RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER XIII

GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET

AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the book of Genesis be interpreted to conform to the theory of the contact of a comet with the earth in the Drift Age?

It may appear to some of my readers irreverent to place any new meaning on any part of the sacred volume, and especially to attempt to transpose the position of any of its parts. For this feeling I have the highest respect.

I do not think it is necessary, for the triumph of truth, that it should lacerate the feelings even of the humblest. It should come, like Quetzalcoatl, advancing with shining, smiling face, its hands full of fruits and flowers, bringing only blessings and kindliness to the multitude; and should that multitude, for a time, drive the prophet away, beyond the seas, with curses, be assured they will eventually return to set up his altars.

He who follows the gigantic Mississippi upward from the Gulf of Mexico to its head-waters on the high plateau of Minnesota, will not scorn even the tiniest rivulet among the grass which helps to create its first fountain. So he who considers the vastness for good of this great force, Christianity, which pervades the world down the long course of so many ages, aiding, relieving, encouraging, cheering, purifying, sanctifying humanity, can not afford to ridicule even these the petty fountains, the head-waters, the first springs from which it starts on its world-covering and age-traversing course.

If we will but remember the endless array of asylums, hospitals, and orphanages; the houses for the poor, the sick, the young, the old, the unfortunate, the helpless, and the sinful, with which Christianity has literally sprinkled the world; when we remember the uncountable millions whom its ministrations have restrained from bestiality, and have directed to purer lives and holier deaths, he indeed is not to be envied who can find it in his heart, with malice-aforethought, to mock or ridicule it.

At the same time, few, I think, even of the orthodox, while bating no jot of their respect for the sacred volume, or their faith in the great current of inspired purpose and meaning which streams through it, from cover to cover, hold to-day that every line and word is literally accurate beyond a shadow of question. The direct contradictions which occur in the text itself show that the errors of man have crept into the compilation or composition of the volume.

The assaults of the skeptical have been largely directed against the opening chapters of Genesis:

"What!" it has been said, "you pretend in the first chapter that the animated creation was made in six days; and then in the second chapter (verses 4 and 5) you say that the heavens and the earth and all the vegetation were made in one day. Again: you tell us that there was light shining on the earth on the first day; and that there was night too; for 'God divided the light from the darkness'; and there was morning and evening on the first, second, and third days, while the sun, moon, and stars, we are told, were not created until the fourth day; and grass and fruit-trees were made before the sun."

"How," it is asked, "could there be night and day and vegetation without a sun?"

And to this assault religion has had no answer.

Now, I can not but regard these opening chapters as a Mosaic work of ancient legends, dovetailed together in such wise that the true chronological arrangement has been departed from and lost.

It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called Jehovah Elohim. This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as Jehovah-Jove. The conclusion would be very strong that the first part was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences. And this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an incongruous order.

I propose, therefore, with all reverence, to attempt a re-arrangement of the verses of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, which will, I hope, place it in such shape that it will be beyond future attack from the results of scientific research; by restoring the fragments to the position they really occupied before their last compilation. Whether or not I present a reasonably probable case, it is for the reader to judge.

If we were to find, under the dris of Pompeii, a grand tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the "Iliad," but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the fragments so as to do justice to the great design of its author; and to silence, at the same time, the cavils of those who could see in its shocked and broken form nothing but a subject for mirth and ridicule.

In the same way, following the clew afforded by the legends of mankind and the revelations of science, I shall suggest a reconstruction of this venerable and most ancient work. If the reader does not accept my conclusions, he will, at least, I trust, appreciate the motives with which I make the attempt.

I commence with that which is, and should be, the first verse of the first chapter, the sublime sentence:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Let us pause here: "God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning";--that is, before any other of the events narrated in the chapter. Why should we refuse to accept this statement? In the beginning, says the Bible, at the very first, God created the heavens and the earth. He did not make them in six days, he made them in the beginning; the words "six days" refer, as we shall see, to something that occurred long afterward. He did not attempt to create them, he created them; he did not partially create them, he created them altogether. The work was finished; the earth was made, the heavens were made, the clouds, the atmosphere, the rocks, the waters; and the sun, moon, and stars; all were completed.

What next? Is there anything else in this dislocated text that refers to this first creation? Yes; we go forward to the next chapter; here we have it:

Chap. ii, v. 1. "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them."

And then follows:

Chap. ii, v. 4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created, IN THE DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Chap. ii, v. 5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."

Here we have a consecutive statement--God made the heavens and the earth in the beginning, and thus they were finished, and all the host of them. They were not made in six days, but "in the day," to wit, in that period of remote time called "The Beginning." And God made also all the herbs of the field, all vegetation. And he made every plant of the field before it was cultivated in that particular part of the world called "The Earth," for, as we have seen, Ovid draws a distinction between "The Earth" and the rest of the globe; and Job draws one between "the island of the innocent" and the other countries of the world.

And here I would call the reader's attention particularly to this remarkable statement:

Chap. ii, verse 5. "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Verse 6. "But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground."

This is extraordinary: there was no rain.

A mere inventor of legends certainly had never dared make a statement so utterly in conflict with the established order of things; there was no necessity for him to do so; he would fear that it would throw discredit on all the rest of his narrative; as if he should say, "at that time the grass was not green," or, "the sky was not blue."

A world without rain! Could it be possible? 'Did the writer of Genesis invent an absurdity, or did he record an undoubted tradition? Let us see:

Rain is the product of two things--heat which evaporates the waters of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again into rain or snow. Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows, accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the rain falls.

But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air, and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth, before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru, from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1]where no rain ever falls, in consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of condensation.

Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of temperature between night and day, settling

[1. "American Cyclopia," vol. xiii, p. 387.]

like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.

What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human history--to the age before the Drift!

After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next? We go back to the first chapter:

Verse 21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the earth."

Verse 25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 7. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

We return to the first chapter:

Verse 27. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 8. "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed."

Verse 9. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Verse 10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden," etc.

Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended to Spitzbergen.

Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man, "male and female"; and here we have him making woman over again from man's rib.

Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the Drift.

Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by the theologians.

He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita, the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain rayless ones, or Darklings. And the woman ate of the fruit of the tree.

This is the same legend which we see appearing in so many places and in so many forms. The apple of Paradise was one of the apples of the Greek legends, intrusted to the Hesperides, but which they could not resist the temptation to pluck and eat. The serpent Ladon watched the tree.

It was one of the apples of Idun, in the Norse legends, the wife of Brage, the god of poetry and eloquence. She keeps them in a box, and when the gods feel the approach of old age they have only to taste them and become young again. Loke, the evil-one, the Norse devil, tempted Idun to come into a forest with her apples, to compare them with some others, whereupon a giant called Thjasse, in the appearance of an enormous eagle, flew down, seized Idun and her apples, and carried them away, like Ravana, into the air. The gods compelled Loke to bring her back, for they were the apples of the tree of life to them; without them they were perishing. Loke stole Idun from Thjasse, changed her into a nut, and fled with her, pursued by Thjasse. The gods kindled a great fire, the eagle plumage of Thjasse caught the flames, he fell to the earth, and was slain by the gods.[1]

But the serpent in Genesis ruins Eden, just as he did in all the legends; just as the comet ruined the Tertiary Age. The fair world disappears; cold and ice and snow come.

Adam and Eve, we have seen, were at first naked, and subsequently clothe themselves, for modesty, with fig-leaves, (chap. iii, v. 7;) but there comes a time, as in the

[1. Norse Mythology," pp. 275, 276.]

North American legends, when the great cold compels them to cover their shivering bodies with the skins of the wild beasts they have slain.

A recent writer, commenting on the Glacial Age, says:

"Colder and colder grew the winds. The body could not be kept warm. Clothing must be had, and this must be furnished by the wild beasts. Their hides must assist in protecting the life of men. . . . The skins were removed and transferred to the bodies of men." [1]

Hence we read in chapter iii, verse 21:

"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them."

This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly, the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis, [2]only "thorns and thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just as in Job we are told:

Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."

[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.

2. Chap. iii, verse 18.]

Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for their food."

Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they gathered together."

And God "drove out the man" from the fair Edenic world into the post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and--

"At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life."

This is the sword of the comet. The Norse legends say:

"Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim. It is a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and situate at the end of the earth. Surtur holds his empire there. In his hand there shines a flaming sword."

There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the present land of stones and thistles.

Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which accompanied the comet in Genesis?

Yes, but it is strangely out of place. It is a distinct description of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity; but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely populated world. It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have completely overwhelmed it. So we find the story of Lot and the destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time of Abraham, when Egypt and Babylon were in the height of their glory. And Lot's daughters believed that the whole human family, except themselves, had been exterminated; while Abraham was quietly feeding his flocks in an adjacent country.

For if Lot's story is located in its proper era, what became of Abraham and the Jewish people, and all the then civilized nations, in this great catastrophe? And if it occurred in that age, why do we hear nothing more about so extraordinary an event in the history of the Jews or of any other people?

Mr. Smith says:

"The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely admits of explanation. It has been generally supposed that his daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed, except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]

The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent, and probable.

We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race, according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness. In the Norse Sagas we read:

• Brothers will fight together,
  And become each other's bane;
  Sisters' children
  Their sib shall spoil;
  Hard, is the world,
  Sensual sins grow huge."

[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 388.]

In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was "the profligacy of mankind" that caused God to send the great disaster. So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot's time, God resolved on the destruction of "the cities of the plain," Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind:

Chap. xviii, verse 20. "And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous"--

therefore he determined to destroy them. When the angels came to Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites. The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly "to the mountain, lest they be consumed."

There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably, where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot's intercession seems to have been of no avail:

Verse 24. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven."

Verse 25. "And he overthrew those cities, and all the cities of the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground."

It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality; and Lot "dwell in a cave, he and his two daughters."

And the daughters were convinced that they were the last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse 21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently was overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish, committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an empty and desolated world..

To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:

1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them.

2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.

3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for her children.

4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.

5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.

6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.

7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and Muspelheim.

What next?

We return now to the first chapter of this dislocated text:

Verse 2. "And the earth was without form, and void."

That is to say, chaos had come in the train of the comet. Otherwise, how can we understand how God, as stated in the preceding verse, has just made the heavens and the earth? How could his work have been so imperfect?

"And darkness was upon the face of the deep."

This is the primeval night referred to in all the legends; the long age of darkness upon the earth.

"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The word for spirit, in Hebrew, as in Latin, originally meant wind; and this passage might be rendered, "a mighty wind swept the face of the waters." This wind represents, I take it, the great cyclones of the Drift Age.

