The Great Flood

 

When you listen to the hancockian and other pseudoarchaeologists, what strikes me is the number of folk who talk about "the Great Flood" as though it was a real, geologically-tested, historical global event that really happened. What's more, they never qualify that phrase, they seemingly do not even conceive that there might be a reason why many of their potential listeners do not share that conclusion. For them, the event is seen as a foundational, universally accepted baseline. For example US YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti  writes several times of the site at Gobekli Trepe (admittedly in the same country as Mt Ararat!) as potentially the site of THE altar that Noah built when the Ark came to rest (Genesis 8:5-21). Because their algorithms, podcasts, and books cross-reference each other as objective fact, they genuinely lose the cognitive perspective required to realize that mainstream science views the global deluge myth as entirely unsupported by any evidence.  

Google n-gram of Google-Book content also gives food for thought, the mentions of this myth-as-event increases dramatically after 1987. It is odd that there was rather a low incidence of use of the term when it was more 'mainstream' in the nineteenth century (possibly other terms such as "Noah's Flood" supplemented that). 

This is pretty shocking. What could be causing it? There are a number of (unrelated?) reasons. A lot of it is due to influence from the USA. The Anglophone "alternative history" market is structurally, financially, and rhetorically dominated by American cultural exports. 

In Europe, the ground was prepared by related processes. In particular chanbges in the book market (away from more serious literature to ephemeral train-station paperbacks) and the blossoming of the New Agey approach to the world that grew from beginnings in the late 1970s and 1980s, developing the "Earth Mysteries" movement. By 1987–1988, this movement crossed over from radical counter-culture into mainstream British publishing.

Unlike in the US, where climate anxieties were largely academic or simply dismissed, Europeans were led to change their views in the mid-eighties. Although climate change and related threats had been discused in Europe since the late 1960s (Silent Spring) the threat was seen as rather an abstract situation that "someone" would have to deal with eventually. But when the explosion of the Soviet-built Chornobil in April 1986 suddenly blanketed Europe in radioactive fallout, a whole continent experienced an overnight, invisible environmental cataclysm. Arguably this led to an abrupt shift in thinking about humanity's vulnerability to sudden, invisible, global ecological ruin. This seems to be one of the roots of a vein of neo-cataclystic (apocalytic) fears - into which the pseudoarchaeologists like Hancock tapped. One corollory of this was the increasing prevalence to see ancient myths not as religious dogma, but as historical warnings. "The Great Flood" stopped being viewed as an ancient Sunday-school story and was re-interpreted through a secular, ecological lens: it became the ultimate archetype of a highly advanced society destroyed by planetary upheaval. 

In the US, there had long been attempts to get the Biblical account of the human past accepted as absolutely literal events, though until the late eighties this was largely confined to fundamentalist Christian circles (for example under the banner of "Creation Science). In June 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching "creation science" (sic) in public schools was unconstitutional because it advanced a specific religion. This legal loss seems to have forced a massive, highly funded intellectual migration. Creationist organizations could no longer use standard educational channels, so they heavily shifted resources toward pop-science literature, alternative documentaries, and alternative geology books too promote their pseudoscientific views. This included encouraging seeing the Biblical deluge myth instead as a real "historic, global cataclysmic event".

As in Europe, in the late eighties there was greater interest in New Age and related ideas and this period marks the birth of modern mass-market alternative history to cater for the massive, commercially viable demographic of consumers hungry for books that validated ancient wisdom over traditional, mainstream history and geology. In this period too, the conceptual framework for pseudoarchaeology transitioned from ancient astronauts (the fading 1970s Chariots of the Gods era) to Earth-based cataclysms.Writers and researchers in the late 1980s realized that audiences were weary of UFO explanations but deeply responsive to ideas of lost human greatness. By treating the Great Flood as a purely physical, geological event caused by crustal displacement, comets, or ice age melting rather than the wrath of God they made the myth palatable to a secular, scientifically literate but conspiratorially minded public. This laid the exact structural groundwork that writers like Graham Hancock stepped into in the early 1990s.