given, were all identical. There was one who is called Thor, and he
is Asa-Thor, the old. He is Oeku-Thor (Chariot-Thor) and to him
are ascribed the great deeds by Hektor in Troy.

As for the rebirth of the world, another "Twilight" comes to
mind. It is in the Kumulipo, a Polynesian cosmogonic myth from
Hawaii. "Although we have the source of all things from chaos, it
is a chaos which is simply the wreck and ruin of an earlier world."35

Now turns the swinging of time over on the burnt-out world
Back goes the great turning of things upwards again
As yet sunless the time of shrouded light;

34 R. von Heine-Geldern, "Weltbild und Bauform in Siidostasien," in Wiener
Beitrage zur Kunst- und Kulturgeschicte 4 (1930), pp. 41f.

35  R. B. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology (1910), p. 15.

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Unsteady, as in dim moon-shimmer,

From out Makalii's night-dark veil of cloud

Thrills, shadow-like, the prefiguration of the world to be?6

So sang an Oceanian Empedocles long ago. The poem was drawn
from very old royal tradition, just as Virgil had drawn his from
the story of the Gens Julia, for the true original line of Hawaiian
kings was supposed to come from Kane, the Demiurge God of the
Pacific.

36 A. Bastian, Die Heilige Sage der Polynesier (1881), pp. 69-121. Along with
Roland B. Dixon, who translated the last three lines above, we have relied on the
German of Bastian, who was an outstanding authority on Polynesian culture and
language. Modern experts have their own way. M. Beckwith (Hawaiian Mythology
[1940], p. 58) translates these lines thus: "At the time when the earth became hot/
At the time when the heavens turned about/At the time when the earth was
darkened/To cause the moon to shine/The time of the rise of the Pleiades."

As concerns Makalii (Maori: Matariki; Micronesian and Melanesian dialects
spell it Makarika, and the like), it is the name for the Pleiades, although more often
we come across the phrase "the net of Makalii" (the correct form: Huihui-o-
Matariki, i.e., the cluster of M.). The "person" Makalii, to whom this net belongs,
as well as a second one (see p. 175) which we have reason to take for the Hyades,
remains in the dark. See E. Tregear, The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dic-
tionary (1891) s.v. Matariki; N. B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii
(1909), p. 17; M. W. Makemson, The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Poly-
nesian Astronomy (1941), nos. 327, 380; Beckwith, p. 368; K. P. Emory, Tuamo-
tuan Religious Structures and Ceremonies (1947), p. 61. For the Hyades and
Pleiades as "celestial hunting nets" of the Chinese sphere, see G. Schlegel, L'Urano-
graphie Chinoise (1875; repr. 1967), pp. 365-70.

Chapter XI

Samson Under Many Skies

Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed
As of a person separate to God,
Designed for great exploits, if I must die
Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out. . .
O dark dark dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrevocably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first-created beam, and thou great Word,
"Let there be light, and light was over all"
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?

Samson Agonistes

he story of Samson stands out in the Bible as a grand tissue
of absurdities. Sunday school pupils must long have been puzzled
about his weapon for killing Philistines: But there is much more to
puzzle about (Judges xv):                 

15.  And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand
and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

16.  And Samson said, with the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps,
with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.

17.  And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that
he cast away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place
Ramathle'hi.                             

18.  And he was sore athirst, and called on the Lord, and said, Thou
hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant: and
now shall I die for thirst, and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?

19.  But God clave an hollow/place that was in the jaw, and there
Came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his spirit came again,
and he revived: wherefore he called the name thereof En-hak'ko-re,
which is in Le'hi unto this day.

20.   And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.

If

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166

■/

The passage has been bowdlerized in the Revised Version to
make it more plausible, but verse 18 is an unshakable reminder that
this was not an ordinary bone, or even "the place" of it as suggested
recently. For that jaw is in heaven. It was the name given by the
Babylonians to the Hyades, which were placed in Taurus as the
"Jaw of the Bull." If we remember the classic tag "the rainy
Hyades" it is because Hyades meant "watery." In the Babylonian
creation epic, which antedates Samson, Marduk uses the Hyades as
a boomeranglike weapon to destroy the brood of heavenly mon-
sters. The whole story takes place among the gods. It is known,
too, that Indra's powerful weapon, Vajra, the Thunderbolt made
of the bones of horse-headed Dadhyank, was not of this earth (see
appendix #19).

The story is so universal that it must be seen as spanning the
globe. In South America, where bulls were still unknown, the
Arawaks, the Tupi, the Quechua of Ecuador spoke of the "jaw of
the tapir," which was connected with the great god, Hunrakan, the
hurricane, who certainly knows how to slay his thousands. In our
sky, the name of the celestial Samson is Orion, the mighty hunter,
alias Nimrod. He remains such even in China as "War Lord Tsan,"
the huntmaster of the autumn hunt, but the Hyades are changed
there into a net for catching birds. In Cambodia, Orion himself
became a trap for tigers; in Borneo, tigers not being available, pigs
have to substitute; and in Polynesia, deprived of every kind of big
game, Orion is found in the shape of a huge snare for birds. It is this
snare that Maui, creator-hero and trickster, used to catch the Sun-
bird; but having captured it, he proceeded to beat it up, and with
what?—the jawbone of Muri Ranga Whenua, his own respected
grandmother.

If one brings Samson—the biblical Shimshon—back to earth, he
becomes a preposterous character, or rather, no character at all,
except for his manic violence and his sudden passions. It comes as
a shock, after reading that chaotic and whimsical life, to find: "And
he judged Israel twenty years." For if anyone was bereft of judg-
ment, it was this berserker. As Frazer remarks, one doubts whether
he particularly adorned the bench. Yet there is a mysterious im-

167 • Samson Under Many Skies

portance to his person. On him was piled a hoard of classic fairy
tales, like "the man whose soul was placed elsewhere" (the ex-
ternal soul), and the insistent motif of fatal betrayal by women, the
motif of Herakles and Llew Llaw Gyffes. More than that, he is
an incongruous montage of nonhuman functions which could no
longer be put together intelligibly, and were crowded together
with cinematographic haste. Even his feats as a young Herakles, tear-
ing a lion apart, change over in a flash to the generation of bees
from a carcass, recalling the time-honored bougonia of the fourth
book of Virgil's Georgies.

Of the many nonsense feats there are some which take particular
relief from the context. Samson was displeased (Judges xiv-xv)
because the wife of his heart, a Philistine, had given away to the
children of her people the meaning of his riddle on the lion: "Out
of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth
sweetness," so that he was held to pay forfeit for his last bet.

xiv. 19. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he went down
to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and
gave change of garments unto them which expounded the riddle.
And his anger was kindled, and he went up to his father's house.
20. But Samson's wife was given to his companion, whom he had used
as his friend.

xv. 1. But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat
harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said, I will go
in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him
to go in.

2.  And her father said, I verily thought that you hadst utterly hated
her; therefore I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister
fairer than she? Take her, I pray thee, instead of her to your com-
panion.

3.  And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless
than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.

4.  And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took fire-
brands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst be-
tween two tails.

