Deucalion’s Flood

DEUCALION’S Flood, so called to distinguish it from the Ogygian and other floods, was caused by Zeus’s anger against the impious sons of Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus. Lycaon himself first civilized Arcadia and instituted the worship of Zeus Lycaeus; but angered Zeus by sacrificing a boy to him. He was therefore transformed into a wolf, and his house struck by lightning. Lycaon’s sons were, some say, twenty-two in number; but others say fifty.

b. News of the crimes committed by Lycaon’s sons reached Olympus, and Zeus himself visited them, disguised as a poor traveller. They had the effrontery to set umble soup before him, mixing the guts of their brother Nyctimus with the umbles of sheep and goats that it contained. Zeus was undeceived and, thrusting away the table on which they had served the loathsome banquet-the place was afterwards known as Trapezus-changed all of them except Nyctimus, whom he restored to life, into wolves.

c. On his return to Olympus, Zeus in disgust let loose a great flood on the earth, meaning to wipe out the whole race of man; but Deucalion, King of Phthia, warned by his father Prometheus the Titan, whom he had visited in the Caucasus, built an ark, victualled it, and went aboard with his wife Pyrrha, a daughter of Epimetheus. Then the South Wind blew, the rain fell, and the rivers roared down to the sea which, rising with astonishing speed, washed away every city of the coast and plain; until the entire world was flooded, but for a few mountain peaks, and all mortal creatures seemed to have been lost, except Deucalion and Pyrrha. The ark floated about for nine days until, at last, the waters subsided, and it came to rest on Mount Parnassus or, some tell, on Mount Aetna; or Mount Athos; or Mount Othrys in Thessaly. It is said that Deucalion was reassured by a dove which he had sent on an exploratory flight.

d. Disembarking in safety, they offered a sacrifice to Father Zeus, the preserver of fugitives, and went down to pray at the shrine of Themis, beside the river Cephissus, where the roof was now draped with seaweed and the altar cold. They pleaded humbly that mankind should be renewed, and Zeus, hearing their voices from afar, sent Hermes to assure them that whatever request they might make would be granted forthwith. Themis appeared in person, saying: ‘Shroud your heads, and throw the bones of your mother behind you!’ Since Deucalion and Pyrrha had different mothers, both now deceased, they decided that the Titaness meant Mother Earth, whose bones were the rocks lying on the river bank. Therefore, stooping with shrouded heads, they picked up rocks and threw them over their shoulders; these became either men or women, according as Deucalion or Pyrrha had handled them. Thus mankind was renewed, and ever since ‘a people’ (laos) and ‘a stone’ (loas) have been much the same word in many languages.

e. However, as it proved, Deucalion and Pyrrha were not the sole survivors of the Flood, for Megarus, a son of Zeus, had been roused from his couch by the scream of cranes that summoned him to the peak of Mount Gerania, which remained above water. Another who escaped was Cerambus of Pelion, whom the nymphs changed to a scarabaeus, and he flew to the summit of Parnassus.

f. Similarly, the inhabitants of Parnassus-a city founded by Parnasus, Poseidon’s son, who invented the art of augury-were awakened by the howling of wolves and followed them to the mountain top. They named their new city Lycorea, after the wolves.

g. Thus the flood proved of little avail, for some of the Parnassians migrated to Arcadia, and revived Lycaon’s abominations. To this day a boy is sacrificed to Lycaean Zeus, and his guts mixed with others in an umble soup, which is then served to a crowd of shepherds beside a stream. The shepherd who eats the boy’s gut (assigned to him by lot), howls like a wolf, hangs his clothes upon an oak, swims across the stream, and becomes a werewolf. For eight years he herds with wolves but if he abstains from eating men throughout that period, may return at the close, swim back across the stream and resume his clothes. Not long ago, a Parrhasian named Damarchus spent eight years with the wolves, regained his humanity and, in the tenth year, after hard practice in the gymnasium, won the boxing prize at the Olympic Games.

h. This Deucalion was the brother of Cretan Ariadne and the father of Orestheus, King of the Ozolian Locrians, in whose time a white bitch littered a stick, which Orestheus planted, and which grew into a vine. Another of his sons, Amphictyon, entertained Dionysus, and was the first man to mix wine with water. But his eldest and most famous son was Hellen, father of all Greeks.

1. The story of Zeus and the boy’s guts is not so much a myth as a moral anecdote expressing the disgust felt in more civilized parts of Greece for the ancient cannibalistic practices of Arcadia, which were still performed in the name of Zeus, as ‘barbarous and unnatural’ (Plutarch: Life of Pelopidas). Lycaon’s virtuous Athenian contemporary Cecrops, offered only barley-cakes, abstaining even from animal sacrifices. The Lycaonian rites, which the author denies that Zeus ever countenanced, were apparently intended to discourage the wolves from preying on flocks and herds, by sending them a human king. ‘Lycaeus’ means ‘of the she-wolf’, but also ‘of the light’, and the lightning in the Lycaon myth shows that Arcadian Zeus began as a rain-making sacred king-in service to the divine She-wolf, the Moon, to whom the wolfpack howls.

