Rating: 
Summary: A Milestone Book
Review: This book has contributed more to the understanding of myth and the passing of time than anything since Robert Graves' works. It is a difficult book to read. But, the implication of the authors, that astrology/astronomy and the passage of time were the 'grand backdrop' for all of human history, has profound meaning to all who study it. As mankind passes from one Great Age to the next, he is charged with reinventing himself and the cosmos. The changes hold until the next Great Age, when chaos sweeps away the old systems, and once again all is made anew. This theme echos back through time, we find it most everywhere in the world, in the myths and tales of every people. One of the most important books of the twentieth century.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent starting point for study of mythic-astronomy
Review: This book is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in archeo/ethno/astronomy. While there are many fine initial texts on archeoastronomy (e.g., Krupp, Williamson), this effort demonstrates the fine art and the complexity of interpretation of such manifestations relating to the myth-structures of the scrutinized cultures. Some have interpreted this effort as posing uni-modal answers (precession) to all such questions, however, the multi-vocal aspect of myth is clearly represented to those who will look carefully. Ten stars!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting compendium, flawed synthesis
Review: This book is regarded highly by Graham Hancock and that is why I laid my hands on it. It is tough going and the language used was not simple. A second reading was essential in order to comprehend at least 50% of what it was saying.Credit to Santillan and Dechend for proposing such a wonderful theory, especially in explaining the role of precession in many mythologies. However, to subject all mythologies to only cosmological observation is not correct. This is the same trap that Alan Alford and Daniken fell into. Alford tried to explain all myths using his meteorite hypothesis in his books The Phoenix Solution and When the Gods Came Down while Daniken tried to explain everything using alien visitation. In this book, the explanation for the Great Deluge was simply brushed aside by claiming it to be a metaphorical drowning of the "earth". If one reads the works of Ian Wilson, Stephen Oppenheimer and others on this subject, one cannot help but conclude that the Flood was a real earthly event. I believe there is some truth in Santillana and Dechend's conclusions but to ascribe all myths to the observed interplay of cosmological lights seem to be overstretching a good hypothesis. For a more balanced view, I would strongly recommend the books of Zacharia Sitchin, Colin Wilson and Graham Phillips. Normally I owuld give 5 stars to the books I review but one star is taken away for its extremely difficult to understand style of writing.
Rating: 
Summary: One aspect of myth
Review: This book is regarded highly by Graham Hancock and that is why I laid my hands on it. It is tough going and the language used was not simple. A second reading was essential in order to comprehend at least 50% of what it was saying. Credit to Santillan and Dechend for proposing such a wonderful theory, especially in explaining the role of precession in many mythologies. However, to subject all mythologies to only cosmological observation is not correct. This is the same trap that Alan Alford and Daniken fell into. Alford tried to explain all myths using his meteorite hypothesis in his books The Phoenix Solution and When the Gods Came Down while Daniken tried to explain everything using alien visitation. In this book, the explanation for the Great Deluge was simply brushed aside by claiming it to be a metaphorical drowning of the "earth". If one reads the works of Ian Wilson, Stephen Oppenheimer and others on this subject, one cannot help but conclude that the Flood was a real earthly event. I believe there is some truth in Santillana and Dechend's conclusions but to ascribe all myths to the observed interplay of cosmological lights seem to be overstretching a good hypothesis. For a more balanced view, I would strongly recommend the books of Zacharia Sitchin, Colin Wilson and Graham Phillips. Normally I owuld give 5 stars to the books I review but one star is taken away for its extremely difficult to understand style of writing.
Rating:
Summary: A great, but flawed book
Review: This book reminds me of the cowboy who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions. The authors try to say everything at once. By the time they inserted their twentieth appendix (each such digression full of more digressions in the footnotes), you'd think they would have considered overhauling their framework and integrating everything more smoothly. Sorry. I got tired of trying to hold onto the train of thought in the text while wading through appendices -- 39 in all. Sloppy editing here, too, because some appendices appear without any reference in the text. In revenge on such authors who fill their books with untranslated quotes in German and Latin, some day I am going to write a book full of quotes in Chinese -- in the original archaic characters, or course -- Viet Namese, and Tayal: ima maniq mami qaniy! I am somewhat perplexed by the authors' hostility to psychology and practically deliberate misreading of evolution. It is more intriguing to me to find that the same symbol is valid both psychologically and astrologically. However, the authors insist that theirs is the one and only possible interpretation. Too bad. The book focuses on astronomical events, but gives us only two hard dates, in the final pages. William Sullivan's Secret of the Incas, inspired by Hamlet's Mill, by far surpasses it in every way. If Hamlet's Mill interests you, I urge you to read Secret of the Incas, too. There, I have told you all the bad points about Hamlet's Mill. Were I asked, "Should I read this book?" I would answer unequivocally, imperitively even, Yes, absolutely yes, there's gold in these pages.
Rating:
Summary: To see our own past and future in a wise perspective
Review: This book will allow to who never accepted Myths as unclearly conceived funny stories of ancient civilizations, with funny numbers and strange expressions, to see them under a perfeclty reasonable new point of view.
Rating:
Summary: Impenetrable Text
Review: This is an excellent book, but extremely dense. Only one who has read it can truly appreciate the remark the authors make in appendix #32, when they refer to "the impenetrable text" of some other book, by Brugsch. The mind boggles at what that other book must be like. A more recent book on the same theme, but much more lucid and with a very restricted scope, is "The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries" by David Ulansey. "Hamlet's Mill" is well worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: Truth about pre-copernican foundations of consciousness
Review: Universal coherence. We still seek it because we know it must "exist." Read this, McClain's "Myth of Invariance," and "Pythagorean Plato", Van Crevel's prefaces to Obrecht's Missae Sub Tuum Praesedium and Maria Zart (in the edition abandoned because he took it to far in search of symmetries), and the fine work on Angkor Wat by Eleanor Mannikka, learn observational astronomy, and sidereal astrology and its history (Cyril Fagan, Garth Allen, Rupert Gleadow), and you've got all you need to understand the old mind, on the basis of what they saw and lived with. It helps if you can live some place dark, where you can see the skies at night, like people did until pretty recently.
Organizationwise, the writing is at times caught inconclusively between summaries of stories and drawing of connections, and perhaps the really definitive points are not highlighted or isolated as they deserve to be, because they are such universal historic human truths. But this book is not about MYTH, it is about ASTROLOGY, MUSIC, MATHEMATICS, NUMBER AS REVEALED BY THE HEAVENS, AND EMBODIED IN LITERATURE, PRE-COPERNICAN EXISTENTIALISM: THIS IS HOW IT WAS, what you saw happening in the sky night after night, why and how deeply this was experienced by all humanity. It was spoken of in various but perceptually related ways, at all times everywhere before the modern world revealed its coincidental nature (there's no reason for the sun and moon to be the same size, but that's what they look like from here, and there you've got yin-yang, etc >> all the great symmetries). Too bad it isn't "true". Or maybe perception means that much, and it is "true" locally. Great work. I hope follow up literature exists.
If you are concerned with philosophy and non-modern minds, God Bless 'em, this is endless and indescribably rich food for thought. Writing, though, seems at times overwhelmed at what to do with it all, though NOT stupidly. This is very high grade stuff. This is not pulp mysticism, just not quite written as well as one would hope. And it's just a door into the real thought. It is Sumerian, but to understand how it became the universal truth of as above so below, you must know music from the monochord up, it ain't easy, but it will open all Timaeus inspired thought to you, for starters. But you must learn tuning and proportion. Among other things. And don't confuse Sidereal Astrology with the "normal" metaphoric stuff. It ain't like that.
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