5.  And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the
standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and
also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.

6.  Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they an-
swered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken

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168

his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up,
and burnt her and her father with fire.

7.  And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I
be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.

8.  And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he
went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.

Leaving the great Shimshon there sitting in the top of the rock,
a brief interlude before he goes out again on his own wayward,
rash and splenetic way to provoke his enemies, one is moved to
reflection.

To catch and corral three hundred foxes, and tie them in pairs
by the tail, just to work off a spite, seems more the daydream of
a juvenile delinquent or a Paul Bunyan or a "Starke Hans" than the
feat of a warrior. It is as if Scripture had remembered that he had
to stand out as a great hunter, but had misplaced the occasion of
his hunts. After all, lions are not to be found behind every hedge-
row, and foxes might do, if only to annoy. But we know from Ovid
(Fasti 4, 631ff.) that in April, at the feast of Ceres, foxes with burn-
ing fur were chased through the Circus. This might be the real
context. The modern "fertility rite" explanations are so futile that
it might be more to the point to be reminded of the three hundred
elite "dogs" that Gideon recruited for his band, and which still
stand unexplained. One should also consider a more important occa-
sion to which attention has been drawn by Felix Liebrecht: the
"Sada-Festival," during which animals were kindled and chased,
burning, through the whole Iranian countryside. This, however,
would lead back to Firdausi's Book of Kings, and beyond that to
the whole problem of Kynosoura, that cannot be tackled at this
point because it calls for an examination of all that was implied by
the starting of celestial fires.

But the main theme of the story will appear more clearly if it is
transposed in an utterly different narrative convention, the adven-
tures of Susanowo the Japanese god. They are found in the Japanese
Scriptures, in this case the Nihongi, compiled about the 8th century
a.d. but going back to unknown times. They are the full equivalent
of what the Bible was in our recent past, and even more, for "this

169 • Samson Under Many Skies

body of legend, folklore to us but credible history to the people of
the archipelago, is tangled in the roots of everything Japanese."
The quotation is from Post Wheeler, who prepared the latest edi-
tion of the Japanese mythical corpus. To quote him further: "In
no other land do we find a people's sacred legend so interknit with
the individual's daily thoughts and life. Its episodes peer at us from
every nook and byway. The primeval myth of the slaughter of the
Eight-Forked-Serpent by the deity Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male,
brother of Bright-Shiner the Sun-Goddess, is pictured on Japan's
paper currency. I have seen it produced au grand serieux at Tokyo's
Imperial Theatre, in the same week as one of Ibsen's tragedies and a
Viennese light opera."1

Most of Hebrew mythology wears the hempen homespun of
peasants and patriarchs from Palestine. Japanese myth bears the
mark of an already refined perverse feudal world, back of which
there is the baroque elegance and fantasy of late Chinese culture.
With this premise, here is the story of the Japanese Samson, Susa-
nowo, whose name means Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male. No better
set of attributes for Mars; he is also officially a god, since his sister
Amaterasu, the sun-goddess, is still today the worshiped ancestor
of the Imperial dynasty; the courtly precedences are neatly estab-
lished. The hero need no longer masquerade as a boor from the
tribe of Dan who raged in Ashkelon and destroyed himself in Gaza.

Now Susanowo was banished from the sky for having thrown
the hind part of his backward-flayed piebald stallion in the weaving
hall of his sister Amaterasu. These sudden discourteous gestures
seem to be part of the code: Enkidu had thus thrown the hind
quarter of the Bull from Heaven in the face of Ishtar, but here
there is the additional code feature (it is code) of the backward-
flayed animal. Susanowo's gesture caused the Sun-lady to withdraw
in anger into a cave: the world was plunged into darkness. The
80,000 gods assembled in the Milky Way to take counsel, and at last
came upon a device to coax the Sun out of the cave and end the
great blackout. It was a low-comedy trick, part of the stock-in-

1 P. Wheeler, The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese (1952), pp. vf.

Hamlet's Mill

170

trade that is used to coax Ra in Egypt, Demeter in Greece (the
so-called Demeter Agelastos or Unlaughing Demeter) and Skadi
in the North—obviously another code device.2

Now light was restored to the world, but on earth the hero-god
moving out of the darkness had nowhere to lay his head; he wan-
dered around and succeeded in killing the "Eight-Forked-Serpent,"
thus saving a damsel.

Afterwards he arranged "The Drawing of the Lands," and the
sowing of more land, giving the islands the shape which they
have now. Finally, Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male, having traveled
about the limits of the sky and the earth, even to the Sky-Upright-
Limiting-Wall, dwelt on Mount Bear-Moor and finally went to the
Lower World, also called the Nether-Distant-Land.

To this his place came a Jason, namely the Kami (Divine Prince)
Great-Land-Master, looking for some helpful device against his
brothers, "the 80 Kami" who had succeeded in killing him several
times (Sky-Producer revived him). Before reaching the house, he
married Susanowo's daughter, Princess-Forward, and this Medea
was to support him faithfully, so that he survived the different
"stations" which Susanowo had prepared for him3 as proper guest
rooms: the fire, the snake-house, the centipede-and-wasp-house
(Dostoyevsky's Svidrigailov must have been a great seer):

Then Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male, having shot a humming arrow
into the midst of a great grass-moor, sent him to fetch it, and when
he had entered the moor, set fire to it on all sides. But when Great-
Land-Master found no place of exit, there came a mouse which said,
"The inside is hollowly hollow; the outside is narrowly narrow." Even
as it spoke thus, he trod on the spot, and falling into the hollow, hid
himself until the fire had burned over, when the mouse brought him
the humming arrow in its mouth, and the arrow's feathers were
brought in like manner by its young ones.

2 The obscene dance of old Baubo, also called Iambe in Eleusis, parallels the
equally unsavory comic act of Loke in the Edda. The point in all cases is that the
deities must be made to laugh (cf. also appendix #36).

3 For a comparison of the sequence of troublesome caves, holes, or "houses" that
heroes of the Old World as well as of the New World have to pass through, see L.
Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904), pp. 371f.

171

Samson Under Many Skies

Now his wife, Princess-Forward, weeping, made preparation for the
funeral, and her father, deeming Great-Land-Master dead, went out
and took stand on the moor, but he found his guest standing there,
who brought the arrow and gave it to him. Then the great Kami
Susanowo took him into the palace and into a great-spaced room,
where he made Great-Land-Master pick the lice from his head,
among which were many centipedes. His wife, however, gave him
aphananth berries and red earth, and he chewed up the berries and
spat them out with the red earth which he held in his mouth, so that
the great Kami, believing him to be chewing and spitting out the
centipedes, began to feel a liking for him in his heart and fell asleep.

Then Great-Land-Master bound Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male's hair
fast to the palace rafters, and blocking up the door with a five-hun-
dred-man-lift rock, took his wife Princess-Forward on his back,
possessed himself of the Kami's great life-preserving sword, his bow-
and-arrows, and his Sky-speaking lute, and fled. But the Sky-speaking
lute smote against a tree so that the earth resounded, and the great
Kami [Susanowo] started from sleep at the sound and pulled down
the palace.

