Books: Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

I >> Ignatius Donnelly >> Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel

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In the midst of this darkness and cold and snow, the remnants of poor
humanity wander over the face of the desolated world; stumbling,
awe-struck, but filled with an insatiable hunger which drives them
on; living upon the bark of the few trees that have escaped, or on
the bodies of the animals that have perished, and even upon one
another.

All this we shall find plainly depicted in the legends of mankind, as
we proceed.

Steadily, steadily, steadily--for days, weeks, months, years--the
rains and snows fall; and, as the clouds are drained, they become
thinner and thinner, and the light increases.

It has now grown so light that the wanderers can mark the difference
between night and day. "And the evening and the morning were the
first day."

Day by day it grows lighter and warmer; the piled-up snows begin to
melt. It is an age of tremendous floods. All the low-lying parts of
the continents are covered with water. Brooks become mighty rivers,
and rivers are floods; the Drift _débris_ is cut into by the waters,
re-arranged, piled up in what is called the stratified, secondary, or
Champlain drift. Enormous river-valleys are cut out of the gravel and
clay.

The seeds and roots of trees and grasses, uncovered by the rushing
torrents, and catching the increasing

{p. 111}

warmth, begin to put forth green leaves. The sad and parti-colored
earth, covered with white, red, or blue clays and gravels, once more,
wears a fringe of green.

The light increases. The warmth lifts up part of the water already
cast down, and the outflow of the steaming ice-fields, and pours it
down again in prodigious floods. It is an age of storms.

The people who have escaped gather together. _They know the sun is
coming back_. They know this desolation is to pass away. They build
great fires and make human sacrifices to bring back the sun. They
point and guess where he will appear; for they have lost all
knowledge of the cardinal points. And all this is told in the legends.

At last the great, the godlike, the resplendent luminary breaks
through the clouds and looks again upon the wrecked earth.

Oh, what joy, beyond all words, comes upon those who see him! They
fall upon their faces. They worship him whom the dread events have
taught to recognize as the great god of life and light. They burn or
cast down their animal gods of the pre-glacial time, and then begins
that world-wide worship of the sun which has continued down to our
own times.

And all this, too, we shall find told in the legends.

And from that day to this we live under the influence of the effects
produced by the comet. The mild, eternal summer of the Tertiary age
is gone. The battle between the sun and the ice-sheets continues.
Every north wind brings us the breath of the snow; every south wind
is part of the sun's contribution to undo the comet's work. A
continual amelioration of climate has been going on since the Glacial
age; and, if no new catastrophe falls on the earth, our remote
posterity will yet see the last snow-bank

{p. 112}

of Greenland melted, and the climate of the Eocene reestablished in
Spitzbergen.

"It has been suggested that the warmth of the Tertiary climate was
simply the effect of the residual heat of a globe cooling from
incandescence, but many facts disprove this. For example, the fossil
plants found in our Lower Cretaceous rocks in Central North America
indicate a temperate climate in latitude 35° to 40° in the Cretaceous
age. The coal-flora, too, and the beds of coal, indicate a moist,
equable, and warm but not hot climate in the Carboniferous age,
millions of years before the Tertiary, and three thousand miles
farther south than localities where magnolias, tulip-trees, and
deciduous cypresses, grew in the latter age. Some learned and
cautious geologists even assert that there have been several Ice
periods, one as far back as the Devonian."[1]

The ice-fields and wild climate of the poles, and the cold which
descends annually over Europe and North America, represent the
residuum of the refrigeration caused by the evaporation due to the
comet's heat, and the long absence of the sun during the age of
darkness. Every visitation of a comet would, therefore, necessarily
eventuate in a glacial age, which in time would entirely pass away.
And our storms are bred of the conflict between the heat and cold of
the different latitudes. Hence, it may be, that the Tertiary climate
represented the true climate of the earth, undisturbed by comet
catastrophes; a climate equable, mild, warm, stormless. Think what a
world this would be without tempests, cyclones, ice, snow, or cold!

