II.
Indian Traditions.—India, in its turn, affords us an account of the Deluge, which by its poverty strikingly contrasts with that of the Bible and the Chaldeans. Its most simple and ancient form is found in the Çatapatha Brâhmana of the Rig-Veda. It has been translated for the first time by M. Max Müller.
"One morning water for washing was brought to Manu, and when he had washed himself a fish remained in his hands. And it addressed these words to him:—'Protect me and I will save thee.' 'From what wilt thou save me?' 'A deluge will sweep all creatures away; it is from that I will save thee.' 'How shall I protect thee?' The fish replied: 'While we are small we run great dangers, for fish swallow fish. Keep me at first in a vase; when I become too large for it dig a basin to put me into. When I shall have grown still more, throw me into the ocean; then I shall be preserved from destruction.' Soon it grew a large fish. It said to Manu, 'The very year I shall have reached my full growth the Deluge will happen. Then build a vessel and worship me. When the waters rise, enter the vessel and I will save thee.'
"After keeping him thus, Manu carried the fish to the sea. In the year indicated Manu built a vessel and worshipped the fish. And when the Deluge came he entered the vessel. Then the fish came swimming up to him, and Manu fastened the cable of the ship to the horn of the fish, by which means the latter made it pass over the mountain of the North. The fish said, 'I have saved thee; fasten the vessel to a tree that the water may not sweep it away while thou art on the mountain; and in proportion as the waters decrease thou shalt descend.' Manu descended with the waters, and this is what is called the descent of Manu on the mountain of the North. The deluge had carried away all creatures, and Manu remained alone."
Next in order of date and complication, which always goes on loading the narrative more and more with fantastic and parasitical details, comes the version in the enormous epic of Mahâbhârata. That of the poem called Bhâgavata-Purâna is still more recent and fabulous. Finally, the same tradition forms the subject of an entire poem of very low date, the Matsya-Purâna, of which an analysis has been given by the great Indian scholar, Wilson.
In the preface to the third volume of his edition of Bhâgavata-Purâna, Eugene Burnouf has carefully compared the three narratives known at the time he wrote (that of the Çatapatha Brâhmana has been since discovered), with a view to clearing up the origin of the Indian tradition of the Deluge. He points out in a discussion that deserves to remain a model of erudition and subtle criticism, that it is absolutely wanting in the Vedic hymns, where we only find distant allusions to it that seem to belong to a different kind of legend altogether, and also that this tradition was primitively foreign to the essentially Indian system of Manvantaras, or periodic destructions of the world. He thence concludes that it must have been imported into India subsequently to the adoption of this system, which is, however, very ancient, being common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, and therefore inclines to look upon it as a Semitic importation that took place in historic times, not, indeed, of Genesis, but more probably of the Babylonian tradition.
The discovery of an original edition of the latter confirms the theory of the French savant. The leading feature which distinguishes the Indian narrative is the part assigned to a god who puts on the form of a fish, in order to warn Manu, to guide his vessel and save him from the flood. The nature of the metamorphosis is the only fundamental and primitive point, for different versions vary as to the personality of the god who assumes this form—the Brâhmana leaves it uncertain, the Mahâbhârata fixes on Brahma, and the compilers of the Purânas on Vishnu. This is the more remarkable that this metamorphosis into a fish Matsyavatara remains isolated in Indian mythology, is foreign to its habitual symbolism, and gives rise to no ulterior developments: no trace being found in India of that fish-worship which was so important and widespread among other ancient people. Burnouf rightly saw in this a sign of importation from without, and especially of its Babylonian origin, for classic testimony, recently confirmed by native monuments, shows us that in the religion of Babylon the conception of ichthyomorphic gods held a more prominent place than elsewhere. The part played by the divine fish with regard to Manu in the Indian legend, is attributed both by the Epic of Uruk and by Berosus to the god Êa, who is also designated Schalman, "the Saviour." Now this god, whose type of representation we now know certainly from Assyrian and Babylonian monuments, is essentially the ichthyomorphic god, and his image almost invariably