Part 16

A comparison has also been made, but erroneously as I think, between the Biblical and Chaldean Deluge and a story only found complete in the _Bundahesh-pahlavi_;[48] though, as a few of the older books contain allusions to some of its circumstances;[49] it must date further back than this edition of it, which is recent. Ahuramazda determines to destroy the Khafctras--_i.e._, the maleficent spirits created by Angromainyus, the spirit of evil: Tistrya, the genius of the star Sirius, descends at his command to earth, and, assuming the form of a man, causes it to rain for ten days. The waters cover the earth, and all maleficent beings are drowned. A violent wind dries the earth, but some germs of the evil spirit's creation remain, and may reappear, therefore Tistrya descends again under the form of a white horse, and produces a second Deluge by another rainfall of ten days. To prevent him accomplishing his task, the demon Apusha assumes the appearance of a black horse, and engages in combat; but he is struck with lightning by Ahuramazda, as well as the demon Cpendjaghra, who had come to his aid. Finally, to bring about the complete destruction of evil, Tistrya descends the third time under the form of a bull, and produces a third Deluge by a third rainfall of ten days, after which the waters divide to form the four great and the twenty-four small seas. Now all this relates to a cosmogonic fact, anterior to the creation of man. The Khafctras, from which Tistrya undertakes to purge the earth, are the hurtful and venomous beasts created by Angromainyus which fervent Mazedans make it a duty to destroy in our actual world--such as scorpions, lizards, toads, serpents, rats, &c. There is no allusion here to humanity, or the punishment of its sins. If we were bent on finding in our Bible any parallel to this first rain falling on the surface of the earth--which both destroys the hurtful creatures by which it was infested and renders it productive of a fertile vegetation--we should turn, not to the account of the Deluge, but to what is said in Gen. ii. 5, 6.

The Greeks had two principal legends as to the cataclysm by which primitive humanity was destroyed. The first was connected with the name of Ogyges, the most ancient of the kings of Boeotia or Attica; a quite mythical personage, lost in the night of ages, his very name seemingly derived from one signifying deluge in Aryan idioms, in Sanscrit _Angha_. It is said that in his time the whole land was covered by a flood, whose waters reached the sky, and from which he, together with some companions, escaped in a vessel.

The second tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus having worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha. The Deluge came, the chest or coffer floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days and nine nights, and was finally stranded on Mount Parnassus. Deucalion and Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and according to the command of Zeus re-people the world by throwing behind them "the bones of the earth"--namely, stones, which change into men. This Deluge of Deucalion is in Grecian tradition what most resembles a universal Deluge. Many authors affirm that it extended to the whole earth, and that the whole human race perished. At Athens, in memory of the event, and to appease the manes of its victims, a ceremony called _Hydrophoria_ was observed, having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis in Syria, that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician importation, and the result of an assimilation established in remote antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as described by the author of the treatise "On the Syrian Goddess."[50] Close to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was shown, in length but one cubit, through which it was said the waters of the Deluge had been swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the third day of the festival of the Anthesteria, a day of mourning consecrated to the dead,--that is, on the thirteenth of the month of Anthesterion, towards the beginning of March--it was customary, as at Bambyce, to pour water into the fissure, together with flour mixed with honey, poured also into the trench dug to the west of the tomb, in the funereal sacrifices of the Athenians.

Others, on the contrary, limit Deucalion's flood to Greece, even declare that it only destroyed the larger portion of the community, a great many men saving themselves on the highest mountains. Thus the Delphian legend told how the inhabitants of that town, following the wolves in their flight, had taken refuge in a cave on the summit of Parnassus, where they built the town of Lycorea, whose foundation is, on the other hand, attributed by the Chronicle of Paros to Deucalion, after the reproduction by him of a new human race. Later mythographers necessarily adopted this idea of several points of simultaneous escape from a desire to reconcile the local legends of several places in Greece, which named some other than Deucalion as the hero saved from the flood. For instance, at Megara it was the eponym of the city Megaros, son of Zeus and of one of the nymphs Sithnides, who, warned by the cry of cranes of the imminence of the danger, took refuge on Mount Geranien. Again, there was the Thessalian Cerambos, who was said to have escaped the flood by rising into the air on wings given him by the nymphs, and it was Perirrhoos, son of Eolus, that Zeus Naios had preserved at Dodona. For the inhabitants of the Isle of Cos the hero of the Deluge was Merops, son of Hyas, who there assembled under his rule the remnant of humanity preserved with him. The traditions of Rhodes only supposed the Telchines, those of Crete Jasion, to have escaped the cataclysm. In Samothracia the same character was attributed to Saon, said to be the son of Zeus or of Hermes; he seems only to have been a heroic form of the Hermes Saos or Socos, the object of special worship in the island, a divinity in whom M. Philippe Berges recognizes with good reason a Phoenician importation, the Sakan of Canaan identified elsewhere with Hermes Dardanos, supposed to have arrived in Samothracia immediately after these events, being driven by the Deluge from Arcadia.

