_Indian Traditions._--India, in its turn, affords us an account of the
Deluge, which by its poverty strikingly contrasts with that of the Bible
and the Chaldeans. Its most simple and ancient form is found in the
_Catapatha Brahmana_ of the Rig-Veda. It has been translated for the
first time by M. Max Muller.
"One morning water for washing was brought to Manu, and when he had
washed himself a fish remained in his hands. And it addressed these
words to him:--'Protect me and I will save thee.' 'From what wilt
thou save me?' 'A deluge will sweep all creatures away; it is from
that I will save thee.' 'How shall I protect thee?' The fish
replied: 'While we are small we run great dangers, for fish swallow
fish. Keep me at first in a vase; when I become too large for it dig
a basin to put me into. When I shall have grown still more, throw me
into the ocean; then I shall be preserved from destruction.' Soon it
grew a large fish. It said to Manu, 'The very year I shall have
reached my full growth the Deluge will happen. Then build a vessel
and worship me. When the waters rise, enter the vessel and I will
save thee.'
"After keeping him thus, Manu carried the fish to the sea. In the
year indicated Manu built a vessel and worshipped the fish. And when
the Deluge came he entered the vessel. Then the fish came swimming
up to him, and Manu fastened the cable of the ship to the horn of
the fish, by which means the latter made it pass over the mountain
of the North. The fish said, 'I have saved thee; fasten the vessel
to a tree that the water may not sweep it away while thou art on the
mountain; and in proportion as the waters decrease thou shalt
descend.' Manu descended with the waters, and this is what is called
the _descent of Manu_ on the mountain of the North. The deluge had
carried away all creatures, and Manu remained alone."
Next in order of date and complication, which always goes on loading the
narrative more and more with fantastic and parasitical details, comes
the version in the enormous epic of _Mahabharata_. That of the poem
called _Bhagavata-Purana_ is still more recent and fabulous. Finally,
the same tradition forms the subject of an entire poem of very low date,
the _Matsya-Purana_, of which an analysis has been given by the great
Indian scholar, Wilson.
In the preface to the third volume of his edition of _Bhagavata-Purana_,
Eugene Burnouf has carefully compared the three narratives known at the
time he wrote (that of the _Catapatha Brahmana_ has been since
discovered), with a view to clearing up the origin of the Indian
tradition of the Deluge. He points out in a discussion that deserves to
remain a model of erudition and subtle criticism, that it is absolutely
wanting in the Vedic hymns, where we only find distant allusions to it
that seem to belong to a different kind of legend altogether, and also
that this tradition was primitively foreign to the essentially Indian
system of _Manvantaras_, or periodic destructions of the world. He
thence concludes that it must have been imported into India subsequently
to the adoption of this system, which is, however, very ancient, being
common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, and therefore inclines to look upon
it as a Semitic importation that took place in historic times, not,
indeed, of Genesis, but more probably of the Babylonian tradition.
The discovery of an original edition of the latter confirms the theory
of the French savant. The leading feature which distinguishes the Indian
narrative is the part assigned to a god who puts on the form of a fish,
in order to warn Manu, to guide his vessel and save him from the flood.
The nature of the metamorphosis is the only fundamental and primitive
point, for different versions vary as to the personality of the god who
assumes this form--the _Brahmana_ leaves it uncertain, the _Mahabharata_
fixes on Brahma, and the compilers of the _Puranas_ on Vishnu. This is
the more remarkable that this metamorphosis into a fish _Matsyavatara_
remains isolated in Indian mythology, is foreign to its habitual
symbolism, and gives rise to no ulterior developments: no trace being
found in India of that fish-worship which was so important and
widespread among other ancient people. Burnouf rightly saw in this a
sign of importation from without, and especially of its Babylonian
origin, for classic testimony, recently confirmed by native monuments,
shows us that in the religion of Babylon the conception of
ichthyomorphic gods held a more prominent place than elsewhere. The part
played by the divine fish with regard to Manu in the Indian legend, is
attributed both by the Epic of Uruk and by Berosus to the god Ea, who is
also designated Schalman, "the Saviour." Now this god, whose type of
representation we now know certainly from Assyrian and Babylonian
monuments, is essentially the ichthyomorphic god, and his image almost
invariably combines the forms of fish and man. In astronomical tables
frequent mention is made of the catasterism of the "fish of Ea," which
is indubitably our sign Pisces, since it presides over the month Adar.
