Page 204 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

an immense furnace. Flames spurted from fissures in the rocks; everywhere there
was the hissing of steam. All living things, all plant life, were blotted out. Only the
naked soil remained, but like the sky itself the earth was no more than cracks and
crevasses.

And now all the rivers, all the seas, rose and overflowed. From every side waves
lashed against waves. They swelled and boiled slowly over all things. The earth
sank beneath the sea ...

Yet not all men perished in the great catastrophe. Enclosed in the wood itself of
the ash tree Yggdrasil—which the devouring flames of the universal conflagration
had been unable to consume—the ancestors of a future race of men had escaped
death. In this asylum they had found that their only nourishment had been the
morning dew.

Thus it was that from the wreckage of the ancient world a new world was born.
Slowly the earth emerged from the waves. Mountains rose again and from them
streamed cataracts of singing waters.
27
The new world this Teutonic myth announces is our own. Needless to say,
like the Fifth Sun of the Aztecs and the Maya, it was created long ago and
is new no longer. Can it be a coincidence that one of the many Central
American flood myths about the fourth epoch, 4 Atl (‘water’), does not
install the Noah couple in an ark but places them instead in a great tree
just like Yggdrasil? ‘4 Atl was ended by floods. The mountains
disappeared ... Two persons survived because they were ordered by one
of the gods to bore a hole in the trunk of a very large tree and to crawl
inside when the skies fell. The pair entered and survived. Their offspring
repopulated the world.’
28
Isn’t it odd that the same symbolic language keeps cropping up in
ancient traditions from so many widely scattered regions of the world?
How can this be explained? Are we talking about some vast, subconscious
wave of intercultural telepathy, or could elements of these remarkable
universal myths have been engineered, long ages ago, by clever and
purposeful people? Which of these improbable propositions is the more
likely to be true? Or are there other possible explanations for the enigma
of the myths?
We shall return to these questions in due course. Meanwhile, what are
we to conclude about the apocalyptic visions of fire and ice, floods,
volcanism and earthquakes, which the myths contain? They have about
them a haunting and familiar realism. Could this be because they speak
to us of a past we suspect to be our own but can neither remember
clearly nor forget completely?

New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, pp. 275-7.
27
28 Maya History and Religion, p. 332.

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