In all these flood stories of Greece we cannot doubt that the tradition of a cataclysm fatal to the whole of humanity--a tradition common to all Aryan peoples--was mixed up, as Knobel rightly observes, more or less precisely with local catastrophes produced by extraordinary overflows of lakes or rivers, or the rupture of their natural embankments, the sinking of some portions of the sea-coast, or tidal waves consequent upon earthquakes or sudden upheavals of the ocean bed. Such events were frequent in Greece, in the district between Egypt and Palestine, near Pelusium and Mount Casius, as well as in the Cimbric Chersonese. The Greeks used to relate how often their country had in primitive ages been the theatre of such catastrophes. Istros numbered four of these, one of which had opened the Straits of the Bosphorus and Hellespont, when the waters of the Euxine, rushing into the Aegean, submerged the islands and neighbouring coasts. This is evidently the Deluge of Samothracia; where the inhabitants who succeeded in saving themselves did so only by gaining the highest peak of the mountain that rises there; then, in gratitude for their preservation, consecrated the whole island by surrounding its shores with a belt of altars dedicated to the gods. In like manner the tradition of the Deluge of Ogyges seems connected with the recollection of an extraordinary rise of the Lake Capais, inundating the whole of the great Boeotian Valley, a recollection amplified later--as is ever the case with legends--by applying to the local disaster all the details popularly told of the primitive Deluge which had taken place before the separation of the ancestors of the two races, Semitic and Aryan. It is also probable that some event that had occurred in Thessaly, or rather in the region of Parnassus, determined the localization of the legend of Deucalion. Nevertheless, it always retained, as we have seen, a more general character than the others, whether the Deluge be extended to the whole earth or limited to the whole of Greece.

Be that as it may, the different narratives were reconciled by admitting three successive Deluges, those of Ogyges, Deucalion, and Dardanos. The general opinion pronounced the former the most ancient, placing it 600 or 250 years before that of Deucalion. But this chronology is far from being universally accepted; and the inhabitants of Samothracia maintain their Deluge to have been the earliest. Christian chronographers of the third and fourth century, as, for instance, Julius Africanus and Eusebius, adopted the Hellenic dates of the Deluges of Ogyges and Deucalion, and inscribed them in their records as different events from the Mosaic Deluge, which, for their part, they fixed at 1000 years before that of Ogyges.

In Phrygia the diluvian tradition was as natural as in Greece. The town of Apamea derived thence its surname _Kibotos_, or ark, and claimed to be the place where the Ark had stopped. Iconium had the like pretensions. In the same way the people of Milyas, in Armenia, showed the fragments of the Ark on the top of the mountain called Baris; and these were also exhibited in early Christian times to pilgrims on Ararat, as Berosus tells us that in his day the remnants of the vessel of Khasisatra were visited on the Gordyan range.

In the second and third centuries of our era, by means of the syncretic infiltration of Jewish and Christian traditions even into minds still attached to Paganism, the sacerdotal authorities of Apamea and Phrygia had coins struck bearing an open ark, in which the patriarch and his wife were seen receiving back the dove with the olive branch, and side by side were the two same personages, having left the Ark to retake possession of the earth. On the Ark is inscribed the name =NOE=, the very form the name assumes in the Septuagint. Thus, at this time the Pagan priesthood of the Phrygian city had, we see, adopted the Biblical narrative, even down to its names, and had grafted it on the old native tradition. They related that a short while before the Deluge there reigned a holy man called Annacos, who had predicted it, and occupied the throne more than 300 years, an evident reproduction of the Enoch of the Bible, who walked with God for 365 years.

As to the branch of the Celts--in the bardic poems of Wales, we have a tradition of the Deluge, which, although recent under the concise form of the Triads, is still deserving of attention. As usual, the legend is localized in the country, and the Deluge counts among three terrible catastrophes of the island of Prydain, or Britain, the other two consisting of devastation by fire and by drought.

"The first of these events," it is said, "was the irruption of Llyn-llion, or 'the lake of waves,' and the inundation (_bawdd_) of the whole country, by which all mankind was drowned with the exception of Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who saved themselves in a vessel without rigging, and it was by them that the island of Prydain was re-peopled."[51]

Pictet here observes--

"Although the triads in their actual form hardly date further than the thirteenth or fourteenth century, some of them are undoubtedly connected with very ancient traditions, and nothing here points to a borrowing from Genesis.

