TES Comparative Mythology: The Flood Myth

Over a few posts I've been mulling on for awhile (over the next couple weeks or so), I will examine the lore of The Elder Scrolls through the lens of comparative mythology, demonstrating motifs that appear across various mythologies real and fictional, and hopefully offering a glimpse into the psychology behind all of this madness. First, we'll take a look at the Flood myth, then the creative sacrifice, the dying god, the hero cycles, the axis mundi, the deus otiosus, and I may finish with a short piece on mythopoeia (though really, Tolkien's Mythopoeia (poem) and On Fairy Stories explains it best).

One of the most common myths in comparative mythology is the Flood myth. The deluge motif is characterized by a flood laying waste to a great swathe of land — usually the world — often in an act of divine retribution, with only a few survivors. Found in Abrahamic religion and mythology (naturally), but also in certain Mesoamerican, South American, North American, Greek, Sumerian, and Vedic mythologies. My personal pet theory for the origin of this myth is the megatsunami in 6000 B.C. which devastated the Mediterranean. Another theory is that an asteroid landed in the Indian Ocean and flooded the lands. More commonly, scientists believe the myth comes from the phenomenon of seashells on mountains.

Nirn also features a similar, though localized, deluge myth, in the form of Yokuda. “Then evil came to Yokuda, and red war, and forbidden rites were practiced, and fell things were summoned that should never have been called forth. It was a Time of Ending. Satakal arose from the starry deeps, and Yokuda was pulled down beneath the waves.” [From The Hunger of Sep] Here, the Yokundan Redguards turned away from their god Satakal, and their god punished them with a flood. But “But after every End Time comes a New Time, and it was even so in this case. For some of the people were permitted to sojourn to Tamriel, where we took Hammefell [sic] for our own. There we were given a chance to once again worship the gods in proper reverence.” In an act of divine retribution, a god punished its people with a flood, but allowed a group to survive by sailing away from the disaster.

Satakal, it is interesting to note, has more in common with the Abrahamic deity than most gods in the Elder Scrolls (with the very prominent exception of The All-Maker). Rather than being a god of something specific, Satakal was the Yokundan god of everything. Given that Redguard culture is very clearly steeped in Arab stereotypes, this makes a great deal of sense. Beyond this rather superficial resemblance to the deity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, however, Satakal reveals his resemblance to a mythology often overlooked: Australian Aboriginal mythology.

Naturally you could say that Satakal is merely the fusion of Anu and Padomay, as Harihara of certain parts of Hinduism is the fusion of Shiva and Vishnu, but identifying Satakal as the Rainbow Snake is much more interesting to me — whether the developers intended it or not. Altjira created Earth and everything on it, and then left without leaving anybody instructions. The Rainbow Snake, another creator god, called by some twenty-eight names by culture throughout Australia, kind of takes care of things, and is associated with the cycle of life and death as well as the cycle of seasons.

Australian aboriginal mythology is pretty well connected to Tamrielic mythology, too, which is unsurprising considering Tamriel basically looks like Australia upside down (and morphed a bit, with Indonesia as the Summerset Isles, no?). Creation is often referred to as “The Dreaming” or “The Dreamtime,” because ancestor godlike spirits dreamed the world out of the hazy existence that Altjira (or The Rainbow Snake… Australia’s a big continent, they weren’t just “The Aboriginees,” they were dozens of unique cultures) left it in.

This leaves a decently sized question. Should Satakal be identified with the Harihara and therefore Anu/Padomay, or with the Rainbow Snake and therefore Akatosh/Lorkhan?

I would argue that Satakal as the Rainbow Snake/Akatosh/Lorkhan seems more likely, despite the fact that it requires a reinterpretation of Yokudan lore. Ruptga’s “Walkabout” is blatantly stolen from Australian culture. It fits snugly into the Gnostic framework of the Aurbis, if we consider Altjira as Anu the Godhead and The Rainbow Snake as Satakal: it's the demiurge who supposedly tried to destroy humanity altogether with the food in Gnosticism, after all. Satakal is recognized as a parallel of Alduin, and his name has “Aka” after “Sat” – therefore, he is the evil SAT variant of Aka (puns are solid bases for lore reasoning, yes?). Finally, the Elder Scrolls is bound to share some similarities with The Dreaming, intentionally or not, given that both cosmologies speak of a Dreamtime before time really made sense.