CATACLYSM

Just saw the movie Noah. At first glance, it’s Mad Max meets The Ten Commandments, sort of a Dystopian Past fantasy. Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson are both Aussies… a desert breed, eh? (Next thing, Russ may be ranting against Christ-killers.) But the fanatic, fatalistic message of the movie’s script warrants consideration.

The film’s magic mineral, Zohar, is a Hebrew cabbalistic term for “divine fire”. Presumably it doesn’t exist anymore, as an unstable chemical element in nature. But in this sci-fictional plot, it allows the ancients to build a greedy, lazy, corrupt technological society… sort of like our oil-based civilization today.

The film draws on Jewish occultism for its pre-Christian imagery of a time when God Almighty was no longer sending prophets to warn humans, but instead ordaining divine destruction to wipe the slate clean. The movie’s harsh question is, will humanity be given a second chance and be allowed to reproduce, or just die out after rescuing all the animals from the flood?

The Noah myth is inherited from ancient Babylonian religion, or the Sumerian backstory of Gilgamesh the god-king. Historically, according to some theorists, the Great Deluge story may record the re-flooding of the Black Sea basin after the last Ice Age, when the sea broke through the strait of Marmora.

Current scientific theory holds that Mediterranean waters poured into the extant freshwater lake basin and raised its level by 90 to 300 feet, submerging large areas of fertile coastal land. This is a plausible explanation for the far-fetched notion of a planet-wide flood. As it stands, some floods that we are now facing from melting poles and rising seas could be equally devastating.

The movie's question, will the Lord God relent and allow humans a second chance go forth and multiply... to again ravage the earth mindlessly, or to be good custodians for the animal life Noah has saved?... is definitely relevant to our times.

Divine Fire

There is also a recent astronomical explanation for the Biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It may have been astronomical, caused by an exploding asteroid which impacted a mountaintop in the Alps and spread its swath of heat destruction eastward. This was based on an ancient Assyrian clay tablet from NIneveh, a “planisphere” star map that records the night sky on 21 June, 3123 BCE. This record is precise enough for computer software to project backward to an exact date. The disk with cuneiform notations portrays the trajectory of a moving object that is no longer present in the night sky. It is evidently a 700 BC copy of the night diary of a much earlier Sumerian astronomer.

 Accounts like these, preserved over the ages, have given force to the image of the gods, or of one God Almighty , as being vengeful or judgmental enough to destroy almost all of humanity . By common interpretation, the Great Flood is aimed at humans for our unforgivable sins, while the vast majority of animal life is God's precious creation. No mention is given to any vegetation that could have been made extinct by a worldwide flood. Presumably God could preserve or re-create those from seed, but the animals require mating pairs.

Whose Fault?

Our current century’s climate and related disasters, by contrast, suggest that mankind is not being punished for violating the Ten Commandments or for venial sins, but for collective decisions and actions which threaten the survival of life on Earth. New millennial techno-theology reveals that the Earth Goddess Geo-Gaia is real and, unlike sky-gods, her laws and miracles are in full effect. She is warning us against violating the balance of nature, poisoning the climate, unearthing and burning fossil carbon that will, at best, throw back Earth’s evolution to a primal Carboniferous Age.