It looks as though the same sort of process must have been at work within the Rig Veda. Here, like Osiris for the Egyptians, Manu is a household name even incorporated into aphorisms such as ‘may we speak like Manu’27 – which, Griffith says, was universally understood to mean ‘with the wisdom and authority of Manu who was instructed directly by the Gods’.28 Yet nowhere in the Rig is there anything even remotely resembling a continuous Manu narrative which would explain the awe within which he was held and the fundamental role assigned to him as the saviour and the progenitor of Vedic civilization. As with the case of Osiris in Egypt, it is probably safe to assume the full story of Manu was simply so well known amongst the practitioners of the Vedas that the composers and compilers saw no need to spell it out in detail.
A flood to carry away all creatures
The earliest surviving glimpse of a more complete version of the story of Manu is provided by the Satpatha Brahmana. The setting is antediluvian India some years before it is to be destroyed by the flood and Manu is a king and leader of men (specifically identified in the later Bhagvata Purana with ‘a South Indian or Dravidian king named Satyavrata’):29
In the morning they brought to Manu water for washing the hands. When he was washing himself a fish came into his hands. It spake to him the word ‘Rear me, I will save thee!’ ‘Wherefrom wilt thou save me?’ ‘A flood will carry away these creatures: from that I will save thee.’ ‘How am I to rear thee?’ It said, ‘As long as we are small, there is great destruction for us: fish devours fish. Thou wilt first keep me in a jar. When I outgrow that, thou wilt dig a pit and keep me in it. When I outgrow that, thou wilt take me down to the sea for then I shall be beyond destruction.’ It soon became a large fish … Thereupon it said, ‘In such and such a year that flood will come. Thou shalt attend to me [i.e. to my advice] by preparing a ship; and when the flood has risen thou shalt enter into the ship and I shall save thee from it.’ After he had reared it in this way, he took it down to the sea. And in the same year which the fish had indicated to him, he attended to the advice of the fish by preparing a ship; and when the flood had risen he entered into the ship. The fish then swam up to him, and to its horn he tied the rope of the ship and by that means he passed swiftly up to yonder northern mountain. It then said, ‘I have saved thee. Fasten the ship to a tree; but let not the water wash thee away30 whilst thou art on the mountain. As the water subsides, thou mayest gradually descend!’ Accordingly he gradually descended, and hence that slope of the northern mountain is called ‘Manu’s descent’.31
In this version, Manu survives the deluge alone, with no mention of the ‘Seven Sages’ and with no other human companions. How then does he qualify for his Vedic role as the father of mankind?
According to the Satpatha Brahmana:
Being desirous of offspring, he engaged in worshipping and austerities. During this time he also … offered up in the waters clarified butter, sour milk, whey and curds. Thence a woman was produced in a year … With her he went on worshipping and performing austerities, wishing for offspring. Through her he generated this race, which is this race of Manu …32
‘The ship whirled like a reeling and intoxicated woman …’
Maintaining the sequence of the established chronology, the next properly connected version of the Manu story comes to us in the Mahabaratha. In this recension of the old tale Manu is not a king but a powerful rishi (sage, seer) who spends a supernaturally long time practising yogic austerities:
standing with uplifted arm, on one foot, he practised intense, austere fervour. This direful exercise he performed with his head downwards, and with unwinking eyes, for 10,000 years. Once, when clad in dripping rags with matted hair, he was so engaged, a fish came to him on the banks [of a river] and spake, ‘Lord I am a small fish; I dread the stronger ones, and from them you must save me.’33
With a few more details the tale then proceeds in the same manner as in the Satpatha Brahmana with the fish being cared for and attended to by the kindly Manu, outgrowing various habitats and finally being placed by him in the ocean:
