Godly Mot

Since Christmas, I’ve been slowly working my way through Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating The Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio De Santillana & Hertha Von Dechend. It’s a fascinating read, despite being esoterically organised, bone dry and, frankly, riddled with much bunkum.

In brief, De Santillana & Von Dechend reckon that common themes in the mythology of unconnected cultures are not evidence of the collective unconscious Chinese-whispering records of cataclysmic events in pre-history, but proof that myths are codified memetic transmission devices for detailed astrological and pseudo-scientific knowledge from the earliest human civilisations. Something like that, anyway.

They seem to be on to something, or at least capable of forging links between myths and astronomical knowledge - they’re certainly convincing when it comes to, say, the assertion that all primitive cultures understood equinoctal precession, and that the structure of a whole host of myths can be interpreted as relating to that knowledge - but I’ll save further notes for a future post when I’ve finished the book.

For the time being, I’ll just share this snippet quoted from the Ras Shamra texts, myths of the Ugarit (better known as Canaanites), those clever folk who invented the 30-letter ur-alphabet from which all phonetic alphabets derive. For obvious reasons, it made me piss myself:

She seizes the Godly Mot
With swords she does cleave him
With fan she does winnow him
With fire she does burn him
With hand-mill she grinds him
In the field she does sow him
Birds eat his remnants
Consuming his portions
Flitting from remnant to remnant.

(Concerned readers will be pleased to learn that my godly namesake somehow manages to spring back to life a couple of clay tablets later.)

Posted at 6pm on 24/01/05 by Jack Mottram to the books category.
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Tags: anthropology, meta, theory