While he was freeing his hair from the rafters, however, Great-
Land-Master fled a long way; so pursuing after him to the Level-
Pass-of-the-Land-of-Night, and gazing on him from afar, Brave-
Swift-Impetuous-Male called out to him, saying, "With the great,
life-preserving sword and the bow-and-arrow which you carry, pur-
sue your low-born brethren till they crouch on the hill-slopes and are
swept into the river currents! And do you, fellow! make good your
name of Great-Land-Master, and your name of Spirit-of-the-Living-
Land, and making my daughter Princess-Forward your chief wife,
make strong the pillars of your palace at the foot of Mount Inquiry
in the lowest rock bottom, and rear its crossbeams to the Plain-of-the-
High-Sky, and dwell there!"

Then, bearing the great sword and book, Great-Land-Master pur-
sued and scattered the eighty Kami, saying, "They shall not be
permitted within the circle of the blue fence of mountains." He
pursued them till they crouched on every hill-slope, he pursued them
till they were swept into every river, and then he began to rule the
Land. (Therefore the place where he overtook them was called Come-
Overtake.)4

Later on, the "Genesis" part of the Nihongi will be shown to
meet the requirements of archaic theory very exactly. Even inci-
dents that seem like minor embellishments, the little mouse in her

4 Wheeler, pp. 44f.

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172

burrow, are really recurrent elements in the ancient fugue. Because
it is necessary to deal with one theme at a time, much of the tale
of Susanowo appears wildly arbitrary although no more so than
that of Samson. Also the narrative is confusingly interwoven with
other classic plots, recognizably those of Theseus and the Argo-
nauts. And yet there Susanowo is, a maker of darkness at noon,
Samson strength-in-hair, who "went away with the pin of the
beam, and with the web," walking off with rafters and rocks and
gates and posts, pulling down a palace (his own, for a change),
smiting and scattering low-born workers of iniquity "not to be
permitted again within the circle of the blue fence." But the
Nihongi shows the ampler scheme in which the old order is
smashed and the new foundation of an order is undertaken: "make
strong the pillars of your palace at the foot of Mount Inquiry in
the lowest rock-bottom, and rear its crossbeams to the Plain-of-
the-High Sky, and dwell there."

The god has not only judged and apportioned, he has also estab-
lished and sowed for the future in his capacity as the new king
of the Underworld; he has gone to sleep in his Ogygia, and ap-
pointed his successor as ruler of the new age. Further, the Great-
Land-Master had to procure something in the Nether-Distant-Land
(in Japan the dead go down there by land with countless wind-
ings, whereas the whirlpool in the ocean is good only for trans-
porting there the "sinful dirt"). He had been sent there to get
"counsel" from Susanowo (who identified him at the first glance
as: "This is the Kami Ugly-Male-of-the-Reed-Plains"), he eventu-
ally got it, and added to it the precious life-preserving sword which
Susanowo had found in the tail of the Eight-Forked Dragon, and
the "bow-and-arrows," and his Orphic Sky-speaking lute, not to
forget Princess-Forward. A complicated affair. But the Great-
Land-Master undeniably plays a Jupiter role against Susanowo's
Mars, the more so, as his beloved Princess-Forward turns out to be
extremely jealous.

Now, after this Far Eastern interlude, Samson's own tragedy can
be seen in better focus (Judges xvi):

173 • Samson Under Many Skies

19.  And [Delilah] made him sleep upon her knees; and she called
for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head;
and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.

20.  And she said, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he
awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before,
and shake myself. And he wist not that the Lord was departed from .
him.

21.  But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought
him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did
grind in the prison house. [ Appendix #17]

22.  Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was
shaven.

23.  Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to
offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they
said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.

24.  And when the people saw him, they praised their god: for they
said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the
destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.

25.  And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they
said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for
Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport; and they
set him between the pillars.

26.  And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer
me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I
may lean upon them.

27.  Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of
the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three
thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.

28.  And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, remem-
ber me, pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O
God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two
eyes.

29.  And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which
the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his
right hand, and of the other with his left.

30.  And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed
himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and
upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at
his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

Such is the great story, and it has gone through innumerable
variations.

The general design of the tragedy is obviously faulty, more even
than most Bible narratives which are superbly indifferent to such

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174

considerations. If Samson had been bred as "a person separate to
God," by the care of the Lord "who sought an occasion against the
Philistines," he does not compare with chiefs like Joshua and
Gideon. He remains, mythically speaking, a misguided missile. Most
great feats of the mythistorical past would not have rated the atten-
tion of news media, but Samson's achievements make so little sense,
even on the micro-scale of Palestine power politics, that Milton
finds it hard to justify the ways of God to man. Certain "central"
events like the fall of royal houses, whether in Greece or Babylon
or Denmark, are capable of a truer and deeper reverberation. That
is why great motifs like "darkness at noon" and "pulling down the
edifice" combine into a larger theme, obviously cosmic, which is
here obscured. The Nihongi is truer to this larger style.

In the arabesque of interlaced motifs, one can mark those where
the theme of "pulling down the structure" is in evidence. The
powerful Maori hero Whakatau, bent on vengeance,

laid hold of the end of the rope which had passed round the posts of
the house, and, rushing out, pulled it with all his strength, and
straightaway the house fell down, crushing all within it, so that the
whole tribe perished, and Whakatau set it on fire.5

This is familiar. At least one such event comes down dimly from
history. It happened to the earliest meetinghouse of the Pytha-
gorean sect, and it is set down as a sober account of the outcome
of a political conflict, but the legend of Pythagoras was so artfully
constructed in early times out of prefabricated materials that doubt
is allowable. The essence of true myth is to masquerade behind
seemingly objective and everyday details borrowed from known
circumstances. However that may be, in many other stories the
destruction of the building is linked with a net. Saxo's Amlethus
does not pull down pillars; he reappears at the banquet set by the
king for his own supposed funeral, like Great-Land-Master himself.
He throws the knotted carpet net prepared by his mother over the
drunken crowd and burns down the hall. In Japan the parallel does
not go farther than that but it has its own relevance nevertheless.
It suggests the fall of the House of Atreus. The net thrown by

5 See Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology (1956; 1st ed. 1855), pp. 97f.

175 • Samson Under Many Skies

Clytemnestra over the king struggling in "his bath cannot have come
in by chance. But this is an uncertain lead as yet.

The Sacred Book of the ancient Maya Quiche, the famous Popol
Vuh (the Book of Counsel) tells of Zipacna, son of Vucub-Caquix
(=Seven Arara). He sees 400 youths dragging a huge log that they
want as a ridgepole for their house. Zipacna alone carries the tree
without effort to the spot where a hole has been dug for the post
to support the ridgepole. The youths, jealous and afraid, try to kill
Zipacna by crushing him in the hole, but he escapes and brings
down the house on their heads. They are removed to the sky, in a
"group," and the Pleiades are called after them (appendix #18).

