Reddit mentions of Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth

You'll hear a lot of Joseph Campbell (the Masks of God series was my favorite)...and maybe even Carl Jung (...along that line consider Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness and M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy, Its sources and its transformations); but, may I suggest three books you've probably never heard of before:

1. Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture;
   
   
2. de Santilliana & von Dechen, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth --a very difficult read but very well worth it; and
   
   
3. Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture.
   
   These studies not only provide flesh for the body of myth that acts as a verbal echo of our nascent cultural memory, but also provides a framework for the work that those myths did in their original context, i.e., mitigating the sexual dynamics of our species and accounting for the observed regularity--naturally, first noticed by women, those avatars of language, which is to say, the hands that rock the cradle--between the cycles in the heavens and the female reproductive system...a happenstance that Marija Gimbutas has suggested that led to our earliest "gods," i.e., woman as a creative force.

https://www.amazon.com/Hamlets-Mill-Investigating-Knowledge-Transmission/dp/0879232153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484668827&sr=8-1&keywords=hamlet%27s+mill


this was first written a long time ago and the original research was done in the 60's and it's not really accepted yet. but there is a lot more research being done now that most ancient myths were allegories for ancient astronomers watching the night sky and taking detailed measurements over thousands of years. it's actually very interesting that the same numbers appear in most myths and religious works from around the world and most of these numbers relate to astronomy

some people doing this research say that the ancients knew about precession of the equinoxes a lot earlier than the greeks first "discovered" it and had even calculated the size of the earth from their measurements of the stars. and that the sumerians or babylonians may have even figured out calculus

Hey thank you for this information - most of it is completely new to me. I haven't had a chance to look at all the links yet, but I will definitely check them out since this topic is an interest of mine. The reddit post about the black stone is now deleted though so I can't read it. I read quite a lot of mythology, anthropology of religion and culture, etc. and this isn't the first time I've come across weird rituals (like walking in circles) in relation to not just meteorites but regular stones. It's so bizarre. I wonder where the stone worship originated. I still personally think it has something to do with astronomy or did originally. Maybe some primitive cultures mindlessly copied rituals they saw slightly more advanced cultures with astronomical knowledge doing without even understand what was going on. I don't know!

I started reading the article "In Defense of Pre-Islamic Arabian Culture" and so far it's really interesting. This part is especially interesting to me:

>“It is incontrovertible” that Islam took from the pagan Arabs “an entire pre-Islamic ritual, previously steeped in paganism.” This ritual is the veneration of and the pilgrimage to the Kaaba at Mecca. For the pre-Islamic Arabs, “the Kaaba was the center of worship where the Jahilis prayed and went round it seven times. The Jahilis went on pilgrimage to the Kaaba once a year in Dhul-Hijja for a week, and they performed the Waqfa [standing in or stoppage at] on Mount Arafat”

This ritual sounds a lot like descriptions of events from many other pagan myths. The ritual of circling around a pole, temple, tree, mountain, stone in a temple, etc. is pretty common. Do you happen to know anything about Hindu mythology? The Kaaba ritual sounds a lot like the descriptions of the churning of the ocean of milk in Hindu lore to me especially if you consider that the Hindu tale is probably an exaggerated metaphor that was meant to be interpreted and not taken literally. Wiki articles here and here.

I can't be sure, but from what I've read about ancient star worship (with gods being the personifications of the sun, moon, planets, individual stars, asterisms, and entire constellations) I'm pretty convinced that these stories/rituals are actually based upon the worship of pole stars, the axial tilt (which would be the world pillar, axis mundi, world tree like Yggdrasil, world mountain like Mount Olympus, etc.), and the "churning" refers to how the sky appears to turn (due to the earth's spin) around that central point (the pole star appears stationary). Here and here are two animations to show what I mean since I suck at explaining it. What do you think? I read that one corner of the Kaaba is actually aligned with the star Canopus and that the Kaaba is somehow aligned to the solstice or something so if that's true then the connection to astronomy is obviously undeniable and possibly links it to the concepts I mentioned.

You might be interested in reading this book. Here's the wiki. This has some excerpts but lacks most of the diagrams and images from the book. The book was written by two MIT researchers who claimed that most of the world religions and myths are actually about the axial procession. Many cultures talk of a churning, a mill, a cauldron, claim the sky dome is held up by a pillar, tree, or mountain (the axial tilt + pole star = the object holding up the sky), etc. and the authors claim these stories are references to the procession. Page 221 here and appendix 36 here discuss the Kaaba.

The book actually received a lot of criticism, but I just started reading it and it has a lot of really interesting information that I had never heard about before even though it's from 1969. They analyze myths from all over the world. So far it's kind of dryly written so I can only get through a couple pages at a time, but it's interesting nonetheless. I think you might like it. From what I've read about ancient astronomy in other cultures (Norse, Babylonians, Finnish culture, Chinese, Sumerians, Aboriginals, etc.) it seems likely to me that these myths actually are related to astronomy and that the authors weren't completely wrong. I think the myths are also layered in meaning. There are some weird spiritual/metaphysical aspects that don't make much sense to me, but the astronomical references seem fairly undeniable.

Also, I gotta say I snooped your comment history and love how you stand up against misogyny in Islam. It's something that bothers me more than I can explain (I'm a woman) and I get really sick of being accused of being "racist" for criticizing an ideology that has dehumanized my entire gender and demonized every single square inch of our bodies on a pretty much global scale. It's nice to see others standing up to it because sometimes I look at the state of the world and feel completely hopeless and depressed. It's heartbreaking to see people defend how we're treated and then try to assassinate the character of anyone who dares speak out or criticize it. So thank you.

>I really believe that there IS a grain of truth to all the stories and myths.

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, check out this book.

The post you linked is full of a lot of misinformation and half-truths.

There is a book called Hamlets Mill that is really worth reading and relates to this subject somewhat:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hamlets-Mill-Investigating-Knowledge-Transmission/dp/0879232153