The Great Flood

Episode 2 flood mythology

Make sure to check out the episode! https://www.buzzsprout.com/1685008/episodes/8130952

Hello everybody and welcome to this, the second episode of the We’re all stories podcast! Today we’re taking a look at the great flood and flood mythology. Now I know what you may be thinking, “I’ve heard this one before” but stick around, it may just surprise you.

So probably most of us are familiar with the story of Noah’s ark. An account of this story is found in scripture in Genesis 5-9. So here it is. Basically God created the world but men were violent and evil so God says enough was enough. God is going to cause a great flood to wipe out everything off the face of the earth. Then along comes Noah and God sees that he is a good guy and I mean, after all, the animals weren’t to blame so God tells Noah the plan and instructs him to build an ark to load himself, his wife, their 3 sons and their wives along with a sample of all the animals in the world. The two of every kind thing only applied to unclean animals. There were 7 pairs of each for all the rest. Enough to “keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth” according to King James This ark needs to be 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long by 50 cubits (75 feet) wide and 30 cubits (45 feet ) tall. In case you’re wondering a cubit equals roughly one and a half feet. And it has to be made out of gopher wood. What is gopher wood you might ask?No one knows. Genesis 6:14 is the one and only time we see this term. Ever. There is much speculation, some translations read cypress wood and many scholars like this answer. The only problem is Cypress has a different name in Hebrew and that is berosh. (Ber-osh) Not Gopher or in any way even close. So there’s that then. Likely we will never know what gopher wood was referring to. There’s an extremely high probability that it is some extinct type of vegetation, it just doesn't exist anymore. Oh but with this flood and all, did i mention it's all going down in a week?

So Noah gets to building. Everybody comes by to see this weirdo building a big boat on dry land. Build it and they will come, the animals start showing up. Then it starts raining. It pours for 40 days and 40 nights straight. Egg on their face when the water is up to their knees and they’re knocking on Noahs door. So the entire earth is flooded. Noah and his family are all nice and cozy, chilling with the animals while the whole earth floods and everyone else is wiped out. After 150 days the water starts to recede, after another 150 things are still receding. After a while the ark lands on the top of the Ararat mountains. Where are the Ararat mountains? Who knows. The location of these mountains has been debated for thousands of years. Noah sends out a dove to check, see if there's land yet, and the dove comes right back. So He waits a week and tries again, this time the dove brings back an olive branch showing that land was beginning to reappear. Then he waits another week and this time the dove flies the coop and never comes back. Noah figures the bird must have found somewhere to perch and it is safe to leave the ark. God lays out some laws to keep people in line so it doesn’t return to that level on the badness meter and says he’ll never kill everyone in a giant flood again. They seal the deal with a rainbow. The end. Ok, so nothing big and exciting there. But did you know there are stories of a great flood in a ton of cultures across every inhabited continent? Let’s take a look at a few.

We start with probably the next best known story which we find in the epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is “the fifth king of Uruk” around 2500 bc. So Gilgamesh is walking around the world, trying to find a way to cheat death after his best friend Enkidu dies and He decides he doesn’t want to share Enkidu’s fate. He is Gilgamesh after all. So he’s meandering along when he stumbles across an old guy named Utnapishtim (OOt-na-pish-team) who has an interesting story to tell. Hundreds of years prior, when Utnapishtim was a younger man, the gods chiefly Enlil (god of winds and agriculture, inventor of the hoe and finder of men.) Are fed up with people so they decide to kill everyone in a flood. The god Ea is against this plan, feeling it is disproportionate to the crime. Ea is a god associated with ritual purification and also a patron of the arts and culture he is also seen as a fertility god. He is depicted as half goat, half fish. If this sounds familiar this is where we get the astronomical sign Capricorn. Ea tells Utnapishtim to make a giant boat for him and his family along with “the seed of all living things” that is, mating pairs of all the animals. Sound familiar?

