Deucalion, Noah, and the Great Recycled Flood: A Tale as Old as Rain

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the universe isn’t nearly as original as it lets on. People talk about “new ideas” the way bakers talk about “fresh bread” — but both usually come from a very old recipe and someone else’s oven.

I think I’ve spent enough time around people — and flood stories ever since we moved to the boat — to know two things for certain:

1. We’ve been telling the same tales since the first man figured out how to carve a story into a rock, and
2. Most of us are that rock.

Take floods. The kind where the heavens open up like a leaky roof and all of humanity gets washed out like bad laundry. In the Bible, we got Noah, a man of patience, a shipbuilder with no shipyard, who piles two of every living thing onto a boat the size of a hotel and sails off into divine history while the rest of humanity learns what happens when you ignore weather warnings from the Almighty. It’s dramatic, righteous, and wet — everything a good story needs.

But then you turn the page of a Greek myth, and lo and behold — here come Deucalion and Pyrrha, paddling onto the scene in their own little ark. Zeus, who was always fond of lightning and overreactions, gets a bee in his thunderbolt about humanity’s wickedness (sound familiar?) and sends a flood to drown them all. But Prometheus — the same fellow who gave us fire and probably regretted it ever since — tips off his son Deucalion: “Build a chest, boy. It’s about to get biblical.”

So Deucalion and Pyrrha ride out the storm like a pair of ancient Hellenic sailors. When the waters calm, they land on Mount Parnassus and ask the gods, “What now?”   

Here’s where it gets poetic — and a little too symbolic for comfort.

The gods tell them: “Throw the bones of your mother behind you.” Now, most modern folks would call this a very bad idea, but Deucalion and Pyrrha are no amateurs. They figure out that “mother” means Mother Earth, and her bones must be stones. So, they throw stones over their shoulders, and where those stones land, people spring up.

And here’s where it gets interesting — in ancient Greek, the word for stone is “las” (λας), and the word for people is “laos” (λαός).

You catching that?

If the word for “people” is built right out of the word for “rock”, maybe it isn’t so surprising that humanity still acts dumb as one half the time. Stubborn, slow to learn, hard to move, and prone to sinking when things get wet.

Sure, we build cities, invent machines, shoot rockets to the moon (some of them explode halfway there…) — but then we go and start wars with each other again; we fight over anything and argue with strangers online like it’s sport. It’s no mystery: we’re just rocks with egos, trying to be clever between disasters.

And the best part? We’ve been telling this same story — over and over — for thousands of years. A god gets mad, a flood comes, a good man (and a patient woman) survive, and humanity gets a second chance. Again. And again. And again.

We’re a species on repeat. Mythology’s greatest hits, scratched into history’s record like a broken lyre string.

So, if you hear someone say, “This has never happened before!” or “this uprecedented calamity” — whether it’s a flood, a war, or someone getting famous for doing absolutely nothing — just remember:
Nothing is new. Every story is just an old one wearing a different pair of sandals.

And if you ever feel out of place in this ridiculous world, take comfort in this:
You’re not a mistake — you’re a pebble in the long gravel path of human history.
And that’s something solid, at least.