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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

It is at this point that the strange parallels with the traditions of the<br />

biblical flood begin to crop up, for Ahura Mazda takes advantage of the<br />

meeting to warn Yima of what is about to happen as a result of the<br />

powers of the Evil One:<br />

And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima saying: ‘Yima the fair ... Upon the material<br />

world a fatal winter is about to descend, that shall bring a vehement, destroying<br />

frost. Upon the corporeal world will the evil of winter come, wherefore snow will<br />

fall in great abundance. ...<br />

‘And all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and<br />

those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the depths of<br />

the valleys under the shelter of stables.<br />

‘Therefore make thee a var [a hypogeum or underground enclosure] the length of<br />

a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every<br />

kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men,<br />

of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires. 3<br />

‘There shalt thou make water flow. Thou shall put birds in the trees along the<br />

water’s edge, in verdure which is everlasting. There put specimens of all plants,<br />

the loveliest and most fragrant, and of all fruits the most succulent. All these<br />

kinds of things and creatures shall not perish as long as they are in the var. But<br />

put there no deformed creature, nor impotent, nor mad, neither wicked, nor<br />

deceitful, nor rancorous, nor jealous; nor a man with irregular teeth, nor a leper<br />

...’ 4<br />

Apart from the scale of the enterprise there is only one real difference<br />

between Yima’s divinely inspired var and Noah’s divinely inspired ark: the<br />

ark is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will<br />

destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water; the var is a<br />

means of surviving a terrible and devastating ‘winter’ which will destroy<br />

every living creature by covering the earth with a freezing blanket of ice<br />

and snow.<br />

In the Bundahish, another of the Zoroastrian scriptures (believed to<br />

incorporate ancient material from a lost part of the original Avesta), more<br />

information is provided on the cataclysm of glaciation that overwhelmed<br />

Airyana Vaejo. When Angra Mainyu sent the ‘vehement destroying frost’,<br />

he also ‘assaulted and deranged the sky’. 5 The Bundahish tells us that<br />

this assault enabled the Evil One to master ‘one third of the sky and<br />

overspread it with darkness’ as the encroaching ice sheets tightened their<br />

grip. 6<br />

3 Vendidad, Fargard II, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 300, 353-4.<br />

4 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 320.<br />

5 West, Pahlavi Texts Part I, p. 17, London, 1880.<br />

6 Ibid.; Justi, Der Bundahish, Leipzig, 1868, p. 5.<br />

198

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