combines the forms of fish and man. In astronomical tables frequent mention is made of the catasterism of the "fish of Êa," which is indubitably our sign Pisces, since it presides over the month Adar. It is to a connection of ideas based on the diluvian record, that we must attribute the placing of Pisces—primarily of the "fish of Êa"—next to Aquarius, whose relation to the history of the Deluge we have already pointed out. Here we have an evident allusion to the part of Saviour attributed by the people who invented the Zodiac, to the god Êa in the flood, and to the idea of an ichthyomorphic nature especially belonging to this aspect of his personality. Êa is, moreover, the Oannès, lawgiver of the fragments of Berosus, half-man, half-fish, whose form, answering to the description given by the Chaldean history, has been discovered in the sculptures of Assyrian palaces and on cylinders, the Euahanès of Hygin, and the Oès of Helladios.[46]
Whenever we find among two different peoples one same legend, with as special a circumstance which does not spring naturally and necessarily from the fundamental facts of the narrative, and when, moreover, this circumstance is closely connected with the whole religious conceptions of one of these peoples, and remains isolated and alien from the customary symbolism of the other, criticism lays it down as an absolute rule that we must conclude the legend to have been transmitted from the one to the other in an already fixed form, to be a foreign importation, superimposed, not fused with the national, and as it were genial, traditions of the people, who have received, without having created it.
We must also remark that in the Purânas it is no longer Manu Vaivasata that the divine fish saves from the Deluge, but a different personage, the King of the Dâsas—i.e., fishers, Satyravata, "the man who loves justice and truth," strikingly corresponding to the Chaldean Khasisatra. Nor is the Puranic version of the Legend of the Deluge to be despised, though it be of recent date and full of fantastic and often puerile details. In certain aspects it is less Aryanized than that of Brâhmana or than the Mahâbhârata, and above all it gives some circumstances omitted in these earlier versions, which must yet have belonged to the original foundation, since they appear in the Babylonian legend; a circumstance preserved no doubt by the oral tradition—popular and not Brahmanic—with which the Purânas are so deeply imbued. This has been already observed by Pictet, who lays due stress on the following passage of the Bhâgavata-Purâna: "In seven days," said Vishnu to Satyravata, "the three worlds shall be submerged." There is nothing like this in the Brâhmana nor the Mahâbhârata, but in Genesis the Lord says to Noah, "Yet seven days and I will cause it to rain upon the earth;" and a little further we read, "After seven days the waters of the flood were upon the earth." And we have just pointed out the parts played by hebdomades as successive periods in that system of the duration of the flood, adopted by the author of the Jehovist documents inserted in Genesis, as well as by the compiler of the Chaldean Epic of Uruk. Nor must we pay less attention to what the Bhâgavata-Purâna says of the directions given by the fish-god to Satyravata for the placing of the sacred Scriptures in a safe place in order to preserve them from Hayagrîva, a marine horse dwelling in the abyss, and of the conflict of the god with this Hayagrîva, who had stolen the Vedas and thus produced the cataclysm by disturbing the order of the world. This circumstance too is wanting in the more ancient compositions, even in the Mahâbhârata, but it is a most important one, and cannot be looked on as a spontaneous product of Indian soil, for we recognize in it under an Indian garb the very tradition of the interment of the sacred writings at Sippara by Khasisatra, such as we have it in the fragments of Berosus.
It is the Chaldean form, then, of the tradition that the Indians have adopted owing to communications which the commercial relations between the countries render historically natural, and they afterwards amplified it with the exuberance peculiar to their imagination. But they must have adopted it all the more readily because it agreed with a tradition, which under a somewhat different form had been brought by their ancestors from the primitive cradle of the Aryan race. That the recollection of the flood did indeed form part of the original groundwork of the legends as to the origin of the world held by this great race, is beyond all doubt. For if Indians have accepted the Chaldean form of the story, so nearly allied to that of Genesis, all other nations of Aryan descent show themselves possessed of entirely original versions of the cataclysm which cannot be held to have been borrowed either from Babylonian or Hebrew sources.