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 Celestial myth theory. and moon, and of the constellations, even though an 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[16] 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[17] (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.”[18] 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,[19] 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.[20] 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 Indian myth reconsidered. earliest Babylonian flood-story,[21] and almost inconceivable that in its second form the Indian story should not have become adapted to what may be called the celestial mythic theory. The phrase “the northern mountain” for the place where the ship grounded may quite well be the name of an earthly substitute (the epic has “the highest summit of the Himalaya”) for the mythic mountain of heaven. Nor is it unimportant that Manu is the son of the sun-god, and that the phrase “the seven rishis” in classical Sanskrit is a designation of the seven stars of the Great Bear. For such problems all that we can hope for is a probable solution. The opposite view[22] that the deluge is a historical occurrence implies a self-propagating power in early tradition which is not justified by critical research, and leaves out of sight many important facts revealed by comparative study.
For a conspectus of deluge-stories see Andree, Die Flutsagen, ethnographisch betrachtet (1891), by a competent anthropologist; E. Suess, Face of the Earth, i. 17 (1904); also Elwood Worcester, Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge (New York, 1901), Appendix ii., in tabular form, from Schwarz’s Sintfluth und Völkerwanderungen. Dr Worcester’s work is popular, but based on well-chosen authorities. The article “Flood” in Hastings’ D. B. is comprehensive; it represents the difficult view that flood-stories, &c., are generally highly-coloured traditions of genuine facts.
(T. K. C.)
[1] See Muir, Sanscrit Texts, i. 182, 206 ff.
[2] Cf. Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, The Hexateuch, ii. 9, where the documents are printed separately in a tabular form.
[3] Isa. xi. 6-8 prophesies that one day this idyllic state shall be restored.