Page 194 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

world was destroyed by a flood and later recreated by a god named
Tangaloa. The Samoans believe that there was once an inundation that
wiped out almost all mankind. It was survived only by two human beings
who put to sea in a boat which eventually came to rest in the Samoan
archipelago.
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Greece, India and Egypt

On the other side of the world, Greek mythology too is haunted by
memories of a deluge. Here, however (as in Central America) the
inundation is not viewed as an isolated event but as one of a series of
destructions and remakings of the world. The Aztecs and the Maya spoke
in terms of successive ‘Suns’ or epochs (of which our own was thought to
be the Fifth and last). In similar fashion the oral traditions of Ancient
Greece, collected and set down in writing by Hesiod in the eighth century
BC, related that prior to the present creation there had been four earlier
races of men on earth. Each of these was thought more advanced than
the one that followed it. And each, at the appointed hour, had been
‘swallowed up’ in a geological cataclysm.
The first and most ancient creation had been mankind’s ‘golden race’
who had ‘lived like the gods, free from care, without trouble or woe ...
With ageless limbs they revelled at their banquets ... When they died it
was as men overcome by sleep.’ With the passing of time, and at the
command of Zeus, this golden race eventually ‘sank into the depths of
the earth’. It was succeeded by the ‘silver race’ which was supplanted by
the ‘bronze race’, which was replaced by the race of ‘heroes’, which was
followed by the ‘iron’ race—our own—the fifth and most recent creation.
34
It is the fate of the bronze race that is of particular interest to us here.
Described in the myths as having ‘the strength of giants, and mighty
hands on their mighty limbs’, these formidable men were exterminated
35
by Zeus, king of the gods, as a punishment for the misdeeds of
Prometheus, the rebellious Titan who had presented humanity with the
gift of fire. The mechanism the vengeful deity used to sweep the earth
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clean was an overwhelming flood.
In the most widespread version of the story Prometheus impregnated a
human female. She bore him a son named Deucalion, who ruled over the
country of Phthia, in Thessaly, and took to wife Pyrrha, ‘the red-blonde’,
daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. When Zeus reached his fateful
decision to destroy the bronze race, Deucalion, forewarned by
Prometheus, made a wooden box, stored in it ‘all that was necessary’,

33 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 460, 466.
C. Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, Thames & Hudson, London, 1974, pp. 226-9.
34
35 Ibid.
36 World Mythology, pp. 130-1.

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