Fascinating, if somewhat dizzyingly presented and unsystematic. The project is to show that mythic ideas about cyclical time, world ages, their characteristics and dominant players, were actually based in close observation of the heavens and the complex apparent movements of planets and constellations, and particularly the precession of the equinoxes. Since the whole universe was thought to be ruled by the same living, volitional forces, it was by no means a simple “primitive” or childlike fantasy that what happened in the sky was related to what happened on earth in describable ways.

The authors’ point is not to dismiss the modern scientific method but to say that there is a tendency to look at the history of human knowledge in a reductively linear way, from less to more sophistication and mastery of complexity, and that such a view actually runs counter to the evidence provided even by what little we have of these early cosmologies.

For folklore fans, the stories themselves are from a treasure trove of not-the-usual-suspects sources: Guyana, Peru, India, Persia, Africa, Northwest and Plains Indians, as well as the Norse and Greco-Roman standbys.

difficult to rate this book.. The subject matter is well researched and fascinating, but all the references and footnotes made it difficult at best

"A book wonderful to read and startling to contemplate. If this theory is correct, both the history of science and the reinterpretation of myths have been enriched immensely."
— Washington Post Book World

I only understood about a quarter of this book, but I found it fascinating and remarkable.

A study of human imagination beyond the science

A thesis that is ultimately dubious, but a fascinating read.

A book worth reading ✨ absolutely amazed of how looking at the skies, planets and stars made humans develop similar thinking, similar traditions, similar beliefs, even though they might be in different parts of the planet earth.
A proper study that should be examined and perhaps taught in school instead of the prejudiced and untrue things regarding other cultures they make us swallow.
Eye opening ✨

Not easy reading, but giving it five stars for the depth of research and the impact it has had on how we view myth and history. Very fascinating but I’ve had to take several breaks as the information can be a lot and it’s very easy to get lost as they transition between various myths and stories. The overall message (as I saw it) is that the various myths share basic similarities and point (most likely) to historical events and forgotten civilizations - with a special focus on astronomy.

I wish I could give this book 4.5 stars. This is dense reading, but the gist is enlightening. In short, myths were aural tales of the precession. They were methods of telling of our existence (life, death and rebirth) through religion, geometry, math and science. All myths, through the ages and civilizations, are tales of the planets and constellations. From The Epic of Gilgamesh to King Arthur, we have tales of the same events.

John Crowley put it better than I'll ever be able to: "I don't know what *it* is. But whatever *it* is, I bet it's a lot like this". In the vein of Campbell, the comparative mythology lens allows for a reality-altering shift of understanding of where myth comes from and how science blends with the arcane and the literary. The codification of information into myth is explored in the novel and gives a mechanical explanation for the ability to persist information by couching it in metaphor and analogy to propagate it down the river of time.

Some interesting bits of information here and there, but most of all, the lack of any structure and the "inductive" approach are maddening. This is truly painful reading, although it is not as bad as something like the conspiracy classic Programmed to Kill, and indeed, this is not "conspiracy" literature as such. The annoying thing is that the thesis of the book is actually interesting and the idea of the spatialization of earth in early astronomy being made in terms of changes of star-signs in time makes sense and is really intriguing. So I'm far from saying this book is "dumb" or dismissing it like that: I'm just saying that this kind of unstructured barrage from myth to myth all over the globe and from very distinct civilizations is very unreadable unless you just abandon yourself completely to the hands of the author. The subject itself is already complex: why not try to organize it at least a little bit?

