[182] Bryant (“Mythology,” ii. 254) says, “Many persons of great learning have not scrupled to determine that Noah and Janus were the same. By Plutarch he is called Ιαννος, and represented as an ancient prince who reigned in the infancy of the world.... He was represented with two faces, with which he looked both forwards and backwards; and from hence he had the name of Janus Bifrons. One of these faces was that of an aged man; but in the other was often to be seen the countenance of a young and beautiful personage. About him ... many emblems.... There was particularly a staff in one hand, with which he pointed to a rock, from whence issued a profusion of water. In the other hand he held a key.... He had generally near him some resemblance of a ship.... Plutarch does not accede to the common notion” (that it was the ship that brought Saturn to Italy), “but still makes it a question why the coins of this personage bore on one side the resemblance of Janus Bifrons, and on the other the representation of either the hind part or the fore part of a ship.... He is said to have first composed a chaplet, and to him they attributed the invention of a ship. Upon the Sicilian coins (at the temple) of Eryx his figure often occurs with a twofold countenance, and on the reverse is a dove encircled with a crown, which seems to be of olive. He is represented as a just man and a prophet (comp. [pp. 207–208]), and had the remarkable characteristics of being in a manner the author of time and the god of the year.”
[183] “Megasthenes stated that the first king (of India) was Dionysus. He found a rude population in a savage state, clothed in skins, unacquainted with agriculture, and without fixed habitations. The length of his reign is not given. The introduction of civilization and agriculture is a natural allusion to the immigration of the Aryans into a country inhabited by Turanian races.... Fifteen generations after Dionysus, Hercules reigned.... Now all this is obviously pure Indian tradition. Dionysus is the elder Manu, the divine primeval man, son of the Sun (Vivasvat). He holds the same position in the primeval history of India as does Jima or Gemshid, another name of the primeval man in the Iranian world.... The first era, then, is represented by Megasthenes as having fourteen generations of human kings, with a god as the founder and a god as the destroyer of the dynasty, in all fifteen or sixteen generations.”—Bunsen’s Egypt, iii. 528. Compare those fifteen generations with Palmer. Compare the confusion of Dionysus and Hercules with Deucalion and Prometheus, &c., p. 232. Pelasgus among the Arcadians passed for the first man and the first legislator (Boulanger, i. 133). Of Cadmus, too, it is said—“Greece is indebted to him for alphabetical writing, the art of cultivating the vine, and the forging and working of metals.”—Goguet, ii. 41.
[184] Vide supra, [Oannes], ch. ix.; vide Smith, “Myth. Dict.”
[185] “All nations have given the honour of the discovery of agriculture to their first sovereigns. The Egyptians said that Osiris (vide supra, [p. 204]) made men desist from eating each other, by teaching them to cultivate the earth. The Chinese annals relate that Gin-Hoang, one of the first kings of that country, invented agriculture, and by that means collected men into society, who before had wandered in the fields and woods like brute beasts.” (Goguet, “Origin of Laws.”) I need not remind the reader that Goguet’s learned work is not written from our point of view. Compare infra, [p. 240.]
[186] Vide, [chap. xiii.] Golden age, Mexican tradition.
[187] Although the greater number of these traditions have been localised, yet in almost every case we shall find embodied in them some one incident or other of the universal Deluge, as recorded by Moses. Kalisch (“Hist. and Crit. Commentary on the Old Testament”) says:—“It is unnecessary to observe that there is scarcely a single feature in the biblical account which is not discovered in one or several of the heathen traditions; and the coincidences are not limited to desultory details, they extend to the whole outlines, and the very tenor and spirit of the narrative; ... and it is certain that none of these accounts are derived from the pages of the Bible—they are independent of each other.... There must indisputably have been a common basis, a universal source, and this source is the general tradition of primitive generations.”
It is not, I think, generally known how widespread these traditions are. L’Abbé Gainet has collected some thirty-five (“La Bible sans la Bible”); but Mr Catlin (vide infra, [p. 245]) says he found the tradition of a deluge among one hundred and twenty tribes which he visited in North, South, and Central America. This accords with Humboldt’s testimony (Kalisch, i. 204), who “found the tradition of a general deluge vividly entertained among the wild tribes peopling the regions of Orinoco.” To these I must add the evidence of the indirect testimony of the commemorative ceremonies which I have collected in another chapter (vide [p. 242]). It has been said that the Chinese tradition is too obscure to be adduced, but we shall see ([p. 65]) whether, when in contact with other traditions, it cannot be made to give light; and I shall refer my readers to the pages of Mr Palmer (supra, [p. 71]) for evidence of the tradition in Egypt, where it had heretofore been believed that no such evidence was to be found. In India (vide [ch. ix.]) the tradition is embodied in the history of Manu and the fish; and Bunsen (“Egypt,” iii. 470) admits “that there is evidence in the Vedas, however slight, that the flood does form a part of the reminiscences of Iran.” Vide also [p. 68], evidence of the tradition in Cashmere. I wish also to direct attention here to two recent and important testimonies to the existence of the tradition in India and the Himalayan range. At pp. 151 and 450 of Hunter’s “Bengal,” it will be seen that the Santals have a distinct tradition of the Creation, flood, intoxication of Noah, and the dispersion; and of the Vedic evidence, which Bunsen (supra, [223]) calls slight, Mr Hunter says:—“On the other hand, the Sanscrit story of the Deluge, like that in the Pentateuch, makes no mystery of the matter. A ship is built, seeds are taken on board, the ship is pulled about for some time by a fish, and at last gets on shore upon a peak of the Himalayas.” Dr Hooker (“Himalayan Journal,” ii. 3) says:—“The Lepchas have a curious legend of a man and woman having saved themselves on the summit of Tendong (a very fine mountain, 8613 feet) during a flood which once deluged Sikhim,” which he authenticates on the spot. Here, as in many of Mr Catlin’s instances of local tradition, I may observe that the event as recorded proves the universality of the Deluge for the rest of the world, or at least all the world below the level of Tendong. In speaking, however, of the universal Deluge (universal as far as the human race are concerned), I do not enter into the geological argument, or exclude the view (permissible I believe, vide Reusch, p. 368, and note to Rev. H. J. Coleridge’s fourth sermon on “The Latter Days”) that it was not geographically universal. I merely adhere to the testimony of tradition, and from this point of view it would suffice (vide Reusch) that it was universal so far as the horizon of the survivors extended.
[188] Mr Grote certainly says—“Apollodorus connects this deluge with the wickedness of the brazen race in Hesiod, according to the practice general with the logographers of stringing together a sequence out of legends totally unconnected with each other.” One would have thought in one’s simplicity that if any two legends linked well together, uniting in common agreement with the scriptural account, it would be the legends of the Deluge and the brazen age.
[189] Let the significance of the following coincidence be considered in connection with the evidence at p. 244, Boulanger, “Ces fêtes (Atheniasmes, ‘Anthisteries’) avoient pour objet une commémoration (of the Deluge) et l’on en attribuoit la fondation à Deucalion; elles étoient aussi consacrées à Bacchus, ce qui les a fait nommés les anciennes ou les grandes Bacchanales.”—Comp. ch. xi. [p. 244], also supra, [213].
[190] It is the fashion to deride Bryant’s etymology, and no doubt he did not write in the light of modern science; but I find (“Mythology,” iii. 534) that he had already given this information. “Main, from whence mœnia, signified in the primitive language a stone, or stones, and also a building.”