A final note on myths.
Another idea that unites humanity is the belief that there was once a great flood. The idea most familiar to people of my background — the biblical one — appears in plenty of other religions and mythologies as well. And there are two possible reasons why this happened.
Option one: these are echoes of the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene — the melting of the ice sheets 11.7 thousand years ago. Ice doesn’t melt overnight, of course, and sea levels didn’t rise the way they do in the movie Deep Impact, with a giant tsunami swallowing all of America. But within a human lifetime, you could watch Uncle Borya’s house — once proudly on the beachfront — slowly become Poseidon’s new investment property. And Uncle Borya — respectable homeowner, cattle-owner, and owner-of-many-things — drinks himself into oblivion and transitions into the underworld from last week’s note. “Water took our homes, livestock, livelihood” — this happened everywhere. People remembered it, passed it down for generations, and eventually someone dramatized it: instead of happening over 40 years, it happened in 40 days.
Option two: humans just really love water. Water, my friends, is life! And you know what else water is? Death. Flooded rivers, tsunamis — wherever there is water, there is also loss of life, property, and stability. There isn’t a single large river around which people could settle that hasn’t, at least once, caused massive trouble. So eventually a flood did happen — dramatic, yes, but not universal.
But what is “the world” for ancient Uncle Borya? He doesn’t have a messenger app that gets signal even in the parking lot — he can’t write to another city or country and ask: “Hey, did this happen to you too?” So every people created essentially the same myth — possibly at different times. And the more cultures interacted, the more they were surprised: “Wait… you had this too?”
Well, must have been global then!
This concludes our little excursion into the history of the collective unconscious. We’ll return to something more typical soon!