Biblical Flood Dives: Global Cataclysms and Cycles of Time
Growing up, this was my sole exposure to the biblical flood myth:
Not exactly the most solid theological grounding.
Owing much to my dismissal of the legitimacy of religion, I dismissed basically by default stories such as Noah and the Flood as fanciful fictions used to illustrate some underlying moral point. But then I started to read history, specifically alternative history, and specifically Graham Hancock and his lost civilisation hypothesis, and my view changed drastically.
Looking at the evidence that exists for the presence of a lost and highly advanced civilisation, one can hardly argue against the likelihood of its existence. This is what the Puzzle of the Pyramids shows above anything else: that our current understanding of the evolution of human civilisation can in no way account for the extraordinary mathematical, architectural and astronomical knowledge that is demonstrated all around the world in the construction of the pyramids and other megalithic structures.
So, the question at hand shouldn’t be whether such a civilisation existed, but what the heck happened to them? How could such an advanced group of peoples simply vanish from the face of the Earth, leaving behind only this mysterious puzzle for us to solve as proof of their existence? If we can find a logical explanation for their disappearance, then that really should be the final nail in the coffin of conventional human history.
But of course, we already have the perfect explanation for such an occurrence: a massive, cataclysmic global flood event some time in our distant past. The problem is, the main source of such an explanation is the Bible, which automatically disqualifies it as a Serious Theory for a large proportion of people who have Serious Opinions.
But, it isn’t just the Bible, as it turns out. Evidence of a Great Flood is all around us.
All we need to do is to overcome the arrogance — and, dare I say it, racism — that seems to underly the mix of Judaeo-Christianity and materialism that is Western thought, and take the wisdom encoded into the mythology of ancient cultures with the seriousness and reverence it deserves.
Hancock addresses the flood myth in his two most well-known books: Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and Magicians of the Gods (2015). This article will hopefully be the final exorcism of my infatuation with Hancock.
He starts, as we are all obliged to, with the Bible, given it is the most well known account of this global deluge.
Back before Noah arrives on the scene, the Biblical account of the Flood Myth begins in Genesis 6. The key event in Genesis 6, which I discussed in more detail here, is apparently sex between fallen angels and humans: an act that, as well as being inherently creepy in itself, also produced hybrid giant offspring called the Nephilim. It is this divine transgression that set the scene (or sin, as it were) for the divine deluge that is probably the most documented event of our distant past.
Genesis 6 and the full flood story, Noah’s Ark and all, is pretty wild — not to mention oddly specific in many instances. A rational minded individual might be inclined to call BS, and many of course have. But we also have more to draw on than Genesis 6 and the Bible — as discussed by Bible scholar Michael Heiser in The Unseen Realm, a deluge event is also recounted in other Jewish texts.
Most notably, there is the Book of Enoch, and specifically 1 Enoch. It is from this book that we get the term ‘Watcher’ as another description of these sons of God. The initial account is largely the same, albeit with some key additions:
“And when the sons of men had multiplied, in those days, beautiful and comely daughters were born to them. And the watchers, the sons of heaven, saw them and desired them. And they said to one another, “Come, let us choose for ourselves wives from the daughters of men, and let us beget for ourselves children (1 Enoch 6–11).”
Firstly, was it was really necessary to use ‘comely’? Surely ‘beautiful’ communicated the key message here well enough. Anyway: it reflects the spicening up of the account that is contained in Enoch; the M rated version to the PG rated version in Genesis 6, if you will.
If one needed further mythological evidence that the Hebrew accounts of the flood had something to them, such evidence can be found in the parallels with Mesopotamian texts.
A detailed comparison of the flood myths of the Hebrew and Mesopotamian cultures was undertaken by academic Amar Annus. The same general details of the Mesopotamian flood myth are present: the same catastrophic deluge, the same chosen few who survive the flood in an animal-filled boat to start afresh, and the same divine beings who brought on the whole episode.
These divine beings are referred to as the apkallus in the Mesopotamian accounts. Like the Elohim of the Bible, apkallus could be both good and evil. Like the sons of God in the Bible, these beings descended upon Earth and mated with human females and produced hybrid offspring: yep, the Nephilim again.
There are many fascinating contrasts to draw between the Hebrew and Mesopotamian accounts: Annus in fact presents the quite juicy hypothesis that the Hebrew texts were actually creative re-writings of the earlier Mesopotamians accounts. Michael Heiser makes a similar argument, although rather less objectively by framing the Hebrew account — mainly through the Bible — as a polemic work against the apparent un-Godliness of the Babylonian culture of the Mesopotamians.
Yet we needn’t limit ourselves to the ancient culture wars that were occurring between the Hebrews and the Mesopotamians. We have many other sources to go by to get an idea of what the general gist of the pre-flood shenanigans looked like.
As detailed by Hancock, South American flood myths also recount the presence of giants on the earth in ancient times, whose frivolity and immorality necessitated their destruction by the creator God Viracocha by way of a great flood.