Verse 3. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

The sun and moon had not yet appeared, but the dense mass of clouds, pouring their waters upon the earth, had gradually, as Job expresses it, "wearied" themselves,--they had grown thin; and the light began to appear, at least sufficiently to mark the distinction between day and night.

Verse 4. "And God saw the light: that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness."

Verse 5. "And God called the light day, and the darkness be called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

That is to say, in subdividing the phenomena of this dark period, when there was neither moon nor sun to mark the time, mankind drew the first line of subdivision, very naturally, at that point of time, (it may have been weeks, or months, or years,) when first the distinction between night and day became faintly discernible, and men could again begin to count time.

But this gain of light had been at the expense of the clouds; they had given down their moisture in immense and perpetual rains; the low-lying lands of the earth were overflowed; the very mountains, while not under water, were covered by the continual floods of rain. There was water everywhere. To appreciate this condition of things, one has but to look at the geological maps of the amount of land known to have been overflowed by water during the so-called Glacial Age in Europe.

And so the narrative proceeds:

Verse 6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

This has been incomprehensible to the critics. It has been supposed that by this "firmament" was meant the heavens; and that the waters "above the firmament" were the clouds; and it has been said that this was a barbarian's conception, to wit, that the unbounded and illimitable space, into which the human eye, aided by the telescope, can penetrate for thousands of billions of miles, was a blue arch a few hundred feet high, on top of which were the clouds; and that the rain was simply the leaking of the water through this roof of the earth. And men have said: "Call ye this real history, or inspired narrative? Did God know no more about the nature of the heavens than this?"

And Religion has been puzzled to reply.

But read Genesis in this new light: There was water everywhere; floods from the clouds, floods from the melting ice; floods on the land, where the return of the evaporated moisture was not able, by the channel-ways of the earth, to yet find its way back to the oceans.

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

That is to say, first a great island appeared dividing the waters from the waters. This was "the island of the innocent," referred to by Job, where the human race did not utterly perish. We shall see more about it hereafter.

"7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

"8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

The Hebrew Rokiis translated stereoma, or solidity, in the Septuagint version. It meant solid land--not empty space.

And if man was not or had not yet been on earth, whence could the name Heaven have been derived? For whom should God have named it, if there were no human ears to catch the sound? God needs no lingual apparatus--he speaks no human speech.

The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "in the midst of the waters," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents.

What next?

"9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

"10. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

This may be either a recapitulation of the facts already stated, or it may refer to the gradual draining off of the continents, by the passing away of the waters; the continents being distinguished in order of time from the island "in the midst of the waters."

"11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so."

It has been objected, as I have shown, that this narrative was false, because science has proved that the fruit-trees did not really precede in order of creation the creeping things and the fish, which, we are told, were not made until the fifth day, two days afterward. But if we will suppose that, as the water disappeared from the land, the air grew warmer by the light breaking through the diminishing clouds, the grass began to spring up again, as told in the Norse, Chinese, and other legends, and the fruit-trees, of different kinds, began to grow again, for we are told they produced each "after his kind."

And we learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, water, and ice?

And on the fourth day "God made two great lights," the sun and moon. If this were a narration of the original creation of these great orbs, we should be told that they were made exclusively to give light. But this is not the case. The light was there already; it had appeared on the evening of the first day; they were made, we are told, to "divide the day from the night." Day and night already existed, but in a confused and imperfect way; even the day was dark and cloudy; but, with the return of the sun, the distinction of day and night became once more clear.

"14. And God said . . . Let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years."

That is to say, let them be studied, as they were of old, as astronomical and astrological signs, whose influences control affairs on earth. We have seen that in many legends a good deal is said about the constellations, and the division of time in accordance with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which was made soon after the catastrophe:

"90. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."

That is to say, the moving creatures, the fishes which still live, which have escaped destruction in the deep waters of the oceans or lakes, and the fowls which were flying wildly in the open firmament, are commanded to bring forth abundantly, to "replenish" the desolated seas and earth.

"23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

"24. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so."

God does not, in this, create them; he calls them forth from the earth, from the caves and dens where they had been hiding, each after his kind; they were already divided into species and genera.

"28. And God blessed them," (the human family,) "and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the earth."

Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking. But how could the word "replenish" be applied to a new world, never before inhabited?

We have seen that in chapter ii (verses 16 and 17) God especially limited man and enjoined him not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; while in v. 22, ch. iii, it is evident that there was another tree, "the tree of life," which God did not intend that man should enjoy the fruit of. But with the close of the Tertiary period and the Drift Age all this was changed: these trees, whatever they signified, had been swept away, "the blazing sword" shone between man and the land where they grew, or had grown; and hence, after the Age of Darkness, God puts no such restraint or injunction upon the human family. We read:

Ch. i, v. 29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

With what reason, if the text is in its true order, could God have given man, in the first chapter, the right to eat the fruit of every tree, and in the following chapters have consigned the whole race to ruin for eating the fruit of one particular tree?

But after the so-called Glacial Age all limitations were removed. The tree of knowledge and the tree of life had disappeared for ever. The Drift covered them.

Reader, waive your natural prejudices, and ask yourself whether this proposed readjustment of the Great Book does not place it thoroughly in accord with all the revelations of science; whether it does not answer all the objections that have been made against the reasonableness of the story; and whether there is in it anything inconsistent with the sanctity of the record, the essentials of religion, or the glory of God.

Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret "days" to mean vast periods of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation, and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the Jews received their traditions divided it into days.

The first subdivision was, as I have said, that of the twilight age, when light began to invade the total darkness; it was subdivided again into the evening and the morning, as the light grew stronger.

The next subdivision of time was that period, still in the twilight, when the floods fell and covered a large part of the earth, but gradually gathered themselves together in the lower lands, and left the mountains bare. And still the light kept increasing, and the period was again subdivided into evening and morning.

And why does the record, in each case, tell us that the evening and the morning "constituted the day, instead of the morning and the evening? The answer is plain:--mankind were steadily advancing from darkness to light; each stage terminating in greater clearness and brightness; they were moving steadily forward to the perfect dawn. And it is a curious fact that the Israelites, even now, commence the day with the period of darkness: they begin their Sabbath on Friday at sunset.

The third subdivision was that in which the continents cleared themselves more and more of the floods, and the increasing light and warmth called forth grass and the trees, and clothed nature in a mantle of green. Man had come out of his cave, and there were scattered remnants of the animal kingdom here and there, but the world, in the main, was manless and lifeless--a scene of waste and desolation.

In the fourth subdivision of time, the sun, moon, and stars appeared;--dimly, and wrapped in clouds, in the evening; clearer and brighter in the morning.

In the next subdivision of time, the fish, which spawn by the million, and the birds, which quadruple their numbers in a year, began to multiply and scatter themselves, and appear everywhere through the waters and on the land. And still the light kept increasing, and "the evening and the morning were the fifth day."

And on the sixth day, man and the animals, slower to increase, and requiring a longer period to reach maturity, began to spread and show themselves everywhere on the face of the earth.

There was a long interval before man sent out his colonies and repossessed the desolated continents. In Europe, as I have shown, twelve feet of stalagmite intervenes in the caves between the remains of pre-glacial and post-glacial man. As this deposit forms at a very slow rate, it indicates that, for long ages after the great destruction, man did not dwell in Europe. Slowly, "like a great blot that spreads," the race expanded again over its ancient bunting-grounds.

And still the skies grew brighter, the storms grew less, the earth grew warmer, and "the evening and the morning" constituted the sixth subdivision of time.

And this process is still going on. Mr. James Geikie says:

"We are sure of this, that since the deposition of the shelly clays, and the disappearance of the latest local glaciers, there have been no oscillations, but only a gradual amelioration of climate." [1]

The world, like Milton's lion, is still trying to disengage its binder limbs from the superincumbent weight of the Drift. Every snow-storm, every chilling blast that blows out from the frozen lips of the icy North, is but a reminiscence of Ragnarok.

But the great cosmical catastrophe was substantially over with the close of the sixth day. We are now in the seventh day. The darkness has gone; the sun has come back; the waters have returned to their bounds; vegetation has resumed its place; the fish, the birds, the animals, men, are once more populous in ocean, air, and on the land; the comet is gone, and the orderly processes of nature are around us, and God is "resting" from the great task of restoring his afflicted world.

The necessity for some such interpretation as this was apparent to the early fathers of the Christian Church, although they possessed no theory of a. comet. St. Basil, St. Carius, and Origen, long before any such theory was dreamed of, argued that the sun, moon, and stars existed from the beginning, but that they did not appear until the fourth day. "Who," says Origen, "that has sense, can think that the first, second, and third days were without sun, moon, or stars?"

But where were they? Why did they not appear? What obscured them?

What could obscure them but dense clouds? Where did the clouds come from? They were vaporized water. What vaporized the water and caused this darkness on the face of the deep, so dense that the sun, moon, and stars did not appear until the world had clothed itself

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 438.]

again in vegetation? Tremendous heat. Where did the heat come from? If it was not caused by contact with a comet, what was it? And if it was not caused by contact with a comet, how do you explain the blazing sword at the gate of Eden; the fire falling from heaven on "the cities of the plain"; and the fire that fell on Job's sheep and camels and consumed them; and that drove Job to clamber by ropes down into the narrow-mouthed bottomless cave; where he tells us of the leviathan, the twisted, the undulating one, that cast down stones in the mire, and made the angels in heaven to tremble, and the deep to boil like a pot? And is it not more reasonable to suppose that this sublime religious poem, called the Book of Job, represents the exaltation of the human soul under the stress of the greatest calamity our race has ever endured, than to believe that it is simply a record of the sufferings of some obscure Arab chief from a loathsome disease? Surely inspiration should reach us through a different channel; and there should be some proportion between the grandeur of the thoughts and the dignity of the events which produced them.

And if Origen is right, and it is absurd to suppose that the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the third day, then the sacred text is dislocated, transposed; and the second chapter narrates events which really occurred before those mentioned in the first chapter; and the "darkness" is something which came millions of years after that "Beginning," in which God made the earth, and the heavens, and all the host of them.

In conclusion, let us observe how fully the Bible record accords with the statements of the Druidical, Hindoo, Scandinavian, and other legends, and with the great unwritten theory which underlies all our religion. Here we have:

1. The Golden Age; the Paradise.

2. The universal moral degeneracy of mankind; the age of crime and violence.

3. God's vengeance.

4. The serpent; the fire from heaven.

5. The cave-life and the darkness.

6. The cold; the struggle to live.

7. The "Fall of Man," from virtue to vice; from plenty to poverty; from civilization to barbarism; from the Tertiary to the Drift; from Eden to the gravel.