It is to a connection of ideas based on the diluvian record, that we
must attribute the placing of Pisces--primarily of the "fish of
Ea"--next to Aquarius, whose relation to the history of the Deluge we
have already pointed out. Here we have an evident allusion to the part
of Saviour attributed by the people who invented the Zodiac, to the god
Ea in the flood, and to the idea of an ichthyomorphic nature especially
belonging to this aspect of his personality. Ea is, moreover, the
Oannes, lawgiver of the fragments of Berosus, half-man, half-fish, whose
form, answering to the description given by the Chaldean history, has
been discovered in the sculptures of Assyrian palaces and on cylinders,
the Euahanes of Hygin, and the Oes of Helladios.[46]
Whenever we find among two different peoples one same legend, with as
_special_ a circumstance which does not spring _naturally_ and
_necessarily_ from the fundamental facts of the narrative, and when,
moreover, this circumstance is closely connected with the whole
religious conceptions of one of these peoples, and remains isolated and
alien from the customary symbolism of the other, criticism lays it down
as an absolute rule that we must conclude the legend to have been
transmitted from the one to the other in an already fixed form, to be a
foreign importation, superimposed, not fused with the national, and as
it were genial, traditions of the people, who have received, without
having created it.
We must also remark that in the _Puranas_ it is no longer Manu Vaivasata
that the divine fish saves from the Deluge, but a different personage,
the King of the Dasas--_i.e._, fishers, Satyravata, "the man who loves
justice and truth," strikingly corresponding to the Chaldean Khasisatra.
Nor is the Puranic version of the Legend of the Deluge to be despised,
though it be of recent date and full of fantastic and often puerile
details. In certain aspects it is less Aryanized than that of _Brahmana_
or than the _Mahabharata_, and above all it gives some circumstances
omitted in these earlier versions, which must yet have belonged to the
original foundation, since they appear in the Babylonian legend; a
circumstance preserved no doubt by the oral tradition--popular and not
Brahmanic--with which the _Puranas_ are so deeply imbued. This has been
already observed by Pictet, who lays due stress on the following passage
of the _Bhagavata-Purana_: "In _seven days_," said Vishnu to Satyravata,
"the three worlds shall be submerged." There is nothing like this in the
_Brahmana_ nor the _Mahabharata_, but in Genesis the Lord says to Noah,
"_Yet seven days_ and I will cause it to rain upon the earth;" and a
little further we read, "_After seven days_ the waters of the flood were
upon the earth." And we have just pointed out the parts played by
hebdomades as successive periods in that system of the duration of the
flood, adopted by the author of the Jehovist documents inserted in
Genesis, as well as by the compiler of the Chaldean Epic of Uruk. Nor
must we pay less attention to what the _Bhagavata-Purana_ says of the
directions given by the fish-god to Satyravata for the placing of the
sacred Scriptures in a safe place in order to preserve them from
Hayagriva, a marine horse dwelling in the abyss, and of the conflict of
the god with this Hayagriva, who had stolen the Vedas and thus produced
the cataclysm by disturbing the order of the world. This circumstance
too is wanting in the more ancient compositions, even in the
_Mahabharata_, but it is a most important one, and cannot be looked on
as a spontaneous product of Indian soil, for we recognize in it under
an Indian garb the very tradition of the interment of the sacred
writings at Sippara by Khasisatra, such as we have it in the fragments
of Berosus.
It is the Chaldean form, then, of the tradition that the Indians have
adopted owing to communications which the commercial relations between
the countries render historically natural, and they afterwards amplified
it with the exuberance peculiar to their imagination. But they must have
adopted it all the more readily because it agreed with a tradition,
which under a somewhat different form had been brought by their
ancestors from the primitive cradle of the Aryan race. That the
recollection of the flood did indeed form part of the original
groundwork of the legends as to the origin of the world held by this
great race, is beyond all doubt. For if Indians have accepted the
Chaldean form of the story, so nearly allied to that of Genesis, all
other nations of Aryan descent show themselves possessed of entirely
original versions of the cataclysm which cannot be held to have been
borrowed either from Babylonian or Hebrew sources.