Then there is a true avenger-of-his-father, the Tuamotuan Ta-
haki, who, after long travels, arrives in the dark at the house of
the goblin band who tortured his father. He conjures upon them
"the intense cold of Havaiki" (the other world) which puts them
to sleep.

Then Tahaki gathered up the net given to him by Kuhi, and carried
it to the door of the long house. He set fire to the house. When the
goblin myriads shouted out together "Where is the door?" Tahaki
called out: "Here it is." They thought it was one of their own band
who had called out, and so they rushed headlong into the net, and
Tahaki burned them up in the fire.6

What the net could be is known from the story of Kaulu. This
adventurous hero, wanting to destroy a she-cannibal, first flew up
to Makalii the great god, and asked for his nets, the Pleiades and the
Hyades, into which he entangled the evil one before he burned
down her house.7 It is clear who was the owner of the nets up there.
The Pleiades are in the right hand of Orion on the Farnese Globe,8
and they used to be called the "lagobolion" (hare net). The Hyades
were for big game.9

At the end of this far-ranging exploration, it is fair now to ask,
who could Samson have been? Clearly a god, and a planetary

6 J. F. Stimson, The Legends of Maui and Tahaki (1934), pp. 51, 66.

7 A. Fornander, Hawaiian Antiquities (1916-1920), vol. 4, pp. 350f.; vol. 5, p. 368.

8 R. Eisler, Orpheus the Fisher (1921), pp. 25f.

9. G. Schlegel, L'Urano graphic Chinoise (1967), pp. 351-58, 365-70.

Hamlet's Mill

176

Power, for such were the gods of old. As Brave-Swift-Impetuous-
Male, as the Nazirite Strong One, he has all the countersigns that
belong to Mars, and to none other. Clearly, while trying to draw
the concluding episode of the investigation of Amlethus-Kronos,
King of the Cosmic Mill, something else has come into view, the
new and formidable personage of Mars—or Ares as the Greeks
called him. He will come back more than once. Yet there is no
question but that the name of Samson comes up quite spontane-
ously in connection with the Sampo, the original quern. It was
clearly and unequivocally within the Amlethus design. At this
point, the intrusion of this new planetary Power must be recog-
nized. Even Susanowo substitutes for Kronos in his very reign of
the Underworld. It would have been desirable to present the
Powers separately, and each in his own shape, as will be done
farther on. But the many-threaded tale has its own rules, and this
exemplifies an important one. There are no Powers more diverse
than Saturn and Mars; yet this is not the only time they will appear
as a confusing and unexplained doublet of the two.

One of the motifs, destruction, is often associated with the Am-
lethus figure. The other belongs more specifically to Mars. There
is a peculiar blind aspect to Mars, insisted on in both Harranian
and Mexican myths. It is even echoed in Virgil: "caeco Marte."
But it does not stand only for blind fury. It must be sought in the
Nether World, which will come soon. Meanwhile, here is the first
presentation of the double figure of Mars and Kronos. In Mexico,
it stands out dreadfully in the grotesque forms of the Black and the
Red Tezcatlipoca. There is a certain phase in the Great Tale, obvi-
ously, in which the wrecking powers of Mars unleashed make up
a fatal compound with the avenging implacable design of Saturn.
Shakespeare has, with his preternatural insight, alluded to both
when he made Hamlet warn the raging Laertes before their final
encounter:

Though I am not by nature rash and splenetic

Yet there is in me something dangerous

Which let thy wisdom fear ...

177 • Samson Under Many Skies

But obviously there is more, and what emerges here lifts the veil
of a fundamental archaic design. The real actors on the stage of
the universe are very few, if their adventures are many. The most
"ancient treasure"—in Aristotle's word—that was left to us by our
predecessors of the High and Far-Off Times was the idea that the
gods are really stars, and that there are no others. The forces reside
in the starry heavens, and all the stories, characters and adventures
narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among
the stars, who are the planets. A prodigious assignment it may seem
for those few planets to account for all those stories and also to run
the affairs of the whole universe. What, abstractly, might be for
modern men the various motions of those pointers over the dial
became, in times without writing, where all was entrusted to images
and memory, the Great Game played over the aeons, a never-
ending tale of positions and relations, starting from an assigned
Time Zero, a complex web of encounters, drama, mating and
conflict.

Lucian of Samosata, that most delightful writer of antiquity, the
inventor of modern "science fiction," who knew how to be light
and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity, and was fully aware
of the "ancient treasure," remarked once that the ludicrous story
of Hephaistos the Lame surprising his wife Aphrodite in bed with
Mars, and pinning down the couple with a net to exhibit their
shame to the other gods, was not an idle fancy, but must have
referred to a conjunction of Mars and Venus, and it is fair to add,
a conjunction in the Pleiades.

This little comedy may serve to show the design, which turns out
to be constant: the constellations were seen as the setting, or the
dominating influences, or even only the garments at the appointed
time by the Powers in various disguises on their way through their
heavenly adventures.

No one could deny, in the case of the Amlethus-Samson epiph-
any, that this fierce power, or momentary combination of powers,
wears here the figure of Orion the blind giant, called also Nimrod
the Hunter, brandishing the Hyades, working the Mill of the

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178

Stars, like Talos, the bronze giant of Crete. For the feature which
clinches the case has been named. Orion was blind, the only blind
figure of constellation myth. He was said to have regained his sight
eventually, as befits an eternal personage. But this is how legend
portrays him, wading through the rushing flood of the whirlpool
at his feet (where he will appear again), guided by the eyes of little
Tom Thumb sitting on his shoulder, whose name, Kedalion, sug-
gests a low-comedy occupation. But who are we to impose Mrs.
Grundy on the assembly of heaven?             

Chapter XII

Socrates' Last Tale

Al suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei
Qual si fe' Glauco nel gustar dell'erba
Che il fe' consorto in mar degli altri dei.

Dante, Paradiso 1.67

What a man has to say in the last hours of his life deserves
attention. Most especially if that man be Socrates, awaiting execu-
tion in his jail and conversing with Pythagorean friends. He has
already left the world behind, has made his philosophical will and
is now quietly communing with his own truth. This is the close of
the Phaedo (107D-115A), and it is expressed in the form of a myth.
Strangely enough, innumerable commentators have not taken the
trouble to scrutinize it, and have been content to extract from it
some pious generalities about the rewards of the soul. Yet it is a
thoughtful and elaborate statement, attributed to an authority
whom Socrates (or Plato) prefers not to name. It is clothed in a
strange physical garb. It is worth accepting Plato's suggestion to
take it with due attention. Socrates is quietly moving into the other
world, he is a denizen of it already, and his words stand, as it were,
for a rite of passage:

"The story goes that when a man dies his guardian deity, to whose lot
it fell to watch over the man while he was alive, undertakes to con-
duct him to some place where those who gather must submit their
cases to judgment before journeying to the other world; and this they
do with the guide to whom the task has been assigned of taking them
there. When they have there met with their appropriate fates and
waited the appropriate time, another guide brings them back here
again, after many long cycles of time. The journey, then, is not as
Aeschylus' Telephys describes it: he says that a single track leads to

