8 Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 36, 154, 237.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 69
Ty-fong." 9 It appears as though the noise of the hurricane was over-toned by a sound not unlike the name Typhon, as if the storm were calling him by name.
* The cosmic upheaval proceeded with a "mighty strong west wind," 10 but before the climax, in the simple words of the Scriptures, "the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided." u
-The Israelites were on the shore of the Sea of Passage at the climax of the cataclysm. The name Jam Suf is generally rendered as Red Sea; the Passage is supposed to have taken place either at the Gulf of Suez or at Akaba Gulf of the Red Sea, but sometimes the site of the Passage is identified as one of the inner lakes on the route from Suez to the Mediterranean. It is argued that suf means "reed" (papyrus reed), and since papyrus reed does not grow in salt water, Jam Suf must have been a lagoon of fresh water.12 We will not enter here into a discussion where the Sea of the Passage was. The inscription on the shrine found in el-Arish may provide some indication where the Pharaoh was engulfed by the whirlpool;13 in any event, the topographical distribution of sea and land did not remain the same as before the cataclysm of the days of the Exodus. But the name of the Sea of the Passage—Jam Suf—is derived not from "reed," but from "hurricane,"
robin-bobin
suf, suf a, in Hebrew. In Egyptian the Red Sea is called shari, which signifies the sea of percussion (mare percussionis) or the sea of the stroke or of the disaster.14
The Haggadah of Passover says: "Thou didst sweep the land of Moph and Noph ... on the Passover."15
The hurricane that brought to an end the Middle Kingdom in Egypt—"the blast of heavenly displeasure" in the language of Mane-tho—swept through every corner of the world. In order to distinguish, in the traditions of the peoples, this diluvium venti of cosmic dimensions from local disastrous storms, other cosmic disturbances like
» G. Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (1858-1862), II, 225 note.
io Exodus 10 : 19. « Exodus 14 : 21. « Cf. Isaiah 19 : 6. " See p. 60.
"Akerblad, Journal asiatique, XIII (1834), 349; F. Fresnel, ibid., 4e Serie, XI (1848); cf. Peyron, Lexicon linguae copticae (1835), p. 304.
16 Moph and Noph refer to Memphis.
70 WORLDS IN COLLISION
disappearance of the sun or change of the sky must be found accompanying the hurricane.
In the Japanese cosmogonical myth, the sun goddess hid herself for a long time in a heavenly cave in fear of the storm god. "The source of light disappeared, the whole world became dark,"
and the storm god caused monstrous destruction. Gods made terrible noise so that the sun should reappear, and from their tumult the earth quaked.16 In Japan and in the vast extent of the ocean hurricanes and earthquakes are not rare occurrences; but they do not disturb the day-night succession, nor is there any resulting permanent change in the sky and its luminaries. "The sky was low," relate the Polynesians of Takaofo Island, and "then the winds and waterspouts and the hurricanes came, and carried up the sky to its present height." «
"When a world cycle is destroyed by wind," says the Buddhist text on the "World Cycles," the wind also turns "the ground upside down, and throws it into the sky," and "areas of one hundred leagues in extent, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred leagues in extent, crack and are thrown upward by the force of the wind" and do not fall again but are "blown to powder in the sky and annihilated." "And the wind throws up also into the sky the mountains which encircle the earth . . . [they] are ground to powder and destroyed." The cosmic wind blows and destroys
"a hundred thousand times ten million worlds." 18
The Tide
The ocean tides are produced by the action of the sun and to a larger extent by that of the moon.
A body larger than the moon or one nearer to the earth would act with greater effect. A comet with a head as large as the earth, passing sufficiently close, would raise
W Nihongi, "Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times" (transl. W. G. Aston), Transactions and Proceedings of the Japanese Society, I (1896), 37 f., 47. 1T Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia, I, 44. 18 Warren, "World Cycles," Buddhism, p. 328.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 71
the waters of the oceans miles high.1 The slowing down or stasis of the earth in its rotation would cause a tidal recession of water toward the poles,2 but the celestial body near by would disturb this poleward recession, drawing the water toward itself.
The traditions of many peoples persist that seas were torn apart and their water heaped high and thrown upon the continents. In order to establish that these traditions refer to one and the same event, or at least to an event of the same order, we must keep to this guiding sequence: the great tide followed a disturbance in the motion of the earth.
The Chinese annals, which I have mentioned and which I intend to quote more extensively in a subsequent section, say that in the time of Emperor Yahou the sun did not go down for ten davs.
The world was in flames, and "in their vast extent" the waters "overtopped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods." The water of the ocean was heaped up and cast upon the continent of Asia; a great tidal wave swept over the mountains and broke in the middle of the Chinese Empire. The water was caught in the valleys between the mountains, and the land was flooded for decades.
robin-bobin
The traditions of the people of Peru tell that for a period of time equal to five days and five nights the sun was not in the sky, and then the ocean left the shore and with a terrible din broke over the continent; the entire surface of the earth was changed in this catastrophe.3
The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma relate: "The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time."
Finally a bright light appeared in the north, "but it was mountain-high waves, rapidly coming nearer."4
In these traditions there are two concurrent elements: a complete darkness that endured a number of days (in Asia, prolonged day)
1 Cf. J. Lalande, AbrSge cTastronomie (1795), p. 340, who computed that a comet with a head as large as the earth, at a distance of 13,290 lieues, or about four diameters of the earth, would raise ocean tides 2,000 toises or about four kilometers high.
2 P. Kirchenberg, La Theorie de la relativite (1922), pp. 131-132.
3 Andree, Die Flutsagen, p. 115.
* H. S. Bellamy, Moons, Myths and Man (1938), p. 277.
72 WORLDS IN COLLISION
and, when the light broke through, a mountain-high wave that brought destruction.
>-The Hebrew story of the passage of the sea contains the same elements. There was a prolonged and complete darkness (Exodus 10:21). The last day of the darkness was at the Red Sea.5 When the world plunged out of darkness, the bottom of the sea was uncovered, the waters were driven apart and heaped up like walls in a double tide.6 The Septuagint translation of the Bible says that the water stood "as a wall," and the Koran, referring to this event, says 'like mountains." In the old rabbinical literature it is said that the water was suspended as if it were "glass, solid and massive." 7
The commentator Rashi, guided by the grammatical structure of the sentence in the Book of Exodus, explained in accordance with Mechilta: "The water of all oceans and seas was divided."
8
The Midrashim contain the following description: "The waters were piled up to the height of sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth." 9 The figure in this sentence intends to say that the heap of water was tremendous. According to the Scriptures, the waters climbed the mountains and stood above them, and they mounted to the heavens.10