Deucalion

For other uses, see Deucalion (disambiguation).

Deucalion and Pyrrha from a 1562 version of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In Greek mythology, Deucalion (Template:Lang-grc) was a son of Prometheus and Pronoia. When the anger of Zeus was ignited against the holism of the Pelasgians, Zeus decided to put an end to the Bronze Age with the Great Deluge. For Lycaon, the king of Arcadia sacrificed a boy to Zeus. This was a sacrifice which was forbidden in the new Olympian order and utterly inappropriate as an offering and repugnant besides. Zeus struck Lycaon's house with a thunderbolt and turned him into a wolf (see werewolf). Which however may have been the whole point, for in Arcadia Zeus was honored as [Zeus Lykaos] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), "Wolf-Zeus, son of the she-wolf". Sending a werewolf to be king among the wolves and thus keep them off the flocks seems to have been the practice, and lingered among the shepherds of Arcadia into the age of the Olympiads.

But, it was the treatment Zeus received when he visited the hall of the fifty sons of Lycaon, in the usual poverty-stricken disguise that gods assume whenever they travel. They set him a stew of sheep guts—hearts, livers and tripes—in which they included the stewed innards of their brother Nyctimus. Zeus was appalled at the primitive cannibal offering and turned them all into a pack of wolves; he then restored Nyctimus to life.

So Zeus was set upon loosing a deluge, where the rivers would run in torrents and the sea encroach rapidly on the coastal plain, engulf the foothills with spray and wash everything clean.

Deucalion had been forewarned of the flood by his father, Prometheus, the first in a long Near Eastern tradition of more-than-human mediators between Mankind and God. Deucalion was to build an ark and provision it carefully (no animals are rescued in this version of the Flood myth), so that when the waters receded after nine days, he and his wife Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus, were the one surviving pair of humans. Their ark touched solid ground on Mount Parnassus or Mount Etna or Mount Athos or Mount Othrys in Thessaly.

Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth. He was told to cover your head and throw the bones of your mother behind your shoulder. Deucalion and Pyrrha understood that "mother" is Gaia, the mother of all living things, and the "bones" to be rocks. They threw the rocks behind their shoulders and the stones formed people. Pyrrha's became women; Deucalion's became men.

Deucalion and Pyrrha had at least two children, Hellen and Protogenea, and possibly a third, Amphictyon (who is autochthonous in other traditions).

Deucalion is parallel to Biblical Noah and to Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Sumerian Flood that is told in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has been suggested that Deucalion's name comes from δεύκος deucos + ἁλιεύς halieus "new wine sailor," making him even more parallel to Noah, inventor of wine.. However, it is at least as likely that "Deucalion" is related somehow to lightning or to oaks, from "Dyēus" -- Liddell and Scott note a Boeotian variant "Δεύς" of the usual Greek Ζεύς -- and κᾶλον "stuff to be burned," hence "wood" (and thus "ships"), which they derive from καίω "burn, set on fire." Certainly his wife Pyrrha's name is an adjective "πυρρός, ά, όν," meaning "flaming (figuratively, never with actual fire)" or "flame-colored, orange," and it would make sense for their names to match the way Prometheus (προμηθεύς, "forethought") and Pronoia (πρόνοια, "foresight") do.

But a shred perhaps of earlier myth survives in the tale that another survivor of the Flood was Megaron, who was roused from his couch by the cries of cranes (see crane (bird) for crane lore) and climbed to the top of Mount Gerania ("Crane Mountain") and so was saved. And Cerambus of Pelion: he the nymphs changed to a scarab beetle and he flew to the top of Mount Parnassus above the waters.

Deucalion's flood is dated in the chronology of Saint Jerome to ca. 1460 BC, remarkably close to the archaeological date proposed for the Thera eruption. One might argue that the flood would have devastating effects on the population, with only a few thousand or even a few hundred of survivors in the north-east Mediterranean region. It would then take several centuries or even millennia until the first settlements would start to develop following such a deluge. Archaeological findings however on the 2nd millennium BCE settlements like Troy or Mycenae do not indicate such a discontinuity. Troy I was founded in the 3rd millennium BC and was flourishing until 1200s BC. Troy VI: lasted between the 17th–15th centuries BC with no signs of any deluge during 1460 BC. Likewise, Mycenae shows a continuous development between 2100 BC to 1200 BC. Therefore it would be reasonable to trace the chronology of the flood before the establishment of these settlements.

External links

• Deucalion from Charles Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867), with source citations and some variants not given here.
• Deucalion from Carlos Parada, Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology.

References

• Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon at the Perseus Project