Hamlet's Mill

180

181

Socrates' Last Tale

the other world, but I don't think that it is 'single' or 'one' at all.
If it were, there would be no need of guides; no one would lose the
way, if there were only one road. As it is, there seem to be many
partings of the way and places where three roads meet. I say this,
judging by the sacrifices and rites that are performed here. The
orderly and wise soul follows on its way and is not ignorant of its
surroundings; but that which yearns for the body, as I said before,
after its long period of passionate excitement concerning the body
and the visible region, departs only after much struggling and suffer-
ing, taken by force, with great difficulty, by the appropriate deity.
When it arrives where the others are, the unpurified soul, guilty of
some act for which atonement has not been made, tainted with
wicked murder or the commission of some other crime which is akin
to this and work of a kindred soul, is shunned and avoided by every-
one, and no one will be its fellow-traveller or guide, but all by itself
it wanders, the victim of every kind of doubt and distraction, until
certain periods of time have elapsed, and when they are completed, it
is carried perforce to its appropriate habitation. But that soul which
has spent its life in a pure and temperate fashion finds companions
and divine guides, and each dwells in the place that is suited to it.
There are many wonderful places in the world, and the world itself
is not of such a kind or so small as is supposed by those who generally
discourse about it; of that a certain person has convinced me."

"How do you mean, Socrates?" asked Simmias. "I too have heard a
great deal about the world, but not the doctrine that has found favour
with you. I would much like to hear about it."

"Well, I don't think it requires the skill of a Glaucus1 to relate my
theory; but to prove that it is true would be a task, I think, too dif-
ficult for the skill of Glaucus. In the first place I would probably not
even be capable of proving it, and then again, even if I did know how
to, I don't think my lifetime would be long enough for me to give
the explanation. There is, however, no reason why I should not tell
you about the shape of the earth as I believe it to be, and its various
regions."

"That will certainly do," said Simmias.

"I am satisfied," he said, "in the first place that if it is spherical and
in the middle of the universe, it has no need of air or any other force
of that sort to make it impossible for it to fall; it is sufficient by itself
to maintain the symmetry of the universe and the equipoise of the

1 Whoever this (unidentified) Glaucus is, he has nothing to do with the Glaucus
of Anthedon mentioned in the epigraph, a fisherman who on eating a certain plant
was overtaken by a transmutation and threw himself into the sea where he became
a marine god.

■/

earth itself. A thing which is in equipoise and placed in the midst of
something symmetrical will not be able to incline more or less
towards any particular direction; being in equilibrium, it will remain
motionless. This is the first point," he said, "of which I am con-
vinced!"2

"And quite rightly so," said Simmias.

"And again, I am sure that it is very big," he said, "and that we who
live between the Phasis river and the pillars of Hercules inhabit only
a small part of it, living round the coast of the sea like ants or frogs
by a pond, while many others live elsewhere, in many similar regions.
All over the earth there are many hollows of all sorts of shape and
size, into which the water and mist and air have collected. The earth
itself is a pure thing lying in the midst of the pure heavens, in which
are the stars; and most of those who generally discourse about such
things call these heavens the 'ether.' They say that these things I have
mentioned are the precipitation of the 'ether' and flow continually
into the hollows of the earth. We do not realize that we are living in
the earth's hollows, and suppose that we are living up above on the
top of the earth — just as if someone living in the middle of the sea-
bed were to suppose that he was living on the top of the sea, and
then, noticing the sun and the stars through the water, were to
imagine that the sea was sky; through sluggishness and weakness he
might never have reached the top of the sea, nor by working his way
up and popping up out of the sea into this region have observed how
much purer and more beautiful it is than theirs; nor even heard about
it from anyone who had seen it. That is exactly what has happened
to us: we live in a hollow in the earth, but suppose that we are living
on top of it; and we call the air sky, as though this were the sky, and
the stars moved across it. But the truth of the matter is just the same
—through weakness and sluggishness we are not able to pass through
to the limit of the air. If anyone could climb to the air's surface, or
grow wings and fly up, then, as here the fishes of the sea pop their
heads up and see our world, so he would pop his head up and catch
sight of that upper region; and if his nature were such that he could
bear the sight, he would come to realize that that was the real sky and
the real light and the real earth. This earth of ours, and the stones,
and all the region here is corrupted and corroded, just as the things
in the sea are corroded by the brine; and in the sea nothing worth
mentioning grows, and practically nothing is perfect—there are just
caves and sand and indescribable mud and mire, wherever there is

2 Thus far, this is Anaximander and his Principle of Sufficient Reason. But we
cannot draw further conclusions: Socrates is, here, deep in his own myth already,
and far beyond Ionian physics which, in His opinion, ought not to be taken
seriously.

■/

Hamlet's Mill • 182

earth too, and there is nothing in any way comparable with the
beautiful things of our world; but those things in the upper world, in
their turn, would be seen far to surpass the things of our world. If it
is a good thing to tell a story then you should listen, Simmias, and
hear what the regions on the earth beneath the sky are really like."

"We should certainly very much like to hear this story, Socrates,"
said Simmias.

"In the first place, then, my friend, the true earth is said to appear to
anyone looking at it from above like those balls "which are made of
twelve pieces of leather, variegated, a patchwork of colours, of which
the colours that we know here—those that our painters use—are sam-
ples, as it were. There the whole earth is made of such colours, and
of colours much brighter and purer than these: part of it is purple,
of wondrous beauty, and part again golden, and all that part which is
white is whiter than the whiteness of chalk or snow; and it is made
up of all the other colours likewise, and of even more numerous and
more beautiful colours than those that we have seen. Indeed these
very hollows of the earth, full of water and of air, are said to present
a kind of colour as they glitter amid the variety of all the other
colours, so that the whole appears as one continuous variegated pic-
ture. And in this colourful world the same may be said of the things
that grow up—trees and flowers and all the fruits; and in the same
way again the smoothness and transparency and colours of the stars
are more beautiful than in our world. Our little stones, these highly
prized ones, sards and jaspers and emeralds and so on, are but frag-
ments of those there; there, they say, everything is like this, or even
more beautiful than these stones that we possess. The reason is that
the stones there are pure, and not corroded or corrupted, as ours are,
by rust and brine, as a result of all that has collected here, bringing
ugliness and diseases to stones and to soil, and to animals and to plants
besides. The earth itself, they say, is ornamented with all things, and
moreover with gold and silver and all things of that sort. They are
exposed to view on the surface, many in number and large, all over
the earth, so that the earth is a sight for the blessed to behold. There
are many living creatures upon it, including men; some live inland,
some live round about the borders of the air as we do on the coasts
of the sea, while others again live on islands encompassed by air near
the mainland. In a word, what the water and the sea are to us, for our
purposes, the air is to them; and what the air is to us, the 'ether' is to
them. Their climate is such that they are free from illnesses, and live
much longer than the inhabitants of our world, and surpass us in sight
and hearing and wisdom and so on, by as much as the pureness of
air surpasses that of water, and the pureness of 'ether' surpasses that
of air. Moreover they have groves and temples sacred to the gods, in

183

Socrates' Last Tale

which the gods really dwell, and utterances and prophesies and visions
of the gods; and other such means of intercourse are for them direct
and face to face. And they see the sun and moon and stars as they
really are, and their blessedness in other respects is no less than in
these.

