Giorgio de Santillana was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). and co-author with Hertha von Dechend of the controversial book Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (1969). Recently, I picked up a copy of Hugh W. Nibley’s “magnum opus” One Eternal Round and quickly scanned its contents to find any references to de Santillana’s works. I was pleasantly surprised to find numerous citations.
Previously, Dr. Nibley wrote the following:
In recent years the early myths have acquired a new status and dignity. A steady accumulation of comparative studies tying this to that and these to those now crams the stacks of our libraries. Spread out before the mind’s eye, their myriad pages interweave into a grandiose texture, a vast shadowy tapestry in which we begin to discern the common backdrop of all history and religion. But the books are still sedulously segregated and widely distributed among the floors and alcoves of the library, and to bring them all together into the one organic whole from which they were taken is a task that will yet tax the capacity of the computer. Meanwhile, we must imagine the pieces of this huge jigsaw puzzle as heaped in separate piles, each representing a special field of study or cultural area, from Iceland to Polynesia. To date no one has taken the trouble to integrate the materials in even one of these hundred-odd piles; and as to taking up the whole lot and relating every pile to every other, so far only a few bold suggestions have come from men of genius like G. Santillana, Cyrus Gordon, or Robert Graves, whose proposals get chilly reception from specialized scholars who can only be alarmed by such boldness and appalled by the work entailed in painting the whole picture. But such study as has been done shows us that the old myths are by no means pure fiction, any more than they are all history. As the Muses told Hesiod, “We know both how to fib and how to tell the truth”; and, as Joseph Smith learned of the Apocrypha, “there are many things contained therein that are true, and there are many things contained therein that are not true” (see D&C 91)—all of which means that we must be very careful in accepting and condemning.1
Born in Rome, Giorgio de Santillana received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rome and did graduate work in philosophy in Paris and physics at the University of Milan. He was an assistant to Federigo Enriques2 at Rome and was asked to help organise a department for the History of Science.” In the 1930’s, he emigrated from Italy to the United States and joined the faculty at M.I.T in 1941 as Professor of English and History.3 He was the author of numerous works such as:
- The Crime of Galileo
- Dialogue on the Great World Systems (ed.)
- The Renaissance Philosophers – The Age of Adventure
- The Development of Rationalism and Empiricism
- The Origins of Scientific Thought
Why was – and is – Hamlet’s Mill controversial? In The New York Review of Books, Sir Edmund Ronald Leach, a British social anthropologist, wrote disparagingly:
. . . the murky confusion generated by reading any random twenty pages of Hamlet’s Mill is strongly reminiscent of Frobenius. Indeed, the whole operation is not much more than a gloss on two early works of that extraordinary author, Die Mathematik der Oceaner (1900) and Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904).
The theme of Hamlet’s Mill is that once upon a time (when or where is not very clear, but 4000 B.C. somewhere in the Middle East seems to be what the authors have in mind) there was an archaic civilization whose members had a sophisticated theory of the relations between time and astronomy. This theory rested on an understanding of the annual cycle of the constellations of the Zodiac and a recognition of the precession of the equinoxes, knowledge of which had been incorporated into a coherent cosmological schema expressed in the language of myth. Later mythological systems whether recorded in Greece in the fourth century B.C., in Scandinavia in the twelfth century A.D., or North Africa, or Guiana, or Polynesia at the present day, are all truncated remnants of this ancient astrological-astronomical mythology, and close attention to these “relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages” will allow part of the ancient knowledge to be reconstructed.4
In response, Dr. de Santillana wrote concerning this “specialized scholar”:
- “Myths and Scriptures”. Old Testament and Related Studies. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1986. 41. This article was originally published in the October 1971 New Era magazine.↩
- An Italian mathematician who is known as “the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry.” Wikipedia. 29 May 2010.↩
- Thompson, Garyd D. “Critics and Criticisms of Hamlet’s Mill”. 29 May 2010.↩
- “Bedtime Story”. 29 May 2010. The entire review is not available online. A subscription is necessary to read the whole of the book review.↩
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