Chapter 25
Like the Hopi Indians of North America, the Avestic Aryans of pre-Islamic Iran believed that there were three epochs of creation prior to our own. In the first epoch men were pure and sinless, tall and long lived, but at its close the Evil One declared war against Ahura Mazda, the holy god, and a tumultuous cataclysm ensued. During the second epoch the Evil One was unsuccessful. In the third good and evil were exactly balanced. In the fourth epoch (the present age of the world), evil triumphed at the outset and has maintained its supremacy ever since.1
The end of the fourth epoch is predicted soon, but it is the cataclysm at the end of the first epoch that interests us here. It is not a flood, and yet it converges in so many ways with so many global flood traditions that some connection is strongly suggested.
The Avestic scriptures take us back to a time of paradise on earth, when the remote ancestors of the ancient Iranian people lived in the fabled Airyana Vaejo, the first good and happy creation of Ahura Mazda that flourished in the first age of the world: the mythical birthplace and original home of the Aryan race.
In those days Airyana Vaejo enjoyed a mild and productive climate with seven months of summer and five of winter. Rich in wildlife and in crops, its meadows flowing with streams, this garden of delights was converted into an uninhabitable wasteland of ten months’ winter and only two months summer as a result of the onslaught of Angra Mainyu, the Evil One:
The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created was the Airyana Vaejo … Then Angra Mainyu, who is full of death, created an opposition to the same, a mighty serpent and snow. Ten months of winter are there now, two months of summer, and these are cold as to the water, cold as to the earth, cold as to the trees … There all around falls deep snow; that is the direst of plagues …’2
The reader will agree that a sudden and drastic change in the climate of Airyana Vaejo is indicated. The Avestic scriptures leave us in no doubt about this. Earlier they describe a meeting of the celestial gods called by Ahura Mazda, and tell us that ‘the fair Yima, the good shepherd of high renown in the Airyana Vaejo’, attended this meeting with all his excellent mortals.
It is at this point that the strange parallels with the traditions of the biblical flood begin to crop up, for Ahura Mazda takes advantage of the meeting to warn Yima of what is about to happen as a result of the powers of the Evil One:
And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima saying: ’Yima the fair … Upon the material world a fatal winter is about to descend, that shall bring a vehement, destroying frost. Upon the corporeal world will the evil of winter come, wherefore snow will fall in great abundance.…
’And all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the depths of the valleys under the shelter of stables.
’Therefore make thee a var [a hypogeum or underground enclosure] the length of a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men, of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires.3
‘There shalt thou make water flow. Thou shalt put birds in the trees along the water’s edge, in verdure which is everlasting. There put specimens of all plants, the loveliest and most fragrant, and of all fruits the most succulent. All these kinds of things and creatures shall not perish as long as they are in the var. But put there no deformed creature, nor impotent, nor mad, neither wicked, nor deceitful, nor rancorous, nor jealous; nor a man with irregular teeth, nor a leper …’4
Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference between Yima’s divinely inspired var and Noah’s divinely inspired ark: the ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating ‘winter’ which will destroy every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice and snow.
In the Bundahish, another of the Zoroastrian scriptures (believed to incorporate ancient material from a lost part of the original Avesta), more information is provided on the cataclysm of glaciation that overwhelmed Airyana Vaejo. When Angra Mainyu sent the ‘vehement destroying frost’, he also ‘assaulted and deranged the sky’.5 The Bundahish tells us that this assault enabled the Evil One to master ‘one third of the sky and overspread it with darkness’ as the encroaching ice sheets tightened their grip.6
Indescribable cold, fire, earthquakes and derangement of the skies
The Avestic Aryans of Iran, who are known to have migrated to western Asia from some other, distant homeland,7 are not the only possessors of archaic traditions which echo the basic setting of the great flood in ways unlikely to be coincidental. Indeed, though these are most commonly associated with the deluge, the familiar themes of the divine warning, and of the salvation of a remnant of mankind from a universal disaster, are also found in many different parts of the world in connection with the sudden onset of glacial conditions.