So Utnapishtim does as Ea commands and the rain starts. After a while the whole earth is flooded. So Utnapishtim and co. hang out for a long while until the boat lands on a mountain. He sends out a dove to find land, no dice. He waits then sends out a swallow (Probably African if you’re wondering, given the geographic location) and no dice. He waits and then sends out a raven which finds land. The gods are feeling a little sheepish at this point and the goddess Ishtar (goddess of war, sex and oxymorons,(love and war, fertility and death, fire making and quenching, playing nice and being enemies, etc.) patron to prostitutes and bars) she creates a rainbow as a promise that it won’t happen again. Oh, and if you’re wondering why Utnapishtim is still hanging around all these years later, for one, as in the Bible, people of this era had crazy long lifespans (Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk for 126 years. That’s not his lifespan, just how long he was in power) and 2, remember the god Enlil? The one whose idea it was in the first place? Well to say sorry He gave Utnapishtim and his wife eternal life. This explains why Gilgamesh makes him part of the tour when he is seeking his own key to eternal life.

The next story comes to us from Iceland’s Prose Edda written around 1200 AD by the ever verbose Snorri Sturluson. The legend itself is much older but the earliest written record of it and a vast majority of other Norse myths come to us via good old Snorri. This is a short one, a mere footnote in the greater story which I hope to one day do a full episode on. So in the beginning there was one giant named Ymir. While he is sleeping his feet somehow start doing the dirty with each other and produce baby giants. I guess his arms were doing it with his torso and he had baby giants popping out of his armpits.Then along comes Odin (or Ođinn) in the original, (the D in Odin was actually originally a letter called an eth (đ) and is pronounced like our th. The đ happens to look remarkably like the letter d in English and so the English replace đ with D. Sidebar, this đ is only used in the middle of words. Th at the beginning of a word, like in Thor, is called a thorn (þ) because it looks like a thorn on a branch.) so Odin shows up ,along with his lesser known brothers Vili and Vé. They kill Ymir and his blood gushes out in a great flood that killed all the giants except Bergelmir and his family who survives by making a boat and hanging out until the “water” dies down. When the water abates some, Ymir’s salt blood becomes the oceans. If you’re wondering what they did with the rest of Ymir, His flesh becomes the land, his bones the mountains, his teeth the rocks and pebbles. His skull they put over it all to create the sky, being held up by four dwarves, one in each corner named North, South, East and West. If those names sound familiar, good, they should!

Our last two tales from Europe are both short and sweet, both from Celtic traditions. The first comes to us from 18th or 17th century Wales and recorded by Iolo Morganwg (yolo morganug)in the 1800s. Side note, Morganwg’s work is somewhat suspect since he claimed to have found his stories in their entirety in ancient manuscripts which later turned out to be forgeries that he had made based on the actual stories. Anyway, in the Welsh version the monster Afanc causes lake Llion (hleon) as an aside, Llion looks like lion but with a double L. Most non-natives pronounce it 'Leon' but as near as I can tell, this is incorrect. Personally, I suck at making this sound and I'm sure if any native Welsh are listening they're probably getting a good laugh at me trying. The double L in Welsh is called a voiceless alveolar fricative and is actually pretty common in the world at large. After my old Norse Icelandic classes in college, perhaps I should be better at this, because Icelandic uses this kind of sound,but being a natural 'Merican speaker, this sound is alien to me. So as far as I've been able to find from native Welsh speakers, the double L is kind of a hissing noise made by pressing the tip of your tongue behind your top teeth like you would to pronounce L in English but instead of saying "L" you push air through your cheeks, around your tongue. "Ll" sounds kind of like a cat hissing to me. Anyway, getting back to the story: Afanc causes Llion to burst its banks until the world is flooded and everything and everyone dies except Dwyfan and his wife Dwyfach who survive in a mastless boat with two of every type of animal. They land in Prydain, later to be called Britain and the rest is history.

