worldwide deluge

Throughout history, it has been said that there was a universal flood which caused major floods around the world. It is an episode of abundant and unstoppable rainfall that, without any kind of rest, ended up flooding most of the planet. However, many people doubt the existence of the universal flood, including scientists.

For this reason, we are going to dedicate this article to telling you everything you need to know about the universal flood, if it really existed and what its characteristics and consequences were.

worldwide deluge

The name Universal Flood tries to collect, in general, the facts associated with a situation of alleged continuous rain that causes a Universal Flood to erase humans from the face of the Earth, except for a select few.

Only a man and his family and a series of animals are saved from the wrath of one or more gods. In many stories it is about the revenge of the gods for human misdeeds before divine law (royal or priestly). Other gods, demi-gods, or heroes spoke to the chosen people about their draconian plans to save humanity. When the religion is monotheistic, the same god who punishes humanity is the one who saves humanity for people of his own choosing. In a nutshell, this is the general Indo-European flood.

For Western cultures, biblical mythology (or reality for people of faith) tells how God punished humans in the book of Genesis. Human misconduct led God to punish mankind by flooding the entire earth. The chosen ones were Noah and his family. In this case, God is the "punisher" and "savior" of humanity. Noah was chosen to perpetuate the species and become the founder of a race or nation.

Biblical mythology comes from another place far, far away: the babylonians. Previously, the polytheists who ruled and governed the "Fertile Crescent", including parts of Mesopotamia, Syria and Turkey, developed and expanded the concept of a universal flood in the poetry of Gilgamesh and its variants. In this poem, the gods punished mankind, but the whistleblower of another minor deity saved mankind.

While many myths may have some historical basis, the ubiquity of the Flood makes it difficult for modern people to imagine what is universal or global today. In the XNUMXth or XNUMXth century BC, the universe was a known land and very limited in terms of exploration possibilities.

The Greek Myth of the Universal Deluge

In Greek mythology, the gods created five human races, the last being the worst and the worst. Zeus (the supreme god of Olympus), fed up with the evil of humanity, decided to create a terrible and eventual universal flood to finish them off. At that time, Zeus was the most important god in the Greek pantheon.

Prometheus was a Titan friendly to mortals honored for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans to use. Prometheus was punished by Zeus for this. But Prometheus did more for mankind, he was the savior of mankind: he told his son Deucalion and his wife Pyrrhus that they planned to flood and destroy mankind. Prometheus told his son Deucalion to build a boat big or small, and they had everything they needed to protect themselves from the general deluge. So they survived.

Mythology mentions that the flood was caused by the wind from Ostrow (south): "Only the Ostrow was released, and it carried the rain towards the land." At the end of the great flood, after nine days and nine nights, when the earth dried up and the sea receded into the sea, Deucalion's ark landed on Mount Parnassus, where the oracle of the goddess Themis was located.

Deucalion and Pyrrha entered the temple for the oracle to tell them what to do to repopulate the earth, and the goddess only told them: “Turn around and throw the bones of your 'mother'”. Deucalion and his wife guessed that the oracle was referring to the rock (goddess Gia). In this way, the stone thrown by Deucalion turned into a man, and the stone thrown by Pyrrha turned into a woman. In this way, the new and renewed human species was created by two people. The first of these, Helen, gave birth to the Greeks.

Greek mythology is very similar to other surrounding myths: Zeus was the god of punishment who wanted to destroy humanity, humanity turned evil by not obeying the laws of the gods, another god or demigod told him of Zeus' plan to a chosen one, He and his family build an ark and Zeus produces a punishment event in which the persistent and abundant rain is the protagonist, who are rescued and in charge of building a generator of special lineages and chosen people to restart humanity.

Did it really exist?

Researchers have discovered as many as 500 stories of the Great Flood from nearly every culture, information supported by contemporary geological and archaeological data, as well as biblical narratives. Among them, it appears in cultures associated with Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, possibly the oldest city in the world, where there are traces of a great flood, a phenomenon that some archaeologists believe is similar to a phenomenon known as the "Universal Flood"; also in other pre-Columbian cultures, such as the Mesoamerican Toltecs of the Mayans, in their sacred books, such as the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam, or the Aztecs.

In Greek tradition, Zeus is said to have seen humans become so conceited that he found this attitude unacceptable and caused a great flood; thanks to Promovio, Decalion, his wife Pirra, their children and some land animals survived, including pigs, horses, lions and snakes, and their refuge was a large box, which they navigated on the currents for nine days and nine nights overflowing from the earth and the sea. There are similar traditions in India, versioned with elements of their own traditions., but keeping the basic elements of the Great Flood and the miraculous salvation of a few. In Australia, Persia, southwestern Tanzania, Japan, and other cultures of more or less universal influence.

the scientific community proposes a great cosmic catastrophe that existed 9.000 to 12.000 years ago that would end great civilizations on Earth and it would remain in the collective memory of innumerable people as a “universal deluge”. A story in which scientific speculation is mixed with different religious traditions, in which coincidences are very important, although each one of them conceals its own cultural peculiarities.

I hope that with this information you can learn more about the universal flood and its characteristics.