8. Reconstruction and regeneration.

Can all this be accident? Can all this mean nothing?

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER X

THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL

I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote age--before the Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated, or been developed as varieties out of one family--met with a tremendous catastrophe; that a conflagration raged over parts of its surface; that mankind took refuge in the caves of the earth, whence they afterward emerged to wander for a long time, in great poverty and hardships, during a period of darkness; and that finally this darkness dispersed, and the sun shone again in the heavens.

I do not see how the reader can avoid these conclusions.

There are but two alternatives before him: he must either suppose that all this concatenation of legends is the outgrowth of a prodigious primeval lie, or he must concede that it describes some event which really happened.

To adopt the theory of a great race-lie, originating at the beginning of human history, is difficult, inasmuch as these legends do not tell the same story in anything like the same way, as would have been the case had they all originated in the first instance from the same mind. While we have the conflagration in some of the legends, it has been dropped out of others; in one it is caused by the sun; in another by the demon; in another by the moon; in one Phaon produced it by driving the sun out of its course; while there are a whole body of legends in which it is the result of catching the sun in a noose. So with the stories of the cave-life. In some, men seek the caves to escape the conflagration; in others, their race began in the caves. In like manner the age of darkness is in some cases produced by the clouds; in others by the death of the sun. Again, in tropical regions the myth turns upon a period of terrible heat when there were neither clouds nor rain; when some demon had stolen the clouds or dragged them into his cave: while in more northern regions the horrible age of ice and cold and snow seems to have made the most distinct impression on the memory of mankind. In some of the myths the comet is a god; in others a demon; in others a serpent; in others a feathered serpent; in others a dragon; in others a giant; in others a bird in others a wolf; in others a dog; in still others a boar.

The legends coincide only in these facts:--the monster in the air; the heat; the fire; the cave-life; the darkness; the return of the light.

In everything else they differ.

Surely, a falsehood, springing out of one mind, would have been more consistent in its parts than this.

The legends seem to represent the diverging memories which separating races carried down to posterity of the same awful and impressive events: they remembered them in fragments and sections, and described them as the four blind men in the Hindoo story described the elephant;--to one it was a tail, to another a trunk, to another a leg, to another a body;--it needs to put all their stories together to make a consistent whole. We can not understand the conflagration without the comet; or the cave-life without both; or the age of darkness without something that filled the heavens with clouds; or the victory of the sun without the clouds, and the previous obscuration of the sun.

If the reader takes the other alternative, that these legends are not fragments of a colossal falsehood, then he must concede that the earth, since man inhabited it, encountered a comet. No other cause or event could produce such a series of gigantic consequences as is here narrated.

But one other question remains: Did the Drift material come from the comet?

It could have resulted from the comet in two ways: either it was a part of the comet's substance falling upon our planet at the moment of contact; or it may have been torn from the earth itself by the force of the comet, precisely as it has been supposed that it was produced by the ice.

The final solution of this question can only be reached when close and extensive examination of the Drift deposits have been made to ascertain how far they are of earth-origin.

And here it must be remembered that the matter which composes our earth and the other planets and the comets was probably all cast out from the same source, the sun, and hence a uniformity runs through it all. Humboldt says:

"We are 'astonished at being able to touch, weigh, and chemically decompose metallic and earthy masses which belong to the outer world, to celestial space'; to find in them the minerals of our native earth, making it probable, as the great Newton conjectured, that the materials which belong to one group of cosmical bodies are for the most part the same."[1]

[1. "Cosmos," vol. iv, p. 206.]

Some aolites are composed of finely granular tissue of olivine, augite, and labradorite blended together (as the meteoric stone found at Duvets, in the department de l'Ardhe, France):

"These bodies contain, for instance, crystalline substances, perfectly similar to those of our earth's crust; and in the Siberian mass of meteoric iron, investigated by Pallas, the olivine only differs from common olivine by the absence of nickel, which is replaced by oxide of tin."

Neither is it true that all meteoric stones are of iron. Humboldt refers to the aolites of Siena, "in which the iron scarcely amounts to two per cent, or the earthy aolite of Alais, (in the department du Gard, France,) which broke up in the water," (clay?); "or, lastly, those from Jonzac and Juvenas, which contained no metallic iron."

Who shall say what chemical changes may take place in remnants of the comet floating for thousands of years through space, and now falling to our earth? And who shall say that the material of all comets assumes the same form?

I can not but continue to think, however, until thorough scientific investigation disproves the theory, that the cosmical granite-dust which, mixed with water, became clay, and which covers so large a part of the world, we might say one half the earth-surface of the planet, and possibly also the gravel and striated stones, fell to the earth from the comet.

It is a startling and tremendous conception, but we are dealing with startling and tremendous facts. Even though we dismiss the theory as impossible, we still find ourselves face to face with the question, Where, then, did these continental masses of matter come from?

I think the reader will agree with me that the theory of the glacialists, that a world-infolding ice-sheet produced them, is impossible; to reiterate, they are found, (on the equator,) where the ice-sheet could not have been without ending all terrestrial life; and they are not found where the ice must have been, in Siberia and Northwestern America, if ice was anywhere.

If neither ice nor water ground up the earth-surface into the Drift, then we must conclude that the comet so ground it up, or brought the materials with it already ground up.

The probability is, that both of these suppositions are in part true; the comet brought down upon the earth the clay-dust and part of the gravel and bowlders; while the awful force it exerted, meeting the earth while moving at the rate of a million miles an hour, smashed the surface-rocks, tore them to pieces, ground them up and mixed the material with its own, and deposited all together on the heated surface of the earth, where the lower part was baked by the heat into "till" or "hardpan," while the rushing cyclones deposited the other material in partly stratified masses or drifts above it; and part of this in time was rearranged by the great floods which followed the condensation of the cloud-masses into rain and snow, in the period of the River or Champlain Drift.

Nothing can be clearer than that the inhabitants of the earth believed that the stones fell from heaven--to wit, from the comet. But it would be unsafe to base a theory upon such a belief, inasmuch as stones, and even fish and toads, taken up by hurricanes, have often fallen again in showers; and they would appear to an uncritical population to have fallen from heaven. But it is, at least, clear that the fall of the stones and the clay are associated in the legends with the time of the great catastrophe; they are part of the same terrible event.

I shall briefly recapitulate some of the evidence.

The Mattoles, an Indian tribe of Northern California, have this legend:

"As to the creation, they teach that a certain Big Man began by making the naked earth, silent and bleak, with nothing of plant or animal thereon, save one Indian, who roamed about in a wofully hungry and desolate state. Suddenly there arose a terrible whirlwind, the air grew dark and thick with dust and drifting sand, and the Indian fell upon his face in sore dread. Then there came a great calm, and the man rose and looked, and lo, all the earth was perfect and peopled; the grass and the trees were green on every plain and hill; the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the creeping things, the things that swim, moved everywhere in his sight." [1]

Here, as often happens, the impressive facts are remembered, but in a disarranged chronological order. There came a whirlwind, thick with dust, the clay-dust, and drifting sand and gravel. It left the world naked and lifeless, "silent and bleak"; only one Indian remained, and he was dreadfully hungry. But after a time all this catastrophe passed away, and the earth was once more populous and beautiful.

In the Peruvian legends, Apocatequil was the great god who saved them from the powers of the darkness. He restored the light. He produced the lightning by hurling stones with his sling. The thunder-bolts are small, round, smooth stones. [2]

The stone-worship, which played so large a part in antiquity, was doubtless due to the belief that many of the stones of the earth had fallen from heaven. Dr. Schwarz,

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 86.

2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 165.]

of Berlin, has shown that the lightning was associated in popular legends with the serpent.

"When the lightning kindles the woods it is associated with the descent of fire from heaven, and, as in popular imagination, where it falls it scatters the thunderbolts in all directions, the flint-stones, which flash when struck, were supposed to be these fragments, and gave rise to the stone-worship so frequent in the old world." [1]

In Europe, in old times, the bowlders were called devil-stones; they were supposed. to have originated from "the malevolent agency of man's spiritual foes." This was a reminiscence of their real source.

The reader will see (page 173, ante) that the Iroquois legends represent the great battle between the White One, the sun, and the Dark One, the comet. The Dark One was wounded to death, and, as it fled for life, "the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones."

Here we have the red clay and the gravel both represented.

Among the Central Americans the flints were associated with Hurakan, Haokah, and Tlaloe {Tlaloc?--jbh}, the gods of storm and thunder:

"The thunder-bolts, as elsewhere, were believed to be flints, and thus, as the emblem of the fire and the storm, this stone figures conspicuously in their myths. Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone. Such a stone, in the beginning of things, fell from heaven to earth, and broke into sixteen hundred pieces, each of which sprang up a god. . . . This is the germ of the adoration of stones as emblems of the fecundating rains. This is why, for example) the Navajos use, as their charm for rain, certain

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 117.]

long, round stones, which they think fall from the cloud when it thunders." [1]

In the Algonquin legends of Manibozho, or Manobosbu, or Nanabojou, the great ancestor of all the Algic tribes, the hero man-god, we learn, had a terrific battle with "his brother Chakekenapok, the flint-stone, whom he broke in pieces, and scattered over the land, and changed his entrails into fruitful vines. The conflict was long and terrible. The face of nature was desolated as by a tornado, and the gigantic bowlders and loose rocks found on the prairies are the missiles hurled by the mighty combatants." [2]

We read in the Ute legends, given on page ---, ante, that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats "struck the sun-god full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration."[3]

Here we have the same reference to matter falling on the earth from the heavens, associated with devouring fire. And we have the same sequence of events, for we learn that when all of Ta-wats was consumed but the head, "his tears gushed forth in a flood, which spread over the earth and extinguished the fires."

The Aleuts of the Aleutian Archipelago have a tradition that a certain Old Man, called Traghdadakh, created men "by casting stones on the earth; he flung also other stones into the air, the water, and over the land, thus making beasts, birds, and fishes." [4]

It is a general belief in many races that the stone axes and celts fell from the heavens. In Japan, the stone

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 170.

2. Ibid., p. 181.

3. Major J. W. Powell, "Popular Science Monthly," 1879, p. 799.

4 Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 104.]

arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits, who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil, China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal, etc. [1]

In the legends of Quetzalcoatl, the central figure of the Toltec mythology, we have a white man--a bearded man--from an eastern land, mixed up with something more than man. He was the Bird-serpent, that is, the winged or flying serpent, the great snake of the air, the son of Iztac Mixcoatl, "the white-cloud serpent, the spirit of the tornado." [2]He created the world. He was overcome by Tezcatlipoca, the spirit of the night.

