360 mortal years.27
The Kali Yuga, therefore, at 1200 years of the gods, turns out to have a
duration of 432,000 mortal years.28 One Mahayuga, or Great Age (made
up of the 12,000 divine years contained in the four lesser Yugas) is
equivalent to 4,320,000 years of mortals. A thousand such Mahayugas
(which constitute a Kalpa, or Day of Brahma) extend over 4,320,000,000
24 For fuller details see The Hung League and J. S. M. Ward, The Hung Society, Baskerville
Press, London, 1925 (in three volumes).
25 W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology: Vedic and Puranic, Heritage Publishers, New Delhi,
1991, p. 353.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
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ordinary years,29 again supplying the digits for basic precessional
calculations. Separately there are Manvantaras (periods of Manu) of which
we are told in the scriptures that ‘about 71 systems of four Yugas elapse
during each Manvantara.’30 The reader will recall that one degree of
precessional motion along the ecliptic requires 71.6 years to complete, a
number that can be rounded down to ‘about 71’ in India just as easily as
it was rounded up to 72 in Ancient Egypt.
The Kali Yuga, with a duration of 432,000 mortal years, is, by the way,
our own. ‘In the Kali Age,’ the scriptures say, ‘shall decay flourish, until
the human race approaches annihilation.’31
Dogs, uncles and revenge
It was a dog that brought us to these decaying times.
We came here by way of Sirius, the Dog Star, who stands at the heel of
the giant constellation of Orion where it towers in the sky above Egypt. In
that land, as we have seen, Orion is Osiris, the god of death and
resurrection, whose numbers—perhaps by chance—are 12, 30, 72, and
360. But can chance account for the fact that these and other prime
integers of precession keep cropping up in supposedly unrelated
mythologies from all over the world, and in such stolid but enduring
vehicles as calendar systems and works of architecture?
Santillana and von Dechend, Jane Sellers and a growing body of other
scholars rule out chance, arguing that the persistence of detail is
indicative of a guiding hand.
If they are wrong, we need to find some other explanation for how such
specific and inter-related numbers (the only obvious function of which is
to calculate precession) could by accident have got themselves so widely
imprinted on human culture.
But suppose they are not wrong? Suppose that a guiding hand really
was at work behind the scenes?
Sometimes, when you slip into Santillana’s and von Dechend’s world of
myth and mystery, you can almost feel the influence of that hand ... Take
the business of the dog ... or jackal, or wolf, or fox. The subtle way this
shadowy canine slinks from myth to myth is peculiar—stimulating, then
baffling you, always luring you onwards.
Indeed, it was this lure we followed from the Mill of Amlodhi to the
myth of Osiris in Egypt. Along the way, according to the design of the
ancient sages (if Sellers, Santillana and von Dechend are right) we were
first encouraged to build a clear mental picture of the celestial sphere.
Second, we were provided with a mechanistic model so that we could
29 Ibid., pp. 353-4.
30 Ibid., p. 354.
31 Ibid., p. 247.
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visualize the great changes precession of the equinoxes periodically
effects in all the coordinates of the sphere. Finally, after allowing the dog
Sirius to open the way for us, we were given the figures to calculate
precession more or less exactly.
Nor is Sirius, in his eternal station at Orion’s heel, the only doggish
character around Osiris. We saw in Chapter Eleven how Isis (who was both
the wife and sister of Osiris32) searched for her dead husband’s body after
he had been murdered by Set (who, incidentally, was also her brother,
and the brother of Osiris). In this search, according to ancient tradition,
she was assisted by dogs (jackals in some versions).33 Likewise,
mythological and religious texts from all periods of Egyptian history
assert that the jackal-god Anubis ministered to the spirit of Osiris after
his death and acted as his guide through the underworld.34 (Surviving
vignettes depict Anubis as virtually identical in appearance to Upuaut, the
Opener of the Ways.)
Last but not least, Osiris himself was believed to have taken the form of
a wolf when he returned from the underworld to assist his son Horus in
the final battle against Set.35
Investigating this kind of material, one sometimes has the spooky sense
of being manipulated by an ancient intelligence which has found a way to
reach out to us across vast epochs of time, and for some reason has set
us a puzzle to solve in the language of myth.
If it were just dogs that kept cropping up again and again, it would be
easy to brush off such weird intuitions. The dog phenomenon seems
more likely to be coincidence than anything else. But it isn’t just dogs.
The ways between the two very different myths of Osiris and Amlodhi’s
Mill (which nonetheless both seem to contain accurate scientific data
about precession of the equinoxes) are kept open by another strange
common factor. Family relationships are involved.
Amlodhi/Amleth/Hamlet is always a son who revenges the murder of his
father by entrapping and killing the murderer. The murderer,
furthermore, is always the father’s own brother, i.e., Hamlet’s uncle.36
This is precisely the scenario of the Osiris myth. Osiris and Seth are
brothers.37 Seth murders Osiris. Horus, the son of Osiris, then takes
revenge upon his uncle.38
Another twist is that the Hamlet character often has some sort of
incestuous relationship with his sister.39 In the case of Kullervo, the
32 For details of these complicated family relationships, see Egyptian Book of the Dead,
Introduction, p. XLVIIIff.
33 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 366.
34 The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, p. 71.
35 Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 367.
36 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 2.
