omitting minor details: “The earth (a small enough earth,
doubtless) and its inhabitants proved so imperfect that the
beneficent superhuman Being, who had created it, or perhaps
another such Being, determined to remake it. He, therefore,
summoned the serpent or dragon who controlled the cosmic
ocean, and had been subjugated at creation, to overwhelm the
earth, after which the creator remade it better,[1] and the survivor
and his family became the ancestors of a new human race.”
This, however, is only one possible representation. It may have been said that the serpent of his own accord, not having been killed by the creator, maliciously flooded the earth (cf. the Algonquian myth), but was again overcome in battle, or that the serpent, after filling the earth with violence and wrong, was at length slain by the Good Being, and that his blood, streaming, out, produced a deluge.[2] In any case it is unnatural to hold that the first flood (that which preceded creation) had a dragon, but not the second. An old cuneiform text, recopied late, however, appears to call the year of the deluge (i.e. of what we here call the second flood) “the year of the raging (or red-shining) serpent,”[3] and certainly the N. American myths distinctly connect serpents with the deluges.
Among the probable minor details (omitted above) of the presumed shorter and older myth we may include: (1) the warning of “Very-Wise,”[4] either by friendly animals or by a dream; (2) the construction of a chest to contain “Very-Wise,” his wife and his sons, together with animals;[5] (3) the despatch of three birds with a special object (see below); (4) the landing of the survivors on a mountain. As to (1), Berōssus suggests that the notice came to Xisuthrus in a dream; in the Indian myth it is the sacred fish which warns Manu. In the archaic N. American myths, however, it is some animal which gives the notice—an eagle or a coyote (a kind of wolf). As to (2), nothing is more common than the story of a divine child cast into the sea in a box.[6] The ship-motive is also found,[7] but it is not too rash to assume that the box-motive is the earlier, and, in accordance with the parallels, that the hero of the deluge was originally a god or a demigod. The translation of the hero to be with the gods is a transparent modification of the original tradition. As to (3), the original object of sending out the birds was probably not to find out where dry land was, but to use them as helpers in the work of re-creation. Take the story of the Tlatlasik Indians, where the diving-bird (one of three sent out) comes back with a branch of a fir-tree, out of which O’meatl made mountains, earth and heaven;[8] so, too, the Caingangs relate[9] that those who escaped from the flood, as they tarried on a mountain, heard the song of the saracura birds, who came carrying earth in baskets, and threw it into the waters, which slowly subsided. As to (4), the mountain would naturally be thought of as a place of refuge even in the old, simple flood-story. But when Babylonian mythology effected an entrance, the mountain would receive a new and much grander significance. It would then come to represent the summit of that great and most holy mountain, which, save by the special favour of the gods, no human eye has seen.
That a didactic element entered the deluge-tradition but slowly, may be surmised, not only from the genuinely old N. American stories, but from the inconsistent statements, to which Jastrow has already referred, in the Babylonian story. We may imagine that between the creation and the deluge some great and wise Being had initiated the early men, not only in the necessary arts of life, but in the “ways” that were pleasing to the heavenly powers. The Babylonians apparently think of neglected sacrifices, the Australians of a desecrated mystery as the cause of the flood. Some such violation of a sacred rule is the origin that naturally occurs to an adapter or expander of primitive myths.
And now as to the application of the celestial mythic theory to
the early deluge-story. In the agricultural stage it was natural
that men should take a deeper interest than before in
the appearance of the sky, and especially of the sun
and moon, and of the constellations, even though an
Celestial myth
theory.
astrological science or quasi-science would very slowly,
if at all, grow up. That the Polynesian myths (which show no
vestige of science) originally referred to the supposed celestial
ocean, seems to be plain. Schirren[10] regarded the New Zealand
cosmogonies as myths of sunrise, and the deluge-stories as myths
of sunset. We may at any rate plausibly hold, with the article
“Deluge” (by Cheyne) in the ninth edition of this work[11] (1877),
that the deluge-stories of Polynesia and early Babylonia (we may
now probably add India) were accommodated to an imaginative
conception of the sun and moon as voyagers on the celestial
ocean. “When this story had been told and retold a long time,
rationalism suggested that the sea was not in heaven but on
earth, and observation of the damage wrought in winter by
excessive rains and the inundations of great rivers suggested the
introduction of corresponding details into the new earthly deluge-myth.”
