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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
of New Zealand, 25 and in the myths of Finland. There the Hamlet/Samson
figure is known as Kullervo and the mill has a peculiar name: the Sampo.
Like Fenja and Menja’s mill it is ultimately stolen and loaded on board a
ship. And like their mill, it ends up being broken in pieces. 26
It turns out that the word ‘Sampo’ has its origins in the Sanskrit
skambha, meaning ‘pillar or pole’. 27 And in the Atharvaveda, one of the
most ancient pieces of north Indian literature, we find an entire hymn
dedicated to the Skambha:
In whom earth, atmosphere, in whom sky is set, where fire, moon, sun, wind stand
fixed ... The Skambha sustains both heaven and earth; the Skambha sustains the
wide atmosphere; the Skambha sustains the six wide directions; into the Skambha
entered all existence.
Whitney, the translator (Atharvaveda 10:7) comments in some perplexity:
‘Skambha, lit, prop, support, pillar, strangely used in this hymn as frame
of the universe’. 28 Yet with an awareness of the complex of ideas linking
cosmic mills, and whirlpools and world trees and so on, the archaic Vedic
usage should not seem so strange. What is being signalled here, as in all
the other allegories, is the frame of a world age—that same heavenly
mechanism that turns for more than 2000 years with the sun rising
always in the same four cardinal points and then slowly shifts those
celestial coordinates to four new constellations for the next couple of
thousand years.
This is why the mill always breaks, why the huge props always fly off
the bin in one way or another, why the iron rivets burst, why the shafttree
shivers. Precession of the equinoxes merits such imagery because, at
widely separated intervals of time it does indeed change, or break, the
stabilizing coordinates of the entire celestial sphere.
Openers of the way
What is remarkable about all this is the way that the mill (which continues
to serve as an allegory for cosmic processes) stubbornly keeps on
resurfacing, all over the world, even where the context has been jumbled
or lost. Indeed, in Santillana and von Dechend’s argument, it doesn’t
really matter if the context is lost. ‘The particular merit of mythical
terminology,’ they say, ‘is that it can be used as a vehicle for handing
down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the
people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc.’ 29 What matters, in
25 In Maori traditions the Samson character is known as Whakatu. See Sir George Grey,
Polynesian Mythology, London, 1956 (1st ed. 1858), p. 97ff.
26 Cited in Hamlet’s Mill, pp. 104-8.
27 Ibid., p. 111.
28 Ibid., 233.
29 Ibid., 312.
246