The next comes from Celtic Ireland. There were two giants Heaven and his woman Earth. Heaven lays on top of Earth. As couples do when reproducing and they are making baby titans. The problem is that apparently popping out babies didn’t slow this power couple down. Heaven just kept going at it, laying on top of Earth so the baby titans are squished between their parents. Anyone who has had parents can imagine that this was probably extremely uncomfortable for these kids. I just can't imagine how many years of therapy it took to get over that particular experience. Not to mention both the children and their mother live in darkness because heaven never lets Earth off her back. One day, one of the titans decides this was a little too uncomfortable and mentally scarring so he kills heaven and chops him up, similar to how Ođin did in the Norse version. He uses the giant’s skull to make the sky but a side effect is Heaven's blood pours out, raining down on the world, drowning everything except 2 people who are saved when one of the titans takes pity on them and builds them a boat in which to weather the storm.

Another version of this particular flood story has 3 or four men and anywhere from 4 to 150 women. They are told, sometimes by Noah, sometimes by an idol they make after finding out God has abandoned them to their fate, they are told to flee west to escape Noah's flood so they set out and settle in Ireland. The men divvy up the women and set about repopulating the earth. In my Favourite version, there are three men and one hundred and fifty women. The men take fifty wives each but shortly after, one of the men dies so all of his wives go and join the wives of the next man who now has a hundred wives to keep happy. He dies from sheer exhaustion while trying to get all one hundred of them pregnant. Then his hundred turn to the last man. This man sees them coming and runs. He turns into a salmon and makes a clean getaway. This salmon is sometimes linked to the salmon of knowledge from the stories of Fionn MacCumhaill of the fennian cycle of Irish legends, but that is a story for another time.

There are many more stories, Europe is a big place after all, containing many, many cultures but let's travel away from Europe and move on to Africa.

In the Pygmy tradition Chameleon is chilling, doing his chameleon things on a tree. At this time there is no water in the world. Chameleon hears a weird noise coming from inside his tree so he cuts it open. Water comes gushing out from the tree and floods the earth. Along with the water a pair of humans pops out. These are the first humans and everyone is descended from them. I like this version because the arrival of the flood waters brings life rather than death. It sets water as life giver, rather than life taker.

In Egypt flooding is an annual thing. Every year the Nile floods its banks, nourishing and fertilizing the fields, making them ready for planting. This flooding is so important to the ancient Egyptians that they set their calendar by it. But this particular story isn't about a flood of the Nile so much as a flood of blood.

Ra gets worried that the people are going to depose him so he sends the goddess Hathor to deal with it. Hathor is interesting because she is the intrinsic female. She defies description. She is dynamic, multi faceted and many faced. She is the mother, wife and daughter of Ra, she is usually portrayed as a cow or as a woman with cow horns, reflecting her ties to agriculture. She is seen as the greatest mother, giving birth to many gods and goddesses with almost as many fathers. She is the embodiment of femininity and female sexuality. She is also the eye of Ra (at least AN eye of Ra) and as such an extension of him. More specifically, his jealous, vengeful side. In this capacity she becomes the Goddess Sekhmet, a roaring lioness, warrior goddess, defender of the gods and by extension the pharaohs. Sekhmet carries out her divine punishment by killing all the humans indiscriminately. The blood of the slain causes the Nile to turn red and flood running to the oceans, causing them to rise too. Ra, looking down and seeing what was going on and decides that we humans had probably learned our lesson and he tells the few survivors to brew beer and dye it red then pour it out all over the land. Sekhmet, seeing this river of red beer mistakes it for blood and drinks it up, becoming quite drunk. The inebriated goddess falls asleep and reverts back to her old self, the mother Hathor. This gave rise to the festival of drunkenness.

This festival was celebrated annually on the twentieth day of the month of Thoth, which was the first month of the ancient Egyptian calendar. And though its celebration is no longer widespread, modern celebrants do so in mid August to coincide with the flooding of the Nile. This festival was celebrated with music, dancing and, according to some sources, orgies. But most of all by drinking. In temples, shrines or in their homes it was customary to be served beer until they were blackout drunk and passed out. Those celebrants at the temples would be woken up the next morning with loud music to worship Hathor to see what epiphanies the goddess gave them in their, one can only assume, hungover state. While most of us now would see this as an excuse to get publicly wasted, for the ancient Egyptians this was a sacred time, not a big social event. The orgy aspect of the festival is debated. Those who fall on the side of orgies say it was in honor of Hathor’s role as the goddess of sex. The orgy pays tribute to her in this aspect and is further seen as asking for her blessing for the Nile floodwaters to fertilize the earth as they recede to prepare for the time of planting.

