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