"This is the nature of the earth as a whole, and of the regions round
about it, and in the earth, in the cavities all over its surface, are many
regions, some deeper and wider than that in which we live, others
deeper but with a narrower opening than ours, while others again are
shallower than this one and broader. All of these are connected with
each other by underground passages, some narrower, some wider—
bored through in many different places; and they have channels along
which much water flows, from one region to another, as into mixing-
bowls; and they have, too, enormous ever-flowing underground
rivers and enormous hot and cold springs, and a great deal of fire,
and huge rivers of fire, and many rivers also of wet mud, some clearer,
some denser, like the rivers of mud that flow before the lava in Sicily,
and the lava itself; and they fill the several regions into which, at any
given time, they happen to be flowing. They are all set in motion,
upwards and downwards, by a sort of pulsation within the earth.
The existence of this pulsation-is due to something like this: one of
the chasms of the earth is not only the biggest of them all, but is
bored right through the earth—the one that Homer meant, when he
said that it is 'very far off, where is the deepest abyss of all below
the earth.' Homer elsewhere—and many other poets besides—have
called this Tartarus. Now into this chasm all the rivers flow together,
and then they all flow back out again; and their natures ark deter-
mined by the sort of earth through which they flow. The reason why
all these streams flow out of here and flow in is this, that this fluid
has no bottom or resting place: it simply pulsates and surges upwards
and downwards, and the air and the wind round about it does the
same; they follow with it, whenever it rushes to the far side of the
earth, and again whenever it rushes back to this side, and as the breath
that men breathe is always exhaled and inhaled in succession, so the
wind pulsates in unison with the fluid, creating terrible, unimaginable
blasts as it enters and as it comes out. Whenever the water withdraws
to what we call the lower region, the streams flow into the regions
on the farther side of the earth and fill them, like irrigating canals;
and whenever it leaves those parts and rushes back here, it fills the
streams here afresh, and they when filled flow through their several
channels and through the earth, and as each set of streams arrives at
the particular regions to which its passages lead, it creates seas and
marshes and rivers and springs; and then, sinking back again down
into the earth, some encircling larger and more numerous regions,
others fewer and smaller, these streams issue back into Tartarus again

Hamlet's Mill

184

—some of them at a point much lower down than that from which
they were emitted, others only a little lower, but all flow in below
the place from which they poured forth. Some flow into the same
part of Tartarus from which they sprang, some into the part on the
opposite side; and others again go right round in a circle, coiling
themselves round the earth several times like snakes, before descend-
ing as low as possible and falling back again.

"It is possible to descend in either direction as far as the centre, but
not beyond, for the ground on either side begins to slope upwards in
the face of both sets of streams.

"There are many large streams of every sort, but among these many
there are four that I would mention in particular. The largest, the
one which flows all round in a circle furthest from the centre, is that
which is called Oceanus; over against this, and flowing in the opposite
direction, is Acheron, which flows through many desert places and
finally, as it flows under the earth, reaches the Acherusian lake, where
the souls of most of the dead arrive and spend certain appointed
periods before being sent back again to the generations of living
creatures. The third of these rivers issues forth between these two,
and near the place where it issues forth it falls into a vast region
burning with a great fire, and forms a marsh that is larger than our
sea, boiling with water and mud. Thence it makes its way, turbulent
and muddy, and as it coils its way round inside the earth it arrives,
among other places, at the borders of the Acherusian lake, but it does
not mix with the water of the lake; and having coiled round many
times beneath the earth, it flows back at a lower point in Tartarus.
This is the river they call Pyriphlegethon, and volcanoes belch forth
lava from it in various parts of the world. Over against this, again, the
fourth river flows out, into a region that is terrible and wild, all of a
steely blue-grey colour, called the Stygian region; and the marsh
which the river forms as it flows in is called the Styx. After issuing
into this marsh and receiving terrible powers in its waters, it sinks
down into the earth, and coiling itself round proceeds in the opposite
direction to that of Pyriphlegethon, and then meets it coming from
the opposite way at the Acherusian lake. The water of this river
likewise mixes with no other, but itself goes round in a circle and then
flows back into Tartarus opposite to Pyriphlegethon; and the name
of this river, according to the poets, is Cocytus.

"Such is the nature of the world; and when the dead reach the region
to which their divine guides severally take them, they first stand trial,
those who have lived nobly and piously, as well as those who have
not. And those who are found to have lived neither particularly well
nor particularly badly journey to Acheron, and embarking on such
vessels as are provided for them arrive in them at the lake. There they

185

Socrates' Last Tale

dwell and are purified; paying due penalties, they are absolved from
any sins that they have committed, and receive rewards for their
good deeds, each according to his merits. Those who are judged in-
curable because of the enormity of their crimes, having committed
many heinous acts of sacrilege or many treacherous and abominable
murders or crimes of that magnitude, are hurled by their fitting des-
tiny into Tartarus, whence they never more emerge. Those who are
judged to be guilty of crimes that are curable but nevertheless great
—those, for example, who having done some act of violence to father
or mother in anger live the rest of their lives repenting of their
wickedness, or who have killed someone in other circumstances of a
similar nature—must fall into Tartarus; but when they have fallen in
and stayed there a year, the wave casts them forth—the murderers
along Cocytus, those who have struck their fathers or mothers along
Pyriphlegethon; and when they are being carried past the Acheru-
sian lake, they shout and cry out to those whom they have murdered
or outraged, and calling upon them beg and implore them to let them
come out into the lake, and to receive them; and if they can prevail
upon them, they come out and cease from their woes, but if not, they
are carried again into Tartarus, and from there once more into the
rivers, and they do not stop suffering this until they can prevail upon
those whom they have wronged, for such is the sentence that the
judges have pronounced upon them. Lastly, those who are found to
have lived exceptionally good lives are released from these regions
within the earth and allowed to depart from them as from a prison,
and they reach the pure dwelling place up above and live on the sur-
face of the earth; and of these, those who have sufficiently purified
themselves by means of philosophy dwell free from the body for all
time to come, and arrive at habitations even fairer than these, habita-
tions that it is not easy to describe; and there is not time to make the
attempt now. But for these reasons, Simmias, which we have dis-
cussed, we should do all in our power to achieve some measure of
virtue and of wisdom during our lives, for great is the reward, and
great the hope.

"No man of sense should affirm decisively that all this is exactly as I
have described it. But that the nature of our souls and of their habita-
tions is either as I have described or very similar, since the soul is
shown to be immortal—that, I think, is a very proper belief to hold,
and such as a man should risk: for the risk is well worth while. And
one should repeat these things over and over again to oneself, like a
charm, which is precisely the reason why I have spent so long in
expounding the story now.