When he had been thrown into the ocean he said to Manu: ‘Great lord, thou hast in every way preserved me: now hear from me what thou must do when the time arrives. Soon shall all these terrestrial objects … be dissolved. The time for the purification of the worlds has now arrived. I therefore inform thee what is for thy greatest good. The period dreadful for the universe has come. Make for thyself a strong ship, with a cable attached; embark in it with the Seven Sages and stow in it, carefully preserved and assorted, all the seeds which have been described of old … When embarked in the ship, look out for me: I shall come recognizable by my horn … These great waters cannot be crossed over without me.34
When the deluge came:
Manu, as enjoined, taking with him the seeds, floated on the billowy ocean in the beautiful ship. [The arrival of the enormous fish is then announced.] When Manu saw the horned leviathan, lofty as a mountain, he fastened the ship’s cable to the horn. Being thus attached the fish dragged the ship with great rapidity, transporting it across the briny ocean which seemed to dance with its waves and thunder with its waters. Tossed by the tempests the ship whirled like a reeling and intoxicated woman. Neither the earth, nor the quarters of the world appeared; there was nothing but water, air and sky. In the world thus confounded, the Seven Sages, Manu and the fish were beheld. So, for very many years, the fish unwearied drew the ship over the waters; and brought it at length to the highest peak of Himavat [the Himalayas]. He then smiling gently, said to the Sages, ‘Bind this ship without delay to this peak.’ They did so accordingly. And the highest peak of Himavat is still known by the name of Naubandhana (‘the Binding of the Ship’).35
Thereafter, through his advanced yogic powers Manu, the father, ‘began visibly to create all living beings’.36
‘The sea was seen overflowing its shores …’
A third example – amongst so many more that it is invidious to chose – comes from the Bhagvata Purana where Manu first bears the name of Satyaravrata, ‘the lord of Dravida’37 [south India]. In the usual way this Manu encounters a small fish, it grows big and he eventually throws it into the sea. It then reveals itself to him as none other than an incarnation of the god Vishnu, who warns him of the impending flood – which here, as the Mahabaratha also hints, acquires the cosmic and universal dimension of the great pralaya that brings each yuga, or age of the earth, to an end:
On the seventh day after this the three worlds shall sink beneath the ocean of the dissolution. When the universe is dissolved in that ocean, a large ship, sent by me, shall come to thee. Taking with thee the plants and various seeds, surrounded by the Seven Sages … thou shalt embark on the great ship and shalt move without alarm over the one dark ocean …38
The fish incarnation of Vishnu then vanishes, promising to return at the right moment. Seven days later: ‘The sea, augmenting as the great clouds poured down their waters, was seen overflowing its shores and everywhere inundating the earth.’39
Next, the ship of Vishnu appears and Manu and the Seven Sages embark in it – with Manu not failing in his duty to bring on board ‘the various kinds of plants’.40
Last but not least the great fish returns. Manu’s Ark is moored to its horn and towed safely across the flood and storm waves.41
Fleshing out the Vedic flood myth
Is this ancient tradition entirely mythical and symbolic, or could it be anchored at some level in geological reality and historical time?
My impression, perhaps quite wrong, is that the later texts of the tradition deliberately begin to fill in and clarify the details of the Manu narrative missing from the numerous ‘customary’ allusions to him in the Vedas that seem to take a widespread and detailed knowledge of his story for granted.
Perhaps this setting down in writing of the ancient tradition in its late days arose from a recognition that such widespread knowledge could no longer be relied upon and a fear that the oral compositions
might eventually be completely lost. The result, at any rate, is that we can now guess exactly why the Rig speaks of Manu as the father of mankind. It is because in the ancient traditions of the Vedic peoples – so well known to all in the early days that no written elaboration was thought necessary – he was remembered as the survivor of the universal flood through whose virility and yogic powers the human race and all living beings were propagated again after the cataclysm. We now also have the following other pieces of information at our disposal:
Manu made a special point of bringing something very precious and significant with him from the world before the flood – a cache of ‘plants and various seeds’ by means of which agriculture could be restored in post-diluvian times.
lso with Manu in the ship were the Seven Sages.