“This accounts for the strongly mythological character
of Par-napishti (Ut-napishti) in Babylonia and Maui in New
Zealand, who are in fact solar personages. Enoch, too, must
be classed in this category, his perfect righteousness and superhuman
wisdom now first become intelligible. Moreover, we now
comprehend how the goddess Sabitu (the guardian of the entrance
to the sea) can say to Gilgamesh (himself a solar personage),
‘Shamash the mighty (i.e. the sun-god) has crossed the sea;
besides (?) Shamash, who can cross it?’ For though the sea
in the epic is no doubt the earth-circling ocean, it was hardly this
in the myth from which the words were taken.”[12] And, what is
still more important, we can understand better how, in the
Gilgamesh epic (lines 115–116), the gods, after cowering like dogs,
go up to the “heaven of Ana.” They, too, fear the deluge, and
only in the highest heaven can they feel themselves secure.
Such an explanation seems indispensable if the wide influence of the Babylonian form of the deluge-myth is to be accounted for. As Gunkel well remarks,[13] neither the tenacity and self-propagating character of this myth, nor the solemn utterance of Yahweh (who corresponds to the Babylonian Marduk) in Gen. viii. 21b (J.) and ix. 8-17 (P.) can be understood, if the deluge-story is nothing more than an exaggerated account of a historical, earthly occurrence. We, therefore, venture to hold that it is an insufficient account to give of the story in the Gilgamesh epic that it is a combination of a local tradition of the destruction of a single city with a myth of the destruction of mankind—a myth exaggerated in its present form, but based on accurate knowledge of the yearly recurring phenomenon of the overflow of the Euphrates.[14] There are no doubt points in the story as it now stands which indicate a composite origin, but it is probable that even the tradition which apparently limits the destruction to a single city, equally with many other local flood-stories, has a basis in what we may fairly call a celestial myth.
We can now return with some confidence to the Indian deluge-story. It is unlikely that so richly gifted a race as the Aryans of India should not have produced their own flood-story out of the same primeval germs which grew up into the earliest Babylonian flood-story,Indian myth recon-sidered.[15] and almost inconceivable that in its second form the Indian story should not have become adapted to what may be called the celestial mythic
- ↑ Cf. the myths of the Pawnees and the Quichés of Guatemala.
- ↑ See the cuneiform text described in KAT3, pp. 498-499.
- ↑ Zimmern, KAT3, p. 554.
- ↑ i.e. Atraḫasīs (Xisuthrus).
- ↑ To have omitted the animals would have been an offence against primitive views of kinship.
- ↑ Usener, Die Sintflutsagen, pp. 80-108, 115–127.
- ↑ Ib. p. 254.
- ↑ Stucken, Astralmythen, pp. 233–234.
- ↑ Amer. Journ. of Folklore, xviii. 223 ff.
- ↑ Schirren, Wandersagen der Neuseeländer (1856), p. 193.
- ↑ Referring for Polynesia to Gerland in Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vi. 270–273 (1872). After a long interval, this theory has been taken up by Zimmern, KAT3, p. 355, and by Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos (1906), p. 120; Winckler (AOF, 3rd series, i. 96) also speaks of the deluge as a “celestial occurrence.” For other forms of this view see Jeremias, ATAO, pp. 134–136; Usener, p. 239.
- ↑ Cheyne, Ency. Bib. cols. 1063-1064.
- ↑ Genesis, p. 67.
- ↑ Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), pp. 502, 506.
- ↑ The view here adopted is that of Lindner and Usener. On the opposite side are Zimmern, Tiele, Jensen, Oldenberg, Nöldeke, Stucken, Lenormant.
