From Atlantis to the Sphinx (38 page)

Rather more worrying was the fact that the next Mayan cycle will end on 22 December 2012, when the sun’s magnetic field will again reverse. Cotterell points out that there is now a fall in fertility in the developed countries, and that this may be due to this change in the sunspot cycle.

Graham Hancock, we may recall, cites the year 2030 as the time when the earth’s magnetic poles are expected to reverse, causing widespread catastrophes. If Cotterell is correct, the earth may experience problems 18 years before that time.

But then, after all, Hancock and Cotterell may both be wrong. The earth survived its previous change in the sun’s magnetic field—in AD 627—without apparent catastrophe. In that year, the Roman emperor Heraclitus invaded Assyria and Mesopotamia, and defeated the Persians near Nineveh, the Prophet Mahomet harassed the Meccans from Medina, and the Japanese despatched envoys to China. None of these seemed to notice the reversal of the sun’s magnetic field.

As to the earth’s magnetic field, scientists at present have no idea what causes it, let alone why its polarity occasionally reverses; so there can clearly be no scientific reason why it should happen in 2030 rather than in a thousand years’ time.

Cotterell’s ideas have nevertheless made an important contribution to the study of ancient civilisations. He appears to have demonstrated very convincingly that the Maya calendar has a sound scientific foundation, and—once again—that ancient man seemed to know far more about the heavens than modern astronomers give him credit for.

Moreover,
if
the Maya based their calendar on the sunspot cycle, then we must assume that this knowledge was based on intuition rather than purely scientific interest. Schwaller de Lubicz says that each living

being is in contact with the energies of the universe, and that each hour of the day has its different
neters
or vibrations. If Alexander Marshack is correct, then Cro-Magnon man studied the heavens because he was aware of these energies or vibrations, and the same undoubtedly applies to the Incas and the Mayas.

I have deliberately left until this point a discussion of one of the most puzzling and frustrating books ever written on the problem of astronomy and ancient man:
Hamlets Mill
(1960), by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dachend. By comparison with
Hamlets Mill
, Graves’s
White Goddess
seems a model of clarity.

Santillana was a highly respected professor of the history of science, but
Hamlets Mill
was rejected by academic publishers, and finally had to be issued by one of the lesser known commercial publishers. So his fellow academics had two reasons for ignoring it: not only was it incredibly obscure, but the fact that it was brought out by a non-academic press amounted to an admission that it fell below acceptable standards of scholarship. In fact, the general academic opinion seemed to be that it proved Santillana had joined the lunatic fringe.

Yet in spite of its obscurity, the book has slowly made its way—for it is impossible to read more than a few pages without recognising that it is saying something of tremendous importance, and that Santillana knows exactly what he is talking about.

For a long time, Santillana had been aware that there was a point where the history of science blended into mythology. And
Hamlets Mill
makes it clear that, at some point, he must have received a revelation about mythology that left him overwhelmed with the sense that he had been entrusted with some amazing secret of the past.

His collaborator, Hertha von Dachend, was an anthropologist, a pupil of that same Frobenius who had seen the African pygmies shooting an arrow into a drawing of an antelope. She also felt that myth was more than primitive nonsense. And she ‘hit pay dirt’ (in Santillana’s phrase) when she noticed that two tiny Pacific islands, undistinguished except for their extraordinary number of sacred sites, were situated precisely on the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn—the point at which the sun ‘stands still’ and then retraces its steps at the solstices. Her observation confirmed that ‘primitive man’ was deeply concerned with astronomy, and was therefore less primitive than anyone supposed.

Santillana had already reached the same conclusion. Years before, he had recognised that one of the basic characteristics of ancient man was ‘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
.’

Long before writing was invented, says Santillana, man was obsessed by measures and counting, by numbers—and by astronomy. And he goes on to speak—in language reminiscent of Alexander Thom—of those ‘Newtons and Einsteins long forgotten’.