Of the flood myths from Asia I picked three stories from two different countries. The first comes from Siberia. The world flooded but some people and animals survived by clinging to floating debris. The winds blew and scattered the debris with its passengers to all corners of the world. Once they got to their respective destinations they set about repopulating and created their own languages. That is how people came to be all over the globe and why they all speak different languages.

Flood stories in China are unique in that, for the most part they are seen as natural disasters (though sometimes caused by mythical creatures such as dragons or spirits) not as punishment from the gods and they are saved by the work of humans. There are many versions of the story but they share a common theme. The rivers flood and a man named Gun sometimes steals, or sometimes is granted use of expanding soil by the emperor or by the gods, which he tries to use to shore up the banks of the river to stop the flood. In versions where he steals the soil he is killed for theft, when he is given the soil he is killed for failure, whatever the reasoning he is killed and his son Yu takes his place and he successfully shores up the river ending the flood. In one version, when Gun is killed by the gods for stealing the soil his body is cut apart and from out of the corpse rises his son Yu in the form of a powerful dragon that even the gods are afraid of so they let him use the soil to avoid his anger. After Yu successfully ends the flood, the body of Gun turns into a dragon as well. Father and son inhabit this river and the two live happily ever after.

In the more supernatural flood stories from China the flood comes from the gods, usually as a punishment and only a brother and sister survive. Sometimes they are warned by the gods themselves, sometimes by sages or they are saved by their wise parents. Regardless of why they climb into either a hollowed out gourd or log and wait out the storm. In some versions it takes decades for the flood to end and they come out very old, more commonly they emerge still as fresh faced youths. Here is where it gets messy. They are the only two people left in the world. It is their duty to repopulate the earth. The problem is, they are brother and sister. In some versions twins even. Sometimes the gods tell them to marry and the reluctant brother and sister give the gods various impossible tests like each sibling rolls a millstone down opposite hills and they must come together one on top of the other or each throws a knife at random with a double sheath on the ground between them. The knives must both land settled in the sheath. Or, similarly they fire arrows that must land inside a quiver. More commonly it is the brother that tells the sister they must marry. The sister is weirded out by this and she refuses. When the brother insists, she puts those same tests from the previous version to the brother who accomplishes them either by the will of the gods or by trickery. I.E. prestaging different millstones on top of each other or preplacing two other knives in the sheath when the sister isn't looking, stuff like that. The end result being they marry and have lots of children to repopulate the earth. This is interesting because the theme of incest. There are strong incest taboos at play here, hence why the siblings don’t couple willingly. There are incest taboos present in virtually every culture, so why they are always portrayed as brother and sister is beyond me.

Next we head to the land down under. In one aboriginal story God is angry and causes a flood, sometimes by urinating into the ocean, and the aborigines build an ark and survive. Some tellers of this tale say that this is the true version and that Noah’s ark was a copycat tale, a lie told by white men to put them down and make them subservient. Most people agree that this is likely the other way around and was derived from the Judeo Christian version to challenge its authority and legitimacy. Another fun, more original story tells of the frog Tiddalik. Tiddalik is believed to be a water carrying frog, a species unique to Australia who drink up lots of water after it rains, then burrow underground to survive the dry periods in between. Anyway, Tiddalik the giant frog emerges from his hole to drink. He greedily guzzles down all the water in the land the other plants and animals begin dying of thirst and the surviving animals decide something needs to be done. The owl tells them that the only way to get Tiddalik to release the water is to make him laugh. The animals all try and fail until the eel steps up and begins tying himself in various silly shapes which Tiddalik thinks is absolutely hilarious. Like the rumble of thunder Tiddalik starts to chuckle then he absolutely loses it, laughing his head off at the silly eel and his silly shapes, the water all comes gushing out at once, flooding the land. The water subsides and everyone lives happily ever after.

