It is not surprising that in some of the greatest stories of both Western and Eastern traditions that the world as its inhabitants know it comes to an end. Our own mortality and the impossibility of knowing what lies on the other side of death's door makes us all fascinated with endings, and the fact that most parts of the world are subject to at least one form of natural disaster tends to color the stories that we tell ourselves about death and endings. We imagine the end of the world in at least some part because for each one of us the world will of course end. And we link those imaginings to the sometimes terrible realities of the world - a world in which everything and everyone that we know and love can be in a moment swept away by rising waters, rising winds, rising flames. This paper explores two of the great stories of the ending of an era by flood - the Biblical story of the flood and the story of a similar flood in the epic of Gilgamesh.
People from widely diverse cultures have stories of floods, even if they live in places where floods are relatively rare. This suggests - if we are inclined towards psychological and philosophical theories of archetypes - that there is something inherently attractive (in an intellectual and cultural sense) about stories that examine the phenomena of flooding. Floods may occupy such a central place in the human psyche because they epitomize our worst fears about natural disasters: Floods often rise up with little warning and so leave people helpless to combat them in any rational way. Those who are saved from floods - as is Noah and his family - may thus seem to be saved only by the grace of the divine. There may also be something archetypically attractive about floods in that they connect us at some level to our own beginnings in water and thus to all of the rituals that exist in human cultures about the ways in which water can make us not only clean but also whole again. The story of the f...