The character of the flood was that ‘the sea … was seen overflowing its shores and everywhere inundating the earth’.
Borne up on the waters of the flood, and towed by a god, Manu’s survival ship travelled towards the north.
Manu and the Sages made landfall on the slopes of the ‘Northern Mountain’ in Himavat – the Himalayas.
They were to descend from the mountain ‘gradually’, and only as the flood subsided, making sure never to put themselves in a position where they could be ‘washed away’.
Manu was believed to have practised yoga.
Manu was believed to have been, in antediluvian times, a king of the Dravidian people of south India.
A ship in the Himalayas?
Despite the formidable reputation of India’s oral tradition for preserving and transmitting extremely ancient information, I realize that some linguists and historians are likely to be sceptical of any attempt to connect what may be relatively late texts about Manu’s survival of the flood to his earlier more fleeting appearances as a ‘household name’ in the Vedas. Nevertheless there is a strange, isolated passage in the Atharva Veda (AV), and another in the Rig itself, which add further merit to the view that the Vedic peoples at the dawn of their civilization were already fully conversant with all the details of the flood myth as they are given in the much later texts – and even used similar symbols, imagery and language.
Of course, it is possible that the later compositions simply echo the older ones, but if that were so I would expect them not just to be similar but to be much more similar than they in fact are. In my opinion a sufficient degree of difference is evident in the terminology to make it quite unlikely that the Satpatha Brahmana, the Mahabaratha and the Bhagvata Purana, etc., are simply copying the AV and the Rig and much more likely that the earlier and the later written texts both descended separately from a common, extremely archaic, oral source. My view on this is buttressed by the fact that the relevant passages in the AV and the Rig are opaque and meaningless if left to stand alone but begin to make sense to any reader – or listener – who already has knowledge of the broader tradition of Manu and the flood. This creates a knotty logical paradox for those who wish to believe that the connected Manu/flood story is an invention of the later texts and was not in circulation at the time of the AV and the Rig. The knot can be untangled very simply, however, if we accept that the full connected Manu/flood story must indeed have been in circulation (perhaps even very wide circulation) in the earliest Vedic times but was simply not written down then and remained for much longer in the exclusive domain of the oral tradition.
As far as I am aware, the peculiarity of the passage in the Atharva Veda was first commented on in the nineteenth century by Professor Albrecht Weber, a well-known German Indologist.42 The passage can be found in Book 19, Hymn 39, Verse 8, and a modern translation has recently been provided by Sanskrit scholar David Frawley: ‘At the place of the ship’s descent at the top of the Himalayas, there resides the vision of immortality.’43 Griffith’s (1895) translation of the same verse reads as follows: ‘Where is the Sinking of the Ship, the summit of the Hill of Snow, there is the embodiment of life that dies not.’44 In a footnote Griffith then adds:
The Sinking of the Ship: or the place where the ship sank or glided down; probably the Naubandhana of the later Epos [i.e. the Mahabaratha], the highest known peak of the Himalayas, to which in the great flood Manu fastened his ship.45
Weber’s 1882 comment on the passage had made essentially the same comparison of the Rig Veda and the Mahabaratha. In the latter, the peak of the Himalayas to which the ship was tied was afterwards called Naubandhana (meaning ‘the binding or tying of the ship’). Weber pointed out the curious imperfect similarity of this concept to the central idea of AV, 19, 39, 8, ‘where the term Navaprabhramsana or “Gliding down of the Ship” is used in connection with the summit of Himavat’.46
Since one would not normally expect to see a ship either moored to a mountain or gliding down one, I submit that the presence of such imagery in the AV without an accompanying explanation only makes sense if we assume that the singers of the Vedic hymns were already very well acquainted with a story of how a ship got itself into the Himalayas. There are also extremely good reasons to assume that the story in oral circulation then was an early version of the compositions that were much later written down in the Satpatha Brahmana, Mahabaratha, etc.
