Greeks and the Mill

The Mill is like a thread that you can find running through all religions, all ancient civilizations, and throughout the ancient “poems.” The Mill is the cosmological scale. Think of it as a “super culture” a type of cultural Pangaea which, over the course of time, has broken into separate parts and drifted further from the source. In the Middle Ages music was considered a science. Why shouldn’t it be? It is one with math and measurement. Yet, now music is considered today to be only an ‘art.’ And since no one today wants to define ‘art,’ music can have almost any definition…even silence can be declared music if there are enough intellectual treatises that say so!

The history of pre-writing civilizations has been extremely controversial for the past century. “They are proto-men,” the academics say. But I suspect the academic projects his standard of sophistication being himself. Since wordy academics stink of letters and analyzations, there has not been serious attention given to those before the era of writing (which even Plato has acknowledged). Where did the ancient poems, “myths,” and those first traits that serve as our foundation of imagination come from?

Social Darwinism has become a mental wall that has prevented any real research into this area. Social Darwinism says, “These pre-writing men were all howling barbarians. All they had were fertility rites which they worshiped.” So what is with all the mention of stars and astronomical clocks then? “They were just put there. Pre-writing men were living in all childish freedom governed only by the harsh realities of Nature and her elements. They thought nothing, composed nothing, and were nothing.” Yet, standing in the face of such theories are the ancient poems and myths, the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt, other bizarre structures with no value to defense or survival, among other anomalies with such ‘context.’ The reason why Social Darwinism is so prevalent is because it feeds to our narcissism. If ‘culture’ progressed and evolved, then WE’RE are the most evolved, most progressed, and clearly the BEST humans ever made! But with our world population at six or seven billion, as opposed to four million or less back then, why do we not possess the ability to create just as stupendous works like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the other fine works? Surely the imagination of six billion people, with vaster life expectancies and more free time, would surpass that of the ancients in record time, just as our technology has been growing by leaps and bounds since the population booms spurred by the Industrial Revolution. But what has Modern Imagination conjured up? We have the trash of the New Age type idiocy, we have these ridiculous ‘female goddesses,’ and we have the revival of a pseudo type Gnosticism. However the ancients thought, it was clearly in a different context than people today think in.

There is a desire for a cosmological scale within most people. With the religious, their needs are fulfilled. There is a Heaven and a Hell. There is measurement. But with the secular, it is common to find them drifting to the most bizarre scale creations. The New Age cults are an example of this. Today’s ‘goddess’ cults are another example. People (especially girls) believing in, what I mockingly call, “pointy power” of the Egyptian Pyramids as if ancient aliens came down and spliced all our genes. It is nonsense stacked on top of nonsense.

The Mill is the original cosmological scale that predates the invention of writing and, perhaps, the oral transmission of poetry as well. Without the Mill, there would be no need for poets and the first Christians would have no reason to take up the sign of the fish. Pythagoras is a child to the Mill as the rest of the ancients were.

A good example of Mill type thinking would be Stonehenge. Earlier seen as just a temple, its existence troubled many academics. The ancients were “howling barbarians,” so what was going on here? A young astronomer, Gerard Hawkins, fed the Stonehenge stones into a mainframe computer and came up with a startling hypothesis: that Stonehenge was an astronomical computer. Atkinson has been the biggest critic of Hawkins and there is much talk of the astronomical context being “overstated.” But I am still having troubles to determine this ‘overstatedness.’ It sounds like the usual archeologists, who gave us the fertility rites and “social” history, became threatened by an outsider. Today, Stonehenge being astronomical is “undeniable.” We must give Hawkins his due. This is a good example also of how the Digital Revolution can alter the context of something well known.

The overuse of fertility rites and the emphasis of the ancients being nothing but a childish freedom reflects more on us than them. One scholar, Camille Paglia, built her entire career on the ‘sexual personae’ context of the old fertility rites to the present. If the Mill is true, then the foundational stones of Paglia get knocked away and her context and works enter the oblivion of other debunked contexts. The Mill can ultimately be a tool to counter the New Age, Neo- Druidism, and quasi-Goddess worship. It is interesting how the Mill is a friend and adopted by the religions and what we today call ‘classic works’ yet the religions and classical works are despised by the New Age, Neo-Druidism, and quasi-Goddeess worshippers.

Since the Mill runs through everything, it certainly would run through the ancient Greeks. I have posted how prayers to the Mill have occurred in the Odyssey. Lykophron, the master mythologist, speaks of Zeus the Miller. Zeus obtained the title of “Mylinos” which means ‘Miller.’ This title was given to the leader of the Battle of the Giants against the Gods where the war was fought for the control of the Mill of Heaven.

So what to make of Homer? What should be relevant to any reader of history is that the measures of a time period become decayed into when people half understand them until people don’t understand them at all until they are often discarded and replaced with something else. For example, within the short two century history of the United States, the context of Constitutional Law has decayed and is now only half understood. By decayed, I mean a growing number of people and judges find the Constitution as a blueprint for governing society rather than a model for government (keep in mind that Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” begins with the quote: ‘Some people have so confused government and society to think they are the same, but they are different and have different origins…’ and Paine’s famous essay explores those differences.)

As with Homer, and perhaps the other ancient poets, it is probable that the measurements and knowledge of the Mill was lost to them. They had the tradition but the why was lost. Homer probably found pre-existent materials at hand, squared blocks and well-cut ashlars, which he transformed into poetry. The Curse of the Miller Woman, for example, is an example of such a piece. Homer’s craft lay in humanizing and melting the pieces so well that they become blended and hidden within one another.

There is precedent for this in ancient Greece. According to Apollodorus, the original “tragedies” are listed in his “library,” which include the tragedies those we have today, those we have lost, those that were written, and those that were strangely never written. It took an Aeschylus and a Sophocles to transform the meaning and turn the ancient measurements into a work of art. Any student of the Greek tragedies will note that, aside from usually being boring, they all are connected to a type of unifying scale. A play could have two people commit a sin, a grave act, which enflames out like a shockwave affecting and twisting all of society. It should be noted that Shakespeare was heavily criticized for abandoning the Greek Tragedy scales that his other playwrights were using (most of these scales were silly like the play’s events having to occur during a single day). Shakespeare’s scales are still fiercely debated today.

It may be that the cosmological scale was forbidden to be said but allowed to be acted. In Rome, Athenaeus says that there was a much-applauded mime, Memphis, who in a brief dance was said to convey faultlessly the whole essence of the Pythagorean doctrine. He may not have understood it. All he needed was sharpened expression. Things can be acted greatly without any understanding. Drama students who take English Shakespeare classes in universities find they are out of their depth. On three separate instances, I have heard a drama student proclaim something about Shakespeare and, once leaving the room, the professor would shake his head and proceed to mock the drama student. Even today, many of the writers (or thieves) who interject mythology to boost their own lack of creativity can give sharpened expressions on the myths without understanding any of it. I suspect Homer, or Homers, knew more but still lacked the measurements. I doubt he would have humanized the gods so if his aim and center was truly the cosmological measurements. As we have seen with modern reflections on ancient structures and works full of ignorance (like the Da Vinci Code), it is hard to romanticize something you know clearly. This is why most romanticizations live in imagination, not in the knowledge. How do you mythologize precision?