Jumping continents once again we land in the new world: America. According to the Ojibwe or Chippewa tribes of what is now southern Canada and the north midwestern United States the great spirit becomes angry with man so he causes an earth encompassing flood. Waynaboozhoo Builds a raft for himself and the animals to survive. Sounds familiar, right? Well here is where things get interesting. See, while most of these stories are more focused on the beginning and/or the end and kinda glosses over the middle, this story focuses on that middle. See, in this version, the waters don’t go back down. After a while, Waynaboozhoo realizes they never will and he must instead make the world anew. He decides this can only be accomplished by using dirt from the original earth. He tasks different animals with trying to swim down to retrieve said dirt. The loon tries and fails, then the beaver swings and misses, lastly Aajigade (ah-gee-god-eh) a small duck called a coot volunteers. The other animals laugh and Waynaboozhoo tells him that he is too small to possibly be able to so he should just go hang out while the grownups work. Instead of sitting back as he was told, the coot jumps in and dives down. He dives down and down, further and further surpassing what the other animals were able to do. The next day Waynaboozhoo notices something floating in the water by the boat. He sadly fishes Aajigade’s limp body out of the water when he notices something in his bill. It was a mouthful of earth. Though it cost him everything, Aajigade had managed to swim down to the old world and collect the dirt. Moved, Waynaboozhoo breathes life back into Aajigade and warms him with his body, nursing him back to health. The brave little coot then swims away like it was nothing. Because of his sacrifice Waynaboozhoo declared that coots would have an honored place among the animals for all time.

Waynaboozhoo then takes the dirt Aajigade had brought and shapes it, but he has nowhere to put it. Mikinaak the snapping turtle comes over and tells Waynaboozhoo that he could toss it on his back as it was broad and flat. Waynaboozhoo places the tiny mouthful of dirt on Turtle’s back and tells it to grow. He puts some ants on it to spin it around and help it spread, kind of like a potter's wheel. As it grows the other animals step off the raft and onto dry land according to their size. Waynaboozhoo sent the birds out to fly over and observe the land and to send reports back to him in the form of song and they are still doing so to this day this is why we hear the birds singing as they fly overhead. So that is the story of how the earth was remade after the flood. A note about Waynaboozhoo. Waynaboozhoo is the Adamic figure in Ojibwe culture. He was the first man. He is portrayed as a wise man and as a trickster. He is so intrinsic to their culture that the standard ojibwe greeting, Boozhoo, is derived from his name.

The Mohawk tribe tells a similar tale but in their version, our world hadn't been created yet. Everyone in existence lived above us in the spirit world. It sounds like a pretty neat place. The land was full of game, the waters full of fish, the crops planted themselves and though it is always sunny and never rains, everything is lush and green. So who can blame them for not creating anything down below.

In this paradise there was a super rich man, and in this land of wealth and plenty, that's really saying something! This rich man has a beautiful wife named Ataentsic. (Ata-en-sic) This guy is a super jealous husband and when his wife becomes pregnant, for some reason he is convinced the child isn't his. He has his servants uproot a massive tree and shove her down in the hole. They push her deeper and deeper into the ground until she falls right through into our world. As she is falling she apparently has the presence of mind to grab a strawberry plant so she had snacks for when she gets to her destination and a tobacco plant to help her relax. Muskrat sees her falling and gets his buddies loon, beaver, mink and turtle. They decide that one of them needs to let her live on their back and turtle being the only one with a big, broad back is elected. But Turtle's shell is hard. They needed some dirt to cushion the fall. So muskrat dives down, no luck. Then beaver, then mink manages to get a tiny pawful. He puts it on Turtle’s back and it starts to grow, where it eventually becomes all the land we see today. For right now it is small. Once the landing zone is prepped, loon flies up and guides her down to the world they had just made for her on the "fly" as she was airborne. By the time she gets there, the dirt had grown from a tiny clump to the size of her foot. She stands there on one foot until it is big enough to be able to sit. A few days later there is a whole island complete with trees and plants and rivers. She plants her strawberries and tobacco, these are the world's first crops. By the time she is ready to give birth the tiny bit of land mink retrieved had became all the continents we see today. She gave birth to a girl by herself and that daughter would grow up to have her own adventures, but that is a story for another time. I do think it bears saying that when her daughter comes of age, she helps the girl find a suitable husband but she herself never remarries, staying virtuous to the end.