The passage in the Rig Veda is, if anything, even more indicative of the long pre-existence of this story, with all its essential ingredients. In Book 2, Hymn 23, Verse 13 there is suddenly a reference to ‘pure medicines … those that are wholesomest and health-bestowing, those which our father Manu hath selected …’47 In the mid-nineteenth century the Vedic scholar Horace Haymann Wilson was the first to conclude that ‘this alludes to the vegetable seeds which Manu, according to the Mahabaratha, was directed to take with him into the vessel in which he was preserved at the time of the deluge’.48
Finally, to return to the Atharva Veda, there is one other unexplained matter raised in AV, 19,39,8. This concerns the association of immortality – ‘life that dies not’ – with the ‘Place of the Ship’s Descent’ in the Himalayas (or the ‘Place of Manu’s Descent’, as the Satpatha Brahmana calls it). Once again, later texts provide the background story that is presupposed in the Vedas by telling us that as his reward for saving mankind and the seed of all living creatures the gods granted Manu insight into ‘the mystery of the soul’,49 mastery over ‘all knowledge’50 and more than human powers with a lifetime of millions of years so that he might reign for ‘one manvantara’.51 A manvantara is a period of time which the Vedic sages (with uncharacteristic vagueness) describe as ‘about 71’ complete cycles of four yugas,52 equivalent to 64,800,000 years53 – effective immortality.
As readers may already have noticed, there is something familiar about this tradition that Manu was rewarded by the gods with immortality – or at any rate an extremely long life! The same gift was also bestowed (by a supposedly different group of gods) upon Zisudra, the Sumerian flood survivor whose travails are described in chapter 2:
Life like a god they gave him;
Breath eternal like a god they brought down for him,
… Zisudra the king,
The preserver of the name of vegetation and of the seed of mankind.54
Two times seven
Another extraordinary similarity concerns the presence of Seven Sages in both the Sumerian and Vedic traditions. Most ancient societies, I concede, had their sages or seers or wise men – in India they were, and still are, called rishis. But it seems to me to be stretching coincidence too far to find a group specifically named the ‘Seven Sages’ prominently associated with two separate ancient cultures and to imagine that this did not come about through some sort of connection.
In the case of Sumer the Seven Sages were depicted as amphibian, ‘fish-garbed’ beings who emerged from the sea in antediluvian times to teach wisdom to mankind.
In the case of the Vedas the focus is not on the antediluvian period but on the flood itself and those antediluvians who are claimed to have survived it, namely Manu and the Seven Sages.
What do we have
so far?
Two groups of seven antediluvian sages, one in ancient Sumer, one in ancient India.
Both groups are associated with fish symbolism of some sort – the Seven Sages of Sumer are themselves half men, half fish, and the Vedic Seven Sages take refuge on Manu’s survival ship, which is towed by a gigantic fish through the raging waters of the deluge.
Both groups of sages perform an identical function – which is to preserve the gifts of civilization and bring them to mankind in their respective areas.
Both groups of sages set an example of asceticism and teach and promote the spiritual life.
Paradoxically, both groups of sages also play an absolutely fundamental and extremely distinctive earthly role as king-makers and as advisers to kings.
Perhaps the similarities result from direct cultural exchange and transfer of ideas between ancient India and ancient Sumer? This option is at least worth considering, because we already know that the Indus-Sarasvati civilization-which has been proposed as the likely mother of the orphaned Vedas – and the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia were contemporary and did have contact with one another. The problem as before, however, is that the similarities are not similar enough – or, to put it another way, that there are too many differences between the traditions – for them to have resulted from the direct transmission of the ‘Seven Sages’ idea from one society to the other. Besides, although the Indus-Sarasvati people and the Sumerians undoubtedly traded with and knew one another and have left proof of this, the archaeological record also shows that they simply did not exchange cultural ideas, themes and motifs – even at the most basic level such as jewellery design, let alone so fundamental a religious and historical concept as the Seven Sages.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 19