THE |
|
a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects. |
To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.astronomy,alt.archaeology,sci.archaeology,alt.pagan.magick,alt.magick From: Seyfert-1Subject: Mill Correlates? (Hamlet/Xiwangmu/Who?) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 05:33:57 GMT Orig-To: sacredlandscapelist@yahoogroups.com (SL list) 50030614 viii Archaeoastronomy: Mill Metaphors? what other metaphors for Hamlet's Mill in myth that relate to natural patterns (such as the planetary spin in coursing the stars and its transit through precessional wobble, marking changes of Age)? here's a quote from "Hamlet's Mill" (the book) that serves to introduce the idea. I'll extend this below with some suggestions of my own, and then challenge you to come up with some contributions to the topic. :> "Amlodhi [from the Icelandic legend of the 'Hamlet'] was identified, in the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, by the ownership of a fabled mill which, in his own time, ground out peace and plenty. Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt; and now finally, having landed at the bottom of the sea, it is grinding rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom (i.e., the grinding stream, from the verb *mala*, "to grind"), which is supposed to be a way to the land of the dead. This imagery stands, as the evidence develops, for an astronomical process, the secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which determines world-ages, each numbering thousands of years. Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world. The image of the mill and its owner yielded elsewhere to more sophisticated ones, more adherent to celestial events. In Plato's powerful mind, the figure stood out as the Craftsman God, the Demiurge, who shaped the heavens; but even Plato did not escape the idea he had interited, of catastrophes and the periodic rebuilding of the world. Tradition will show that the measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above, dictated by the "Seven Sages," as they are often cryptically mentioned in India and elsewhere. They turn out to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere. These dominant stars of the Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets as they move in different placements and configurations along the zodiac. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their conventional language, called the two Bears the Hands of Rhea (the Lady of Turning Heaven), and called the planets the Hounds of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Far away to the south, the mysterious ship *Argo* with its Pilot star held the depths of the past; and the Galaxy was the Bridge out of Time. These notions appear to have been common doctrine in the age before history -- all over the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolitic period. ... Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future.... ... ...The theory about "how the world began" seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic "original sin" whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being. This is not to suggest that this archaic cosmology will show any great physical discoveries, although it required prodigious feats of concentration and computing. What it did was to mark out the unity of the universe, and of man's mind, reaching out to its farthest limits.... ...The science of astrophysics reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself into the concepts of today's astrophysics short of schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the unconcei- vable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos an order of time and eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. Yet it was a prodigiously vast theory, with no concessions to merely human sentiments. It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man's role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics. Not a forgiving universe, not a world of mercy. That surely not. Inexorable as the stars in their courses, *miserationis parcissimae*, the Romans used to say. Yet it was a world somhow not unmindful of man, one in which there was an accepted place for everything, righfully and not only statistically, where no sparrow could fall unnoted, and where even what was rejected through its own error would not go down to eternal perdition; for the order of Number and Time was a total order preserving all, of which all were members, gods and men and animals, trees and crystals and even absurd errant stars, all subject to law and measure. This is what Plato knew, who could still speak the language of archaic myth. He made myth consonant with his thought, as he built the first modern philosophy. We have trusted his clues as landmarks even on occasions when he professes to speak "not quite seriously." He gave us a first rule of thumb; he knew what he was talking about. Behind Plato there stands the imposing body of doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, but rich with the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregant with a science and a metaphysics that were to flower in Plato's time. From it come such words as "theorem," "theory," and "philosophy." This in its turn rests on what might be called a proto-Pythagorean phase, spread over the East but with a focus on Susa. And then there was something else again, the stark numerical computing of Babylon. From it all came the