Foreword

"Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth." - Plato, The Timæus Dialogues, 360 BC

Plato knew it over two thousand years ago: mythology was the medium humankind used to transmit important information over generations. Most of the knowledge transmitted was astronomical, like the movement of the planets against the background stars. Those Ancients who discovered these things, not having a writing system, made up stories to represent those movements. It was known, down to Plato and Aristotle's time that gods were planets, and stories of the gods were allegories of the interactions of those planets and the constellations of the zodiac.

In the millennia since those times a darkness has fallen. The origins of myths were forgotten and we became ignorant of their inner meanings. But even in those dark centuries storytellers who did understand formulated myths and fables for their listeners. Those stories were transmitted orally over the centuries, their inner meaning lost until the 19th and 20th centuries when researchers began digging. And what treasures they were to unearth. Many of those who grew up before the 1970's remember reading folk tales and fables as children. Being a child I had no idea that there was a significance beyond the tales themselves. Today, when I scour book shops for Christmas presents for nieces and nephews all I find are artificially constructed stories pushing some social agenda, or meaningless fantasies. Where, I wonder, will these tales lead a child? It's for sure there are no hidden treasures for them to find as adults, because these tales have no inner truth except some dubious "author's message."

During the 1960's an historian of science (who was researching scientific content of myth), and an ethnologist (who had a collection of 10,000 pages of incomprehensible Polynesian mythology), joined forces. They were Giorgio de Santillana, and Hertha von Dechend respectively. Their scientific collaboration during the 1960's was to unlock the key to mythology and dispel millennia of darkness. The technical language that was mythology could be understood, and mythic systems could now be decoded. Those bizarre stories turn out to be masterpieces of recording astronomical events for future generations, or social and historical records of preliterate cultures. Santillana and von Dechend encapsulated their findings in a quest to trace the ultimate origins of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the hapless Prince of Denmark. That sad figure could be traced back from one culture to another to the earliest days of civilisation. In doing so, the authors unravelled a technical language, a universal meta-language even, that when applied to a culture's mythology could unravel its inner secrets. We have finally regained what Plato knew over two thousand years ago.

Since they published their findings in "Hamlet's Mill", others have applied that meta-language to unravel the Roman cult of Mithras, a social history of the pre-Inca cultures of the Andes mountains, and uncovered precessional astronomy in the Ancient Egyptian myths of Osiris.

This essay of mine that follows is my contribution to the quest to reveal the true nature of these treasures from the past. Others are in progress.

-- Roy Taylor, autumn 2004