"But it is not so, perhaps, with another triad[52] speaking of the vessel Nefydd-naf-Neifion, which at the time of the overflow of Llyn-llion, bore a pair of all living creatures, and rather too much resembles the ark of Noah. The very name of the patriarch may have suggested this triple epithet, obscure as to its meaning, but evidently formed on the principle of Cymric alliteration. In the same triad we have the enigmatic story of the horned oxen (_ychain bannog_) of Hu the mighty, who drew out of Llyn-llion the _avanc_ (beaver or crocodile?) in order that the lake should not overflow. The meaning of these enigmas could only be hoped from deciphering the chaos of bardic monuments of the Welsh middle age; but meanwhile we cannot doubt that the Cymri possessed an indigenous tradition of the Deluge."

We also find a vestige of the same tradition in the Scandinavian Ealda.[53] But here the story is combined with a cosmogonic myth. The three sons of Borr, Othin, Wili, and We, grandsons of Buri, the first man, slay Ymir, the father of the Hrimthursar or Ice giants, and his body serves them for the construction of the world. Blood flows from his wounds in such abundance that all the race of giants is drowned in it, except Bergelmir, who saves himself, with his wife, in a boat, and reproduces the race. "Thus," Pictet again observes, "the myth only belongs to the general tradition through these last features, by which, however, we trace it up to a common source."

Of all European peoples the Lithuanians were the last to embrace Christianity, and their language remains nearest to the original Aryan. They have a legend of the Deluge, the groundwork of which appears very ancient, although it has assumed the simple character of a popular tale, and some of its details may have been borrowed from Genesis at the time of the first Christian missions. According to it[54] the god Pramzimras, seeing the whole earth to be full of iniquity, sends two giants, Wandu and Wejas (fire and wind), to lay it waste. These overthrew everything in their fury, and only a few men saved themselves on a mountain. Pramzimras, who was engaged in eating celestial walnuts, dropped a shell near the mountain, and in it the men took refuge, the giants respecting it. Having escaped from the calamity, they afterwards disperse, and only one very aged couple remain in the country, greatly bewailing their childless condition. Pramzimras, to console them, sends his rainbow and bids them jump "on the bones of the earth," which curiously recalls the oracle to Deucalion. The two old people jump nine times, and nine pairs are the result, who became the ancestors of the nine Lithuanian tribes.

IV.

_Egyptian Traditions._--While the tradition of the Deluge holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of all branches of the Aryan race, the monuments and original texts of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not afforded one, even distant, allusion to this cataclysm. When the Greeks told the Egyptian priests of the Deluge of Deucalion, their reply was that they had been preserved from it as well as from the conflagration produced by Phaeton; they even added that the Hellenes were childish in attaching so much importance to that event, as there had been several other local catastrophes resembling it. According to a passage in Manetho, much suspected, however, of being an interpolation, Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus had himself, before the cataclysm, inscribed on stelae in hieroglyphical and sacred language the principles of all knowledge. After it the second Thoth translated into the vulgar tongue the contents of these stelae. This would be the only Egyptian mention of the Deluge, the same Manetho not speaking of it in what remains to us of his "Dynasties," his only complete authentic work. The silence of all other myths of the Pharaonic religion on this head render it very likely that the above is merely a foreign tradition, recently introduced, and no doubt of Asiatic and Chaldean origin. "Thus," says M. Maury, "the Seriadic land, where the passage in question places these hieroglyphic columns, might very well be no other than Chaldea. This tradition, though not in the Bible, existed as a popular legend among the Jews at the beginning of our era, which confirms our supposition; as the Hebrews might have learnt it during the Babylonian captivity. Josephus tells us that the patriarch Seth, in order that wisdom and astronomical knowledge should not perish, erected, in prevision of the double destruction by fire and water predicted by Adam, two columns, the one in brick, the other in stone, on which this knowledge was engraved, and which subsisted in the Seriadic country." This history is evidently only a variety of the Chaldean legend of the terra-cotta tables bearing the divine revelations, and the principles of all sciences which Ea ordered Khasisatra to bury before the Deluge, "in the city of the Sun at Sippara," as we have had it above in the extracts from Berosus.

Nevertheless, the Egyptians did admit a destruction by the gods of primal men on account of their rebellion and their sins. This event was related in a chapter of the sacred books of Thoth, those famous Hermetic books of the Egyptian priesthood which are graven on the sides of one of the inmost chambers of the funereal hypogeum of Seti the First at Thebes. The text has been published and translated by M. Edouard Naville.[55]

The scene is laid at the close of the reign of the god Ra, the earliest terrestrial reign, according to the system of the priests of Thebes, the second, according to that of the priests of Memphis, which is the one followed by Manetho, who placed at the very origin of things the reign of Phtah, previous to that of Ra. Irritated by the impiety and crimes of the men he has made, the god assembles the other gods to hold counsel with them in profound secrecy, "so that men should not see it, nor their heart be afraid."