This ancient knowledge, Santillana felt, was based upon
time
, ‘the time of music’ (of which we shall have more to say later).

The basic argument of the book can be expressed very simply: that ancient man not only knew about the precession of the equinoxes (which was supposed to have been discovered by the Greek Hipparchus in 134 BC), but encoded this knowledge in dozens of myths. This is an interesting thesis, but hardly sounds epoch making. But that is only half the story.

Santillana says:

This book is highly unconventional... To begin with, there is no system that can be presented in modern 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.

In other words, what the normal reader expects him to do is to discuss ancient myths, and then ‘explain’ them in terms of precession of the equinoxes. He is trying to say that it is not as simple as that. ‘The subject has the nature of a hologram, something that has to be present as a whole to the mind.’

There is a simpler way of expressing what Santillana is trying to explain. All over the world, in myths of dozens of different cultures, there are legends that are obviously expressions of the same story. Sir James Frazer made this the starting point of his famous
Golden Bough.
Frazer decided that the key to the mystery was the notion of the earth’s fertility, the need for a good harvest. The king was a magician whose powers ensured rainfall. If they began to fail, he was offered as a sacrifice to the gods. Eventually, the sacrifice became symbolic, and turned into a ritual in which the god was buried, and sprang up again in the spring, like John Barleycorn...

The problem here, of course, is that it presupposes that myths developed after man became a farmer. What emerges from
Hamlet's Mill
is Santillana’s powerful sense that they are far, far older. There are even times when we suspect that he is hinting that they stretch back tens of thousands of years.

In effect, Santillana is presenting a rich tapestry of legends of the Eskimoes, Icelanders, Norsemen, American Indians, Finns, Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, Romans, ancient Greeks, ancient Hindus, ancient Egyptians, and dozens of other nations, and asking: how did these strange similarities develop unless myths have some common origin? And this origin, he is inclined to believe, lies in astronomy.

His starting point is a corn-grinding mill that belonged to the Icelandic hero Amlodhi (whose name has come down to us as Hamlet). This mill originally ground out peace and plenty; it existed in the days of the ‘Golden Age’. This came to an end, and the mill then ground out salt. Finally, it ended at the bottom of the sea, grinding up sand, and creating the whirlpool called the Maelstrom—which Edgar Allen Poe used to such dramatic effect. (‘Mala’ means to grind.)

Why a mill? Presumably because one grinding wheel, the sun, goes through the constellations in one direction—Aries, Taurus, Gemini and so on—while the equinoxes move in the opposite direction—Gemini, Taurus, Aries.

What was embodied in the mill was the idea ‘of catastrophes and the periodic rebuilding of the world’. So ancient myths are about catastrophes like the Flood. But the ‘ages’ that end in catastrophe are due to the precession of the equinoxes, which means that we move from age to age—the age of Leo in 10,000 BC down to our present age of Pisces, and the coming age of Aquarius.

Obviously, if the ancients thought that precession was connected with periodic great catastrophes that destroyed a large part of mankind, they were going to attach great importance to it, and study it minutely. According to Santillana, Amlodhi’s mill is an image of precession of the equinoxes.

In our own time, ‘ancient astronaut’ theorists like von Daniken have pointed to the evidence for sophisticated knowledge among the ancients, and argued that this proves that this knowledge was brought to Earth by visitors from outer space. In fact, the precession theory advanced by Santillana is fairly conclusive evidence that there were no such visitors. If there had been, they would have explained to those early astronomers that precession was simply due to the tilt of the earth’s axis, which makes the earth wobble like a top or gyroscope, and that it has no great universal significance—in which case, the rich cluster of myths explored in
Hamlets Mill
would never have come into existence.

Let me offer an example of Santillana’s complex method of argument. Chapter 21, ‘The Great God Pan is Dead’, begins by recounting Plutarch’s story of how a voice from a Greek island called out to the pilot of a ship—an Egyptian named Thamus—‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ Since it was calm and still as he passed Palodes, Thamus did as he was asked, and there were great cries and lamentations from the shore. The emperor Tiberius, who was interested in mythology, sent for Thamus in order to hear the story from his own lips.

