Page 200 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

It is at this point that the strange parallels with the traditions of the
biblical flood begin to crop up, for Ahura Mazda takes advantage of the
meeting to warn Yima of what is about to happen as a result of the
powers of the Evil One:

And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima saying: ‘Yima the fair ... Upon the material
world a fatal winter is about to descend, that shall bring a vehement, destroying
frost. Upon the corporeal world will the evil of winter come, wherefore snow will
fall in great abundance. ...

‘And all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and
those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the depths of
the valleys under the shelter of stables.

‘Therefore make thee a var [a hypogeum or underground enclosure] the length of
a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every
kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men,
of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires.
3

‘There shalt thou make water flow. Thou shall put birds in the trees along the
water’s edge, in verdure which is everlasting. There put specimens of all plants,
the loveliest and most fragrant, and of all fruits the most succulent. All these
kinds of things and creatures shall not perish as long as they are in the var. But
put there no deformed creature, nor impotent, nor mad, neither wicked, nor
deceitful, nor rancorous, nor jealous; nor a man with irregular teeth, nor a leper
...’
4
Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference
between Yima’s divinely inspired var and Noah’s divinely inspired ark: the
ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will
destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a
means of surviving a terrible and devastating ‘winter’ which will destroy
every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice
and snow.
In the Bundahish, another of the Zoroastrian scriptures (believed to
incorporate ancient material from a lost part of the original Avesta), more
information is provided on the cataclysm of glaciation that overwhelmed
Airyana Vaejo. When Angra Mainyu sent the ‘vehement destroying frost’,
he also ‘assaulted and deranged the sky’. The Bundahish tells us that
5
this assault enabled the Evil One to master ‘one third of the sky and
overspread it with darkness’ as the encroaching ice sheets tightened their
grip.
6

3 Vendidad, Fargard II, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 300, 353-4.
New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 320.
4
5 West, Pahlavi Texts Part I, p. 17, London, 1880.
6 Ibid.; Justi, Der Bundahish, Leipzig, 1868, p. 5.

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