Hamlet's Mill

Hamlet's Mill (first published by Gambit, Boston, 1969) by Giorgio de Santillana (a professor of the history of science at MIT) and Hertha von Dechend (a scientist at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität) is a nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy. The book is thematically similar to Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God.

The essential premise of the book is that much mythology and ancient literature have been badly misinterpreted and that they generally relate to a sort of monomyth conveying significant scientific and specifically astronomical ideas and knowledge.

Read more about Hamlet's Mill:  Background, Publishing History, Reception

Famous quotes containing the words hamlet and/or mill:

    “A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
    —Northrop Frye (b. 1912)

    “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
    —John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)