The Mill is *Everywhere*

Here is a quote from The Odyssey:

Straightaway he thundered from shining Olympus, from on high from the place of the clouds; and goodly Odysseus was glad. Moreover, a woman, a grinder at the mill, uttered a voice of omen from within the house hard by, where stood the mills of the shepherd of the people. At these hand mills twelve women in all plied their task, making meal of barley and of wheat, the marrow of men. Now all the others were asleep, for they had ground out their task of grain, but one alone rested not yet, being the weakest of all. She now stayed her quern and spoke a word, a sign to her Lord. “Father Zeus, who rules over gods and man, loudly hast thou thundered from the starry sky, yet nowhere is there a cloud to be seen: this is surely a portent thou art showing to some mortal. Fulfill now, I pray thee, even to miserable me, the word that I shall speak. May the wooers, on this day, for the last and latest time make their sweet feasting in the halls of Odysseus! They that have loosened my knees with cruel toil to grind their barley meal, may they now sup their last!” 

The weakest calls out for the blessing of Odysseus. It is no surprise to find the Mill turn up in the Odyssey as the Mill is in every religion, every myth, and in every ancient civilization. As you prepare to go to Ithaca, remember the blessing from the Mill.

From Saxo’s original Hamlet story, this appears:

T’is said, sang Snaebjorn, that far out, off younder ness, the Nine Maids of the Island Mill stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern- they who in ages past ground Hamlet’s meal. The good chieftain furrows the hull’s lair with his ship’s beaked prow. Here the sea is called Hamlet’s Mill.

As I studied the Humanities, my interest was in how could the poets or writers create such a context? HOW could Hamlet be written? HOW could the Odyssey be thought? HOW could the Norse, the Hindu, and all the other mythologies and religions be done? What is the source of imagination?

“It is Nature, Pook,” you say. “Everything comes from Nature.” …Perhaps. But Nature as the source and authority is an Enlightenment idea. The ancient Greeks didn’t submit to the authority of ‘Nature’ as we do today. They saw Nature as all chaotic. But all these ancient civilizations do make mention of the Mill. Why, because it is probably the source of imagination, the original context which the most ancient of myths come from. In the Kalevala, the plot turns on the Sampo. When Mystery Science Theater 3000 did a show on a bad production of the Kalevala, the commentators were wondering what the hell a Sampo was. This gave the Sampo the Internet folk-lore for being something of great importance that no one knew what it was. Nothing could be closer than the truth! The Sampo is, of course, the Mill.

Imagine you are an ancient man. Deer and trees will not interest you as those are everywhere. You are already are in Nature so why use imagination toward Nature? No. You would look up, and you would see the star filled sky. Today, we never look up. We have nicely decorated homes, but our ceilings are bare. But when you were a kid, I bet you stared at the sky and examined the clouds and stars. You probably turned the clouds into animals and gave them names. Perhaps you invented strange stories on them.

This is exactly what happened. The ancient man did not know a star as we knew it today. They probably didn’t grasp the idea of other planets out there (though, the Pythagoreans did). What they did do was chart those stars and imagined. To them, the stars were the astral plane. It was like a mirror world up there. When you hear references to the four pillars of the world and the world being ‘flat,’ they are referring to that astral plane. Plato looked at it and thought it reflected something from here. From this, he could come up with philosophy that a perfect being exists for each object up there. Those stars allowed him to come up with the Allegory of the Cave. The ‘Atlantis’ Plato refers to, which he tells to “not take seriously,” was in those stars. It is extremely likely that ancient man had navigation. This required accuracy of the stars. And these old myths are a type of ‘technical knowledge’ for the history or progress of the stars. Remember the Greek myth about the change of seasons? There are myths that chart the exactitude of the stars as well. This explains why the Hindu epic of Mahabharata can be interpreted as an ancient form of Star Wars (yes, they do battle on the moon and have flying vehicles in Hindu literature).

In Norse myth, Odin asks the wise giant Vafthrudner of the oldest event he can think of. His answer: “Countless ages ere the earth was shapen, Bergelmer was born. The first thing I remember-is when the great mill was laid to grind.”

The Mill was the stars or, rather, the context the ancients saw those stars. The Mill was above Nature and the axis of Time itself. Ancient man was not natural but cosmological. Everything was tied to the cosmos. After Kepler, a split occurred where we had science on one side and Humanities on the other. One could even think of Human contexts like a gigantic Pangaea of union in the ancient days. But over time, it has broken apart into various continents and drifts further and further away.

The Mill is the maelstrom of the sky, the starry wheel. It is also the whirlpool that grinds out gold or salt. But the Mill is also known as the World Tree. And the World Tree is referred to as Axis Mundi. Check this link and you’ll see all the connections the Mill (the Axis Mundi) has to everything. “It is very phallic!” some may declare. Of course it is. It is, after all, the source of Patriarchy itself.

As you can see, a budding renaissance awaits if one pieces it all together. Consider reuniting art and math back into the cosmological frame today. It would completely annihilate today’s corrupt Humanities foolish belief in ‘culture-as-source-of-genius’ and destroy Feminists’ made up “pagan goddess religions” (since they could find no religion, pagan or monotheistic, that fit the Matriarchal view they have to make them up). Returning to a cosmological frame would ruin matriarchies everywhere.