"When he would promulgate his decrees, his herald proclaimed them from Tzatzitepec, the hill of shouting, with such a mighty voice that it could be heard a hundred leagues around. The arrows which he shot transfixed great trees; the stones he threw leveled forests; and when he laid his hands on the rocks the mark was indelible." [3]

"His symbols were the bird, the serpent, the cross, and the flint."[4]

In the Aztec calendar the sign for the age of fire is the flint.

In the Chinese Encyclopia of the Emperor Kang-hi, 1662, we are told:

"In traveling from the shores of the Eastern Sea toward Che-lu, neither brooks nor ponds are met with in the country, although it is intersected by mountains and valleys. Nevertheless, there are found in the sand, very far away from the sea, oyster-shells and the shields of crabs. The tradition of the Mongols who inhabit the country is, that it has been said from time immemorial that in a

[1. Tyler's "Early Mankind," p. 224.

2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 197.

3. Ibid., p. 197.

4. Ibid., p. 198.]

remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded the district, and when they retired the places where they had been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . This is why these deserts are called the 'Sandy Sea,' which indicates that they were not always covered with sand and gravel." [1]

In the Russian legends, a "golden ship sails across the heavenly sea; it breaks into fragments, which neither princes nor people can put together again,"--reminding one of Humpty-Dumpty, in the nursery-song, who, when he fell from his elevated position on the wall--

"Not all the king's horses,
Nor all the king's men,
Can ever make whole again."

In another Russian legend, Perun, the thunder-god, destroys the devils with stone hammers. On Ilya's day, the peasants offer him a roasted animal, which is cut up and scattered over the fields, [2]just as we have seen the great dragon or serpent cut to pieces and scattered over the world.

Mr. Christy found at Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the Atlas, in Northern Africa, in a bare, deserted, stony place among the mountains, a collection of fifteen hundred tombs, made of rude limestone slabs, set up with one slab to form a roof, so as to make perfect dolmens--closed chambers--where the bodies were packed in.

"Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their sins stones were rained upon them from heaven; so they built these chambers to creep into." [3]

In addition to the legend of "Phaon," already given, Ovid derived from the legends of his race another story,

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 328.

2. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 400.

3. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 222.]

which seems to have had reference to the same event. He says (Fable XI):

"After the men who came from the Tyrian nation had touched this grove with ill-fated steps, and the urn let down into the water made a splash, the azure dragon stretched forth his head from the deep cave, and uttered dreadful hissings."

We are reminded of the flying monster of Hesiod, which roared and hissed so terribly.

Ovid continues:

"The urns dropped from their hands, and the blood left their bodies, and a sudden trembling seized their astonished limbs. He wreathes his scaly orbs in rolling spirals, and, with a spring, becomes twisted into mighty folds; and, uprearing himself from below the middle into the light air, he looks down upon all the grove, and is of" (as) "large size, as, if you were to look on him entire, the serpent which separates the two Bears" (the constellations).

He slays the Phnicians; "some he kills with his sting, some with his long folds, some breathed upon by the venom of his baleful poison."

Cadmus casts a huge stone, as big as a millstone, against him, but it falls harmless upon his scales, "that were like a coat-of-mail"; then Cadmus pierced him with his spear. In his fall he crushes the forests; the blood flows from his poisonous palate and changes the color of the grass. He is slain.

Then, under the advice of Pallas, Cadmus sows the earth with the dragon's teeth, "under the earth turned up, as the seeds of a future people." Afterward, the earth begins to move, and armed men rise up; they slay Cadmus, and then fight with and slay each other.

This seems to be a recollection of the comet, and the stones falling from heaven; and upon the land so afflicted subsequently a warlike and aggressive and quarrelsome race of men springs up.

In the contest of Hercules with the Lygians, on the road from Caucasus to the Hesperides, "there is an attempt to explain mythically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Lygian field of stones, at the mouth of the Rhe." [1]

In the "Prometheus Delivered" of echylus, Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes "the district round about to be covered with a shower of round stones." [2]

The legends of Europe refer to a race buried under sand and earth:

"The inhabitants of Central Europe and Teutonic races who came late to England, place their mythical heroes under ground in caves, in vaults beneath enchanted castles, or in mounds which open and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire the buried race are supposed to have been buried under the sand-hills, as they are in some parts of Brittany." [3]

Turning again to America, we find, in the great prayer of the Aztecs to Tezcalipoca, {Tezcatlipoca--jbh} given on page 186, ante, many references to some material substances falling from heaven; we read:

"Thine anger and indignation has descended upon us in these days, . . . coming down even as stones, spears, and darts upon the wretches that inhabit the earth; this is the pestilence by which we are afflicted and almost destroyed." The children die, "broken and dashed to pieces as against stones and a wall. . . . Thine anger and thy indignation does it delight in hurling the stone and arrow and spear. The grinders of thy teeth" (the dragon's teeth of Ovid?) "are employed, and thy bitter whips upon the miserable of

[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 115.

2. Ibid., p. 115.

3. "Frost and Fire," vol. ii, p. 190.]

thy people.... Hast thou verily determined that it utterly perish; . . . that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a wilderness of stones? . . . Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy fury are spent? . . . Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people."

In the legend of the Indians of Lake Tahoe (see page 168, ante), we are told that the stars were melted by the great conflagration, and they rained down molten metal upon the earth.

In the Hindoo legend (see page 171, ante) of the great battle between Rama, the sun-god, and Ravana, the evil one, Rama persuaded the monkeys to help him build a bridge to the Island of Lanka, "and the stones which crop out through Southern India are said to have been dropped by the monkey builders."

In the legend of the Tupi Indians (see page 175, ante), we are told that God "swept about the fire in such way that in some places he raised mountains and in others dug valleys."

In the Bible we have distinct references to the fall of matter from heaven. In Deuteronomy (chap. xxviii), among the consequences which are to follow disobedience of God's will, we have the following:

"22. The Lord shall smite thee . . . with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.

"23. And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

"24. The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from. heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. . . .

"29. And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness."

And even that marvelous event, so much mocked at by modern thought, the standing-still of the sun, at the command of Joshua, may be, after all, a reminiscence of the catastrophe of the Drift. In the American legends, we read that the sun stood still, and Ovid tells us that "a day was lost." Who shall say what circumstances accompanied an event great enough to crack the globe itself into immense fissures? It is, at least, a curious fact that in Joshua (chap. x) the standing-still of the sun was accompanied by a fall of stones from heaven by which multitudes were slain.

Here is the record

"11. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: there were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword."

"13. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.

"14. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel."

The "book of Jasher" was, we are told, a very ancient work, long since lost. Is it not possible that a great, dim memory of a terrible event was applied by tradition to the mighty captain of the Jews, just as the doings of Zeus have been attributed, in the folk-lore of Europe, to Charlemagne and Barbarossa?

If the contact of Lexell's comet with the earth would, as shown on page 84, ante, have increased the length of the sidereal year three hours, what effect might not a comet, many times larger than the mass of the earth, have had upon the revolution of the earth? Were the heat, the conflagrations, and the tearing up of the earth's surface caused by such an arrestment or partial slowing-up of the earth's revolution on its axis?

I do not propound these questions as any part of my theory, but merely as suggestions. The American and Polynesian legends represent that the catastrophe increased the length of the days. This may mean nothing, or a great deal. At least, Joshua's legend may yet take its place among the scientific possibilities.

But it is in the legend of the Toltecs of Central America, as preserved in one of the sacred books of the race, the "Codex Chimalpopoca," that we find the clearest and most indisputable references to the fall of gravel (see page 166, ante):

"'The third sun' (or era) 'is called Quia-Tonatiuh, sun of rain, because there fell a rain of fire; all which existed burned; and there fell a rain of gravel.'

"'They also narrate that while the sandstone which we now see scattered about, and the tetzontli' (amygdaloide poreuse, basalt, trap-rocks) 'boiled with great tumult, there also arose the rocks of vermilion color.'

"'Now this was in the year Ce Tecpatl, One Flint, it was the day Nahui-Quiahuitl, Fourth Rain. Now, in this day in which men were lost and destroyed in a rain of fire, they were transformed into goslings.'" [1]

We find also many allusions in the legends to the clay.

When the Navajos climbed up from their cave they found the earth covered with clay into which they sank mid-leg deep; and when the water ran off it left the whole world full of mud.

In the Creek and Seminole legends the Great Spirit made the first man, in the primeval cave, "from the clay around him."

[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 499.]

Sanchoniathon, from the other side of the world, tells us, in the Phnician legends (see page 209, ante), that first came chaos, and out of chaos was generated m or mud.

In the Miztec (American) legends (see page 214, ante), we are told that in the Age of Darkness there was "nothing but mud and slime on all the face of the earth."

In the Quiche legends we are told that the first men were destroyed by fire and pitch from heaven.

In the Quiche legends we also have many allusions to the wet and muddy condition of the earth before the returning sun dried it up.

In the legends of the North American Indians we read that the earth was covered with great heaps of ashes; doubtless the fine, dry powder of the clay looked like ashes before the water fell upon it.

There is another curious fact to be considered in connection with these legends--that the calamity seems to have brought with it some compensating wealth.

Thus we find Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster, rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's death.

Hence we have a whole mass of legends wherein a dragon or great serpent is associated with a precious horde of gold or jewels.

"The Scythians had a saga of the sacred gold which fell burning from heaven. The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover bronze coins."[1]

"In Peru the god of riches was worshiped under the image of a rattlesnake, horned and hairy, with a tail of gold. It was said to have descended from the heavens in

[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 115.]

the sight of all the people, and to have been seen by the whole army of the Inca." [1]

The Peruvians--probably in reference to this event--chose as their arms two serpents with their tails interlaced.

Among the Greeks and ancient Germans the fiery dragon was the dispenser of riches, and "watches a treasure in the earth." [2]

These legends may be explained by the fact that in the Ural Mountains, on the east of Europe, in South America, in South Africa, and in other localities, the Drift gravels contain gold and precious stones.

The diamond is found in drift-gravels alone. It is pure carbon crystallized. Man has been unable to reproduce it, except in minute particles; nor can he tell in what laboratory of nature it has been fabricated. It is not found in situ in any of the rocks of an earth-origin. Has it been formed in space? Is it an outcome of that pure carbon which the spectroscope has revealed to us as burning in some of the comets?

