Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/547

 notion of a universal deluge, in which not only a few tribes or villages perished, but all the inhabited earth was laid under water; or the memory of some actual flood of unusual dimensions may have survived in the popular mind, and been handed down with traits of exaggeration and distortion such as are commonly found in the narratives of events preserved by oral tradition. Let us examine a few instances of the flood-myth.

The Fijians relate that the god "Degei was roused every morning by the cooing of a monstrous bird," but that two young men, his grandsons, one day accidentally killed and buried it. Degei having, after some trouble, found the dead body, determined to be avenged. The youths "took refuge with a powerful tribe of carpenters," who built a fence to keep out the god. Unable to take the fence by storm, Degei brought on heavy floods, which rose so high that his grandsons and their friends had to escape in "large bowls that happened to be at hand." They landed at various places; but it is said that the two tribes became extinct (Viti, p. 394).

The Greenlanders have "a tolerably distinct tradition" of a flood. They say that all men were drowned excepting one. This one beat with his stick upon the ground and thereby produced a woman (Grönland, p. 246).

Kamtschatka has a somewhat similar legend, except that it admits a larger number of survivors. Very many, according to this version, were drowned, and the waves had sunk those who had got into boats; but others took refuge in rafts, binding the trees together to make them. On these they saved themselves with their provisions and all their property. When the waters subsided, the rafts remained on the high mountains (Kamtschatka, p. 273).

Among the North Americans "the notion of a universal deluge" was, in the time of the Jesuit De Charlevoix, "rather wide-spread." In one of their stories, told by the Iroquois, all human beings were drowned; and it was necessary, in order to re-populate the earth, to change animals into men (N. F., vol. iii. p. 345).

The Tupis of Brazil are supposed to be named after Tupa, the first of men, "who alone survived the flood" (M. N. W., p. 185). Again, "the Peruvians imagined that two destructions