strange principle: "Things are numbers." Once having grasped a thread going back in time, then the test of later doctrines with their own historical developments lies in their congruence with tradition preserved intact even if half understood. For there are seeds which propagate themselves along the jetstream of time. ... ...the wilting away of classical studies, the abandonment of any living familiarity with Greek and Latin has cut the *omphalloessa*, the umbilical cord which connected our culture -- at least at its top level -- with Greece, in the same manner in which men of the Pytha- gorean and Orphic tradition were tied up through Plato and a few others with the most ancient Near East.... ------------------------------------------------ "Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time, aka "Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth' [Cover], by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Deschend, Nonpareil Books, 1977; pp. 2-10. ================================================== Xiwangmu had a Grindstone and I looked it up: [Xiwangmu, Queen Mother of the West] is controller of the Grindstone and the Five Shards Constellations of Heavens. ...Command of constellations indicates her power in maintaining cosmic balance and her membership in the group of high deities controlling human fate. In her wild hair she wears the ornament associated with her in iconography ever after. The *sheng* headdress remains one of the goddess's most fixed attributes, although its shape alters over time. The headdress has received various interpretations. One plausible theory identifies it with the brake mechanism of the loom, connecting the goddess with the creation and maintenance of the universe through literally weaving its fabric. The *sheng* also occurs' independently of the Queen Mother, as an auspicious symbol.... [and] resembles an axle with two wheels attached, one at either end. They were depicted in tombs and exchanged as gifts on festivals such as Double Seven, which also involved demonstrations of women's skill in weaving. The picture of the goddess as weaver or creator contrasts with her image as tiger or destroyer. Both seem essential parts of her identity. The *sheng* headdress may have been a crown of stars originally. ... The interpretation of her headdress as a star crown does not exclude its reading as part of a loom: the Queen Mother is connected with the Weaver Girl Star and with weaving in other contexts. --------------------------------------------- "Transcendance and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China", by Suzanne E. Cahill, Stanford Univ., 1997; p. 16-7. ============================================ so Grindstone is right up there, and it seems possible also to add *Headdress* to the Mill metaphors. Looms? here's a description of K'un-lun Mtn that ties it into the above material from Hamlet's Mill. notice the 'overturned basin' shape and the focus on the Big Dipper: This mountain's height above level ground is thirty-six thousand *li*. At its summit are three corners. Its area is ten thousand *li*. Its shape is like an overturned basin.... This is where the Queen Mother of the West reigns, where the realized officials and transcendent numina are revered. Above it penetrates through to the Dark Mechanism {double star in the Big Dipper}. Primal pneuma flow and spread out. The Jade Crossbar of the Five Constants {handle of the Big Dipper} governs the internal structure of the nine heavens and regulates yin and yang. As for categories and phenomena in their flocks being engendered, and rare and strange characteristics separately emerging: in all cases they depend on her. ------------------------------------------------ Ibid., Cahill; p. 38. ===================== can you come up with any other Hamlet-gods? post them here and dissect their relation to the topic of archaeoastronomy. thanks! extra credit: is Hamlet someone who makes it all perfect by arighting the askew rotating object (Mill), or throwing everything into disarray and knocking the cosmos off it's old axis? or both? Seyfert-1 nagasiva@luckymojo.com
The Arcane Archive is copyright by the authors cited.
Send comments to the Arcane Archivist: tyaginator@arcane-archive.org. |
Did you like what you read here? Find it useful?
Then please click on the Paypal Secure Server logo and make a small donation to the site maintainer for the creation and upkeep of this site. |
The ARCANE ARCHIVE is a large domain,
organized into a number of sub-directories, each dealing with a different branch of religion, mysticism, occultism, or esoteric knowledge. Here are the major ARCANE ARCHIVE directories you can visit: |
|
interdisciplinary:
geometry, natural proportion, ratio, archaeoastronomy
mysticism: enlightenment, self-realization, trance, meditation, consciousness occultism: divination, hermeticism, amulets, sigils, magick, witchcraft, spells religion: buddhism, christianity, hinduism, islam, judaism, taoism, wicca, voodoo societies and fraternal orders: freemasonry, golden dawn, rosicrucians, etc. |
SEARCH THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
There are thousands of web pages at the ARCANE ARCHIVE. You can use ATOMZ.COM
to search for a single word (like witchcraft, hoodoo, pagan, or magic) or an
exact phrase (like Kwan Yin, golden ratio, or book of shadows):
OTHER ESOTERIC AND OCCULT SITES OF INTEREST
Southern
Spirits: 19th and 20th century accounts of hoodoo,
including slave narratives & interviews
|