Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, everybody. It's Josh, and I have one word to describe this week's Select from 2021 on why there are so many myths about a great flood found in cultures around the world. That word is fascinating. Fascinating. But I'll add a few more words, I guess.
This is one of those good old-fashioned Stuff You Should Know episodes where we find out that a thing that everyone just kind of takes for granted actually has a lot more to it than it seems. And I love those episodes. And I love this episode, which is why I picked it. I hope you love it, too.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Ahoy and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff You Should Know. And that's all there is to it. Although I do think we need to allow for the fact that Jerry is rear admirable. And by that, of course, I mean Rear Admiral. And by that, of course, I mean it's going to be a long episode.
Has there ever been a cutesy TV show called The Admirable Admiral?
No, that sounds great. I think there was one, The Simpsons did one called Admiral Baby. Oh, all right. Well, that counts. Yeah. I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though. Could have been like a terrible person.
So I have a cold, so I just want to apologize up front. Just a head cold. But I'm a little stuffy, so I'm sorry if it's coming across as untoward.
I'm very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser podcasters would not. They might just be like, I can't. I have a cold. People don't want to hear that. You say, to heck with that. I'm going forward with it.
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Chapter 2: What flood myths are explored in different cultures?
There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood myths in southern Canada, in the British Isles. So there was one study that picked out 50 cultures and they all had their own flood myths. And that it was related to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like you said, of like, why is this happening?
And there's a bunch of reasons, and they all kind of make sense to me, if I'm being honest. One of them is that there was a flood in these cultures, but it wasn't a global flood. But if you're...
You know, if all you know is a certain area and you never get to leave that area and it wipes out everything you know, then the story that you pass along orally through the years would sound like one that wiped out everything.
Yeah, and, like, the whole idea is that this flood actually did happen way far back to one ā And then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried that flood myth with them.
And so to those of us today, historians, anthropologists, looking at like all of these groups that are spread out all over the world, all sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem like a flood had impacted all of these groups together. that were that far spread out. So it must have been a really big flood. But this explanation says, no, the flood was actually really localized.
It was the group that it happened to that eventually spread out.
That's one explanation.
It makes a lot of sense. And one of the groups that are usually kind of pinpointed as this flood happening to are the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
who were known to have been around the, I think, the Caucasus Mountains to start, and then just spread out as far as the British Isles, basically all over Europe, northwest, east, south, and that all of our languages, like English, Germanic, just a whole slew of languages developed out of this group.
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Chapter 3: How does the story of Noah compare to other flood myths?
You would have been sneezed on with that big snozz.
Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze.
All right. So we promised talk of geomythology. Here's the idea. Since science really got its act together, there have been a couple of different ways to look at things like flood myths as either ā This is a story about our cultural values. There's a lot of religious metaphor involved. Or this was an actual historical event.
And geomythology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it can kind of be both. Like there could have been a real flood and it also ā took on metaphor and took on cultural values and was used as a story of ā I can't think of the word I'm trying to think of ā to teach you a lesson. What's that called? A fable? Yeah, like a fable.
So this kind of ā this field has emerged since I believe the 60s. And actually it was ā I was reading about this field of geomythology is like still really trying to establish itself in the field of geology ā And most geomythologists are trained geologists. That's where you start out.
Who play D&D?
Probably. But they also are like, you know, they have to really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because they're basically saying all of these myths, all of these legends, all of these folk traditions, they actually contain... eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird events in Earth, of early finds of fossils.
And yeah, they've encloaked them in the language of mythology and the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all this stuff that makes it just seem completely... That's legendary to us today, but that's how these pre-scientific and often pre-literate cultures pass along really valuable information.
And, like, we've been kind of foolish to just discount them as nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there. Don't throw the baby out with the bat. Exactly. And so that's what geomythology is doing. They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute.
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Chapter 4: What evidence suggests a historical basis for flood myths?
we deserve to survive and we would have to survive or else we wouldn't be around to be passing the story along. So somebody had to survive. So that's where those people who repopulate the earth come from. But the rest of us, we got wiped out because we displeased the gods.
That's right. Another one is that we started out as an ocean and nothing but ocean. So this is just a reset to that return to our original state here on planet Earth. And there are a lot of cultures around the world that basically thought that we started out as an ocean from ancient Egypt, Norse, I think in Japan as well. And basically, you know, it's either ā
returns us to a state of water or an island above an ocean.
Yeah, and that's so closely related to the apocalyptic one too. It's just that we just happen to be returning to how things were before, which is also related to another kind of theme as a reason for the flood, which is purification. Like, yes, you're being punished, and yes, you're returning to this primordial state,
But the ultimate reason that, say, like God or the gods have is to purify things, to rid the world of evil and just keep the good and start over with just the good, basically. That's another big one, too. And they're all kind of, you know, pretty tightly wound up together.
Yeah, then there's just angry gods, and it might not have anything to do with you doing anything wrong as a culture or getting your act together. It's just that the gods were angry, so they kicked open the top of that mountain, and it became a volcano. And sorry, TS for you guys.
Yeah, it just happens. But that's still interesting that peopleā That's a rationalization even in itself, though, isn't it? It's just kind of like sometimes that happens even if you didn't do anything wrong. I think so. So there's another one, too. That Emperor Yu myth is a good example of industriousness. Working together, people controlling things where the earth has done something crazy.
Maybe the gods were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in the form of like a savior like Emperor Yu. There's one in Bhutan. I believe there's a legend about Guru Ripoach. And the Zangpo Valley, he shows up and basically drains a lake, exposing all this fertile farmland where a village was then settled. Or theāand I apologize for this.
I genuinely could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck. I really tried. But the Gunganyji, aboriginal people, G-U-N-G-G-A-N-Y-J-Iā They have one where the tsunami keeps coming and coming and the sea levels are rising and rising. So the people are organized and get together and start rolling boulders down into the sea. And it actually prevents the sea levels from rising any further.
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