"For these reasons, then, a man should have no fears about his soul, if
throughout his life he has rejected bodily pleasures and bodily adorn-
ments, as being alien to it and doing more harm than good, and has

Hamlet's Mill

186

concentrated on the pleasures of learning, and having adorned his soul
with adornments that are not alien to it, but appropriate—temperance
and justice and courage and freedom and truth—continues to wait,
thus prepared, for the time to come for him to journey to the other
world. As for you, Simmias and Cebes and all you others, you will
make your several journeys later, at an appointed time; but in my
case, as a character in a tragedy might put it, Destiny is already sum-
moning me; and it is almost time for me to go to the bath. I think it
is better to have a bath before drinking the poison, and not to give
the women the trouble of washing a corpse."3

The end has an invincible beauty, calm and serene, already shim-
mering with immortality, and yet preserving that light skeptical
irony which makes "a man of sense" in this world. It puts the seal
of confidence on what might otherwise be really an incantation
that one repeats to himself in his last moments.

Readers who are insensitive to this magic will be tempted to dis-
miss the story as so much poetic nonsense. If Socrates, or rather
Plato, is really talking of a system of rivers within the earth, then
he obviously does not understand the first thing about hydraulics,
and he has only let his fancy run wild. But looking again at the
setting, one begins to wonder if he is referring at all to the earth as
we understand it. He mentions a certain place where we live, and
it looks like a marsh in a hollow or maybe like the bottom of a lake,
full of rocks, and caverns, and sand, "and an endless slough of
mud." The "true earth," which is like a ball of twelve colored
pieces, is above us, and one may think instinctively that Plato refers
to the upper limits of the stratosphere, but of course he has never
heard of that. He is dealing with "another" world above us, and
although there are some fantasies of lovely landscapes and animals
and gems, it is in the "aether" as the Greeks understood it. It is
above us, and centered like "our" place, whatever that is, on the
center of the universe. There, the celestial bodies have become clear
to the mind, and the gods are visible and present already. If they
have "temples and houses in which they really dwell," these look
very much like the houses of the zodiac. Although some features
are scrambled for keeping up an impression of the wondrous, one

3 R. S. Bluck trans. (1955), pp. 128-39.

187

Socrates' Last Tale

suspects that this is heaven pure and simple. Then comes the un-
equivocal geometric countersign.

That world is a dodecahedron. This is what the sphere of twelve
pieces stands for: there is the same simile in the Timaeus (55c),
and then it is said further that the Demiurge had the twelve faces
decorated with figures (diazographon) which certainly stand for
the signs of the zodiac. A. E. Taylor insisted rather prosily that
one cannot suppose the zodiacal band uniformly distributed on a
spherical surface, and suggested that Plato (and Plutarch after him)
had a dodecagon in mind and they did not know what they were
talking about. This is an unsafe way of dealing with Plato, and
Professor Taylor's suffisance soon led him to grief. Yet Plutarch
had warned him: the dodecahedron "seems to resemble both the
Zodiac and the year."

Is their opinion true who think that he ascribed a dodecahedron to
the globe, when he says that God made use of its bases and the ob-
tuseness of its angles, avoiding all rectitude, it is flexible, and by
circumtension, like globes made of twelve skins, it becomes circular
and comprehensive. For it has twenty solid angles, each of which is
contained by three obtuse planes, and each of these contains one and
the fifth part of a right angle. Now it is made up of twelve equilateral
and equangular quinquangles (or pentagons), each of which consists
of thirty of the first scalene triangles. Therefore it seems to resemble
both the Zodiac and the year, it being divided into the same number
of parts as these.4

In other words, it is stereometrically the number 12, also the num-
ber 30, the number 360 ("the elements which are produced when
each pentagon is divided into 5 isosceles triangles and each of the
hitter into 6 scalene triangles")—the golden section itself. This is
what it means to think like a Pythagorean.

Plato did not worry about future professional critics very much.
He only provided a delectable image, and left them to puzzle it
out. But what stands firm is the terminology. After the Demiurge
had used the first four perfect bodies for the elements, says the
Timaeus, he had the dodecahedron left over, and he used it for the

4Quaestiones Platonicae 5.1, 1003c (R. Brown trans.), in Plutarch's Morals, cd.
W. W. Goodwin (1870), vol. 5, p. 433.

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188

frame of the whole. There is no need to go into the reasons,
geometrical and numerological, which fitted the "sphere of twelve
pentagons," as it was called, for the role. What counts here: it was
the whole, the cosmos, that was meant. Plato had stood by the origi-
nal Pythagorean tradition, which called cosmos the order of the
sun, moon and planets with what it comprised. As a free-roving
soul, you can look at it "from above." (Archimedes in the Sand-
reckoner still uses the term cosmos loosely in that sense, at least by
way of a concession to old usage.)

To conclude: the "true earth" was nothing but the Pythagorean
cosmos, and the rivers that flowed from its surface to the center
and back can hardly be imagined as strictly terrestrial: although
with that curious archaic intrication of earth and heaven which
has become familiar and which makes great rivers flow from heaven
to earth, it is not surprising to find oneself dealing with "real" fiery
currents like Pyriphlegethon connected with volcanic fire. But
where is Styx? Hardly down here, with its landscape of blue. And
the immense storm-swept abyss of Tartaros is not a cavern under
the ground, it belongs somewhere in "outer" space.

This is all the world of the dead, from the surface down and
throughout. It localizes as poorly as the nether world of the Repub-
lic. The winding rivers which carry the dead and which go back
on their tracks are suggestive more of astronomy than of hydrau-
lics. The "seesaw" swinging of the earth (n.b.: it has to be the
"true earth") might well be the swinging of the ecliptic and the
sky with the seasons. There is no need now to go into the con-
fusing earthy or infernal details of the description except to note
that Numenius of Apamea, an important exegete of Plato, comes
out flatly with the contention that the other world rivers and Tar-
taros itself are the "region of planets." But Proclus, an even more
important and learned exegete, comes out flatly against Numenius.5
Enough is known, indeed more than enough of the welter of orien-
tal traditions on the Rivers of Heaven with their bewildering mix-
ture of astronomical and biological imagery, which culminated in
Anaximander's idea of the "Boundless Flow," the Apeiron, to see

5 Sec F. Buffiere, Les Mythes d'Homere et la Pensee Grecque (1956), p. 444.

189

Socrates' Last Tale

whence early Greece got its lore. It can be left alone here. But
Socrates is citing an Orphic version, whence his restraint in naming
his authorities, and its strange entities, such as Okeanos and Chro-
nos, deserve attention. What is meant here is not Kronos, Saturn,
but really Chronos, Time. As concerns Okeanos, even Jane Harri-
son, who could hardly be accused of a tendency to search for the
gods somewhere else than on the surface or in the interior of the
earth, had to admit: "Okeanos is much more than Ocean and of
other birth."6 In her eyes he is "a daimon of the upper air." An im-
portant concession which may lead a long way.

