brilliant writing, very interesting thesis accurately proven. a bit lengthy, but always deeply magnificent.

definitely a ponderous book. great introduction to ancient thinking, makes you think what wisdom and knowledge was led to here from the lost passage of time's past.

This is one you have to work at. The second time I read it I started to understand the thesis and the mode of argument. It presents an important thesis - that ancient cultures encoded the skies in their mythologies.
The book is dense, has endless digressions, and doesn't quite prove its case. However it presents enough of the picture to show that the heavens and their architecture are fundamental aspects of traditional lore. In this it provides a valuable alternative to the ideas of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

Allora, io ci ho provato, non una ma diverse volte, risultato:
non ci capisco un tubo.
Forse, chissà, se schivo la demenza fisiologica o l'Alzheimer eventuale fra qualche anno ci riprovo.

This is part of the ever-growing genre of "Atlantis" (whatever that term means today). All of this stuff really started with Theosophy in the 19th century. Soon you'll be on Youtube watching the Joe Rogan show, looking at "Tartarian Mud Flood" videos, and learning about the "true" age of the pyramids. This entire genre has been panned by scholars across the board. I don't know if former Christians who've become engineers are just looking for answers or what, but these type of books seem more popular than they should be.

Full of ideas I have not encountered anywhere else.

Un saggio particolarmente complesso, sulla falsariga degli scritti di Robert Graves, ma a differenza di quest'ultimo De Santillana e Von Dechend si occupano principalmente di storia.
A differenza invece di Velikovsky, l'approccio alla struttura del mito è molto più "moderata", non si deve intendere il mito alla lettera come accadimento storico, bensì come raccolta delle conoscenze antiche.
In particolare, gli autori vogliono soffermarsi sul mito di Amleto e il suo mulino, attorno ad esso cercano di ricostruire il come e il quando gli umani (gli indoeuropei... ?) osservarono il moto delle stelle e della precessione, il "tempo" e le "ere" ebbero inizio, e nulla più fu come prima.
Il che mi ricorda la citazione di Walter Benjamin, in Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen, 1940:
"C'è un quadro di Klee che si intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in atto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo.
Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, le ali distese. Ha il viso rivolto al passato. Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l'infranto. Ma la tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può più richiuderle. Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui nel cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo progresso, è questa la tempesta."

Perhaps we have heard of the people who still eager to look for Noah's ark at the snowy mountains of Ararat, or the people who used Google Maps to search for the remnants of Dzulkarnain's walls to keep the Gog and Magog from swarming into the oikumene, the inhabited world. The main thesis of the authors of the book is to show such efforts are too naive; the mythology colored our world are not of earthly events, but astral.

The book begins with a comparative analysis of the existence of Hamlet-type figures across the cultures, separated by Time and Space. Again and again, similar themes could be drawn with Icelandic Amlethus, Kalevada's Kullervo and Kai Khusrau in the Persian Shahnama. The themes of avenger, playing lunatic and finally the heroes' melancholy upon conquering the Hvarna (Glory, Destiny) ended with them departed into the unknown, all are present in the aforementioned figures. The author then concludes the initial part of the book by bringing yet another item that omnipresent in those legends; the Mill and the Whirlpool.

From the analysis of the Whirlpool onwards, the authors embarked upon collections of myths and their relation to astral events e.g. Precession of the Equinoxes, constellation et cetera. One example would be of the Phaethon's myth, his action of burning the earth and heavens while driving his father Helios sun-chariot ended up by him being hurled thunderbolt by Zeus. His half-burn corpses then fell into the River Po, which its name interchangeable with Eridanus. In a later epic, the Argonauts were recorded to pass by the stench of Phaethon's corpse while they travelled upstream in the Eridanus. The author then relates with how the constellation Argo located next to another constellation, named Eridanus. This example is the more straightforward of other analysis put forward by the authors, potential reader are warned with the astronomical technical terms and concepts prevalent in this book.

In a way, this essay offered an alternative viewpoint towards mythology. We have the incumbent euhemerism way of interpreting mythology, its founder Snorri Sturluson believed that the mythological figures are real, historical events. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades was the leader of Dorian warbands et cetera. Interpreting mythology as astral events, extending our view towards the longing of the infinite space...If Spengler's still alive and to read this essay, he would say that this would be a perfect example for Faustian dread.