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 125.

2. Ibid., p. 125.]

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER IX

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUN

A GREAT solar-myth underlies all the ancient mythologies. It commemorates the death and resurrection of the sun. It signifies the destruction of the light by the clouds, the darkness, and the eventual return of the great luminary of the world.

The Syrian Adonis, the sun-god, the Hebrew Tamheur, and the Assyrian Du-Zu, all suffered a sudden and violent death, disappeared for a time from the sight of men, and were at last raised from the dead.

The myth is the primeval form of the resurrection.

All through the Gothic legends runs this thought--the battle of the Light with the Darkness; the temporary death of the Light, and its final triumph over the grave. Sometimes we have but a fragment of the story.

In the Saxon Beowulf we have Grendel, a terrible monster, who comes to the palace-hall at midnight, and drags out the sleepers and sucks their blood. Beowulf assails him. A ghastly struggle follows in the darkness. Grendel is killed. But his fearful mother, the devil's clam, comes to avenge his death; she attacks Beowulf, and is slain.[1]There comes a third dragon, which Beowulf kills, but is stifled with the breath of the monster and dies, rejoicing, however, that the dragon has brought with him a great treasure of gold, which will make his people rich. [2]

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," p. 315.

2. Ibid.]

Here, again, are the three comets, the wolf, the snake, and the dog of Ragnarok; the three arrows of the American legends; the three monsters of Hesiod.

When we turn to Egypt we find that their whole religion was constructed upon legends relating to the ages of fire and ice, and the victory of the sun-god over the evil-one. We find everywhere a recollection of the days of cloud, "when darkness dwelt upon the face of the deep."

Osiris, their great god, represented the sun in his darkened or nocturnal or ruined condition, before the coming of day. M. Mariette-Bey says:

"Originally, Osiris is the nocturnal sun; he is the primordial night of chaos; he is consequently anterior to Ra, the Sun of Day." [1]

Mr. Miller says:

"As nocturnal sun, Osiris was also regarded as a type of the sun before its first rising, or of the primordial night of chaos, and as such, according to M. Mariette, his first rising--his original birth to the light under the form of Ra--symbolized the birth of humanity itself in the person of the first man." [2]

M. F. Chabas says:

"These forms represented the same god at different hours of the day. . . . the nocturnal sun and the daily sun, which, succeeding to the first, dissipated the darkness on the morning of each day, and renewed the triumph of Horus over Set; that is to say, the cosmical victory which determined the first rising of the sun--the organization of the universe at the commencement of time. Ra is the god who, after having marked the commencement of time, continues each day to govern his work. . . .

[1. "Mus de Boulaq," etc., pp. 20, 21, 100, 101.

2. Rev. O. D. Miller, "Solar Symbolism," "American Antiquarian," April, 1881, p. 219.]

He succeeds to a primordial form, Osiris, the nocturnal sun, or better, the sun before its first rising." [1]

"The suffering and death of Osiris," says Sir G. Wilkinson, "were the great mystery of the Egyptian religion, and some traces of it are perceptible among other people of antiquity. His being the divine goodness, and the abstract idea of good; his manifestation upon earth, his death and resurrection, and his office as judge of the dead in a future state, look like the early revelation of a future manifestation of the Deity, converted into a mythological fable." [2]

Osiris--the sun--had a war with Seb, or Typho, or Typhon, and was killed in the battle; he was subsequently restored to life, and became the judge of the under-world.[3]

Seb, his destroyer, was a son of Ra, the ancient sun-god, in the sense, perhaps, that the comets, and all other planetary bodies, were originally thrown out from the mass of the sun. Seb, or Typho, was "the personification of all evil." He was the destroyer, the enemy, the evil-one.

Isis, the consort of Osiris, learns of his death, slain by the great serpent, and ransacks the world in search of his body. She finds it mutilated by Typhon. This is the same mutilation which we find elsewhere, and which covered the earth with fragments of the sun.

Isis was the wife of Osiris (the dead sun) and the mother of Horus, the new or returned sun; she seems to represent a civilized people; she taught the art of cultivating wheat and barley, which were always carried in her festal processions.

[1. "Revue Archlogique," tome xxv, 1873, p. 393.

2. Notes to Rawlinson's "Herodotus," American edition, vol. ii, p.:219.

3. Murray's "Mythology," p. 347.]

When we turn to the Greek legends, we shall find Typhon described in a manner that clearly identifies him with the destroying comet. (See page 140, ante.)

The entire religion of the Egyptians was based upon a solar-myth, and referred to the great catastrophe in the history of the earth when the sun was for a time obscured in dense clouds.

Speaking of the legend of "the dying sun-god," Rev. O. D. Miller says:

"The wide prevalence of this legend, and its extreme antiquity, are facts familiar to all Orientalists. There was the Egyptian Osiris, the Syrian Adonis, the Hebrew Tamheur, the Assyrian Du-Zu, all regarded as solar deities, vet as having lived a mortal life, suffered a violent death, being subsequently raised from, the dead. . . . How was it possible to conceive the solar orb as dying and rising from the dead, if it had not already been taken for a mortal being, as a type of mortal man? . . . We repeat the proposition: it was impossible to conceive the sun as dying and descending into hades until it had been assumed as a type and representative of man. . . . The reign of Osiris in Egypt, his war with Typhon, his death and resurrection, were events appertaining to the divine dynasties. We can only say, then, that the origin of these symbolical ideas was extremely ancient, without attempting to fix its chronology."

But when, we realize the fact that these ancient religions were built upon the memory of an event which had really happened--an event of awful significance to the human race--the difficulty which perplexed Mr. Miller and other scholars disappears. The sun had, apparently, been slain by an evil thing; for a long period it returned not, it was dead; at length, amid the rejoicings of the world, it arose from the dead, and came in glory to rule mankind.

And these events, as I have shown, are perpetuated in the sun-worship which still exists in the world in many forms. Even the Christian peasant of Europe still lifts his hat to the rising sun.

The religion of the Hindoos was also based on the same great cosmical event.

Indra was the great god, the sun. He has a long and dreadful contest with Vritra, "the throttling snake." Indra is "the cloud-compeller"; he "shatters the cloud with his bolt and releases the imprisoned waters"; [1]that is to say, he slays the snake Vritra, the comet, and thereafter the rain pours down and extinguishes the flames which consume the world.

"He goes in search of the cattle, the clouds, which the evil powers have driven away."[2]

That is to say, as the great heat disappears, the moisture condenses and the clouds form. Doubtless mankind remembered vividly that awful period when no cloud appeared in the blazing heavens to intercept the terrible heat.

"He who fixed firm the moving earth; who tranquillized the incensed mountains; who spread the spacious firmament; who consolidated the heavens--he, men, is Indra.

"He who having destroyed Ahi (Vritra, Typhon,) set free the seven rivers, who, recovered the cows, (the clouds,) detained by Bal; who generated fire in the clouds; who is invincible in battle--he, men, is Indra."

In the first part of the "Vendidad," first chapter, the author gives an account of the beautiful land, the Aryana Vaejo, which was a land of delights, created by Ahura Mazda (Ormaz). Then "an evil being, Angra-Manyus, (Ahriman,) pill of death, created a mighty serpent, and winter, the work of the Devas."

"Ten months of winter are there, and two months of summer."

[1. Murray's "Mythology," p. 330.

2. Ibid.]

Then follows this statement:

"Seven months of summer are there; five months of winter were there. The latter are cold as to water, cold as to earth, cold as to trees. There is the heart of winter; then all around falls deep snow. There is the worst of evils."

This signifies that once the people dwelled in a fair and pleasant land. The evil-one sent a mighty serpent; the serpent brought a great winter; there were but two months of summer; gradually this ameliorated, until the winter was five months long and the summer seven months long. The climate is still severe, cold and wet; deep snows fell everywhere. It is an evil time.

The demonology of the Hindoos turns on the battles between the Asuras, the irrational demons of the air, the comets, and the gods:

"They dwell beneath the three-pronged root of the world-mountain, occupying the nadir, while their great enemy Indra," (the sun;) "the highest Buddhist god, sits upon the pinnacle of the mountain, in the zenith. The Meru, which stands between the earth and the heavens, around which the heavenly bodies revolve, is the battlefield of the Asuras and the Devas."[1]

That is to say, the land Meru--the same as the island Mero of the ancient Egyptians, from which Egypt was first colonized; the Merou of the Greeks, on which the Meropes, the first men, dwelt--was the scene where this battle between the fiends of the air on one side, and the heavenly bodies and earth on the other, was fought.

The Asuras are painted as "gigantic opponents of the gods, terrible ogres, with bloody tongues and long tusks, eager to devour human flesh and blood." [2]

[1. "American Cyclopia," vol. v, p. 793.

2. Ibid.]

And we find the same thoughts underlying the myths of nations the most remote from these great peoples of antiquity.

The Esquimaux of Greenland have this myth:

"In the beginning were two brothers, one of whom said, 'There shall be night and there shall be day, and men shall die, one after another.' But the second said, 'There shall be no day, but only night all the time, and men shall live for ever.' They had a long struggle, but here once more he who loved darkness rather than light was worsted, and the day triumphed."

Here we have the same great battle between Light and Darkness. The Darkness proposes to be perpetual; it says, "There shall be no more day." After a long struggle the Light triumphed, the sun returned, and the earth was saved.

Among the Tupis of Brazil we have the same story of the battle of light and darkness. They have a myth of Timandonar and Ariconte:

"They were brothers, one of fair complexion, the other dark. They were constantly struggling, and Ariconte, which means the stormy or cloudy day, came out worst."

Again the myth reappears; this time among the Norsemen:

Balder, the bright sun, (Baal?) is slain by the god Hodur, the blind one; to wit, the Darkness. But Vali, Odin's son, slew Hodur, the Darkness, and avenged Balder. Vali is the son of Rind--the rind--the frozen earth. That is to say, Darkness devours the sun; frost rules the earth; Vali, the new sun, is born of the frost, and kills the Darkness. It is light again. Balder returns after Ragnarok.

And Nana, Balder's wife, the lovely spring-time, died of grief during Balder's absence.

We have seen that one of the great events of the Egyptian mythology was the search made by Isis, the wife of Osiris, for the dead sun-god in the dark nether world. In the same way, the search for the dead Balder was an important part of the Norse myths. Hermod, mounted on Odin's horse, Sleifner, the slippery-one, (the ice?) set out to find Balder. He rode nine days and nine nights through deep valleys, so dark that he could see nothing;[1]at last he reaches the barred gates of Hel's (death's) dominions. There he found Balder, seated on a throne: he told Hel that all things in the world were grieving for the absence of Balder, the sun. At last, after some delays and obstructions, Balder returns, and the whole world rejoices.

