Hamlet's mill - an essay investigating the origins of human knowledge and its transmission through myth

575 Pages·1969·20.031 MB·English

by  de Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha Dechend

Hamlet’s Mill
God creating the stars, with the planetary spheres shown inside, according to
the Ptolemaic order. Each sphere is marked by a star, the fourth sphere, that of
the sun, being indicated by a half-visible circle.
Hamlet’s Mill
An essay on myth and the frame of time
GIORGIO de SANTILLANA
&
HERTHA von DECHEND
A NONPAREIL BOOK
David R. Godine · Publisher · Boston
Much of the research for this book was supported by
a grant from the Twentieth Century Fund.
Lines from “As I Walked Out One Evening”, by W. H. Auden.
Copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted
from Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957, by W. H. Auden,
by permission of Random House, Inc.
Line from Ulysses by James Joyce, reprinted by permission of
Random House, Inc. Copyright 1914, 1918 by Margaret Caroline
Anderson. Copyright 1934 by The Modern Library.
Copyright 1942, 1946 by Nora Joseph Joyce.
New edition, corrected and reset, 1961.
First paperback edition published in 1977 by
DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER, INC.
Box 450
Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452
Copyright © 1969 by Giorgio de Santillana and H. von Dechend
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-13267
isbn: 0-87923-215-3
Fifth printing, 1999
Printed in the United States of America

Preface
A
s the 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 • viii
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. I 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-
tually to fruition in my Prologue to Parmenides of 1964 (reprinted in Reflections
on Men and Ideas [1968], p. 80).