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Appendix 17

To prevent rash critics from hurling into our faces the — maybe they will style it thus — “complete absence of technological knowledge," we hasten to assert that the relevant inquiries are not as foreign to us as they might assume. [1] Curwen might point to his enlightened sentence:

We are, happily, emerging from that state of blissful ignorance of the subject which made possible such an anachronism as Décamps’ well-known picture of “Samson grinding in the Prison-house,” wherein Samson is seen turning a huge mill-stone by means of a long lever like a capstan-bar, after the fashion of the Roman slaves a thousand years later. [2]

There are, indeed, “a number of reasons for questioning the common belief that grain-mills were rotary,” as Moritz states (p. 53). And whereas Forbes (*Studies in *Ancient Technology, vol. 3, p. 155, n. 3) votes for “rotary querns . . . in Assyrian times,” Lynn White (p. 108) says: “But while continuous rotary motion was used in this large mola versatilis and, of course, in the water mill which appears in the first century B.C., it is by no means clear how early such a motion was used with querns,” which is certainly true. That true rotary motion was used with the potter’s wheel much earlier is unquestionable, which is the more relevant, as the potter’s wheel, too, belongs to the cosmological instrumentation, e.g., in the hands of Ptah and Khnum. Decisive is the Ancient Egyptian instrument for drilling out stone vessels, which was perhaps even cranked, but there is no unanimity among the historians of technology as to the real nature of this device. In this case and in that of the mill, the accent goes with “true” rotary motion, because there are two kinds of rotary motion, to which we quote Gordon Childe (Singer, p. 187) on the difference “between continuous, true and complete rotary motion, and partial or discontinuous rotary motion. For true rotary motion, the revolving part of the instrument must be free to turn in the same direction indefinitely. There are, however, a number of processes which involve a partial turn of the instrument, such as boring and drilling by hand. There are even machines like the bow-drill or the pole-lather which allow a number, but only a limited number, of complete revolutions of the revolving part. Partial rotary motion of this sort has been used by man much longer than true rotary motion.”

Now, we do not wish to suppress White’s footnote (p. 109), where he claims Fenja’s and Menja’s Grotte to have been an apparatus involving alternative motion, “no doubt.” This might be the case, although we do not agree with the “no doubt": several doubts are permitted. We shall abstain, however, from discussing this and similar questions as long as we do not understand precisely and thoroughly how the “Churning of the Milky Ocean” was thought to work, in India, and in Egypt, where the specialists insist upon calling the celestial churn a “symbol of uniting the two lands,” and in the survivals in Homer and Plato. For the time being we do think that the oldest technological device used in cosmological terminology was, indeed, a churn or a drill, implicating alternative motion.

The point is this: whether or not Samson, or Fenja and Menja, waited on an oscillating quern or on a true rotary mill is a cosmological question, and will hardly be decided by historians of technology. To illustrate this, we have a look at that “mill” of the Cherokee Indians, mentioned in the chapter on the Galaxy, where it is told that “people in the South had a corn mill,” from which meal was stolen again and again; the owners discovered the thief, a dog, who “ran off howling to his home in the North, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day . . . ‘Where the dog ran’.” In his supplementary notes (p. 443), Mooney explains: “In the original version the mill was probably a wooden mortar, such as was commonly used by the Cherokee . . .” Well, in the “original version,” as told by the Cherokee, we may rely on their talking of a mortar — but certainly not in the truly “original” myth. There is no possible way whatsoever of “developing” out of “primitive” mortars (or grindstones) cosmological imagery; in other words: the Cherokee mortar is a “deteriorated” mill (whether oscillating or not).

The cosmic machine (mill, drill, or churn) produces periods of time, it brings about the “separation of heaven and earth,” etc. Along the way of diffusion into unfamiliar surroundings, particularly tropical ones (lacking grain, plow culture, etc.), the Mill (or churn) ceases to be understood, while the memory sticks to an instrument for crushing foodstuff. And, suddenly, we are told in several continents how Heaven, who once was lying closely upon Earth, withdrew in anger because of women who, busy with their mortars, kept bumping with their pestles against Heaven’s body. An extremely pointless idea, the origin of which is only to be understood when we follow it back to the highly complicated machinery which stood at its beginning (historically as well as “sinngemäss”), and begot quite innocently such strange offshoots.

Although we do not like to apply strictly scientific models to historical phenomena, here we abuse the case of entropy: to derive Grotte (the Amritamanthana, etc.) from those utterly nonsensical females bumping their pestles against “Heaven” would be on the same level as to derive the original substances from the state of randomly mingled gases.

These minima only for the technological problem. We keep these questions under lock and key on purpose, and not because it has not dawned upon us that the technological aspect is a very important one. On the contrary, we nurse the suspicion that next to nobody has an idea of the huge difficulties that arise with churn, mill, and fire drill, if one understands them properly as machines which were meant to describe the motions of nested spheres.

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1. To mention only a few useful titles: Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, Pt. II, (1965); Gordon Childe’s chapter on “Rotary Motion,” in Singer et al., eds., *A History of *Technology, vol. 1 (1954), pp. 187ff.; Hugo Theodor Horwitz, “Die Drehbewegung in ihrer Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der materiellen Kultur,” Anthropos 28 (1933), 29 (1934). John Storck and Walter Dorwin Teague, *Flour for Man’s Bread: A History of *Milling (1952); Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) — this title is a grotesque understatement!

2. “Querns,” *Antiquity *11 (1937), pp. 133f. See also L. A. Moritz, Grain-Mills and Flour in Classical Antiquity (1958), p.12 — he makes it a medieval mill.