"Said by Ra to Nun:[56] 'Thou, the eldest of the gods, of whom I am born, and ye ancient gods, here are the men who are born from myself; they speak words against me, tell me what you would do in the matter; lo, I have waited, and have not slain them before hearing your words.'

"Said by the Majesty of Nun: 'My son Ra, a greater god than he who has made him and created him, I stand in great fear of thee; do thou deliberate alone.'

"Said by the Majesty of Ra: 'Lo, they take to flight through the country, and their hearts are afraid....'

"Said by the Gods: 'Let thy face permit, and let those men be smitten who plot evil things, thine enemies, and let none [of them remain.]'"

A goddess, whose name has unfortunately disappeared, but who seems to have been Tefnut, identified with Hathor and Sekhet, is then sent to accomplish the sentence of destruction.

"This goddess left, and slew the men upon the earth.

"Said by the Majesty of this God: 'Come in peace, Hathor; thou hast done [what was ordained thee.]'

"Said by this Goddess: 'Thou art living; for I have been stronger than men, and my heart is satisfied.'

"Said by the Majesty of Ra: 'I am living, for I will rule over them [and I will complete] their ruin.'

"And lo, Sekhet, during several nights, trod their blood under-foot as far as the town of Ha-klinen-su (Heracleopolis.)"

But the massacre ended, the anger of Ra was appeased; he began to repent of what he had done. A great expiatory sacrifice succeeded in finally calming him. Fruits were gathered throughout Egypt, bruised, and their juice mingled with human blood, 7000 pitchers being filled with it and presented to the god.

"And lo, the Majesty of Ra, the god of Upper and Lower Egypt, comes with the gods in three days of sailing to see these vases of drink, after he had ordered the goddess to slay men.

"Said by the Majesty of Ra: 'This is well; I will protect men because of it.' Said by Ra: 'I raise my hand concerning this, to say that I will no more destroy men.'

"The Majesty of Ra, the god of Upper and Lower Egypt, commanded in the middle of the night to overthrow the liquid in the vases, and the fields were completely filled with water by the will of this god. The goddess arrived in the morning, and found the fields full of water. Her face grew joyous, and she drank abundantly and went away satisfied. She no more perceived any men.

"Said by the Majesty of Ra to the goddess: 'Come in peace, gracious goddess.'

"And he caused the young priestesses of Amu to be born.

"Said by the Majesty of Ra to this goddess: 'Libations shall be made to her at each of the festivals of the new year, under the superintendence of my priestesses.'

"Hence it comes that libations are made under the superintendence of the priestesses of Hathor by all men since the ancient days."

Nevertheless, some men have escaped the destruction commanded by Ra, and renewed the population of the earth. As for the solar god who reigns over the world, he feels himself old, sick and weary; he has had enough of living among men, whom he regrets not to have completely annihilated, but has sworn henceforth to spare.

"Said by the Majesty of Ra: 'There is a smarting pain that torments me; what is it then that hurts me?' Said by the Majesty of Ra: 'I am living, but my heart is weary of being with them [men], and I have in no way destroyed them. That destruction is not one that I have made myself.'

"Said by the gods who accompany him: 'Away with lassitude, thou hast obtained all thou didst desire.'"

The god Ra decides, however, to accept the help of the men of the new human race who offer themselves to him to combat his enemies, and a great battle takes place, out of which they come victorious. But in spite of this success the god, disgusted with earthly life, resolves to quit it for ever, and has himself carried into heaven by the goddess Nut, who takes the form of a cow. Then he creates a region of delight, the fields of Aalu, the Elysium of Egyptian mythology, which he peoples with stars. Entering into rest, he assigns to different gods the government of different parts of the world. Shu, who is to succeed him as king, is to administer celestial matters with Nut; Seb and Nun receive the charge of the things of earth and water. Finally, Ra, a sovereign who has voluntarily abdicated, goes to dwell with Thoth, his favourite son, on whom he has bestowed the superintendence of the under-world.

Such is this strange narrative, "in which," as M. Naville has well said, "in the midst of fantastic and often puerile inventions, we do nevertheless find the two terms of existence as understood by the ancient Egyptians. Ra begins with earth, and passing through heaven stops in the region of profundity, Ament, in which he apparently wishes to sojourn. This then is a symbolic and religious representation of life, which for every Egyptian--and especially for a royal conqueror--had to begin and end like the sun. This explains the chapter being inscribed in a tomb."