The figure of Hamlet as a favorable starting point came by chance. Many other avenues offered themselves, rich in strange symbols and beckoning with great images, but the choice went to Hamlet because he led the mind on a truly inductive quest through a familiar landscape—and one which has the merit of its literary setting. Here is a character deeply present to our awareness, in whom ambiguities and uncertainties, tormented self-questioning and dispassionate insight give a presentiment of the modern mind. His personal drama was that he had to be a hero, but still try to avoid the role Destiny assigned him. His lucid intellect remained above the conflict of motives—in other words, his was and is a truly . . . And yet this character whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual, concealed a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth. There was a numinous aura around him, and many clues led up to him. But it was a surprise to find behind the mask an ancient and all-embracing cosmic power—the original master of the dreamed-of first age of the world. Yet in all his guises he remained strangely himself. The original Amlodhi,* as his name was in Icelandic legend, shows the same characteristics of melancholy and high intellect. He, too, is a son dedicated to avenge his father, a speaker of cryptic but inescapable truths, an elusive carrier of Fate who must yield once his mission is accomplished and sink once more into concealment in the depths of time to which he belongs: Lord of the Golden Age, the Once and Future King.
Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend
Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth
