I took my son out to Wendy’s for a burger, and decided to quiz him on his New Church knowledge. I said, “So, the flood in the Noah’s Ark story… was it a real event, or a myth?” He said, “It’s a parable.” I was puzzled as to why he would not use one of the two answers I provided, so I pushed a bit harder, asking again, “But was it a real event?” With that he said, “No.” I told him that up until a few years ago I would have answered the same. But these days, I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is more literal truth to this story than we of the New Church typically believe. In this article we’ll take a look at some of the evidence, and then we’ll re-examine what the Writings say about the flood.
One of the things I’ve always found interesting about the Noah’s Ark story is the fact that many other cultures have flood stories too. The Sumerians have one, Hindus, native Americans, Greeks… cultures all around the world that you wouldn’t think would be in communication with each other. Yet despite the assumed lack of communication, the main story elements are strikingly similar. God or gods are upset with humanity and is going to flood the Earth, but He helps the good to survive. The boat eventually comes to rest on a mountain, God eventually relents and promises to not do it again and a sacrificial ritual is done at the end.
I don’t know about you, but I have understood these myths as proof of what Swedenborg wrote about the Most Ancient and Ancient Churches. He essentially states that the Ancient Church existed around the world, and that the stories from early Genesis were handed down from the Most Ancient Church who had direct communication with angels and enjoyed writing stories that were full of spiritual symbolism, i.e. correspondences. Therefore the reason the story was so prevalent and consistent was because of that direct communication between heaven and these very ancient people.
I was really happy with this perspective, because seriously, who could really believe that this story was real? In the Genesis account it says that the waters were higher than the tallest mountains… folks, that’s a LOT of water! It couldn’t possibly be true! As such I have spent my life chuckling at the silly people who were unable to see the obvious truth that this story was a myth.
So what has me thinking that there’s more reality to these stories than I once believed? It started off with an interesting theory on the city of Atlantis, which was to me yet another ancient myth. Yet I came across a video where the host is showing an ancient Roman map that actually has Atlantis on it, and it is located in what is now the Sahara desert. What is compelling about it is the actual physical evidence of a structure that is similar to Plato’s description of Atlantis at this location, and even more evidence of a massive flood that basically went from the Mediterranean Sea into Africa across the modern Sahara. Of course, the proposed Atlantis is right in the path of this massive flood. Whether or not you believe Atlantis was there, the evidence for a massive flood is pretty compelling. (If you’re interested in the details of this theory, look up this video on YouTube: Lost Roman Map has ATLANTIS at Eye of Sahara Africa! It’s on the channel “Bright Insight.”)
This flood is in the right part of the world for it to impact the people of the Bible, so it was starting to make sense to me that maybe the flood really was real. Suddenly two myths – Atlantis and Noah’s Ark – were possibly actual history? Yet there’s more. Because this Atlantis flood theory doesn’t quite explain why there are flood myths that exist around the world… that is, until you realize that the flood that we’re talking about wasn’t just local to the Mediterranean area, but was part of a larger global catastrophe known as the “Younger Dryas.”
What is the “Younger Dryas” you ask?! It was a dramatic and relatively sudden return to glacial conditions that occurred about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago, interrupting the general warming trend that followed the last Ice Age. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere abruptly dropped—especially around the North Atlantic. This cold period lasted about 1,200 years. Then, just as suddenly, the Earth returned to rapid warming, marking the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of our current epoch, the Holocene. It’s one of the most significant climate events of the last 20,000 years, and it had profound impacts on the environment, wiping out the megafauna animals – Woolly Mamoths, Sabertooth Tigers, etc., and early human societies.
Why did this happen? There isn’t a firm answer on this yet, but I think the best theory is essentially that a comet or asteroid hit the planet. There’s some geological evidence for this theory too… basically a layer of sediment right where you’d expect it to be. But unlike the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, the theory on this one is that it was more of an asteroid shower, and that’s why they haven’t found a single massive crater. At least, not yet. Regardless of the cause of the Younger Dryas, there’s no doubt that it happened and that this event was a global catastrophe. As such it explains why it is that there were flood myths around the world. The Genesis account was right: the world really was flooded and it was catastrophic. Maybe not literally two of every kind of animal in the ark literal, but also not a completely made up history either.
It also suggests why there is so little evidence of human civilization before the Younger Dryas. If it wiped out a lot of animals, there’s no reason to think it didn’t wipe out a lot of humans too and evidence of humans and whatever civilization had developed too. This has led some researchers to reconsider the history of humanity, and that perhaps it hasn’t been this linear progress that has been theorized so far. Perhaps, just maybe, there were advanced human civilizations before the Younger Dryas… you know, something like what is described in the stories of Atlantis… and that much of that ancient (most ancient?) knowledge was lost, but what remained found its way to Egypt and some other places. I don’t know about you, but it sounds believable to me, and jives with what I read in the Writings. These “advanced civilizations” weren’t “advanced” in terms of having computers, spaceships and such, but were “advanced” because they had open communication with the heavens, and the angels were able to teach them things that were far beyond their own developed abilities.
All of this brought me back to the Writings with one simple question: do they actually say that the flood wasn’t a literal flood? Or have we mis-interpreted that? Well, here are three numbers that seem to speak to this: AC 660, 739, and 787. The latter two say basically the same thing, but here’s the quote from 739: “a flood or deluge of waters means nothing other than temptations and vastations, even though according to the custom of the most ancient people the description is of historical events.”
That quote sounds to me like it is dismissive of it being a literal event. However #660 gives a fuller description, so here’s the full quote:
That ‘a flood’ means a deluge of evil and falsity is clear from what has been stated already about the descendants of the Most Ancient Church being possessed with filthy desires and immersing doctrinal matters concerning faith in them. This immersing led to false persuasions within them which annihilated all truth and good and simultaneously closed off the road for remnants and so made it impossible for them to do their work. It was inevitable therefore that these men would destroy themselves. When the road for remnants has been closed off a person is no longer human, for he can no longer be protected by angels but is wholly and completely possessed by evil spirits who long and desire to do nothing else but annihilate man. It was this that led to the death of the people who existed before the Flood, a death described by ‘a flood’ or utter deluge. Indeed the influx of delusions and desires from evil spirits is not unlike a flood. Consequently in various places in the Word that influx is called a flood or a deluge, as in the Lord’s Divine mercy will be seen in the preliminary remarks to the next chapter. (my underlining)
So how do we reconcile this passage with what we’re learning about physical reality? Can we make the two work? Well, maybe. It does say that humanity was so immersed in evil that they lost angelic protection. Normally I think of that as a spiritual protection, but at the same time there is the whole concept of guardian angels that do provide us some physical protection too. Could it be that we pushed away our angelic protectors so far that the evil spirits that wished to “annihilate” us actually got their wish? Is it possible that because humanity as a whole was so evil, that the whole planet had a lack of angelic protection and as a result the Earth was hit by asteroids or a comet that annihilated human civilization?
It feels like a stretch to say that, but what other interpretation do you have? There are several other numbers in Arcana that talk about the death of the people before the flood, and it’s consistently phrased as “their extinction is compared to a ‘flood,’” or other translations have it as “described as” a flood. This, to me, is a clear inference that it wasn’t actually a flood, and so what I’m seeing is that the Writings really don’t seem to give space for a literal flood. Plus wouldn’t you think that if there was a literal flood that they’d straight out mention that? Seems like that would be a useful bit of information, and yet you could also argue that revelation from God is there to give us information we can’t figure out on our own, so no need to give us stuff we can learn for ourselves, e.g., that there literally was a global flood 12,000 years ago.
So where does this leave us? For me, I find that I’m comfortable believing that the Noah’s Ark story is more true history than I had originally thought, and I’m going to stop short of calling the Writings “wrong” because perhaps there’s something I’m missing in the Writings that is key to all of this. There are, after all, a lot of pages in the Writings to read and I did not read them all to research this article! As such I find this all leaves my mind wondering what else is literally true in the story? Did God warn people of impending disaster? Were there animals on a large boat? A promise to not do it again? While I’d stop short of saying there were two of every kind on the ark, I find myself believing that all of those things could actually be true. And with that, I wonder more about the reality of Atlantis… was it the pinnacle of the most ancient church? We’ll probably never know. More importantly though, I wonder if I and the New Church should be taking these early Genesis more literally than has been traditionally done. And if we do, does it change how we understand anything else?
The more I look at it, the more I think we’ve been selling the flood short. If we’re willing to accept correspondences, why not accept catastrophe? If we say the ancient stories come from angelic wisdom, who’s to say they didn’t encode real events in symbolic language? Maybe we’ve been so focused on decoding the message that we missed the actual alarm bell. The flood might not be just an allegory about temptation—it might be the memory of a civilization-ending disaster. And if that’s the case, it raises a much bigger question: what warnings are we ignoring now?