Gobbledegook that rambles on for quite some time. The stuff about Hamlet's Mill itself is quite cool. The mythological stories he shares are interesting. But the conclusions are muddled and lack any oomph. By the time he states that the Great Flood only happened in the processional equinox, I'm like wtf am I reading.

He bases a lot of presumptions on Pythagorean theory, which he does not define, but according to Wikipedia is basic astronomy and math.

Book could have used more star charts and equations, but I do not think the author was capable of providing them.

Read Fingerprints of the Gods instead. The theories may be just as ridiculous, but Graham Hancock is by far the superior writer.

The authors’ main thesis is that some myths are not describing historical or psychological phenomena, but are actually passing along astronomical information. Particularly, these myths describe the precession of the equinoxes and annual cycles. This interpretation makes up what felt like 5% of the book, with the other 95% being a recitation of various myths from all over the world. Anytime there was something moving in a circle, flowing, described as having corners or being on a flat plane, this was taken as evidence that the myth was actually talking about the stars. There were interesting motifs shared in the old and new world myths, such as the millstone spinning.

It is really a huge amount of raw data dumped on the reader, with a large number of myths cited in detail, to the point where I felt it was counterproductive and distracting. It could have been included as appendices. The theory also implies that a common civilization existed that developed the scientific knowledge that they then encoded in myth and subsequently spread as civilization fractured.

The book doesn’t get into archaeological evidence, solely relying on myths. The book also scoffs at other types of interpretations that are not astronomical, but surely not every myth must be astronomical, so I don’t know they have to be mutually exclusive.

Utterly brilliant, groundbreaking, necessary book, which overturns many flawed and biased assumptions about the "primitive" past. The mere 450 pages are so densely packed that it took me almost three stinkin' weeks to read, but it was worth every frustrating minute.

The fundamental narrative structures of popular stories are clearly derivative and based not on a convergence of psychological archetypes but rather on older forms which have been widely diffused throughout seemingly-unrelated ancient cultures. The later accretions and interpolations and subtractions can deform a story almost beyond recognition, yet by tracing subtle influences to earlier versions, one can reconstruct migratory pathways that lead past the traditional classical Greco-Roman derivations, blending the Indo-Europeans with outside traditions hitherto unrecognized by some philologists.

The opening demonstration of this principle shows how the "Hamlet scheme" in which a whirlpool is made by women working a grinding mill - a great wheel in the sky - has been found in various forms through the north and west of Europe, from Iceland down to Rome. Ancient stories in the Nordic Eddas continue on back through Ireland, the mainland, and down to the Near East; the tales recorded much later in the Shahnama are as ancient as the hymns of the Rig-Veda, and the whole mass circles throughout the Shamanism of the steppes and the Indus river valley religions and finally to a nearly global treasury of universal myth.

The heroes proclaim that they rule over recurring sections of the Zodiac - over heaven and time - in an essentially cosmological conception of the place of humanity, recurring in cycles of myth and ritual, eternal rounds, circles within cycles within wheels of a vast interconnected whole.

The problem is that prehistory is by definition unwritten, and only scraps and fragments of myth have survived from that time. Yet "an enormous intellectual achievement" is presupposed in the ancient view of the world, which even the earliest documents introduce in medias res. Archaic verbal imagery was in some cases a scientific language, preserved now only in fleeting implication discernible solely through painstaking correlation of hundreds of sources. As Giorgio de Santillana was professor of the history and philosophy of science at MIT, and Hertha von Dechend was professor of science at the University of Frankfurt (and a research associate at MIT), they are uniquely equipped for the task.

For instance, the "four corners" of the "earth" which moderns laughingly assume to be a primitive reference to a flat earth was actually the ideal plane made by the ecliptic spread between the four points of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices (it wasn't until around 1400 that "earth" was though to represent the actual planet). The conceptual spinning poles marking the wobble of the axial tilt turned the planet into the middle connecting point of a sort of cosmic hourglass figure. The precession of the equinoxes marked each world-age - Christ opened that of Pisces, Ichthys, the Fish, and is known as the sacrificed lamb of the constellation of the Ram, which follows next.