We bypass for the moment the imposing work of Eisler, Welten-
mantel und Himmelszelt (1910), an inexhaustible lode but one
which provides more information than guidance. Onians' Origins of
European Thought offers a more recent appraisal.7 He compares
Okeanos to Achelous, the primal river of water that "was con-
ceived as a serpent with human head and horns." He goes on:

The procreation element in any body was the psyche, which ap-
peared in the form of a serpent. Okeanos was, as may now be seen,
the primeval psyche and this would be conceived as a serpent in rela-
tion to procreative liquid . . . Thus we may see, for Homer, who
refers allusively to the conception shared by his contemporaries, the
universe had the form of an egg girt about by "Okeanos, who is the
generation of All" . . . We can perhaps also better understand . . .
why in this Orphic version [Frgs. 54, 57, 58 Kern] the serpent was
called Chronos and why, when asked what Chronos was, Pythagoras
answered that it was the psyche of the universe. According to Phere-
kydes it was from the seed of Chronos that fire and air and water
were produced.

The great Orphic entity was Chronos Aion (the Iranian Zurvan
akarana), commonly understood as "Time Unbounded," and in
"Ai5n" Professor Onians sees "the procreative fluid with which the
psyche was identified, the spinal marrow believed to take serpent
form" and it may well be so, since these are timeless ideas which
still live today in ophidic cults and in the "kundalini" of Indian
Yoga. But Aion certainly meant "a period of time," and age, hence

6 J. E. Harrison, Themis (1960), pp. 456f.
7 P. B. Onians: The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind,
the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (2nd ed. 1953), pp. 249.

Hamlet's Mill

190

"world-age" and later "eternity," and there is no reason to think
that the biological meaning must have been prior and dominant. It
is known that for the Orphics Chronos was mated to Ananke,
Necessity, "which also, according to the Pythagoreans, surrounds
the universe. Time and Necessity circling the universe, this is a
fairly clear and fundamental conception; it is linked with heavenly
motions independently from biology, and it leads directly to Plato's
idea of time as "the moving image of eternity."

It would be helpful if historians of archaic thought would first
present straight data, without pressing and squeezing their material
into a shape that reflects their preconceived conclusion, that bio-
logical images must come first in "primitive" psychology, like all
that is concerned with generation.

If one wants psychology, one can go back to Socrates in a very
different phase of his life, where he is really talking psychology in
the Theaetetus (152E): "When Homer sings the wonder of 'Ocean
whence sprang the Gods and Mother Tethys,' does he not mean
that all things are the offspring of flux and motion?" The question
arises, would the ocean be an image of flux except for the tides? But
Socrates' Aegean had no tides. The image comes to him from
Hesiod's description of Okeanos (Theogony 790ff.): "With nine
swirling streams he winds about the earth and the sea's wide back,
and then falls into the main; but the tenth flows out from a rock, a
sore trouble to the Gods." That dreaded tenth is the river of Styx.
Jane Harrison was right. Okeanos is "of another birth" than our
Ocean.

The authority of Berger can reconstruct the image.8 The at-
tributes of Okeanos in the literature are "deep-flowing," "flowing-
back-on-itself," "untiring," "placidly flowing," "without billows."
These images, remarks Berger, suggest silence, regularity, depth,
stillness, rotation—what belongs really to the starry heaven. Later
the name was transferred to another more earthbound concept: the
actual sea which was supposed to surround the land on all sides.
But the explicit distinction, often repeated, from the "main" shows
that this was never the original idea. If Okeanos is a "silver-swirl-

8 E.H.. Berger, Mythische Kosmographie der Griechen (1904), pp, 1ff.

191

Socrates' Last Tale

ing" river with many branches which obviously never were on sea
or land, then the main is not the sea either, pontos or thalassa, it has
to be the Waters Above. The Okeanos of myth preserves these
imposing characters of remoteness and silence. He was the one who
could remain by himself when Zeus commanded attendance in
Olympus by all the gods. It was he who sent his daughters to
lament over the chained outcast Prometheus, and offered his power-
ful mediation on his behalf. He is the Father of Rivers; he dimly
appears in tradition, indeed, as the original god of heaven in the
past. He stands in an Orphic hymn9 as "beloved end of the earth,
ruler of the pole," and in that famous ancient lexicon, the Ety-
mologicum magnum, his name is seen to derive from "heaven."

9 83.7 (ed. Quandt, p. 55): terma philon gaies, arche polou.

Chapter XIII

Of Time and the Rivers

Di, quibus imperium est animarum, umbraeque silentes
Et Chaos et Phlegethon, loca tacentia late
Sit mihi fas audita loqui...

Virgil, Aeneid vi.264

Socrates' inimitable habit of discussing serious things while
telling an improbable story makes it very much worth while to take
a closer look at his strange system of rivers.

It appears again in Virgil, almost as a set piece. The Aeneid is
noble court poetry, and was not intended to say much about the fate
of souls; one cannot expect from it the grave explicit Pythagorean
indications of Cicero's Dream of Scipio. But while retaining con-
ventional imagery and the official literary grand style which befitted
a glorification of the Roman Empire, it repays attention to its hints,
for Virgil was not only a subtle but a very learned poet. Thus,
while Aeneas' ingress into Hades begins with a clangorous overture
of dark woods, specters, somber caves and awesome nocturnal rites,
which betoken a real descent into Erebus below the earth, he soon
finds himself in a much vaguer landscape. Ibant obscuri sola sub
nocte per umbram . . . "On they went dimly, beneath the lonely
night amid the gloom, through the empty halls of Dis and his
unsubstantial realm, even as under the grudging light of an incon-
stant moon lies a path in the forest."

The beauty of the lines disguises the fact that the voyage really
is not through subterranean caverns crowded with the countless
dead, but through great stretches of emptiness suggesting night

193 • Of Time and the Rivers

space, and once the party has crossed the rivers and passed the gates
of Elysium thanks to the magic of the Golden Bough, they are in a
serene land "whence, in the world above, the full flood of Eridanus
rolls amid the forest." Now Eridanus is and was in heaven—surely
not, in this context, on the Lombard plain. And here also "an
ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light, and they know
their own sun, and stars of their own." There is no mention here
of the "pallid plains of asphodel" of Homeric convention. Those
hovering souls, "peoples and tribes unnumbered," are clearly on the
"true earth in heaven," for it is also stated that many of them await
the time of being born or reborn on earth in true Pythagorean
fashion. And there is more than an Orphic hint in the words of
father Anchises: "Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those
life-seeds, so far as harmful bodies clog them not . . ." But when
they have lived, and died, "it must needs be that many a taint, long
linked in growth, should in wondrous use become deeply ingrained.
Therefore, they are schooled with penalties, for some the stain of
guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out in fire.
Each of us suffers his own spirit." Some remain in the beyond
and become pure soul; some, after a thousand years (this comes
from Plato) are washed in Lethe and then sent to life and new
trials.

This is exactly Socrates' belief. The words "above" and "below"
are carefully equivocal, here as there, to respect popular atavistic
beliefs or state religion, but this is Plato's other world.

When Dante took up Virgil's wisdom, his strong Christian pre-
conceptions compelled him to locate the world of ultimate punish-
ment "physically below." But his Purgatory is again above, under
the open sky, and there is no question but that most, if not quite all,
of Virgil's world is a Purgatory and definitely "up above" too.
Socrates' strange descriptions have remained alive.