Let us turn now to the evidences that man dwelt on the earth during
the Drift, and that he has preserved recollections of the comet to
this day in his myths and legends.

[1. "Popular Science Monthly," July, 1876, p. 283.]

{p. 113}

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURE OF MYTHS.

IN a primitive people the mind of one generation precisely repeats
the minds of all former generations; the construction of the
intellectual nature varies no more, from age to age, than the form of
the body or the color of the skin; the generations feel the same
emotions, and think the same thoughts, and use the same expressions.
And this is to be expected, for the brain is as much a part of the
inheritable, material organization as the color of the eyes or the
shape of the nose.

The minds of men move automatically: no man thinks because he intends
to think; he thinks, as he hungers and thirsts, under a great primal
necessity; his thoughts come out from the inner depths of his being
as the flower is developed by forces rising through the roots of the
plant.

The female bird says to herself, "The time is propitious, and now, of
my own free will, and under the operation of my individual judgment,
I will lay a nestful of eggs and batch a brood of children." But it
is unconscious that it is moved by a physical necessity, which has
constrained all its ancestors from the beginning of time,

{p. 114}

and which will constrain all its posterity to the end of time; that
its will is nothing more than an expression of age, development,
sunlight, food, and "the skyey influences." If it were otherwise it
would be in the power of a generation to arrest the life of a race.

All great thoughts are inspirations of God. They are part of the
mechanism by which he advances the race; they are new varieties
created out of old genera.

There come bursts of creative force in history, when great thoughts
are born, and then again Brahma, as the Hindoos say, goes to sleep
for ages.

But, when the fever of creation comes, the poet, the inventor, or the
philosopher can no more arrest the development of his own thoughts
than the female bird, by her will-power, can stop the growth of the
ova within her, or arrest the fever in the blood which forces her to
incubation.

The man who wrote the Shakespeare plays recognized this involuntary
operation of even his own transcendent intellect, when he said:

"Our poesy is a gum which oozes
From whence 'tis nourished."

It came as the Arabian tree distilled its "medicinal gum"; it was the
mere expression of an internal force, as much beyond his control as
the production of the gum was beyond the control of the tree.

But in primitive races mind repeats mind for thousands of years. If a
tale is told at a million hearth-fires, the probabilities are small,
indeed, that any innovation at one hearth-fire, however ingenious,
will work its way into and modify the narration at all the rest.
There is no printing-press to make the thoughts of one man the
thoughts of thousands. While the innovator is modifying

{p. 115}

the tale, to his own satisfaction, to his immediate circle of
hearers, the narrative is being repeated in its unchanged form at all
the rest. The doctrine of chances is against innovation. The majority
rules.

When, however, a marvelous tale is told to the new generation--to the
little ones sitting around with open eyes and gaping mouths--they
naturally ask, "_Where_ did all this occur?" The narrator must
satisfy this curiosity, and so he replies, "On yonder mountain-top,"
or "In yonder cave."

The story has come down without its geography, and a new geography is
given it.

Again, an ancient word or name may have a signification in the
language in which the story is told different from that which it
possessed in the original dialect, and, in the effort to make the old
fact and the new language harmonize, the story-teller is forced,
gradually, to modify the narrative; and, as this lingual difficulty
occurs at every fireside, at every telling, an ingenious explanation
comes at last to be generally accepted, and the ancient myth remains
dressed in a new suit of linguistic clothes.

But, as a rule, simple races repeat; they do not invent.

One hundred years ago the highest faith was placed in written
history, while the utmost contempt was felt for all legends. Whatever
had been written down was regarded as certainly true; whatever had
not been written down was necessarily false.

We are reminded of that intellectual old brute, Dr. Samuel Johnson,
trampling poor Macpherson under foot, like an enraged elephant, for
daring to say that he had collected from the mountaineers of wild
Scotland the poems of Ossian, and that they had been transmitted,
from mouth to mouth, through ages. But the great epic of the son of
Fingal will survive, part of the widening

{p. 116}

heritage of humanity, while Johnson is remembered only as a
coarse-souled, ill-mannered incident in the development of the great
English people.

