Scorching skies, drowning earth

Amid the extreme weather events, echoes from ancient myths caution us about our planet's fragile existence in the face of climate change

The summer of 2023 is playing out as an eerie enactment of multiple end-of-the-world mythologies. From the crash-and-burn scenarios depicted in Ragnarök (Norse mythology) and in Central American myths, to the apocalyptic flood myths found across cultures, and the cyclical plague-famine-drought-flood destruction mythology of Mesopotamia, every story from the timeless past reads like a cautionary tale for the times.

July has already been declared as the hottest recorded month, while wildfires, floods and typhoons worldwide have put lives at risk and gutted livelihoods. Extreme heat has turned the idyllic European summer into a procession of heat waves, and unseasonal rains and cloudbursts have precipitated a calamitous sequence of landslides and avalanches in the Himalayan countryside.

Call it climate change, global warming or environmental degradation, but the obvious takeaway is that humanity is staring at an existential crisis. Just as the gods of the Norse world once did, when their sun goddess Sol was devoured by the fire-breathing wolf Fenrir; or as the Japanese gods feared, when their sun goddess Amaterasu hid in a cave to escape the repeated attacks by her brother, the storm god Susanoo.

The end of the world, caused by extreme weather phenomena, has always been a big concern and has therefore, spawned a fascinating chain of myths and belief systems.

Chinese myths about the cosmos, for instance, paint numerous doomsday scenarios — one talks about the world being burnt to a crisp when the sky blazed with ten suns. The mother of the suns, the goddess Xi He, tried her best to bring the world back to order but her children, tired of being tethered to her routine, refused. The great archer-hero Hu Yi saved the world by shooting down nine of the ten suns.

The Norse myth of Ragnarök decrees that the universe will fall apart when a fire-breathing wolf races across the skies, devouring all that comes his way. It will swallow the sun, plunging the world into darkness and ice. An army of giants will break their fetters and battle with the gods. The fire giant will set the world ablaze and the cosmic serpent that lies coiled around the tree of life, Yggdrasil, will rise from the depths of the ocean, spilling the seas over and spitting poison all around.

The end is also more commonly imagined as a flood story. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, an angry God brings down a deluge. Only Noah, who was warned in advance survived and subsequently, rebuilt the world. In the Quran, Nuh is the flood survivor. In the Biblical account, a corrupt and sinful world angers God while in the Quranic version, the problem arises because people worship multiple gods.

The flood story in India has several versions, the oldest one is about a sage called Manu and a one-horned fish called Matsya. The fish warned Manu about the impending deluge, because Manu had saved his life and led him to safety when the waters began to rise. In later versions of this story, Matsya is reimagined as an avatar of Vishnu, who not only saves Manu, but also rescues the Vedas from the depths of the ocean.

The oldest flood stories are however believed to be from Mesopotamia where Enlil, one of the most powerful gods in the pantheon, destroys the world because it had grown too noisy for his liking. Enlil’s destructive streak causes a series of disasters—plague, drought, famine and flood—and every time, the world is saved by another god (Enki) who wants the human species to survive.

Squabbling gods destroying the world is a common theme. Central American myths conceive of the world divided into four quarters and incessant fighting between the gods of each quarter, leads to repeated cycles of destruction and creation.

One god against many gods. Angry gods against sinful humans. Quarrelsome gods and conniving giants, trickster gods and truant human beings. World-ending cataclysms are mapped into a network of causal connections. But how does one read them today?

Many consider the flood myths to be the vestiges of a traumatic memory. Geologists have suggested the possibility of a great flood in the Middle East at the end of the last Ice Age as the source for such myths. For many, the stories are make-believe and fantasy, best suited for entertainment. For instance, Ragnarök has often been reimagined as an immersive fantasy game and also, chillingly, as a cultic tale that predicts the rise of a pure, post-apocalyptic race on earth.

Surely, the myths could be put to better use. Instead of bickering over their antiquity or spending billions to prove their authenticity, the myths could be mined for the ideas that they carry—of the underlying fragility of existence, the need to balance the needs of a rising, noisy population with those of the gods of nature, and the understanding that no one is safe until everyone is protected from a changing climate.