The book is a rambling treatise on a bewildering bunch of obscure myths and creation stories. I loved the parenthetical story of Il-mater, the daughter of the air, descending to the surface of the waters (much like the Holy Ghost - long understood to be a feminine mother-figure - hovered and brooded over the waters in Genesis), floating above the world until Ukko/Zeus sent his bird to her to create the world out of seven eggs with her.

We range over the Golden Age ending in the Twilight of the Gods; the world wars between Aesir and Vanir; the Celestial Wars of the Indians; the cosmic context of the otherwise-ludicrous Biblical story of Samson. We are treated to discussions on the rivers of forgetfulness, and speculations on how they are related to Native American myths. We wander through Plato's Pythagorean "world above" and the rivers and oceans of space between heaven and earth; the whirlpool with the tree overhanging it common from Greece to Polynesia, with "the way of the dead" being through the Milky Way. Ancient star maps are discussed, showcasing the constellations common from Egypt to China such as the Arrow. The extraction of the navel of the earth in stories from Turkestan to King Arthur and his sword are tied together.

The cosmological conceptions spreading from the Ancient Near East to India in the great Temple-building complexes which grew out into the Indonesian islands culminating in such monuments as Barabudur are shown to have commonalities with a great surplus of art, such as the African calabashes with cosmic scenes inscribed on their surfaces. There is an amazing discussion on all the different types of cosmic trees, such as the Yggdrasil. We search for eternal life with Gilgamesh (and other fire-bringers like Prometheus and Maui) and the goddesses in the great river of the sky and watch Plato's Timaean Demiurge creating a planetarium of sorts, creating souls in equal number with the stars and distributing them throughout the cosmos where, if they live well, they might one day journey back to their first star.

The Cosmic Tree of the Northwest Africans turning in a spiral marking the rotation of the stars; in the Kalevala, Ilmarinen climbs the great Tree to grasp the stars, and Vainamoinen sweeps him away in the whirlwind out to Pohjola. The Sampo - the Sanskrit skambha, "pillar, pole" - is part of the mill, with the tree which grows from it being the world axis, leading back to the Indo-European complex and beyond. The Shaman climbing the notches like stairs on his post or tree is mimicking an ascension to Heaven just as did the Mesopotamian Priest on his seven-planetary-spheres-tiered Ziggurat; the Chinese myths are even more explicitly calendrical and sky-conscious, and the Siberian cosmological drums contain a wealth of performance-based records of stellar events.

What is ultimately shown through the wild untamed mass of material Santillana and von Dechend have collected is how the typical view of cultural history as a steady rise from primitive man to our modern enlightened age is simply not based on evidence. As Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler have shown, high cultures existed far earlier than we have been taught to imagine.

One bit of advice: read all the appendices as you go along! (Yes, all 39 of 'em.) Don't save them for later; I found them absolutely vital to understanding the arguments presented. Those of us who are not multilingual would also do well to keep Google Translate open, as there are multiple quotes in different languages which add interesting details.

With a thesis this revolutionary, there are bound to be minor flaws as the details are worked out. The underlying problem with this book (among so many other books) - my major disagreement - is that it attempts to allegorize the myths more than always seems to be necessary; I deeply disagree that a cosmological interpretation inherently implies fictitiousness. A more literal and a more figurative reading are not mutually exclusive; that is, even if the myths are used to record and name astrological principles, the personages they take their names from don't always have to be imaginary as well. Both stories can often be true. If anything, the causation seems to me more likely to be reversed in this book; that is, the figures predated their use as labeling devices for the astronomical concepts. In the ancient cosmology, Nut can be the Mother of the Sky both symbolically when related to the zodiac, and literally as a Queen of Heaven giving birth to the Stars, the souls of humanity.

Then again, I'm just a stodgy euhemerist, so what do I know.

Fascinating and almost hypnotising in its treatment of mythology but the theory it proposes is rather meaningless. Let's say you're right and the ancients were super smart and had knowledge that was since lost. You've shown there is no way to recover it beyond knowledge we already have and can recognise fragments of in the myths. In my opinion all this is completely unsubstantiated, seeing patterns in toast, like bible code. Still fascinating, shame about how obtuse the writing is. Would read more.