But as time rolled on it was seen that the greater part of history
was simply recorded legends, while all the rest represented the
passions of factions, the hates of sects, or the servility and
venality of historians. Men perceived that the common belief of
antiquity, as expressed in universal tradition, was much more likely
to be true than the written opinions of a few prejudiced individuals.

And then grave and able men,--philosophers, scientists,--were seen
with note-books and pencils, going out into Hindoo villages, into
German cottages, into Highland huts, into Indian _tepees_, in short,
into all lands, taking down with the utmost care, accuracy, and
respect, the fairy-stories, myths, and legends of the people;--as
repeated by old peasant-women, "the knitters in the sun," or by
"gray-haired warriors, famousèd for fights."

And, when they came to put these narratives in due form, and, as it
were, in parallel columns, it became apparent that they threw great
floods of light upon the history of the world, and especially upon
the question of the unity of the race. They proved that all the
nations were repeating the same stories, in some cases in almost
identical words, just as their ancestors had heard them, in some most
ancient land, in "the dark background and abysm of time," when the
progenitors of the German, Gaul, Gael, Greek, Roman, Hindoo, Persian,
Egyptian, Arabian, and the red-people of America, dwelt together
under the same roof-tree and used the same language.

But, above all, these legends prove the absolute fidelity of the
memory of the races.

We are told that the bridge-piles driven by the Romans, two thousand
years ago, in the rivers of Europe,

{p. 117}

from which the surrounding waters have excluded the decaying
atmosphere, have remained altogether unchanged in their condition. If
this has been the case for two thousand years, why would they not
remain unchanged for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years? If
the ice in which that Siberian mammoth was incased had preserved it
intact for a hundred years, or a thousand years, why might it not
have preserved it for ten thousand, for a hundred thousand years?

Place a universal legend in the minds of a race, let them repeat it
from generation to generation, and time ceases to be an element in
the problem.

Legend has one great foe to its perpetuation--civilization.

Civilization brings with it a contempt for everything which it can
not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men
no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject;
they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it
up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade
of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed
for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if
it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in
Tennyson--a hippopotamus smothered in flowers, jewels, and laces.

Hence we find the legends of the primitive American Indians adhering
quite closely to the events of the past, while the myths that survive
at all among the civilized nations of Europe are found in garbled
forms, and. only among the peasantry of remote districts.

In the future more and more attention will be given to the myths of
primitive races; they will be accounted as more reliable, and as
reaching farther back in time than many things which we call history.
Thoughtful men will

{p. 118}

analyze them, despising nothing; like a chemist who resolves some
compound object into its original elements--the very combination
constituting a history of the object.

H. H. Bancroft describes myths as--

"A mass of fragmentary truth and fiction, not open to rationalistic
criticism; a partition wall of allegories, built of dead facts
cemented with wild fancies; it looms ever between the immeasurable
and the measurable past."

But he adds:

"Never was there a time in the history of philosophy when the
character, customs, and beliefs of aboriginal man, and everything
appertaining to him, were held in such high esteem by scholars as at
present."

"It is now a recognized principle of philosophy that no religious
belief, however crude, nor any historical tradition, however absurd,
can be held by the majority of a people for any considerable time as
true, without having had in the beginning some foundation in fact."[1]

An universal myth points to two conclusions:

First, that it is based on some fact.

Secondly, that it dates back, in all probability, to the time when
the ancestors of the races possessing it had not yet separated.

A myth should be analyzed carefully; the fungi that have attached
themselves to it should be brushed off; the core of fact should be
separated from the decorations and errors of tradition.

But above all, it must be remembered that we can not depend upon
either the geography or the chronology of a myth. As I have shown,
there is a universal tendency to give the old story a new habitat,
and hence we have Ararats and Olympuses all over the world. In the
same

[1. "The Native Races of America," vol. iii, p. 14.]

