the
Brahmans, Persians, Parsees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas,
and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The
length of the intervening periods may widely differ. The kalpa or great
year of the Brahmans is so long that were a cube of granite a hundred
yards each way brushed once in a century by a soft cloth, it would be
quite worn to dust before the kalpa would close: or, as some Christians
believe, there may be but six thousand years, six days of God in whose
sight "a thousand years are as one day," between the creation and the
cremation of the world, from when it rose from the waters until it shall
be consumed by the fire.

There were also various views about the agents and the completeness of
these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the
doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the
last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance
of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the
Great Year. The Brahmans hold that the higher classes of gods outlive
the wreck of things which, at the close of the day of Brahm, involves
all men and many divinities in elemental chaos; while elsewhere, in the
later Puranas and in the myths of Mexico, Peru, and Assyria, one or a
few of the race of man escape a deluge which is universal, and serve to
people the new-made earth. This latter supposition, in its application
to the last epoch of nature, is the origin of the myth of the Flood.

In its general features and even in many details, the story of a vast
overflow which drowned the world, and from which by the timely succor
of divinity some man was preserved, and after the waters had subsided
became the progenitor of the race, is exceedingly common among distant
tribes, where it is impossible to explain it as a reminiscence of a
historic occurrence, or by community of religious doctrine. In Judea
Noah, in India Manu, in Chaldea Xisuthrus, in Assyria Oannes, in Aztlan
Nata, in Algonkin tradition Messou, in Brazil Monan, etc., are all
heroes of similar alleged occurrences. In all of them the story is but a
modification of that of the creation in time from the primeval
waters.[170-1]

"As it was once, so it shall be again," and as the present age of the
world wears out, the myth teaches that things will once more fall back
to universal chaos. "The expectation of the end of the world is a
natural complement to the belief in