Once again, Kaba had me gather all his stuffies and put them on the makeshift boat. The game was simple, we collected as many plush bears, bunnies, kitties, squirrels, as we could fit on the bench and then put a blanket over us so we could all cuddle in as if we were rocking against the waves. Then, at some point, he would say that the rain had stopped, and with great enthusiasm, ripping off the blanket, we would leap down and all the stuffies would run berzerk through the new land.
Out of the hundreds of books we read, the illustrated Noah myth was the one that he wanted his mother and I to enact, endlessly. There is something in the story's DNA, in the same way that he was intrinsically fascinated by fire trucks, unicorns, and dinosaurs. Certain things just seem to spark the archetypal imagination. We were still in the pandemic, and I was only working part time from home, so much of my life was wandering with him in this imaginal realm.
It just so happened that I had been meditating on the Noah myth from my adult apocalyptic fascination as well. There are flood myths from cultures all around the world, and in the Middle East you can track the evolving history of Noah back through Gilgamesh and the Mesopotamian saga of Atrahasis.
The Atrahasis story contains the same elements of flood, animals two by two, and the great arc, but it also retains some older shamanic and polytheistic elements. In the beginning, the people have upset the gods, with all their loud anvil hammering, overpopulation, and deforestation. The angry elemental deities send plagues; a pandemic, drought, famine, all to wipe them out.
This is early civilization mythology 101, the gods originally create man to serve them, but then the people get out of control and the gods need to send some calamity. Most cultures have histories of many creations and destructions, the humans fucking up over and over again and needing to be purged.
In this case, the god Ea comes to their aid and whispers through the reeds of Atrahasis’s house, telling him which plague god needs to be sacrificed to in order to be appeased and balance returned. This motif happens again and again, drought, famine, disease, each time, Ea, the water deity tells Atrahasis how to make offerings to bring the world back to balance.
I couldn’t help but think of all of this as I sat there with Kaba, the wildfire smoke, orange against the windowpane, still in pandemic lockdown. California was in a seemingly endless drought, fires in one season and floods in the next, the Coronavirus still sweeping around the globe. Rather than listening to the whispers of the water deity I was binging incoherent apocalyptic internet news feeds.
The vaccines were starting to be doled out. We could watch planes dropping chemicals onto the nearby fires. The UN was ever working to have peace talks and global agreements on climate change, nuclear proliferation, and cyber threats. As a human community we were trying to mitigate each plague. I was trying to respond even on my little plot of land, thinning the forest for fire suppression, using solar and water catchment, consuming less and being more revarant of nature. I had also spent my entire career working with school systems around the world supporting educators and students to cultivate compassion and wisdom to foster conscious communities. But even with the vaccines Covid seemed to keep burning through the population and when I really thought about recycling and solar panels as well as my herculean attempts to enlighten the masses, I couldn’t help but think it would all have as little impact as making offerings at the altars of the climate gods.
In the Atrahasis story, finally, the storm god, Enlil, decides to send an unstoppable flood, and the water deity again saves Atrahasis by telling him to build an ark. After stuffing it with the menagerie of animals and floating above the sunken world, we survive, much to the chagrin of Enlil. Only with an intervention from the earth womb goddess herself, who forces the agreements that we won’t overpopulate again, are we allowed to survive.
The theme is in every culture, that humans become too greedy and shortsighted, destroying our land, so that the angry gods send plague upon plague. It sounded pretty familiar to me, the same climate change conceptions that we had despoiled our earth with our shortsighted hungers, and now the ecological retribution. I was deep in the wondering of how much of this was an essential truth of human nature and our destructiveness.
But then again Kaba yelled, “The rain has stopped!” And I was wrenched out of my gloomy ponderings with flying stuffed animals and giggles. There was something about the playfulness of the Noah’s ark game that brought levity to my musings, the world being destroyed and born-again over and over with ecstatic leaps of stuffed pigs and horses.
As a family therapist I used to work with young children using a sand tray. The instructions were for the kid to choose any object from the vast library of figures and doodads and create their own little world there in the sand. It was always mind-blowing to watch what they gravitated towards and how their imaginations populated. I remember one 4-year-old whose parents had recently been divorced building a wall like edifice through the middle of the tray and then filling each side with obviously maternal and paternal objects. Then he took a little porcelain baby figurine and tried to balance it on the middle of the wall with great frustration and desire for my help. Usually the analysis was not quite that easy, but every time it was exquisite to support the child in remaking and wrestling with what they were up against.
What are these epic mythologies that we have been retelling together for thousands of years? What are we remaking and wrestling with in our collective sandtray? The psychological view is that we recreate our wounds in order to make sense of and heal them. Is that what we are trying to do collectively with our apocalyptic mythology? Even with the utterly rationalist clarity of climate science, telling us all how we would need to live to maintain balance, we don’t seem to do it. Rational discourse isn’t the language that leads us towards collective action. We are motivated and collectivized through shared story, through a little girl yelling at billionaires that we are destroying our world, like the child asking why the king has no clothes, the only way we can be shaken from our blinders is through mythic emotions.
The good thing about apocalypse is that it wakes us up. Fight and flight responses are activators. You don't want a parasympathetic response in a war zone. You want to wake up, adrenaline fueling your capacity to meet the moment. The apocalyptic prophet wakes and shakes us. They get us to pile high the altars to the plague gods, to scare people into climate change action, to build a rocket to Mars. That's how it can serve us.
In ancient Mesopotamia the archeology shows that the people were actually destabilizing their environments, engendering zoonotics diseases from penning all types of animals together, deforestation creating flooding and drought, wars rising from resource hoarding. We have been collectively wrestling with what to do about our deleterious impact on our world for ages, trying to understand our place in the creation and destruction of our home.
Should we rapidly and completely decarbonize, pulling a harsh halt to growth and development in order to save our ecosystems? Should we be building sea walls for the coming floods? Should we accept that the end is imminent and stuff a spaceship with the animals and seeds for a future elsewhere? Should we sacrifice 100 virgins to appease the storm gods? Should we pack Kaba, our cat, our chickens, into a moving truck to escape the drought and flames? Should I be organizing our friends together to learn the ways of forest fire tending, becoming ever more rooted and resilient here? I can feel the flood myth alive within us, we all are wrestling with it. The world dies and the world is reborn and we are living through it and participating in it. What is our role? Is there some way we can listen close enough to the land, to the elements, the deities, to the data, to bring back balance with sacrifice. What is the reality and our best response?
These mythologies that our ancestors told, that I was acting out with my son, that he would hopefully read one day to his children, we are moving together on some larger current. We are active participants in these stories, responding to the crises of our time, to the collective wounds and the hoped for healing. Is there discernment we can find for how to respond to these plagues? Are there some agreements we can make with the earth deity? Is there some generative mythology we can live together?