1954 cont.

Fire, Flood, and Famine, (Chapt.4, 'Demonology and Disaster', By Hugh Soar (a brief summary) cont.

Recurrent theme in most mythologies is that of chaos. It starts as the lore of a tribe's mythical history, or forerunner of the religious epics of the land, as the case of Biblical Genesis; since we know chaos myths to follow a pattern, the Biblical creation myth would appear incomplete. The following chaos myth, perhaps one of the most perfectly preserved, is taken from Revelations 6-12. It has a reference I think, to the earlier catastrophe, the disintegration of the Tertiary Satellite, though it may be contrasted with the myth immediately following it, also taken from revelations (16-2) which apparently refers to a capture cataclysm. "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair; and the moon as blood; and the stars of the heaven fell into the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens, and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks. Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand."

"And the seventh angel poured out his Vail into the air.. and there were… thunders and lightning's; and there was a great earthquake, such as not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nation fell, and great Babylon (Atlantis?) came in remembrance before God… and every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent."

According to Jewish Lore there was, at the end of every age, a war between God and his adversaries. The enemy, significantly was conceived to be in the form of a dragon. Anti-Christ, this mysterious force, was considered to be influenced by Satan, though this influence we shall see to be, in reality the transposition of evil from an unknown force, only dimly conceived, to a known Prince of Evil. Anti-Christ the latent force of evil, is the Moon. Satan, the Ruler of the Kingdom of darkness whom St. Paul describes in fact as the God of his Age, (in contrast to an age to come after the day of judgement, (the Day of Jahweh)-the moonless age), is ominipresent, and since Satan is held, either directly or indirectly responsible for all evil, when the Moon commences its breakdown, or when its closer in relation to the earth enables its association with the cataclysm, the emphasis of evil will sharply turn from the abstract and by this time fully symbolized Satan to the material, dominant, satellite. The conception of ages, sharply defined, each ending in chaos, and each commencing under the potency of a God is not of course unique. The religion of the Aztecs, of which Tezcatlipoca was but one God/Age, and that of India, the Avataras of Vishnu, are important examples. The moonless age, the age when life will spring from the earth anew, is the time of happiness, until it too is presently dominated by another satellite. One thinks of the Norse Lif, and Lifthrasir entering hand in hand the world, after the terrors of Ragnarok. This played a great part in chaos myths with the dragon also looming.

Edward Langton feels a great connection between Assyria/Babylonian myth, and Satan, since, in the Jewish Apocryphal literature, (Revelations. 12.9) Satan is identified with the dragon that storms the heaven. According to Persian teachings, the serpent Azi-Dalakar is bound and fettered in the Mountain of Damavand. Arriman, the evil principle of Zoroastrian dualism and early monotheism released him after 9,000 years, but , after another thousand years he was slain, by Keresaspa. After the cleansing of the world, the serpent, it is said, will disappear. Here we seem to have an account of the fettering (by bonds of gravitational attraction) of a satellite, a common enough motif in many mythologies, (The fettering of Fenris for example). Evil follows Good, as we know from the study of many religions.

On Satan, it is a coincidence that he, and Azazel the 'chief of the watchers' and the leader of the fallen angels are both associated with the dragon, the destroyer of the world, and referred to as an arch-fiend. As Lord of the Material Universe, 'God of this Age', if he were to be associated with the newly captured moon, and regarded as responsible for the destruction consequent upon the capture cataclysm, then his relation to the conception of God, becomes clearer, The coming of Satan (or Anti-Christ) is the event which disrupts the normal course of life. He is the destroyer, and as has convincingly been shown, the appellation 'dragon' is perfectly consistent with the newly captured moon. We do see also the wolf becomes a part of this moon association with the dragon? From Webmaster-When the Moon in its phases goes to is furthermost points it is often called the Head of the Dragon moon and the Tail of the Dragon moon as if it were talking about some comet, and may explain the alchemical serpent biting its tail, or is Benzine Lunar based? The Head-Tail was based on a larger scale of the North Pole Serpent, and at times is mixed with this age or problem.

The knowledge of these myths came to Wales by way of Hu Gadarn and the Avanc to those Lake names presently. The most compelling myth is Ragnarok:

"After the Fimbul winter, the terrible trail of snow an all embracing ice, the Giantess Angur-boda fed the progeny of the fettered wolf, Fenris until, pursuing Sol and Mani (The Sun and Moon-Egyptian form), they overtook and devoured them. At the chaotic disaster the whole earth shook, and the stars fell from their places in the heavens. (Note the Revelations similarity in Bibles line). The author goes on with the myth, but the point is these Biblical Revelation's already happened and the land was re-peopled. Could St. John merely borrowed from other tales of something already written and spoken in terms of the past, is St. John saying history is repeating, or was he wishing for man a doom what had already happened before? The Celtic story of Henny-Penny is from this line of above works. The Polynesians of the Maori have a strange variation on these myths of the three destruction's of earth. The 'second upsetting of the land was followed by 'Hapopo' (decay) folding up the sun'. Puta, the spirit responsible for the first turning over of the land (agriculture or not?), has been equated with Buddha (more likely Ptah, Egyptian God), and it is thought that the evidence exists for a culture borrowings by the Polynesians from India (and Egypt). India has many accounts of earth being turned upside down. The deluge tradition from the Windward Islands follows the general pattern, but includes a reference to falling stones. "The groves of trees and the stones were carried away by the winds… There they watched, nights ten, the sea ebbed, and they too saw the little heads of the mountains…The land remained without produce…The wind was becoming feeble…the stones and the trees began to fall from the heavens…They heard with terror the loud voice of the falling stones.' A Fijian creation myth recorded, tells how Tangaloa, when the earth was yet uninhabited, sent his daughter Turi to the earth in the shape of a snipe to find place to create humans (sounds like Noah's doves, or ravens?). She eventually found a place where she could rest, and the myth tells of her repeated flights to Tangaloa as she reported that the dry surface was extending upon all sides. Tangoloa then sent down earth and a creeping plant to cover bare rock. The plat grew, withered, decomposed, and the worms which appeared, became human beings." Popul Vuh provides the last example of chaos/flood myth. The first men that were made were made of mud, but they were unsatisfactory to the forefathers so they were broken up, and destroyed. The second men were created, were created of wood, and they populated the earth. But they did not remember their creator, they walked aimlessly about on all fours. So Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, the creator, sent a great flood which fell upon the heads of those wooden creatures and annihilated them. They were deluged by a heavy resin, which fell from the sky. The face of the earth was darkened and a black rain fell (obsidian like, ash, or asteroid?), by day and by night. The following sequence I think is unique in this type of myth; the animals, the birds and beasts of the stockyard, and even the household implements rise and abuse these men. Finally, the men fled in terror to the housetops, and the trees, and even the caverns. But even these refused them access. The descendants of these wooden men are said to be monkeys.

One point of irony involves the men made of mud and then wood, how interesting the mummies of S. America Pacific coast recently found are made of these materials. Is this a commentary of a practice that of the cult of the dead that by the time it reached the Popul Vuh (A Book of the Dead) it was so remote that they considered these people as old as the monkeys? The walking on fours seems to imply that they some how knew our ancestors of the 'walking on fours' larger humanoids may have not quite died out in the memory of these regions?