2. A Great Year of one hundred months, or eight solar years, was divided equally between the sacred king and his tanist; and Lycaon’s fifty sons-one for every month of the sacred king’s reign-will have been the eaters of the umble soup. The figure twenty-two, unless it has been arrived at by a count of the families who claimed descent from Lycaon and had to participate in the umble-feast, probably refers to the twenty-two five-year lustra which composed a cycle-the 110-year cycle constituting the reign of a particular line of priestesses.

3. The myth of Deucalion’s Flood, apparently brought from Asia by the Hellads, has the same origin as the Biblical legend of Noah. But though Noah’s invention of wine is the subject of a Hebrew moral tale, incidentally justifying the enslavement of the Canaanites by their Kassite and Semitic conquerors, Deucalion’s claim to the invention has been suppressed by the Greeks in favour of Dionysus. Deucalion is, however, described as the brother of Ariadne, who was the mother, by Dionysus, of various vine-cult tribes, and has kept his name ‘new-wine sailor’ (from deucos and halieus). The Deucalion myth records a Mesopotamian flood of the third millennium BC; but also the autumnal New Year feast of Babylonia, Syria, and Palestine. This feast celebrated Parnapishtim’s outpouring of sweet new wine to the builders of the ark, in which (according to the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic) he and his family survived the Deluge sent by the goddess Ishtar. The ark was a moon-ship and the feast was celebrated on the new moon nearest to the autumnal equinox, as a means of inducing the winter rains. Ishtar, in the Greek myth, is called Pyrrha-the name of the goddess-mother of the Puresati (Philistines), a Cretan people who came to Palestine by way of Cilicia about the year 1200 BC; in Greek, pyrrha means ‘fiery red’, and is an adjective applied to wine.

4. Xisuthros was the hero of the Sumerian Flood legend, recorded by Berossus, and his ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. All these arks were built of acacia-wood, a timber also used by Isis for building Osiris’s death-barge.

5. The myth of an angry god who decides to punish man’s wickedness with a deluge seems to be a late Greek borrowing from the Phoenicians, or the Jews; but the number of different mountains, in Greece, Thrace, and Sicily, on which Deucalion is said to have landed, suggests that an ancient Flood myth has been superimposed on a later legend of a flood in Northern Greece. In the earliest Greek version of the myth, Themis renews the race of man without first obtaining Zeus’s consent; it is therefore likely that she, not he, was credited with the Flood, as in Babylonia.

6. The transformation of stones into a people is, perhaps, another Helladic borrowing from the East; St. John the Baptist referred to a similar legend, in a pun on the Hebrew words banim and abanim, declaring that God could raise up children to Abraham from the desert stones.

7. That a white bitch, the Moon-goddess Hecate, littered a vine-stick in the reign of Deucalion’s son Orestheus is probably the earliest Greek wine myth. The name Ozolian is said to be derived from ozoi, ‘vine shoots’. One of the wicked sons of Lycaon was also named Orestheus, which may account for the forced connection which the mythographers have made between the myth of the umble soup and the Deucalionian Flood.

8. Amphictyon, the name of another of Deucalion’s sons, is a male form of Amphictyonis, the goddess in whose name the  famous  northern confederation, the Amphictyonic League, had been founded; according to Strabo, Callimachus, and the Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes, it was regularized by Acrisius of Argos. Civilized Greeks, unlike the dissolute Thracians, abstained from neat wine; and its tempering with water at the conference of the member states, which took place in the vintage season at Antela near Thermopylae, will have been a precaution against murderous disputes.

9. Deucalion’s son Hellen was the eponymous ancestor of the entire Hellenic race: his name shows that he was a royal deputy for the priestess of Helle, or Hellen, or Helen, or Selene, the Moon; and, according to Pausanias, the first tribe to be called Hellenes came from Thessaly, where Helle was worshipped.

10. Aristotle (Meteorologica) says that Deucalion’s Flood took place ‘in ancient Greece (Graecia), namely the district about Dodona and the Achelous River’. Graeci means ‘worshippers of the Crone’, presumably the Earth-goddess of Dodona, who appeared in triad as the Graeae; and it has been suggested that the Achaeans were forced to invade the Peloponnese because unusually heavy rains had swamped their grazing grounds. Helle’s worship seems to have ousted that of the Graeae.

11. The scarabaeus beetle was an emblem of immortality in Lower Egypt because it survived the flooding of the Nile-the Pharaoh as Osiris entered his sun-boat in the form of a scarabaeus-and its sacral use spread to Palestine, the Aegean, Etruria, and the Balearic Islands. Antoninus Liberalis also mentions the myth of Cerambus, or Terambus, quoting Nicander.