37 Egyptian Book of the Dead, Introduction, p. XLIX-LI.
38 Ibid.
39 Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 32-4.
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Finnish Hamlet, there is a poignant scene in which the hero, returning
home after a long absence, meets a maiden in the woods, gathering
berries. They lie together. Only later do they discover that they are
brother and sister. The maiden drowns herself at once. Later, with ‘the
black dog Musti’ padding along at his heels, Kullervo wanders into the
forest and throws himself upon his sword.40
There are no suicides in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, but there is the
incest of Osiris and his sister Isis. Out of their union is born Horus the
avenger.
So once again it seems reasonable to ask: what is going on? Why are
there all these apparent l
inks and connections? Why do we have these
‘strings’ of myths, ostensibly about different subjects, all of which prove
capable in their own ways of shedding light on the phenomenon of
precession of the equinoxes? And why do all these myths have dogs
running through them, and characters who seem unusually inclined to
incest, fratricide and revenge? It surely drives scepticism beyond its limits
to suggest that so many identical literary devices could keep on turning
up purely by chance in so many different contexts.
If not by chance, however, then who exactly was responsible for
creating this intricate and clever connecting pattern? Who were the
authors and designers of the puzzle and what motives might they have
had?
Scientists with something to say
Whoever it was, they must have been smart—smart enough to have
observed the infinitesimal creep of precessional motion along the ecliptic
and to have calculated its rate at a value uncannily close to that obtained
by today’s advanced technology.
It therefore follows that we are talking about highly civilized people.
Indeed, we are talking about people who deserve to be called scientists.
They must, moreover, have lived in extremely remote antiquity because
we can be certain that the creation and dissemination of the common
heritage of precessional myths on both sides of the Atlantic did not take
place in historic times. On the contrary the evidence suggests that all
these myths were ‘tottering with age’ when what we call history began
about 5000 years ago.41
The great strength of the ancient stories was this: as well as being for
ever available for use and adaptation free of copyright, like intellectual
chameleons, subtle and ambiguous, they had the capacity to change their
colour according to their surroundings. At different times, in different
continents, the ancient tales could be retold in a variety of ways, but
40 Ibid., p. 33.
41 Ibid., p. 119.
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would always retain their essential symbolism and always continue to
transmit the coded precessional data they had been programmed with at
the outset.
But to what end?
As we see in the next chapter, the long slow cycles of precession are
not limited in their consequences to a changing view of the sky. This
celestial phenomenon, born of the earth’s axial wobble, has direct effects
on the earth itself. In fact, it appears to be one of the principal correlates
of the sudden onset of ice ages and their equally sudden and catastrophic
decay.
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Chapter 32
Speaking to the Unborn
It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient
world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind
survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for
our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and
devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during
the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice
sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took
place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical
period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should
have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified
their forefathers.
Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of
cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.1 Indeed
the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently
remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been
‘written’ by the same ‘author’.
Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or
superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who
appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying
geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to
the shocked and demoralized survivors?
White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this universal
figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is
remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the
primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2 Viracocha, in South America, was
said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood;
Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops,
mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth
Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.
Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between
scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet
1 See Chapter Twenty-four for details of flood myths. The same kind of convergence
among supposedly unconnected myths also occurs with regard to precession of the
equinoxes. The mills, the characters who work and own and eventually break them, the
brothers and nephews and uncles, the theme of revenge, the theme of incest, the dogs
that flit silently from story to story, and the exact numbers needed to calculate
precessional motion—all crop up everywhere, from culture to culture and from age to
age, propagating themselves effortlessly along the jet-stream of time.
2 Diodorus Siculus, Book I, 14:1-15, translated by C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library,
London, 1989, pp. 47-9.
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unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?
And could the myths be attempts to communicate?
A message in the bottle of time
‘Of all the other stupendous inventions,’ Galileo once remarked,
what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate
his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or
place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not
yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater
difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let
this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3
If the ‘precessional message’ identified by scholars like Santillana, von
Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at
communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn’t
just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn’t that have been easier
than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got
destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that
the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the
enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more
than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It
must be obvious that in such circumstances a written legacy to the future
would be of no valu
e at all, because nobody would be able to make sense
of it.
What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the
kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically
advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years
into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics
is one of them—and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a
lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.
Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical
points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid
and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most
conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction
of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall
see).
Another ‘constant’ in our solar system is the language of time: the
great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of
precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message
that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be
instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent
for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost
3 Galileo, cited in Hamlet’s Mill, p. 10.
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imperceptible reverse motion that the sun appears to make along the
ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars (one degree in 71.6
years, 30 degrees in 2148 years, and so on).
The sense that a correlation exists is strengthened by something else. It
is neither as firm nor as definite as the number of syllables in the
Rigveda; nevertheless, it feels relevant. Through powerful stylistic links
and shared symbolism, myths to do with global cataclysms and with
precession of the equinoxes quite frequently intermesh. A detailed
interconnectedness exists between these two categories of tradition, both
of which additionally bear what appear to be the recognizable
fingerprints of a conscious design. Quite naturally, therefore, one is
prompted to discover whether there might not be an important
connection between precession of the equinoxes and global
catastrophes.
Mill of pain
Although several different mechanisms of an astronomical and geological