Discussion- Destruction Myths

THE FLOOD The flood myth is common to many cultures, partly because floods, like great earthquakes and other natural disasters, are distinctly memorable. Floods do occur, and when they do, the destruction and loss are frequently so total as to suggest a cosmic conspiracy of some sort and, necessarily, the hope of a new beginning. The story of the flood myth in Western culture probably originated in Mesopotamia (“the land between two rivers”) where flooding was quite common. Each flood story is similar, but also differs in various ways to make different points; a strong bond with God, the creation of humans, or the understanding of the mortality of humans. Each has a different meaning depending on when and where it originated.

The flood myths that emerge from the human psyche, therefore, tend to be dual in nature. The pattern behind the many forms that the flood myth takes is the archetype of the productive sacrifice. Thus, Jung could write of the “Noah’s Ark that crosses the waters of death and leads to a rebirth of all life” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 353). The Deluge (another word for flood) cleanses and gives birth to new forms even as it

destroys the old. It is the breaking of the eternal waters of the Great Mother—the destructive mother who, whether her name is Kali or Demeter, sweeps away the old life but preserves the germ of a new beginning. The Noah or the Utnapishtim or the Manu who is spared is the hero of new life who is born of the cosmic waters of the womb of the Great Mother. The flood myth, like the myths of the Destroyer-Mother herself, reminds us that life depends on death, that without death there can be no cycle, no birth. That the new creation is preceded by a flood is appropriate, since the first life itself emerged from the waters. The flood myth, like the original creation myth, is what Mircea Eliade calls a “festival” of productive chaos, a “restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act” (The Myth of the Eternal Return, pp. 57—59). The flood myth has personal as well as universal ramifications. Rituals of purification by water are microcosmic versions of the Deluge. The baptized “sinner” immersed in the waters of the font-womb dies to the old life and on emerging is born into the new. Just as the hero descends into the underworld to confront death itself, the baptized individual symbolically overcomes the destructive powers of chaos. J. Danielou writes,

The flood. . . was an image which baptism comes to fulfill. . . . Just as Noah had confronted the Sea of Death in which sinful humanity had been destroyed, and had emerged from it, so the newly baptized man descends into the baptismal piscina to confront the water Dragon in a supreme combat from which he emerges victorious” (Sacramentum futuri, p. 65).

Finally, in psychological terms, the flood myth, like the story of the hero’s descent into the underworld, can be seen as a metaphor for the individual’s necessary time in the dark world of the unconscious before the rebirth that is the achievement of individuation.