In fact, Hancock identifies the almost universal presence in world mythology of a story of an historic catastrophic flood event, stretching over almost 500 separate cultures. While exact details and characters differ, what is consistent is that the world was at one stage encompassed by a great deluge of water, accompanied by blackened skies and intense and prolonged cold. The vast majority of humanity did not survive, with the exception of a chosen few who were then tasked with repopulating the Earth.
This uncanny correlation across the myths of cultures separated by often vast gulfs of time and space is itself fairly convincing that — bar some elaborate and incomprehensible conspiracy of historical record — this event was in fact real.
Hancock is not alone here. Another scholar who has advanced the lost ancient civilisation theory is Robert Schoch, who I mentioned for his work on re-dating the origins of the Sphinx in the Pyramid Puzzle. Schoch did extensive studies of the geology of the Sphinx, which indicated it was initially carved during a climatic period that could best be attributed to the last ice age. This was the catalyst for his realisation that the existence of an advanced lost civilisation was the best explanation for the origin of many of the world’s most mysterious megalithic sites.
Schoch draws attention to the Zep Tepi age that the Egyptians speak of, which was a supposed Golden Age that existed before the beginnings of our current civilisation. In fact, various ancient cultures — not just the Egyptians, but also the Maya, the Hindus, even Classical figures like Plato — speak about Golden Age civilisations in our distant past.
Plato is also well known for forwarding the theory of a lost advanced civilisation from this golden age: the infamous Atlantis. There is much that we can learn from the myths surrounding Atlantis and how it may have come to be lost beneath the sea. At this stage, it is best not to get sidetracked by any single possible ancient civilisation, or the way in which it may have been lost to history.
Because what all of these ancient cultures also talk about a series of great ages that our world cycles through. That is: that our history is best understood as cyclical, not linear.
What are these cycles, and how might they influence the course of human civilisation?
First, we need to look a bit closer at the concept of precession.
Precession is a little known yet incredibly important concept for understanding the history of our species. This is because our ancient ancestors clearly understood it, and have incorporated it to such a vast extent in both their architecture and mythology that we can only assume it must mean something incredibly important.
I touched on precession briefly in the Pyramid Puzzle. Here, we saw that certain aspects of the design of the Giza Plateau matched directly with the the alignment of the stars at approximately 10,500 BC: for example the arrangement of the three pyramids to reflect the constellation of Orion’s Belt orientated due south; as well as the alignment of the Sphinx due East so as to directly face the constellation of Leo. These presumably deliberate choices by the architects in question have been interpreted as time stamps that date these structures back to the last Ice Age.
How is it that these constellations shift across the sky in such a way?
The nature of the precessional rotation is difficult to explain (for me anyway). It is often compared to the ‘wobble’ of a spinning top that, while still obviously spinning in its most fundamental way, also undertakes that slower inwards slanting circulation at the same time. This same movement undertaken by our Earth is why the pole star — the star that either pole is facing at a particular time — changes over time.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, from where I first learnt about precession, Graham Hancock uses the analogy of a Giant, slowly rotating the earth within space. I’ll try to summarise as best I can:
The Earth floats in space at an incline angle of approximately 23 degrees from vertical. Imagine a long axis passing through the centre of the Earth, coming out of and extending beyond both the north and south pole.
Imagine the giant grabs hold of each end of the axis.
Imagine (this is tricky) that without disturbing the existing spin of the Earth and its rotation around the sun, the giant slowly rotates the earth clockwise by pulling one end of the axis and pushing the other.
In other words, the north end of the axis will rotate in a great circle in the space north of the Earth, while the southern tip completes an equally large circle to the south.
The completion of one of these circles will take almost 26,000 years!
If that didn’t make sense, then Google and Wikipedia are your friends here, which is not advice I will be giving out very often.
The main point to take away is this: precession makes our sky turn like a clock— a sloooooow clock. We can understand the signs of the zodiac — those 12 defined and equally-ish spaced constellations that form a grand ring around the horizontal plane of the Earth’s orbit — as the numbers on the clock. We can think of fixed points on our planet as the hands on the clock: the poles for example.
This is also where the Zodiac Ages come from. The Age in question is named after the constellation over which the sun rises at the time of the vernal/spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. We have currently shifted from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, meaning that the sun has shifted to rising over Pisces to rising over Aquarius.
Now the passing of the sun through a single zodiac sign takes roughly 2150 years. We can think of these as Great Months, 12 of which comprise the Great Year of 25,776 of our solar years: the time it takes for the sun to cycle through the entire Zodiac clock.
Now I could ask here: if this complex celestial motion is barely known or understood except for astro-freaks today, which according to conventional sources was only discovered by Hipparchus sometime during the second century BC, how the hell did earlier human civilisations with their primitive sciences know about it? But hopefully you are on board with the lost ancient civilisation hypothesis by now. The better question is why precession was so important to these civilisations.
