The descent of a sticky fluid which came earthward and blazed with heavy smoke is recalled in the oral and written traditions of the inhabitants of both hemispheres.
Popol-Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayas, narrates: 2 "It was ruin and destruction . . . the sea was piled up ... it was a great inundation . . . people were drowned in a sticky substance raining from the sky. . . . The face of the earth grew dark and the gloomy rain endured days and nights. . . .
And then there was a great din of fire above their heads." The entire population of the land was annihilated.
The Manuscript Quiche perpetuated the picture of the population of Mexico perishing in a downpour of bitumen: 3 "There descended from the sky a rain of bitumen and of a sticky substance. . . . The earth was obscured and it rained day and night. And men ran hither and thither and were as if seized by madness; they tried to climb to the roofs, and the houses crashed robin-bobin
down; they tried to climb the trees, and the trees cast them far away; and when they tried to escape in caves and caverns, these were suddenly closed."
A similar account is preserved in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan.* The age which ended in the rain of fire was called Quiauh-tonatiuh, which means "the sun of fire-rain." 5
And far away, in the other hemisphere, in Siberia, the Voguls carried down through the centuries and millennia this memory: "God sent a sea of fire upon the earth. . . . The cause of the fire they call 'the fire-water.'" 6
Half a meridian to the south, in the East Indies, the aboriginal
2 Popol-Vuh, le livre sacrS, ed. Brasseur (1861), Chap. Ill, p. 25.
3 Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilis6es du Mexique, I, 55.
4 Brasseur, Sources de I'histoire primitive du Mexique, p. 28.
5 E. Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur amerikanischen Sprach- und Alter-tumsgeschichte (1902-1923), II, 798.
6 Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology, p. 368.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 55
tribes relate that in the remote past Sengle-Das or "water of fire" rained from the sky; with very few exceptions, all men died.7 NThe eighth plague as described in the Book of Exodus was
"harad [meteorites] and fire mingled with the barad, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation" (Exodus 9 : 24). There were "thunder [correct: loud noises] and barad, and the fire ran along upon the ground" (Exodus 9 : 23).
The Papyrus Ipuwer describes this consuming fire: "Gates, columns, and walls are consumed by fire. The sky is in confusion."8 The papyrus says that this fire almost "exterminated mankind."
The Midrashim, in a number of texts, state that naphtha, together with hot stones, poured down upon Egypt. "The Egyptians refused to let the Israelites go, and He poured out naphtha over them, burning blains [blisters]." It was "a stream of hot naphtha." 9 Naphtha is petroleum in Aramaic and Hebrew.
The population of Egypt was "pursued with strange rains and hails and showers inexorable, and utterly consumed with fire: for what was most marvelous of all, in the water which quencheth all things the fire wrought yet more mightily," 10 which is the nature of burning petroleum; in the register of the plagues in Psalms 105 it is referred to as "flaming fire," and in Daniel (7 :10) as
"river of fire" or "fiery stream."
- In the Passover Haggadah it is said that "mighty men of Pul and Lud [Lydia in Asia Minor]
were destroyed with consuming conflagration on the Passover."
In the valley of the Euphrates the Babylonians often referred to "the rain of fire," vivid in their memory.11
All the countries whose traditions of fire-rain I have cited actually
7 Ibid., p. 369. Also A. Nottrott, Die Gosnerische Mission unter den Kohls (1874). p. 25. See R.
Andree, Die Flutsagen (1891).
8 Papyrus Ipuwer 2 : 10; 7 : 1; 11 : 11; 12 : 6.
9 Midrash Tanhuma, Midrash Psikta Raboti, and Midrash Wa-Yosha. For other sources see Ginzberg, Legends, II, 342-343, and V, 426.
10 The Wisdom of Solomon (transl. Holmes. 1913) in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles.
11 See A. Schott, "Die Vergleiche in den Akkadischen Konigsinschriften," Mitt. d. Vorderasiat.
Ges., XXX (1925), 89, 106.
56 WORLDS IN COLLISION
have deposits of oiclass="underline" Mexico, the East Indies, Siberia, Iraq, and
Egypt.
For a span of time after the combustive fluid poured down, it may well have floated upon the surface of the seas, soaked the surface of the ground, and caught fire again and again. "For seven winters and summers the fire has raged ... it has burnt up the earth," narrate the Voguls of Siberia.12
robin-bobin
The story of the wandering in the desert contains a number of references to fire springing out of the earth. The Israelites traveled three days' journey away from the Mountain of the Lawgiving, and it happened that "the fire of the Lord burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp" (Numbers 11:1). The Israelites continued on their way. Then came the revolt of Korah and his confederates. "And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up. . . . And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them. . . . And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense." 13
When they kindled the fire of incense, the vapors which rose out of the cleft in the rock caught the flame and exploded.
Unaccustomed to handling this oil, rich in volatile derivatives, the Israelite priests fell victims to the fire. The two elder sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, "died before the Lord, when they offered strange fire before the Lord, in the wilderness of Sinai."14 The fire was called strange because it had not been known before and because it was of foreign origin.
If oil fell on the desert of Arabia and on the land of Egypt and burned there, vestiges of conflagration must be found in some of the tombs built before the end of the Middle Kingdom, into which the oil or some of its derivatives might have seeped.
We read in the description of the tomb of Antefoker, vizier of Sesostris I, a pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom: "A problem is set us
12 Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology, p. 369. 18 Numbers 16 : 32-35. Cf. Psalms 106
: 17-18. 14 Numbers 3 : 4; cf. Numbers 26 : 61.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 57
by a conflagration, clearly deliberate, which has raged in the tomb, as in many another. . . . The combustible material must not only have been abundant, but of a light nature; for a fierce fire which speedily spent itself seems alone able to account for the fact that tombs so burnt remain absolutely free from blackening, except in the lowest parts; nor are charred remains found as a rule. The conditions are puzzling."15
"And what does natural history tell us?" asked Philo in his On the Eternity of the World,16 and answered: "Destructions of things on earth, destructions not of all at once but of a very large number, are attributed by it to two principal causes, the tremendous onslaughts of fire and water.
These two visitations, we are told, descend in turns after very long cycles of years. When the agent is the conflagration, a stream of heaven-sent fire pours out from above and spreads over many places and overruns great regions of the inhabited earth."
The rain of fire-water contributed to the earth's supply of petroleum; rock oil in the ground appears to be, partly at least, "star oil" brought down at the close of world ages, notably the age that came to its end in the middle of the second millennium before the present era.
The priests of Iran worshiped the fire that came out of the ground. The followers of Zoroastrianism or Mazdaism are also called fire worshipers. The fire of the Caucasus was held in great esteem by all the inhabitants of the adjacent lands. Connected with the Caucasus and originating there is the legend of Prometheus.17 He was chained to a rock for bringing fire to man. The allegorical character of this legend gains meaning when we consider Augustine's words that Prometheus was a contemporary of Moses.18