The Flood

The Kanyakumari Tsunami Memorial. Notice the lamp and flame,
symbolizing the safe, warm and known in the face of the
unsafe and chaotic.

It's the wee hours and I really need to sleep, but I was thinking about what deeper meaning the very common myth of the Flood might have. And then I thought, it doesn't need a deeper meaning. Any early man who ever saw a tsunami or a flood would have shit his loincloth, it's the scariest thing ever, it's a widespread catastrophe. Water eats the land, the unstable eats the stable, the dangerous eats the safe, and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about one when it starts. A wild beast or a human enemy you could theoretically kill, cold can be tamed with fire, but even today floods of various sorts are disasters that nobody can really stop. In the Bible, the Flood is punishment for human wickedness, but I like to think of it as more a punishment for human conceit. We think we are the rulers of the world, we think we can do anything, we think we ourselves are gods, and then the flood reminds us that we are small and silly and not powerful. 

The ocean too would have been a scary thing in its own right. One one side you have the stable and known and solid, and on the other you have the unstable and unknown and liquid, full of monsters. Most cultures that contain a myth about a world flood also contain a myth about a giant sea serpent and gods that do battle with it. Tiamat, Leviathan, Jörmungandr. Chaos monsters, that the gods must do battle with and defeat on behalf of our warm little human circle of the stable and the known and the 'real'. 

But the Chaos Monster was never defeated really, she's still there, we just pretended she was defeated and averted our gaze. As we cross the world in our heavy stable ships of steel, there under our feet is still the Ocean, and she is still waiting there to kill us, and often does. As Japan recently and regrettably discovered, the greatest human technology in the world can still be bested by her when the quaking Earth pushes her into a tsunami. The Japanese knew more about living with tsunamis than anyone, and had massive bulwarks of concrete and steel to fend her off, but it didn't matter. When she is roused, the Chaos Monster still eats you, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. She's been hungry lately.

In our Western science, for a long time the real was considered almost synonymous with the solid and static. Our ancient Greek intellectual forebears thought that motion and change could not be real, that everything real must ultimately be static and unchanging, and the endless flux of change an illusion. For Western scientists at one time, atoms were billiard balls of matter, and when we knew that was a lie, we imagined the billiard balls made of billiard balls, and those made of billiard balls. The static, the precise, the measurable, susceptible to being completely defined by the human mind with nothing left over. We have only recently begun to understand how much is really left over. How unknown really the fundamental stuff of the Universe is.

You may think we long overcame our primal fear of the chaotic and the fluid and the amorphous, but we never did. We still fear it today. We keep pushing our warm little human circle of the known and safe and stable outwards, trying to tame the world with the measured and the known and the stable, but outside that circle is still the realm of the unstable and unmeasurable and slippery and paradoxical. The Chaos Monsters are still there, we just avert our eyes and convince ourselves that they are not. The flood, the seas, the tsunami, are all reminders that this warm little human circle floats on an Ocean of the uncontained, the unsafe, and the unknown, and that our boat can still be swamped. 

In the classic movie Forbidden Planet, the Krell were an almost unfathomably advanced, wise and benevolent race who were completely wiped out by the unacknowledged chaos monsters in their own minds. Monsters from the Id, to quote the classic line. Lest we miss the moral of the story, we are no more invulnerable from the forces of chaos than they are, and just when we believe we have created the perfect city of human enlightenment and have the power to solve all our problems, the monsters of the side of the universe we refuse to accept can tear it to pieces in an instant. Nothing can protect us, from that which we have convinced ourselves we have already defeated. There is a Tarot card that sums up this picture nicely: The Tower. Whatever shining towers we build for ourselves, they will be brought down. However powerful we are, Chaos - the Flood - still has our number and is not fooled.

But despite the horrors that the seas must have held for our ancestors, they still built boats and explored the world. Knowledge and wisdom lie out there in those oceans too, and like the Dutch with their dikes and their polders we constantly claim little bits of that ocean for ourselves, to expand our knowledge and power. But this process of incorporating the unknown and chaotic does not mean that it isn't still there, and our knowledge carries with it the inherent limitations that we are trying to make stable the unstable and trying to make the mysterious known. Which means that blind spots are built into the very process by which we achieve our greatness, and like the Krell, we can but stare utterly astonished and perplexed when Chaos comes to take back what was always hers. 

This is the only deeper meaning of the Flood. Don't be fooled by human vanity or knowledge or all the fancy technological magic we can summon. In the final analysis, we are but children staring at the edge of the Ocean, at the edge of the Flood, building a fire in a cave and gathering round it and pretending that the enormity of the universe isn't really there outside. That we really do have a handle on it all. We don't have a handle on shit. And all the while, the Chaos Monster is outside there, ignoring us one moment, devouring the sand castles of our conceit the next. 

Tiamat, the Chaos Dragon, was never defeated and never could be.

Tiamat vs. Marduk, WWF Mythological Smackdown!