Christians were inclined to interpret the story as meaning that Christ was dead (since Jesus was crucified in the reign of Tiberius). But Santillana goes on to cite many oddly similar myths. In the Tyrol, there are legends of
Fanggen
, tree spirits who sometimes enter human homes as servants. In one story collected by Grimm, a man on his way home hears a voice calling: ‘Yoke bearer, yoke bearer, tell them at home that Giki-Gaki is dead.’ When he repeats this, the housemaid bursts into tears and vanishes. The ‘yoke’ referred to, according to Santillana, is the axle of Amlodhi’s mill.

There are many variants. A man is watching a meeting of cats when one of them jumps on a wall and shouts: ‘Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead.’ When he gets home, he tells his wife what he has seen, and their house cat shouts: ‘Then I am king of the cats’, and vanishes up the chimney.

Is it possible, asks Santillana, that Plutarch’s ship is the constellation Argo, and that it has the dead body of Osiris on board? And is it chance that the pilot is called Thamus, like Plato’s king who criticised Thoth (the god Mercury) for inventing writing, which made man mentally lazy, and brought an end to an age of ‘integral knowledge’ of the universe?

He goes on to tell another story of women lamenting the death of a god, this time Tammuz, who figures in Frazer as a grain god who dies with the season. But in this context, the minor god Tammuz is mentioned in context with many important gods; what is he doing in such distinguished company?

The answer, says Santillana, appears when we learn the date of the festival of Tammuz. It took place on the night of 19-20 June, the date that marked the beginning of the Egyptian year. On that day, the dog star Sirius rose just before the sun (its ‘heliacal rising’). Now the Egyptians venerated Sirius because over 3000 years, it continued to rise at that date,
in defiance of precession of the equinoxes
.

That sounds impossible, since
all
stars are affected by precession. But Sirius is, relatively speaking, very close to Earth—the second closest of all stars—and has a considerable ‘proper motion’, which enables it to (apparently) defy precession.

There was another reason, to do with the fact that the ancient Egyptians used a calendar which, like the Roman Julian calendar, had only 365 days in the year, instead of 365.25, and this slight inaccuracy again enabled Sirius apparently to defy precession.

So when Sirius also succumbed to precession, as it eventually did, the Great God Pan was dead.

It can be seen why Santillana’s method of argument baffled the scholars, as he leaps bewilderingly from the Great God Pan to servant girls and tabby cats and Plato, and a dozen other examples that I have forborne to include, to end up with precession and Sirius.

Yet again, it must be stated that it is impossible to understand
Hamlet’s Mill
unless we grasp that it is not just an attempt to argue that ancient myths reflect a knowledge of precession. If this was all it amounted to, Santillana could have managed it in a short essay. He needed a large and extremely dense book to convey what he wanted to bring to our attention: the incredible richness of world mythology, and the fact that it seems to point to some way of apprehending the universe that, in our age of written information and sound-bytes, we have long forgotten. He even goes out of his way to attack one of the greatest students of myth, Ernst Cassirer, whom he feels to be too ‘reductionist’. He obviously feels that he is saying something too
big
to be stated in a logical form and in so many words. He often comments that to explore such and such a connection would require a book in itself. Perhaps if he had lived long enough to read Hancock’s
Fingerprints of the Gods
and Bauval’s
Orion Mystery
, he might have begun to feel that a few people were beginning to understand what he was talking about.

We have so far made no mention of another culture that has strong claims to be the ‘cradle of civilisation’: that of ancient India.

The generally accepted view of India was that it was originally occupied by a primitive people called Dravidians, and that some time between 1500 and 1200 BC, blue-eyed Aryans descended from Afghanistan and swept the Dravidians south, then establishing their own ‘Vedic’ culture—a culture whose greatest literary monuments are the Vedic hymns.