Basically, this book is a lengthy elaboration of many, many excerpts of stories through the lens of the ur-Indo-European concept "ages of man", a concept actually synonymous with the "world" in Proto-Germanic: in some sense, it is about the Indo-European sense of the worldhood of the world, in Heideggerian terms. The author propounds the view that the world was conceptualized in terms of the apparent results of what we know as precession of the equinoxes ie. the points where the ecliptic of the earth and its equatorial sphere(extended into "space" for us but part of the same entity for them) meet at any particular point in time. There is even a third circle to add to this synthesis, that is, the equinoctial colure standing for the galaxy: the movement of the precession away from coincidence with the north-pole axis, as happened from Age of Virgo onwards, and perhaps why the coming Age of Pisces was celebrated by Virgil (the author, I guess, gets a bit wobbly here, since he sometimes conflates the Golden Age with the age of Gemini, even though Gemini does not pass through the equinoctial colure). The equinoctial points also have an interesting property of moving in the opposite direction in comparison to the visibility of the zodiac signs from the yearly, ecliptical perspective in Earth's journey around the Sun(or the reverse, as it were). This was obviously described by Plato in Myth of Er, and it has interesting parallels in Aboriginal kinship systems and the foundations of incest taboo and biochemical systems like the Krebs Cycle. The author of this book rejects Freudian and psychoanalytic interpretations along with his more justified takedown of interpreting the ancients in some sort of contra-position to our own over-civilization as an example of lack of civilization, when true sophistication is clearly apparent all over: you could say it has been "ghettoized", to put it mildly. This much is true: however, to explain how men saw these precise patterns in the stars, it is necessary to refer to animal cults, incest taboos, ancestry lineages and ontological curiosity in the face of regeneration and death, which the author also recoils at. There are, of course, no examples supporting these particular interpretations here, revealing a fault in method, but they are there to be found. If you look at any star-sign, it is by no means "obvious" that it represents what it claims to represent based on its name: it could only have acquired that signification based on a pre-existing importance of, say, bulls in the age of Taurus, as sacrificial animals and simultaneously the representations of the God to which people sacrifice(see: El in Canaanite mythology, and see the Golden Calf, and its denunciation as the dawn of Age of Aries in the figure of Moses). However, it does not minimize the intellectual achievement that is the synthesizing of this Freudian muck with the extremely slow changes in the skies. It is very mysterious, indeed.

The author also contends that the recurring figure of Grail, World-Tree, or Sampo represents this "catastrophic" break from the Golden Age of harmony with the galaxy. In the stories, it often recurs that the breaking of the source of infinite wealth, or unhooking its axle, is accompanied by a whirlpool as a result of its sinking into water, usually located somewhere west of the the coast of Norway: however, the author does not think this is about concrete physical locations but actually represents catastrophic changes in the stars, which creates the rivers of the undead. The idea of river Styx etc. in heaven made me think of Northern Lights. These undead locations are supposed to be accessible through some star in Sagittarius or Scorpio, or Antares, but only through "a gate" that opens in the equinox or the solstice ie. is related to the earth alone as a system of equator-ecliptic relations. The age of Pisces is interesting in that it has Virgo at autumnal equinox, while the Pisces is at vernal equinox, obviously: both of them pass through the equinoctial colure, but yet there is no harmony of the golden age, no conjunction between all three worlds.

The myth of grail, Sampo etc. is also interesting due to its relation to what's known as the Haber–Bosch process, where fertilizer is produced from air: it is left to the reader's imagination, considering the apparent sophistication of the ancients, whether these technologies were merely dreams or whether they could have referred to actual realities. The question arises, whether there are groups or entities that intentionally introduce certain pre-existing technologies at correct points of the star cycle? It is, at any rate, an invention befitting of an end of the world cycle where the constellations will soon get unhooked from their proper places again, it being only 600 years (or a bit more or less, depending on how you count) until the Age of Aquarius: explosion of world population, toxification of food(connected to explosion of quantity of population), enabling of German war efforts that shook the world for decades to come etc.

So yeah, tons of interesting stuff in this book, but it's a slog to read due to its organization or lack thereof. I will be looking to books like "Star-Names" for a more palatable read, maybe? Of course, if you are an expert in literally every mythology of the world, the effect that this book produces may not be jarring. I will still rate it three because this has some use in an "encyclopedia" sense, it's useful to have around, and maybe as like an 80-year old after having read literally everything in the world I will appreciate the winding threads of this narrative better.

Finally finished it!

Inspiring, exhausting, exhilarating and impenetrable, after twelve years of trying in this way or that to get through it, I found an excellent reading by a youtube user named "Culain ruled by Venus." After all, it's a book about the truths and verities behind the deep oral tradition of humanity. It's better to hear these strange old stories spoken aloud.

Plus, when you're reading it, there's a tendency to try to memorize all the names of all the various international deities. Listening to it, it's a lot easier to think, "And the Scandinavians believed some messed up stuff, and it was similar to the weird stuff the Persians believed, and so on and so forth."

They really, really don't write books like this any more. This is the final word in that great, sprawling, incoherent mass of mythography that began with The Golden Bough and ended right around the time this was written.

This school of study was home to a particular breed of racists and know-it-alls, and I'm not sorry it fell out of fashion. But they did come up with some gems, and this is one of them.