Because it is not just in Egypt that we see evidence of the knowledge of precession: it is clearly evident in Teotihuacan, Gobekli Tepi and other significant megalithic sites.
Further, it is not just in the architecture of these ancient cultures where see the precessional code being communicated. Comparative analysis of ancient mythology has found clear evidence of coded language within and across these myths that appear to refer to the precessional cycle. What’s more — and this is where things start to heat up — they appear to directly link the precessional cycle to the other recurring theme of immense cataclysms.
The most notable source of this analysis is the book Hamlet’s Mill, originally published over half a century ago. The Mill of the title pops up regularly in mythology, most notably the Icelandic myth of Amleth/Amlodhi, where it is suggested to be a veiled reference to the rotation of the sky under the precessional cycle. Hamlet, interestingly enough, refers to the aforementioned mythological Norse character, whose ‘unhappy intellectual’ archetype was apparently the template for Shakespeare’s famous iteration.
Both the Mill and Hamlet archetype are also found in Homer’s Odyssey, the biblical tale of Samson, and the myths of numerous other cultures. In all these stories, the Mill always breaks apart, causing some kind of colourfully-imagined carnage that is said to symbolise the cyclical cataclysmic events on Earth.
What is required to accept these theories is a paradigm shift in how we understand ancient myth: that they are not simply stories, but are highly complex and detailed symbolic, even scientific, messages. If we make this shift, it becomes obvious that the question is not whether a lost civilisation was once all but eradicated from the face of the Earth, but whether this has been a recurring theme in our history, timed in some mysterious way according to the turning of our heavenly clock.
Such myths are all well and good, but don’t cut the mustard in a culture whose barely disguised hubris gives little serious evidentiary weight to these stories.
We need a solid scientific explanation for what could wipe out such a civilisation, were we to even conceded that they existed. An event so destructive that it would effectively wipe the face of the Earth clean and take close to 5000 years for modern civilisation to recover and begin to re-emerge.
As mentioned earlier, the working theory of Hancock is of a celestial body such as a comet, meteor or asteroid hitting the Earth, who also provides a date for this event: roughly 12,000 years ago. This hypothesis rests largely on the work of Randall Carlson, a legendary geologist and catastrophist who has been central in advancing the scientific case to match the mythological case for a massive global flood event in our distant past. His work proves virtually beyond reasonable doubts two events that have occurred in our past: the collision of the earth from large celestial objects; and massive flood events — both of which have left indelible and unmistakable markings on the surface of the Earth.
The comet/meteor/asteroid theory is not the only possible explanation, however. Robert Schoch agrees with Hancock’s general hypothesis that the end of the last ice age — a period of 1,200 years from 10,900 to 9,700 BC called the Younger Dryas — was initiated by a sudden cooling and ended with a sudden warming, each change potentially occurring within the space of a year. However, he differs in disputing the likelihood that they were caused by a celestial body, even while admitting that he once subscribed to this theory.
His hypothesis is far more close to home: the Sun. By abnormal solar activity, or even a distinct solar outburst event. It appears that even Carlson has recently come round to the likely role of our Sun in the Younger Dryas catastrophes, suggesting we could be onto a winner here.
What do we know about the Sun? We know that it emits particles in the form of plasma on a regular basis, streams of which we can see on Earth most famously in the form of the Aurora Borealis/Northern Lights. However the Sun is not as stable as we might typically (and comfortingly) believe, and can on occasion release more substantial plasma outbursts.
These larger and more severe emissions provide a logical explanation, Schoch suggests, for both the the mass melting of ice caps that caused the initial flood and descent into the Younger Dryas, as well as the final sudden warming at its conclusion.
Schoch cites various scientific indicators — including datasets from ice core, sediment core and even from the moon thanks to samples taken during the Apollo missions — that support unusual solar activity around 9,700 BC. Such events, which result in intense lighting strikes hitting the face of the Earth, may create the same impact indicators that have been previously interpreted as comet events.
As well as geological evidence, Schoch also cites archeological findings of patterns in ancient petroglyph artworks around the world, which according to noted Physicist Anthony Peratt have a close similarity to shape of solar plasma discharges. He looks specifically at Easter Island, where the characters used in the written Rongorongo language have the same symbology as these plasma petroglyphs.
Support for this theory also comes from Dr Paul LaViolette. LaViolette, however, takes things up a notch to a more cosmic scale: suggesting that these solar outbursts are actually the result of ‘Galactic Superwaves’. These superwaves are intense barrages of cosmic rays that originate from explosions in the centre of our galaxy. Upon arrival in our solar system, they cause the kind of drastic climate changes and mass solar outbursts that explain the scientific data surrounding the Younger Dryas cataclysm — not to mention those descriptions found in the Bible and other ancient texts.
And a small point to finish on, one that all our aforementioned scholars agree on: these outbursts and the cataclysms they cause are reoccurring and cyclical in nature, timed in some mysterious cosmic synchronicity by the turning of our heavenly clock. And, based on the timing of this clock, our present cycle is currently drawing to an end.