And what more is needed to prove the original unity of the human race, and the vast antiquity of these legends, than the fact that we find the same story, and almost the same names, occurring among the white-haired races of Arctic Europe, and the dark-skinned people of Egypt, Phnicia, and India. The demon Set, or Seb, of one, comes to us as the Surt of another; the Baal of one is the Balder of another; Isis finds Osiris ruling the underworld as Hermod found Balder on a throne in Hel, the realm of death.

The celebration of the May-day, with its ceremonies, the May-pole, its May-queen, etc., is a survival of the primeval thanksgiving with which afflicted mankind welcomed the return of the sun from his long sleep of death. In Norway, [2]during the middle ages, the whole scene was represented in these May-day festivals: One man represents summer, he is clad in green leaves the other represents winter; he is clad in straw, fit picture of the misery of the Drift Age.

[1. "Nome Mythology," p. 288.

2. Ibid., p. 291.]

They have each a large company of attendants armed with staves; they fight with each other until winter (the age of darkness and cold) is subdued. They pretend to pluck his eyes out and throw him in the water. Winter is slain.

Here we have the victory of Osiris over Seb; of Adonis over Typhon, of Balder over Hodur, of Indra over Vritra, of Timandonar over Ariconte, brought down to almost our own time. To a late period, in England, the rejoicing over the great event survived.

Says Horatio Smith:

"It was the custom, both here and in Italy, for the youth of both sexes to proceed before daybreak to some neighboring wood, accompanied with music and horns, about sunrise to deck their doors and windows with garlands, and to spend the afternoon dancing around the May-pole."

Stow tells us, in his "Survey of London":

"Every man would walk into the sweet meddowes and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds praising God in their kindes." [2]

Stubbs, a Puritan of Queen Elizabeth's days, describing the May-day feasts, says:

"And then they fall to banquet and feast, to leape and dance about it," (the May-pole), "as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect picture, or rather the thing itself." [3]

Stubbs was right: the people of England in the year 1550 A. D., and for years afterward, were celebrating the end of the Drift Age, the disappearance of the darkness and the victory of the sun.

[1. "Festivals, Games," etc., p. 126.

2. Ibid., p. 127.

3. Ibid.]

The myth of Hercules recovering his cows from Cacus is the same story told in another form:

A strange monster, Cacus, (the comet,) stole the cows of Hercules, (the clouds,) and dragged them backward by their tails into a cave, and vomited smoke and flame when Hercules attacked him. But Hercules killed Cacus with his unerring arrows, and released the cows.

This signifies that the comet, breathing fire and smoke, so rarefied the air that the clouds disappeared and there followed an age of awful heat. Hercules smites the monster with his lightnings, and electrical phenomena on a vast scale accompany the recondensation of the moisture and the return of the clouds.

"Cacus is the same as Vritra in Sanskrit, Azbidihaka in Zend, Python in Greek, and the worm Fafnir in Norse."[1]

The cows everywhere are the clouds; they are white and soft; they move in herds across the fields of heaven; they give down their milk in grateful rains and showers to refresh the thirsty earth.

We find the same event narrated in the folk-lore of the modern European nations.

Says the Russian fairy-tale:

"Once there was an old couple who had three sons."

Here we are reminded of Shem, Ham, and Japheth; of Zeus, Pluto, and Neptune; of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; of the three-pronged trident of Poseidon; of the three roots of the tree Ygdrasil.

"Two of them," continues the legend, "had their wits about them, but the third, Ivan, was a simpleton.

"Now, in the lands in which Ivan lived there was never any day, but always night. This was a snake's doings. Well, Ivan undertook to kill the snake."

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 236.]

This is the same old serpent, the dragon, the apostate, the leviathan.

"Then came a third snake with twelve heads. Ivan killed it, and destroyed the heads, and immediately there was a bright light throughout the whole land."[1]

Here we have the same series of monsters found in Hesiod, in Ragnarok, and in the legends of different nations; and the killing of the third serpent is followed by a bright light throughout the whole land--the conflagration.

And the Russians have the legend in another form. They tell of Ilia, the peasant, the servant of Vladimir, Fair Sun. He meets the brigand Solove a monster, a gigantic bird, called the nightingale; his claws extend for seven versts over the country. Like the dragon of Hesiod, he was full of sounds--"he roared like a wild beast, bowled like a dog, and whistled like a nightingale." Ilia bits him with an arrow in the right eye, and he tumbles headlong from his lofty nest to the earth. The wife of the monster follows Ilia, who has attached him to his saddle, and is dragging him away; she offers cupfuls of gold, silver, and pearls--an allusion probably to the precious metals and stones which were said to have fallen from the heavens. The Sun (Vladimir) welcomes Ilia, and requests the monster to howl, roar, and whistle for his entertainment; he contemptuously refuses; Ilia then commands him and he obeys: the noise is so terrible that the roof of the palace falls off, and the courtiers drop dead with fear. Ilia, indignant at such an uproar, "cuts up the monster into little pieces, which he scatters over the fields"--(the Drift).[2]

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," p. 390.

2. Ibid., p. .281.]

Subsequently Ilia hides away in a cave, unfed by Vladimir--that is to say, without the light of the sun. At length the sun goes to seek him, expecting to find him starved to death; but the king's daughter has sent him food every day for three years, and he comes out of the cave hale and hearty, and ready to fight again for Vladimir, the Fair Sun. [1]These three years are the three years of the "Fimbul-winter" of the Norse legends.

I have already quoted (see chapter viii, Part Ill, page 216, ante) the legends of the Central American race, the Quiches, preserved in the "Popul Vuh," their sacred book, in which they describe the Age of Darkness and cold. I quote again, from the same work, a graphic and wonderful picture of the return of the sun

"They determined to leave Tulan, and the greater part of them, under the guardianship and direction of Tohil, set out to see where they would take up their abode. They continued on their way amid the most extreme hardships for the want of food; sustaining themselves at one time upon the mere smell of their staves, and by imagining they were eating, when in verity and truth they ate nothing. Their heart, indeed, it is again and again said, was almost broken by affliction. Poor wanderers! they had a cruel way to go, many forests to pierce, many stern mountains to overpass, and a long passage to make through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand--the sea being, however, parted for their passage. At last they came to a mountain, that they named Hacavitz, after one of their gods, and here they rested--for here they were by some means given to understand that they should see the sun. Then, indeed, was filled with an exceeding joy the heart of Balam-Quitz of Balam-Agab of Mahucutah, and of Iqui-Balam. It seemed to them that even the face of the morning star caught a new and more resplendent brightness.

"They shook their incense-pans and danced for very gladness: sweet were their tears in dancing, very hot their incense--their precious incense.

[1. Poor, "Sanskrit and Kindred Literatures," p. 883.]

At last the sun commenced to advance; the animals small and great were full of delight; they raised themselves to the surface of the water; they fluttered in the ravines; they gathered at the edge of the mountains, turning their beads together toward that part from which the sun came. And the lion and the tiger roared. And the first bird that sang was that called the Queletzu. All the animals were beside themselves at the sight; the eagle and the kite beat their wings, and every bird both great and small. The men prostrated themselves on the ground, for their hearts were full to the brim." [1]

How graphic is all this picture! How life-like! Here we have the starving and wandering nations, as described in the preceding chapter, moving in the continual twilight; at last the clouds grow brighter, the sun appears: all nature rejoices in the unwonted sight, and mankind fling themselves upon their faces like "the rude and savage man of Ind, kissing the base ground with obedient breast," at the first coming of the glorious day.

But the clouds still are mighty; rains and storms and fogs battle with the warmth and light. The "Popul Vuh" continues:

"And the sun and the moon and the stars were now all established"; that is, they now become visible, moving in their orbits. "Yet was not the sun then in the beginning the same as now; his heat wanted force, and he was but as a reflection in a mirror; verily, say the historians, not at all the same sun as that of to-day. Nevertheless, he dried up and warmed the surface of the earth, and answered many good ends."

Could all this have been invented? This people could not themselves have explained the meaning of their myth, and yet it dove-tails into every fact revealed by our latest science as to the Drift Age.

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 46.]

And then, the "Popul Vuh" tells us, the sun petrified their gods: in other words, the worship of lions, tigers, and snakes, represented by stone idols, gave way before the worship of the great luminary whose steadily increasing beams were filling the world with joy and light.

And then the people sang a hymn, "the song called 'Kamucu,'" one of the oldest of human compositions, in memory of the millions who had perished in the mighty cataclysm:

"We see;" they sang, "alas, we ruined ourselves in Tulan; there lost we many of our kith and kin; they still remain there! left behind! We, indeed, have seen the sun, but they--now that his golden light begins to appear, where are they?"

That is to say, we rejoice, but the mighty dead will never rejoice more.

And shortly after Balam-Quitz Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqui-Balam, the hero-leaders of the race, died and were buried.

This battle between the sun and the comet graduated, as I have shown, into a contest between light and darkness; and, by a natural transition, this became in time the unending struggle between the forces of good and the powers of evil--between God and Satan; and the imagery associated with it has,--strange to say,--continued down into our own literature.

That great scholar and mighty poet, John Milton, had the legends of the Greeks and Romans and the unwritten traditions of all peoples in his mind, when he described, in the sixth book of "Paradise Lost," the tremendous conflict between the angels of God and the followers of the Fallen One, the Apostate, the great serpent, the dragon, Lucifer, the bright-shining, the star of the morning, coming, like the comet, from the north.

Milton did not intend such a comparison; but he could not tell the story without his over-full mind recurring to the imagery of the past. Hence we read the following description of the comet; of that--

"Thunder-cloud of nations,
Wrecking earth and darkening heaven."

Milton tells us that when God's troops went forth to the battle--

"At last,
Far in the horizon, to the north, appeared
From skirt to skirt, a fiery region stretched,
In battailous aspect, and nearer view
Bristled with upright beams innumerable
Of rigid spears, and helmets thronged and shields
Various, with boastful arguments portrayed,
The banded powers of Satan, hasting on
With furious expedition. . . .
High in the midst, exalted as a god,
The apostate, in his sun-bright chariot, sat,
Idol of majesty divine, inclosed
With flaming cherubim and golden shields."

