Page 192 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

North America

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Americas, among the Inuit of Alaska,
there existed the tradition of a terrible flood, accompanied by an
earthquake, which swept so rapidly over the face of the earth that only a
few people managed to escape in their canoes or take refuge on the tops
of the highest mountains, petrified with terror.
20
The Luiseno of lower California had a legend that a flood covered the
mountains and destroyed most of mankind. Only a few were saved
because they fled to the highest peaks which were spared when all the
rest of the world was inundated. The survivors remained there until the
flood ended. Farther north similar flood myths were recorded amongst
21
the Hurons. And a legend of the Montagnais, belonging to the
22
Algonquin family, related how Michabo, or the Great Hare, re-established
the world after the flood with the help of a raven, an otter and a
muskrat.
23
Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, an authoritative work of the nineteenth
century which preserved many indigenous traditions that would otherwise
have been lost, reports an Iroquois myth that ‘the sea and waters had at
one time infringed upon the land, so that all human life was destroyed’.
The Chickasaws asserted that the world had been destroyed by water ‘but
that one family was saved and two animals of every kind’. The Sioux also
spoke of a time when there was no dry land and when all men
disappeared from existence.
24

Water water everywhere

How far and how widely across the myth memories of mankind do the
ripples of the great flood spread?
Very widely indeed. More than 500 deluge legends are known around
the world and, in a survey of 86 of these (20 Asiatic, 3 European, 7
African, 46 American and 10 from Australia and the Pacific), the specialist
researcher Dr Richard Andree concluded that 62 were entirely
independent of the Mesopotamian and Hebrew accounts.
25

New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 426.
20
21 Folklore in the Old Testament, pp. 111-12.
22 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 431.
23 Ibid., pp. 428-9; Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 115. In this version the character of
Michabo is called Messou.
24 From Lynd’s History of the Dakotas, cited in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 117.
25 Frederick A. Filby, The Flood Reconsidered: A Review of the Evidences of Geology,
Archaeology, Ancient Literature and the Bible, Pickering and Inglis Ltd., London, 1970,
p. 58. Andree was an eminent German geographer and anthropologist. His monograph
on diluvial traditions is described by J. G. Frazer (in Folklore in the Old Testament, pp.
46-7) as ‘a model of sound learning and good sense set forth with the utmost clearness
and conciseness ...’

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