{p. 119}

way the myth is always brought down and attached to more recent
events:

"All over Europe-in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, England,
Scotland, Ireland--the exploits of the oldest mythological heroes,
figuring in the Sagas, Eddas, and Nibelungen Lied, have been
ascribed, in the folk-lore and ballads of the people, to Barbarossa,
Charlemagne, Boabdil, Charles V, William Tell, Arthur, Robin Hood,
Wallace, and St. Patrick."[1]

In the next place, we must remember how impossible it is for the mind
to invent an entirely new fact.

What dramatist or novelist has ever yet made a plot which did not
consist of events that had already transpired somewhere on earth? He
might intensify events, concentrate and combine them, or amplify
them; but that is all. Men in all ages have suffered from
jealousy,--like Othello; have committed murders,--like Macbeth; have
yielded to the sway of morbid minds,--like Hamlet; have stolen, lied,
and debauched,--like Falstaff;--there are Oliver Twists, Bill
Sykeses, and Nancies; Micawbers, Pickwicks, and Pecksniffs in every
great city.

There is nothing in the mind of man that has not preexisted in
nature. Can we imagine a person, who never saw or heard of an
elephant, drawing a picture of such a two-tailed creature? It was
thought at one time that man had made the flying-dragon out of his
own imagination; but we now know that the image of the _pterodactyl_
had simply descended from generation to generation. Sindbad's great
bird, the _roc_, was considered a flight of the Oriental fancy, until
science revealed the bones of the _dinornis_. All the winged beasts
breathing fire are simply a recollection of the comet.

In fact, even with the patterns of nature before it, the

[1. Bancroft, "Native Races," note, vol. iii, p. 17.]

{p. 120}

human mind has not greatly exaggerated them: it has never drawn a
bird larger than the _dinornis_ or a beast greater than the mammoth.

It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole world, of all
the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the
most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great
heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the
return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It
was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things
if they had never occurred.

{p. 121}

CHAPTER II.

DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?

FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the
Drift?

If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed
through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event
surviving in the traditions of the race.

If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive
of it could have come down to us.

This preliminary question must, then, be settled by testimony.

Let us call our witnesses

"The palæolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene
river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a
fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature
produced glaciers and icebergs in our country; he may, therefore, be
viewed as being probably pre-glacial."[1]

Man had spread widely over the earth before the Drift; therefore, he
had lived long on the earth. His remains have been found in Scotland,
England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece; in Africa, in
Palestine, in India, and in the United States.[2]

"Man was living in the valley of the lower Thames before the Arctic
mammalia had taken full possession of

[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 169.

2. Ibid., pp. 165, 166.]

{p. 122 }

the valley of the Thames, and before the big-nosed rhinoceros had
become extinct."[1]

Mr. Tidderman[2] writes that, among a number of bones obtained during
the exploration of the Victoria Cave, near Settle, Yorkshire, there
is one which Mr. Busk has identified as _human_. Mr. Busk says:

"The bone is, I have no doubt, human; a portion of an unusually
clumsy fibula, and in that respect not unlike the same bone in the
Mentone skeleton."

The deposit from which the bone was obtained is overlaid "by a bed of
stiff glacial clay, containing ice-scratched bowlders." "Here then,"
says Geikie, "is direct proof that men lived in England prior to the
last inter-glacial period."[3]

The evidences are numerous, as I have shown, that when these deposits
came upon the earth the face of the land was above the sea, and
occupied by plants and animals.

###

SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL.

The accompanying cut, taken from Sir John Lubbock's "Prehistoric
Times," page 364, represents the strata at St. Acheul, near Amiens,
France.

[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 137.

2. "Nature," November 6, 1873.

3. "The Great Ice Age," p. 475.]

{p. 123}

The upper stratum (_a_) represents a brick earth, four to five feet
in thickness, and containing a few angular flints. The next (_b_) is
a thin layer of angular gravel, one to two feet in thickness. The
next (_c_) is a bed of sandy marl, five to six feet in thickness. The
lowest deposit (_d_) _immediately overlies the chalk_; it is a bed of
partially rounded gravel, and, in this, _human implements of flint
have been found_. The spot was used in the early Christian period as
a cemetery; _f_ represents one of the graves, made fifteen hundred
years ago; _e_ represents one of the ancient coffins, of which only
the nails and clamps are left, every particle of the wood having
perished.