In South America, for example, Toba Indians of the Gran Chaco region that sprawls across the modern borders of Paraguay, Argentina and Chile, still repeat an ancient myth concerning the advent of what they call ‘the Great Cold’. Forewarning comes from a semi-divine hero figure named Asin:
Asin told a man to gather as much wood as he could and to cover his hut with a thick layer of thatch, because a time of great cold was coming. As soon as the hut had been prepared Asin and the man shut themselves inside and waited. When the great cold set in, shivering people arrived to beg a firebrand from them. Asin was hard and gave embers only to those who had been his friends. The people were freezing, and they cried the whole night. At midnight they were all dead, young and old, men and women … this period of ice and sleet lasted for a long time and all the fires were put out. Frost was as thick as leather.8
As in the Avestic traditions it seems that the great cold was accompanied by great darkness. In the words of one Toba elder, these afflictions were sent ’because when the earth is full of people it has to change. The population has to be thinned out to save the world … In the case of the long darkness the sun simply disappeared and the people starved. As they ran out of food, they began eating their children. Eventually they all died …9
The Mayan Popol Vuh associates the flood, with ‘much hail, black rain and mist, and indescrible cold’.10 It also says that this was a period when ‘it was cloudy and twilight all over the world … the faces of the sun and the moon were covered.’11 Other Maya sources confirm that these strange and terrible phenomena were experienced by mankind, ‘in the time of the ancients. The earth darkened … It happened that the sun was still bright and clear. Then, at midday, it got dark …12 Sunlight did not return till the twenty-sixth year after the flood.’13
The reader may recall that many deluge and catastrophe myths contain references not only to the onset of a great darkness but to other changes in the appearance of the heavens. In Tierra del Fuego, for instance, it was said that the sun and the moon ‘fell from the sky’14 and in China that ‘the planets altered their courses. The sun, moon and stars changed their motions.’15 The Incas believed that ‘in ancient times the Andes were split apart when the sky made war on the earth.’16 The Tarahumara of northern Mexico have preserved world destruction legends based on a change in the sun’s path.17 An African myth from the lower Congo states that ‘long ago the sun met the moon and threw mud at it, which made it less bright. When this meeting happened there was a great flood …’18The Cahto Indians of California say simply that ‘the sky fell’.19 And ancient Graeco-Roman myths tell that the flood of Deucalion was immediately preceded by awesome celestial events.20 These events are graphically symbolized in the story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot but was unable to guide it along his father’s course:
Soon the fiery horses felt how their reins were in an unpractised hand. Rearing and swerving aside, they left their wonted way; then all the earth was amazed to see that the glorious Sun, instead of holding his stately, beneficent course across the sky, seemed to speed crookedly overhead and to rush down in wrath like a meteor.’21
This is not the place to speculate on what may have caused the alarming disturbances in the patterns of the heavens that are linked with cataclysm legends from all over the world. For our purposes at present, it is sufficient to note that such traditions seem to refer to the same ‘derangement of the sky’ that accompanied the fatal winter and spreading ice sheets described in the Iranian Avesta.22 Other linkages occur. Fire, for example, often follows or precedes the flood. In the case of Phaeton’s adventure with the Sun, ‘the grass withered; the crops were scorched; the woods went up in fire and smoke; then beneath them the bare earth cracked and crumbled and the blackened rocks burst asunder under the heat.’23
Volcanism and earthquakes are also mentioned frequently in association with the flood, particularly in the Americas. The Araucanians of Chile say quite explicitly that ‘the flood was the result of volcanic eruptions accompanied by violent earthquakes.’24 The Mam Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango in the western highlands of Guatemala retain memories of ‘a flood of burning pitch’ which, they say, was one of the instruments of world destruction.25 And in the Gran Chaco of Argentina, the Mataco Indians tell of ‘a black cloud that came from the south at the time of the flood and covered the whole sky. Lightning struck and thunder was heard. Yet the drops that fell were not like rain. They were like fire …’26
A monster chased the sun
There is one ancient culture that perhaps preserves more vivid memories in its myths than any other; that of the so-called Teutonic tribes of Germany and Scandinavia, a culture best remembered through the songs of the Norse scalds and sages. The stories those songs retell have their roots in a past which may be much older than scholars imagine and which combine familiar images with strange symbolic devices and allegorical language to recall a cataclysm of awesome magnitude:
In a distant forest in the east an aged giantess brought into the world a whole brood of young wolves whose father was Fenrir. One of these monsters chased the sun to take possession of it. The chase was for long in vain, but each season the wolf grew in strength, and at last he reached the sun. Its bright rays were one by one extinguished. It took on a blood red hue, then entirely disappeared.
