Everything here lay open beneath the sun. Here, nothing was concealed.
It’s not difficult to picture him as he worked away at his vines on the gently sloping land at nighttime, under the stars, alone with his memories of what he’d done, only to return to his tent in the gray dawn and the suffering that awaited him there. He would sleep only for the first few hours, while it still was cool enough. For the rest of the day he lay there and drank. He did so alone, losing more and more of his dignity. In this new, open, shadowless world, he no longer found it worth the effort to hide himself. He’d always been ashamed of his grotesque skin color, always hid it from the eyes of others as best he could, but now he didn’t bother, and why should he? If his dignity had been intact, he wouldn’t have lain there naked and drunk as the Bible relates. If it had been, and he’d been lying there as a result of an accident, a loss of self-control, a thing that can happen to the best of us, he would never have cursed his youngest son, who saw him, but himself. His anger is therefore the best evidence of Noah’s degeneration during these years.
THE MOVING spirit of the Swedish Baroque, the illustrious scientist Olof Rudbeck, the discoverer among other things of the lymphatic system, traces the peoples of the Scandinavian Peninsula back to the Scythians in his great work Atlantica (1697), and their roots in turn to the biblical Kittians. Kittim was the grandson of Japheth, according to the genealogy in Genesis 10. If Noah is the common ancestor of all people living now, Japheth is more specifically the common ancestor of those living in the north.
It is from them we Scandinavians are descended. It is there our history begins. The fact that the history of the beginning, of the world that existed before the great flood, was gradually forgotten and finally disappeared from man’s memory isn’t all that strange. One must remember that the great flood destroyed every object from that time. Every building, every field, every tool, every piece of clothing, every vehicle and vessel. Everything was crushed, ground to pieces, torn up, and covered by an incalculable amount of organic matter that had died and rotted to sludge, earth, clay, and by the incalculable amounts of sand that were carried by the water during the year the flood lasted. Furthermore, one has to remember that all the knowledge about the previous world was vested in eight people: Noah and his family.
How much did they really want to remember? How much did they really want to tell?
As little as humanly possible, it’s reasonable to assume. For even the most innocent story from that time contained a landscape, and within that landscape were people whose fate didn’t bear thinking about. Better never to speak or think about it then.
And because it had little resonance with any place in the world as it was then, the little they did tell was forgotten over the course of a few generations.
The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil.
But could an entire world really vanish without leaving a single sign of its existence?
No. The great flood destroyed almost everything, and of the pieces still left, almost all were covered with layer upon layer of mud, sludge, earth, clay, and sand. But some things escaped undamaged. Now and then over the centuries strange objects and articles came to light, often in the weirdest places, which couldn’t be traced back to phenomena in the known world. Much of this occurred in obscurity, of course; not a few of the objects from the first realm have come to light under the wondering eye of the farmer or shepherd, been turned this way and that in the hands, only to be thrown back into the bushes again, or taken home and shown to friends and acquaintances, perhaps inherited by a son or daughter, who possibly handed it on to their children, who maybe didn’t quite see the value of the object, and threw it away.
What else could they do? In former times there was no place for historic objects, and no interest in them beyond the neighbors’ curious gaze. Everything was totally unsystematic and haphazard. To write about it was certainly pointless as far as they were concerned. Only with the emergence of the Greek civilization, precursor of the Middle Ages, did anything like an organized culture arise around these various phenomena of the world. One began to collect the various things found out in the natural world, to ask questions about them, where they came from, what they were doing here; an inquisitiveness that eventually encompassed everything.
It is at this period that the first descriptions of finds from the world before the great flood begin. According to the shipyard book of Nicolaus Witzen, a Dutch cartographer, a ship was found in 1462 containing a total of forty skeletons in a mine deep underground at Bern in Switzerland. It wasn’t unlike contemporary vessels, but the extraordinary location could be explained only by its being brought there by the flood, and that it therefore must have been built sometime between the fall and the flood. Witzen also mentions an enormous ship’s anchor that was found down a gold mine near Montauban in France, on which characters from an unknown language had been inscribed. But the most interesting of all these documented finds is the one made by Johann Scheuchzer near Lake Constance as late as 1726. There, he dug up parts of a human skeleton, which was exhibited at Haarlem the following year and, because of its size, caused enormous interest. The individual this skeleton had once belonged to must have been more than ten feet tall, perhaps closer to twelve. And one of the few things mentioned in the scriptures about the period before the great flood is that giants wandered the earth. Hence the interest. The skeleton belonged to a giant who existed before the flood and was thus the only living creature from that time whose remains had been discovered. Of course, shells and other marine life forms had always been found high up in the mountains, but this was something different, this was one of the giants from before the flood, mentioned in the Bible.
However, in 1811, all this was repudiated by Baron Georges Cuvier, one of the most important pioneers of evolutionary theory, who believed he could prove that the bones didn’t belong to a giant, but to an enormous, extinct salamander.
As we know, the actual theory of evolution was developed by Charles Darwin and published in The Origin of Species in 1859. This was a huge success in scientific terms, and to this day has completely dominated our view of living things and their history. Other theories have been pushed out into the cold. It’s easy to imagine that the battle between them was fought out at the end of the nineteenth century, but this wasn’t so, by then the path had already been cleared for Darwin’s theory, the victory assured. To find the real struggle, one must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There it is harder to decipher, as the different attitudes, which to us seem like complete opposites, and totally incompatible, could then exist side by side. Not merely within one and the same culture, but within one and the same person. And because these people not only thought differently about the world than we do, but also thought differently about themselves, it’s almost impossible to gain a clear picture of what they really believed. Reason and emotion, historical events and mythological episodes, hard facts and wild speculation, were all mixed up inside them. And all this, that was going on inside their heads, went on to permeate their bodies. The thoughts that thought, the heart that beat, the lungs that breathed, the hair that grew, the wounds that healed, the eyes that saw, the ears that heard, all merged together, just as they do in us, without us realizing it, just as they didn’t realize it: only in retrospect does the human aspect become clear, in the form of what separates them from us. The things they thought that we don’t think. The things they believed that we don’t believe. The things they saw that we don’t see. And from this we can draw the following conclusion: one day, in a few hundred years’ time, the human race of the future will look on us in the same way. What for us is an obvious truth, something we regard as so self-evident we don’t even think about it, because we can see it, it is like this, will to them be completely incomprehensible. Perhaps they’ll laugh at us, perhaps just be fascinated by us, even say they have respect for us, but no matter what they say, they will end up feeling superior to us. For they know. They can see.