The comet represents the uprising of a rebellious power against the supreme and orderly dominion of God. The angel Abdiel says to Satan:

"Fool! not to think how vain
Against the Omnipotent to rise in arms;
Who out of smallest things could without end
Have raised incessant armies to defeat
Thy folly; or, with solitary hand,
Reaching beyond all limit, at one blow,
Unaided, could have finished thee, and whelmed
Thy legions under darkness."

The battle begins:

"Now storming fury rose,
And clamor such as heard in heav'n till now
Was never; arms on armor clashing brayed
Horrible discord, and the madding wheels
Of brazen chariots raged; dire was the noise
Of conflict; overhead the dismal hiss
Of fiery darts in flaming volleys flew,
And, flying, vaulted either host with fire. . . .
Army 'gainst army, numberless to raise
Dreadful combustion warring and disturb
Though not destroy, their happy native seat.
. . . Sometimes on firm ground
A standing fight, then soaring on main wing
Tormented all the air, all air seemed then
Conflicting fire."

Michael, the archangel, denounces Satan as an unknown being a stranger:

"Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt,
Unnamed in heaven . . . how hast thou disturbed
Heav'n's blessed peace, and into nature brought
Misery, uncreated till the crime
Of thy rebellion! . . . But think not here
To trouble holy rest; heav'n casts thee out
From all her confines: heav'n, the seat of bliss,
Brooks not the works of violence and war.
Hence then, and evil go with thee along,
Thy offspring, to the place of evil, bell,
Thou and thy wicked crew! "

But the comet (Satan) replies that it desires liberty to go where it pleases; it refuses to submit its destructive and erratic course to the domination of the Supreme Good; it proposes--

"Here, however, to dwell free
If not to reign."

The result, of the first day's struggle is a drawn battle.

The evil angels meet in a night conference, and prepare gunpowder and cannon, with which to overthrow God's armies!

"Hollow engines, long and round,
Thick rammed, at th' other bore with touch of fire Dilated and infuriate, shall send forth
From far, with thund'ring noise, among our foes
Such implements of mischief, as shall dash
To pieces, and overwhelm whatever stands
Adverse."

Thus armed, the evil ones renew the fight. They fire their cannon:

"For sudden all at once their reeds
Put forth, and to a narrow vent applied
With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,
But soon obscured with clouds, all heav'n appeared,
From these deep-throated engines belched, whose roar
Emboweled with outrageous noise the air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foul
Their devilish glut, chained thunder-bolts and hail
Of iron globes."

The angels of God were at first overwhelmed by this shower of missiles and cast down; but they soon rallied:

"From their foundations, loos'ning to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by their shaggy tops
Uplifted bore them in their hands."

The rebels seized the hills also:

So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation. dire.

. . . . And now all heaven
Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread,"

had not the Almighty sent out his Son, the Messiah, to help his sorely struggling angels. The evil ones are overthrown, overwhelmed, driven to the edge of heaven:

"The monstrous sight
Struck them with horror backward, but far worse
Urged them behind; headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of heav'n; eternal wrath
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. . . .
Nine days they fell: confounded Chaos roared
And felt tenfold confusion in their fall
Through his wide anarchy, so huge a rout
Encumbered him with ruin."

Thus down into our own times and literature has penetrated a vivid picture of this world-old battle. We see, as in the legends, the temporary triumph of the dragon; we see the imperiled sun obscured; we see the flying rocks filling the appalled air and covering all things with ruin; we see the dragon at last slain, and falling clown to hell and chaos; while the sun returns, and God and order reign once more supreme.

And thus, again, Milton paints the chaos that precedes restoration:

On heav'nly ground they stood; and from the shores
They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom, turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heav'n's height, and with the center mix the poles."

But order, peace, love, and goodness follow this dark, wild age of cold and wet and chaos:--the Night is slain, and the sun of God's mercy shines once more on its appointed track in the heavens.

But never again, they feel, shall the world go back to the completely glorious conditions of the Tertiary Age, the golden age of the Eden-land. The comet has "brought death into the world, and all our woe." Mankind has sustained its great, its irreparable "Fall."

This is the event that lies, with mighty meanings, at the base of all our theologies.

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER VII

LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE

I HAVE shown that man could only have escaped the fire, the poisonous gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust, by taking refuge in the water or in the deep caves of the earth.

And hence everywhere in the ancient legends we find the races claiming that they came up out of the earth. Man was earth-born. The Toltecs and Aztecs traced back their origin to "the seven caves." We have seen the ancestors of the Peruvians emerging from the primeval cave, Pacarin-Tampu; and the Aztec Nanahuatzin taking refuge in a cave; and the ancestors of the Yurucares, the Takahlis, and the Mbocobi of America, all biding themselves from the conflagration in a cave; and we have seen the tyrannical and cruel race of the Tahoe legend buried in a cave. And, passing to a far-distant region, we find the Bungogees and Pankhoos, Hill tribes, of the most ancient races of Chittagong, in British India, relating that "their ancestors came out of a cave in the earth, under the guidance of a chief named Tlandrokpah."[1]

We read in the Toltec legends that a dreadful hurricane visited the earth in the early age, and carried away trees, mounds, horses, etc., and the people escaped by seeking safety in caves and places where the great hurricane could not reach them.

[1. Captain Lewin, "The Hill Tribes of Chittagong" p. 95, 1869.]

After a few days they came forth "to see what had become of the earth, when they found it all populated with monkeys. All this time they were in darkness, without the light of the sun Or the moon, which the wind had brought them."[1]

A North American tribe, a branch of the Tinneh of British America, have a legend that "the earth existed first in a chaotic state, with only one human inhabitant, a woman, who dwelt in a cave and lived on berries." She met one day a mysterious animal, like a dog, who transformed himself into a handsome young man, and they became the parents of a giant race." [2]

There seems to be an allusion to the cave-life in Ovid, where, detailing the events that followed soon after the creation, he says:

"Then for the first time did the parched air glow with sultry heat, and the ice, bound up by the winds, was pendent. Then for the first time did men enter houses; those houses were caverns, and thick shrubs, and twigs fastened together with bark." [3]

But it is in the legends of the Navajo Indians of North America that we find the most complete account of the cave-life.

It is as follows:

"The Navajos, living north of the Pueblos, say that at one time all the nations, Navajos, Pueblos, Coyoteros, and white people, lived together tinder ground, in the heart of a mountain, near the river San Juan. Their food was meat, which they had in abundance, for all kinds of game were closed up with them in their cave; but their light was dim, and only endured for a few hours each day. There were, happily, two dumb men among the Navajos, flute-players, who enlivened the darkness with music.

[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 239.

2. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 105.

3. "The Metamorphoses," Fable IV.]

One of these, striking by chance on the roof of the limbo with his flute, brought out a hollow sound, upon which the elders of the tribe determined to bore in the direction whence the sound came. The flute was then set up against the roof, and the Raccoon sent up the tube to dig a way out, but he could not. Then the Moth-worm mounted into the breach, and bored and bored till he found himself suddenly on the outside of the mountain, and surrounded by water."

We shall see hereafter that, in the early ages, mankind, all over the world, was divided into totemic septs or families, bearing animal names. It was out of this fact that the fables of animals possessing human speech arose. When we are told that the Fox talked to the Crow or the Wolf, it simply means that a man of the Fox totem talked to a man of the Crow or Wolf totem. And, consequently, when we read, in the foregoing legend, that the Raccoon went up to dig a way out of the cave and could not, it signifies that a man of the Raccoon totem made the attempt and failed, while a man of the Moth-worm totem succeeded. We shall see hereafter that these totemic distinctions probably represented original race or ethnic differences.

The Navajo legend continues:

"Under these novel circumstances, he, (the Moth-worm,) heaped up a little mound, and set himself down on it to observe and ponder the situation. A critical situation enough!--for from the four corners of the universe four great white Swans bore down upon him, every one with two arrows, one under each wing. The Swan from the north reached him first, and, having pierced him with two arrows, drew them out and examined their points, exclaiming, as the result, 'He is of my race.' So, also, in succession, did all the others. Then they went away; and toward the directions in which they departed, to the north, south, east, and west, were found four great arroyos, by which all the water flowed off, leaving only MUD. The Worm now returned to the cave, and the Raccoon went up into the mud, sinking in it mid-leg deep, as the marks on his fur show to this day. And the wind began to rise, sweeping up the four great arroyos, and the mud was dried away.

"Then the men and the animals began to come up from their cave, and their coming up required several days. First came the Navajos, and no sooner had they reached the surface than they commenced gaming at patole, their favorite game. Then came the Pueblos and other Indians, who crop their hair and build houses. Lastly came the white people, who started off at once for the rising sun, and were lost sight of for many winters.

"When these nations lived under ground they all spake one tongue; but, with the light of day and the level of earth, came many languages. The earth was at this time very small, and the light was quite as scanty as it had been down below, for there was as yet no heaven, no sun, nor moon, nor stars. So another council of the ancients was held, and a committee of their number appointed to manufacture these luminaries." [1]

Here we have the same story:

In an ancient age, before the races of men had differentiated, a remnant of mankind was driven, by some great event, into a cave; all kinds of animals had sought shelter in. the same place; something--the Drift--had closed up the mouth of the cavern; the men subsisted on the animals. At last they dug their way out, to find the world covered with mud and water. Great winds cut the mud into deep valleys, by which the waters ran off. The mud was everywhere; gradually it dried up. But outside the cave it was nearly as dark as it was within it; the clouds covered the world; neither sun, moon, nor stars could be seen; the earth was very small, that is, but little of it was above the waste of waters.

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 81.]

And here we have the people longing for the return of the sun. The legend proceeds to give an account of the making of the sun and moon. The dumb fluter, who had charge of the construction of the sun, through his clumsiness, came near setting fire to the world.

"The old men, however, either more lenient than Zeus, or lacking his thunder, contented themselves with forcing the offender back by puffing the smoke of their pipes into his face."

Here we have the event, which properly should have preceded the cave-story, brought in subsequent to it. The sun nearly burns up the earth, and the earth is saved amid the smoke of incense from the pipes of the old men--the gods. And we are told that the increasing size of the earth has four times rendered it necessary that the sun should be put farther back from the earth. The clearer the atmosphere, the farther away the sun has appeared.

"At night, also, the other dumb man issues from this cave, bearing the moon under his arm, and lighting up such part of the world as he can. Next, the old men set to work to make the heavens, intending to broider in the stars in beautiful patterns of bears, birds, and such things."

That is to say, a civilized race 'began to divide up the heavens into constellations, to which they gave the names of the Great and Little Bear, the Wolf, the Serpent, the Dragon, the Eagle, the Swan, the Crane, the Peacock, the Toucan, the Crow, etc.; some of which names they retain among ourselves to this day.