According to the Hopi, the great flood was not the first time the world was destroyed by the angry gods. In the first world, over time the people stopped worshipping the gods, forgetting their laws and separating into different tribes. The gods became angry and destroyed the world with fire, saving only a handful of the faithful from each tribe by leading them to safety with a great cloud by day and a bright star by night to the caverns of the ant people where they were kept safe. After the fire had died down, they re-emerged and repopulated. In this new world, the gods gave the people everything they needed. The tribes began to trade with one another. And after trade began, luxury items start to emerge, the people become more capitalist, and over time they came to value material wealth over the gods. Then trouble starts because of the inequal distribution of wealth causing fights to break out, then wars. This made the gods angry so they destroyed the second world with ice. They caused the world to go off its axis, changing the poles and freezing the land. Once again a chosen few from each tribe were guided to the ant people and were saved. This is where things get good. The people re re-emerge into this third new world and live happily ever after. For a little while. Then someone invents a flying device. He makes a great big leather shield as it is described, which he uses to fly to another village, raid it then fly away before anyone can catch him. Then others see this and start building their own and soon everyone is flying everywhere stealing things and starting wars. I can just imagine the aerial dogfights going down! The gods see this and cause great waves to crash down, flooding the earth and rearranging the landscape.

Now listen to this, ok, so the first world was destroyed by fire, we see this corroborated in the traditions of other tribes in different parts of the new world, suggesting some kind of massive wildfire may have occurred in prehistory. Then comes the ice age, which everyone knows about. Then when the earth floods, it breaks the land apart. In Lakota tradition, the water spills out of these cracks as the land splits up. See, up til then there was only one land. Which we refer to now as Pangaea. Then, a cataclysmic tectonic event occurred, breaking the super continent apart into separate continents. Now just looking at it rationally and scientifically, if a comparatively small earthquake can cause massively devastating tsunamis, what would a massive event like this cause? I can imagine in the watery chaos that ensued it would have seemed like the world was being destroyed by water to the people who lived through it. In the Hopi legend the survivors ended up on a small bit of land that had previously been the top of a vast mountain and they waited. They sent out various birds to check and see if land was reappearing yet only to have them come back tired, showing they had not found land to settle. THe Lakota story has everyone and everything except Kangi the crow drowning in the flood but luckily Kangi had a magic pipe bag that had in it some of every animal. Then, as in the ojibwe tale, the waters would not go down so Kangi realizes he must rebuild the world using dirt from the old world. Various animals tried, loon, otter and beaver, then turtle came along and dove down, bringing up a mouthful of dirt which Kangi used to rebuild the earth.

People argue whether or not Noah’s flood actually happened and it’s not my place to say one way or another. But given the universal nature of the flood myth, it seems likely that SOMETHING happened involving a cataclysmic event. Now I doubt it was the blood of a giant as in the Celtic and Norse traditions, and while the aboriginal version of God peeing to flood the earth is comical, it does not seem likely unless we look at these metaphorically or take them as an interpretation of the events through the eyes of the given people that experienced it. Other accounts seem more scientifically accurate. For example, we are now finding evidence in China that reinforces their flood myths. As for the Native American versions, wow. Including a series of natural disasters including the ice age and the existence of a supercontinent thousands of years before Pangaea was theorized in 1912 by the German Alfred Wegener. Did God wipe out the earth with a massive global flood, who can say. But these stories suggest we evaluate the idea with open eyes.