Thereafter the world was enveloped in hideous winter. Snow-storms descended from all points of the horizon. War broke out all over the earth. Brother slew brother, children no longer respected the ties of blood. It was a time when men were no better than wolves, eager to destroy each other. Soon the world was going to sink into the abyss of nothingness.
Meanwhile the wolf Fenrir, whom the gods had long ago so carefully chained up, broke his bonds at last and escaped. He shook himself and the world trembled. The ash tree Yggdrasil [envisaged as the axis of the earth] was shaken from its roots to its topmost branches. Mountains crumbled or split from top to bottom, and the dwarfs who had their subterranean dwellings in them sought desperately and in vain for entrances so long familiar but now disappeared.
Abandoned by the gods, men were driven from their hearths and the human race was swept from the surface of the earth. The earth itself was beginning to lose its shape. Already the stars were coming adrift from the sky and falling into the gaping void. They were like swallows, weary from too long a voyage, who drop and sink into the waves.
The giant Surt set the entire earth on fire; the universe was no longer more than an immense furnace. Flames spurted from fissures in the rocks; everywhere there was the hissing of steam. All living things, all plant life, were blotted out. Only the naked soil remained, but like the sky itself the earth was no more than cracks and crevasses.
And now all the rivers, all the seas, rose and overflowed. From every side waves lashed against waves. They swelled and boiled slowly over all things. The earth sank beneath the sea …
Yet not all men perished in the great catastrophe. Enclosed in the wood itself of the ash tree Yggdrasil – which the devouring flames of the universal conflagration had been unable to consume – the ancestors of a future race of men had escaped death. In this asylum they had found that their only nourishment had been the morning dew.
Thus it was that from the wreckage of the ancient world a new world was born. Slowly the earth emerged from the waves. Mountains rose again and from them streamed cataracts of singing waters.27
The new world this Teutonic myth announces is our own. Needless to say, like the Fifth Sun of the Aztecs and the Maya, it was created long ago and is new no longer. Can it be a coincidence that one of the many Central American flood myths about the fourth epoch, 4 Atl (‘water’), does not install the Noah couple in an ark but places them instead in a great tree just like Yggdrasil? ‘4 Atl was ended by floods. The mountains disappeared … Two persons survived because they were ordered by one of the gods to bore a hole in the trunk of a very large tree and to crawl inside when the skies fell. The pair entered and survived. Their offspring repopulated the world.’28
Isn’t it odd that the same symbolic language keeps cropping up in ancient traditions from so many widely scattered regions of the world? How can this be explained? Are we talking about some vast, subconscious wave of intercultural telepathy, or could elements of these remarkable universal myths have been engineered, long ages ago, by clever and purposeful people? Which of these improbable propositions is the more likely to be true? Or are there other possible explanations for the enigma of the myths?
We shall return to these questions in due course. Meanwhile, what are we to conclude about the apocalyptic visions of fire and ice, floods, volcanism and earthquakes, which the myths contain? They have about them a haunting and familiar realism. Could this be because they speak to us of a past we suspect to be our own but can neither remember clearly nor forget completely?