Page 242 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 30

The Cosmic Tree and the Mill of the Gods

In their brilliant and far-reaching study Hamlet’s Mill, Professors de
Santillana and von Dechend present a formidable array of mythical and
iconographic evidence to demonstrate the existence of a curious
phenomenon. For some inexplicable reason, and at some unknown date,
it seems that certain archaic myths from all over the world were ‘co-
opted’ (no other word will really do) to serve as vehicles for a body of
complex technical data concerning the precession of the equinoxes. The
importance of this astonishing thesis, as one leading authority on ancient
measurement has pointed out, is that it has fired the first salvo in what
may prove to be ‘a Copernican revolution in current conceptions of the
development of human culture.’
1
Hamlet’s Mill was published in 1969, more than a quarter of a century
ago, so the revolution has been a long time coming. During this period,
however, the book has been neither widely distributed among the general
public nor widely understood by scholars of the remote past. This state of
affairs has not come about because of any inherent problems or
weaknesses in the work. Instead, in the words of Martin Bernal, professor
of Government Studies at Cornell University, it has happened because
‘few archaeologists, Egyptologists and ancient historians have the
combination of time, effort and skill necessary to take on the very
technical arguments of de Santillana.’
2
What those arguments predominantly concern is the recurrent and
persistent transmission of a ‘precessional message’ in a wide range of
ancient myths. And, strangely enough, many of the key images and
symbols that crop up in these myths—notably those that concern a
‘derangement of the heavens’—are also to be found embedded in the
ancient traditions of worldwide cataclysm reviewed in Chapters Twenty-
four and Twenty-five.
In Norse mythology for example, we saw how the wolf Fenrir, whom the
gods had so carefully chained up, broke his bonds at last and escaped:
‘He shook himself and the world trembled. The ash-tree Yggdrasil was
shaken from its roots to its topmost branches. Mountains crumbled or
split from top to bottom ... The earth began to lose its shape. Already the
stars were coming adrift in the sky.’
In the opinion of de Santillana and von Dechend, this myth mixes the

1 Livio Catullo Stecchini, ‘Notes on the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great
Pyramid’, in Secrets of the Great Pyramid, pp. 381-2.
2 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vintage
Books, London, 1991, p. 276.

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