Giorgio De Santillana

Hertha von Dechend

A seminal work of scientific and philosophical exploration. It argues that our myths are remnants of an ancient astronomy suppressed by the Greeks and Romans and later forgotten. On the way it challenges basic assumptions of Western science and our theories of how ancient knowledge was passed along.

An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time

Hamlet's Mill

Reflections on Men and Ideas

The Renaissance Philosophers

The Age of Adventure

Hertha Von Dechend

The main argument of the book may be summarized as the claim of an early (Neolithic) discovery of the precession of the equinoxes (usually attributed to Hipparchus, 2nd century BCE), and an associated very long-lived Megalithic civilization of "unsuspected sophistication" that was particularly preoccupied with astronomical observation. The knowledge of this civilization about precession, and the associated astrological ages, would have been encoded in mythology, typically in the form of a story relating to a millstone and a young protagonist-the "Hamlet's Mill" of the book's title, a reference to the kenning Amlóða kvren recorded in the Old Icelandic Skáldskaparmál.[1] The authors indeed claim that mythology is primarily to be interpreted as in terms of archaeoastronomy ("mythological language has exclusive reference to celestial phenomena"), and they mock alternative interpretations in terms of fertility or agriculture.[2]

Giorgio De Santillana

About

Books

Join the club