III.
Traditions of other Aryan Peoples.—Among the Iranians, in the sacred books containing the fundamental Zoroastrian doctrines, and dating very far back, we meet with a tradition which must assuredly be looked upon as a variety of that of the Deluge, though possessing a special character, and diverging in some essential particulars from those we have been examining. It relates how Yima, who in the original and primitive conception was the father of the human race, was warned by Ahuramazda, the good deity, of the earth being about to be devastated by a flood. The god ordered Yima to construct a refuge, a square garden, vara, protected by an enclosure, and to cause the germs of men, beasts, and plants to enter it, in order to escape annihilation. Accordingly, when the inundation occurred, the garden of Yima with all that it contained was alone spared, and the message of safety was brought thither by the bird Karshipta, the envoy of Ahuramazda.[47]
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 Khafçtras—i.e., the maleficent spirits created by Angrômainyus, 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 Çpendjaghra, 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 Khafçtras, from which Tistrya undertakes to purge the earth, are the hurtful and venomous beasts created by Angrômainyus 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 Bœotia 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 Ângha. 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-Phœnician 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 Anthestéria, a day of mourning consecrated to the dead,—that is, on the thirteenth of the month of Anthestérion, 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 Hermès Saos or Sôcos, the object of special worship in the island, a divinity in whom M. Philippe Berges recognizes with good reason a Phœnician 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 Ægean, 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 Capaïs, inundating the whole of the great Bœotian 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 ΝΩΕ, 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 Wêjas (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.