And, says Sir John Lubbock:

"It is especially at the _lower part_" of these lowest deposits "that
the flint implements occur."

The bones of the mammoth, the wild bull, the deer, the horse, the
rhinoceros, and the reindeer are found near the bottom of these
strata mixed with the flint implements of men.

"All the fossils belong to animals which live on land; . . . we find
no marine remains."[2]

Remember that the Drift is unfossiliferous and unstratified; that it
fell _en masse_, and that these remains are found in its lower part,
or _caught between it and the rocks below it_, and you can form a
vivid picture of the sudden and terrible catastrophe. The trees were
imbedded with man and the animals; the bones of men, smaller and more
friable, probably perished, ground up in the tempest, while only
their flint implements and the great bones of the larger animals,
hard as stones, remain to tell the dreadful story. And yet some human
bones

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 366.

2. Ibid., pp. 366, 367.]

{p. 124}

have been found; a lower jaw-bone was discovered in a pit at
Moulinguignon, and a skull and other bones were found in the valley
of the Seine by M. Bertrand.[1]

And these discoveries have not been limited to river-gravels. In the
Shrub Hill gravel-bed in England, "_in the lowest part of it_,
numerous flint implements of the palæolithic type have been
discovered."[2]

We have, besides these sub-drift remains, the skulls of men who
probably lived before the great cataclysm,--men who may have looked
upon the very comet that smote the world. They represent two widely
different races. One is "the Engis skull," so called from the cave of
Engis, near Liége, where it was found by Dr. Schmerling. "It is a
fair average human skull, which might," says Huxley, "have belonged
to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a
savage."[3] It represents a

###

THE ENGIS SKULL.

civilized, if not a cultivated, race of men. It may represent a
victim, a prisoner, held for a cannibalistic feast or a trader from a
more civilized region.

[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 360.

2. Ibid., p. 351.

3. "Man's Place in Nature," p. 156.]

{p. 125}

In another cave, in the Neanderthal, near Hochdale, between
Düsseldorf and Elberfeld, a skull was found which is the most
ape-like of all known human crania. The mail to whom it belonged must
have been a barbarian brute of the rudest possible type. Here is a
representation of it.

###

THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL.

I beg the reader to remember these skulls when he comes to read, a
little further on, the legend told by an American Indian tribe of
California, describing the marriage between the daughter of the gods
and a son of the grizzly bears, from which union, we are told, came
the Indian tribes. These skulls represent creatures as far apart, I
was about to say, as gods and bears. The "Engis skull," with its full
frontal brain-pan, its fine lines, and its splendidly arched dome,
tells us of ages of cultivation and development in some favored
center of the race; while the horrible and beast-like proportions of
"the Neanderthal skull" speak, with no less certainty, of
undeveloped, brutal, savage man, only a little above the gorilla in
capacity;--a prowler, a robber, a murderer, a cave-dweller, a
cannibal, a Cain.

{p. 126}

We shall see, as we go on in the legends of the races on both sides
of the Atlantic, that they all looked to some central land, east of
America and west of Europe, some island of the ocean, where dwelt a
godlike race, and where alone, it would seem, the human race was
preserved to repeople the earth, while these brutal representatives
of the race, the Neanderthal people, were crushed out.

And this is not mere theorizing. It is conceded, as the result of
most extensive scientific research:

1. That the great southern mammalia perished in Europe when the Drift
came upon the earth.

2. It is conceded that these two skulls are associated with the bones
of these locally extinct animals, mingled together in the same
deposits.

3. The conclusion is, therefore, logically irresistible, that these
skulls belonged to men who lived during or before the Drift Age.

Many authorities support this proposition that man--palæolithic man,
man of the mammoth and the mastodon--existed in the caves of Europe
before the Drift.

"After having occupied the English caves for untold ages, palæolithic
man disappeared for ever, and with him vanished many animals now
either locally or wholly extinct."[1]

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