"But, just as they had made a beginning, a prairie-wolf rushed in, and, crying out, 'Why all this trouble and embroidery?' scattered the pile of stars over all the floor of heaven, just as they still lie."

This iconoclastic and unthetical prairie-wolf represents a barbarian's incapacity to see in the arrangement of the stars any such constellations, or, in fact, anything but an unmeaning jumble of cinders.

And then we learn how the tribes of men separated:

"The old men" (the civilized race, the gods) "prepared two earthen tinages, or water-jars, and having decorated one with bright colors, filled it with trifles; while the other was left plain on the outside, but filled within with flocks and herds and riches of all kinds. These jars being covered, and presented to the Navajos and Pueblos, the former chose the gaudy but paltry jar; while the Pueblos received the plain and rich vessel--each nation showing, in its choice, traits which characterize it to this day."

In the legends of the Lenni-Lenape,--the Delaware Indians,--mankind was once buried in the earth with a wolf; and they owed their release to the wolf, who scratched away the soil and dug out a means of escape for the men and for himself. The Root-Diggers of California were released in the same way by a coyote."[1]

"The Tonkaways, a wild people of Texas, still celebrate this early entombment of the race in a most curious fashion. They have a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth; the others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, snuff around him, howl in lupine style, and finally dig him up with their nails." [2]

Compare this American custom with the religious ceremony of an ancient Italian tribe:

"Three thousand years ago the Hirpani, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe of Italy, were wont to collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites, in memory of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain their living as wolves do, by violence and plunder.

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 247.

2. Ibid.]

Therefore they dressed in wolf-skins ,ran with barks and howls over burning coals, and gnawed wolfishly whatever they could seize."[1]

All the tribes of the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into one common confederacy, unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence they pretended to have emerged. This hill is an elevation of earth about half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high. From its northeast corner a wall of equal height extends for nearly half a mile to the high land. This was the Nunne Chaha, properly Nanih waiya, sloping hill, famous in Choctaw story, and which Captain Gregg found they had not yet forgotten in their Western home.

"The legend was, that in its center was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath. Here he made the first men from the clay around him, and, as at that time the waters covered the earth, he raised the wall to dry them on. When the soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he banished the waters to their channels and beds, and gave the dry land to his creatures." [2]

Here, again, we have the beginnings of the present race of men in a cave, surrounded by clay and water, which covered the earth, and we have the water subsiding into its channels and beds, and the dry land appearing, whereupon the men emerged from the cave.

A parallel to this Southern legend occurs among the Six Nations of the North. They with one consent looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego River, in the State of New York, as the locality where their forefathers saw the light of day; and their name, Oneida, signifies the people of the stone.

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 217.

2. Ibid., p. 242.]

The cave of Pacarin-Tampu, already alluded to, the Lodgings of the Dawn, or the Place of Birth of the Peruvians, was five leagues distant from Cuzco, surrounded by a sacred grove, and inclosed with temples of great antiquity.

"From its hallowed recesses the mythical civilizers, of Peru, tile first of men, emerged, and in it, during the time of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of the waves." [1]

We read in the legends of Oraibi, hereafter quoted more fully, that the people climbed up a ladder from a lower world to this--that is, they ascended from the cave in which they had taken refuge. This was in an age of cold and darkness; there was yet no sun or moon.

The natives in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta, in Northern California, have a strange legend which refers to the age of Caves and Ice.

They say the Great Spirit made Mount Shasta first:

"Boring a hole in the sky," (the heavens cleft in twain of the Edda?) "using a large stone as an auger," (the fall of stones and pebbles?) "he pushed down snow and ice until they reached the desired height; then he stepped from cloud to cloud down to the great icy pile, and from it to the earth, where he planted the first trees by merely putting his finger into the soil here and there. The sun began to melt the snow; the snow produced water; the water ran down the sides of the mountains, refreshed the trees, and made rivers. The Creator gathered the leaves that fell from the trees, blew upon them, and they became birds," etc.[2]

This is a representation of the end of the Glacial Age.

But the legends of these Indians of Mount Shasta go still further. After narrating, as above, the fall of a stone from heaven, and the formation of immense masses of ice, which subsequently melted and formed rivers, and after the Creator had made trees, birds,. and animals, especially the grizzly bear, then we have a legend which reminds us of the cave-life which accompanied the great catastrophe:

[1. Balboa, "Histoire du Pou," p. 4.

2. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 90.]

"Indeed, this animal" (the grizzly bear) "was then so large, strong, and cunning, that the Creator somewhat feared him, and hollowed out Mount Shasta as a wigwam for himself, where he might reside while on earth in the most perfect security and comfort. So the smoke was soon to be seen curling up from the mountain where the Great Spirit and his family lived, and still live, though their hearth-fire is alive no longer, now that the white-man is in the land."

Here the superior race seeks shelter in a cave on Mount Shasta, and their camp-fire is associated with the smoke which once went forth out of the volcano; while an inferior race, a Neanderthal race, dwell in the plains at the foot of the mountain.

"This was thousands of snows ago, and there came after this a late and severe spring-time, in which a memorable storm blew up from the sea, shaking the huge lodge" (Mount Shasta) "to its base."

(Another recollection of the Ice Age.)

"The Great Spirit commanded his daughter, little more than an infant, to go up and bid the wind to be still, cautioning her, at the same time, in his fatherly way, not to put her head out into the blast, but only to thrust out her little red arm and make a sign, before she delivered her message."[1]

Here we seem to have a reminiscence of the cave-dwellers, looking out at the terrible tempest from their places of shelter.

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 91.]

The child of the Great Spirit exposes herself too much, is caught by the wind and blown down the mountain-side, where she is found, shivering on the snow, by a family of grizzly bears. These grizzly bears evidently possessed some humane as well as human traits: "They walked then on their hind-legs like men, and talked, and carried clubs, using the fore-limbs as men use their arms." They represent in their bear-skins the rude, fur-clad race that were developed during the intense cold of the Glacial Age.

The child of the Great Spirit, the superior race, intermarries with one of the grizzly bears, and from this union came the race of men, to wit, the Indians.

"But the Great Spirit punished the grizzly bears by depriving them of the power of speech, and of standing erect--in short, by making true bears of them. But no Indian will, to this day, kill a grizzly bear, recognizing as he does the tie of blood."

Again, we are told:

"The inhabitants of central Europe and the Teutonic races who came late to England place their mythical heroes under ground in caves, in vaults beneath enchanted castles, or in mounds which rise up and open, and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire the buried race are supposed to be under the sandhills, as they are in some parts of Brittany." [1]

Associated with these legends we find many that refer to the time of great cold, and snow, and ice. I give one or two specimens:

In the story of the Iroquois, (see p. 173, ante,) we are told that the White One, [the Light One, the Sun,] after he had destroyed the monster who covered the earth with blood and stones, then destroyed the gigantic frog.

[1. "Frost and Fire," vol. ii, p. 190.]

The frog, a cold-blooded, moist reptile, was always the emblem of water and cold; it represented the great ice-fields that squatted, frog-like, on the face of the earth. It had "swallowed all the waters," says the Iroquois legend; that is, "the waters were congealed in it; and when it was killed great and destructive torrents broke forth and devastated the land, and Manibozho, the White One, the beneficent Sun, guided these waters into smooth streams and lakes." The Aztecs adored the goddess of water under the figure of a great green frog carved from a single emerald. [1]

In the Omaha we have the fable of "How the Rabbit killed the Winter," told in the Indian manner. The Rabbit was probably a reminiscence of the Great Hare, Manabozho; and he, probably, as we shall see, a recollection of a great race, whose totem was the Hare.

I condense the Indian story:

"The Rabbit in the past time moving came where the Winter was. The Winter said: 'You have not been here lately; sit down.' The Rabbit said he came because his grandmother had altogether beaten the life out of him" (the fallen dris?). "The Winter went hunting. It was very cold: there was a snow-storm. The Rabbit seared up a deer. 'Shoot him,' said the Rabbit. 'No; I do not hunt such things as that,' said the Winter. They came upon some men. That was the Winter's game. He killed the men and boiled them for supper," (cave-cannibalism). "The Rabbit refused to eat the human flesh. The Winter went hunting again. The Rabbit found out from the Winter's wife that the thing the Winter dreaded most of all the world was the head of a Rocky Mountain sheep. The Rabbit procured one. It was dark. He threw it suddenly at the Winter, saying, 'Uncle, that round thing by you is the head of a Rocky Mountain sheep.'

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 185.]

The Winter became altogether dead. Only the woman remained. Therefore from that time it has not been very cold."

Of course, any attempt to interpret such a crude myth must be guess-work. It shows, however, that the Indians believed that there was a time when the winter was much more severe than it is now; it was very cold and dark. Associated with it is the destruction of men and cannibalism. At last the Rabbit brings a round object, (the Sun?), the head of a Rocky Mountain sheep, and the Winter looks on it, and perishes.

Even tropical Peru has its legend of the Age of Ice.

Garcilaso de la Vega, a descendant of the Incas, has preserved an ancient indigenous poem of his nation, which seems to allude to a great event, the breaking to fragments of some large object, associated with ice and snow. Dr. Brinton translates it from the Quichua, as follows

"Beauteous princess,
Lo, thy brother
Breaks thy vessel
Now in fragments.
From the blow come
Thunder, lightning,
Strokes of lightning
And thou, princess,
Tak'st the water,
With it raineth,
And the hail, or
Snow dispenseth.
Viracocha,
World-constructor,
World-enlivener,
To this office
Thee appointed,
Thee created." [1]

[1. "Myths of the New World," p. 167.]

But it may be asked, How in such a period of terror and calamity--as we must conceive the comet to have caused-would men think of finding refuge in caves?

The answer is plain: either they or their ancestors had lived in caves.

Caves were the first shelters of uncivilized men. It was not necessary to fly to the caves through the rain of falling dris; many were doubtless already in them when the great world-storm broke, and others naturally sought their usual dwelling-places.

"The cavern," says Brinton, "dimly lingered in the memories of nations."

Man is born of the earth; he is made of the clay like Adam, created--

"Of good red clay,
Haply from Mount Aornus, beyond sweep
Of the black eagle's wing."

The cave-temples of India-the oldest temples, probably, on earth--are a reminiscence of this cave-life.

We shall see hereafter that Lot and his daughters "dwelt in a cave"; and we shall find Job bidden away in the "narrow-mouthed bottomless" pit or cave.