The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

(perhaps do not eat?) animals.Centuries later a new element is introduced into the story of the flood, one so importantand complex that we must pause for a moment to consider it: the idea that time is both linear andcyclical. The four Ages of time, or Yugas, are a series named after the four throws of the dice.Confusingly, the number of the Age increases as the numbers of the dice, the quality of life, andthe length of the Age decrease: The first Age, the Krita Yuga (“Winning Age”) or the SatyaYuga (“Age of Truth”), what the Greeks called the Golden Age (for the four Ages of time, orYugas, formed a quartet in ancient Greece too), is the winning throw of four, a time ofhappiness, when humans are virtuous and live for a long time. The second Age, the Treta Yuga(“Age of the Trey”), is the throw of three; things are not quite so perfect. In the third Age, theDvapara Yuga (“Age of the Deuce”), the throw of two, things fall apart. And the Kali Age is thedice throw of snake eyes, the present Age, the Iron Age, the Losing Age, the time when peopleare no damn good and die young, and barbarians invade India, the time when all bets are off.This fourth Age was always, from the start, entirely different from the first three in one essentialrespect: Unlike the other Ages, it is now, it is real. The four Ages are also often analogized to thefour legs of dharma visualized as a cow who stands on four legs in the Winning Age, thenbecomes three-legged, two-legged, and totters on one leg in the Losing Age.But time in India is not only linear, as in Greece (for the ages steadily decline), butcyclical, unlike Greece (for the end circles back to the beginning again). The cosmos is rebornover and over again, as each successive Kali Age ends in a doomsday fire and a flood thatdestroys the cosmos but is then transformed into the primeval flood out of which the cosmos isre-created, undergoing a sea change in a new cosmogony. al The idea of circular cosmic time is inpart the result of Indian ideas about reincarnation, the circularity of the individual soul. Theending precedes the beginning, but the end and the beginning were always there from the start,before the beginning and after the end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. amIn later retellings of the story of the flood, therefore—to return at last to our story—thefish saves Manu from the doomsday flood that comes at the end of the Kali Age, the finaldissolution (pralaya):THE FISH AND THE FLOODManu won from the god Brahma, the creator, the promise that hewould be able to protect all creatures, moving and still, when the dissolution took place. Oneday, he found a little fish and saved it until it grew so big that it terrified him, whereupon herealized that it must be Vishnu. The fish said, “Bravo! You have recognized me. Soon the wholeearth will be flooded. The gods have made this boat for you to save the great living souls; bringall the living creatures into the boat, and you will survive the dissolution and be king at thebeginning of the Winning Age. At the end of the Kali Age, the mare who lives at the bottom ofthe ocean will open her mouth and a poisonous fire will burst out of her, coming up out of hell; itwill burn the whole universe, gods and constellations and all. And then the seven clouds ofdoomsday will flood the earth until everything is a single ocean. You alone will survive, togetherwith the sun and moon, several gods, and the great religious texts and sciences.” And so ithappened, and the fish came and saved Manu. 35 In this text, Manu saves not himself alonebut all creatures, and this time the gods, instead of Manu, build the boat. This variant also givesus a much more detailed, and hence more reassuring, image of what is to follow the flood; a newworld is born out of the old one. These stories suggest that floods are both inevitable andsurvivable; this is what happens to the world, yet the world goes on.More significantly, the myth is now part of the great story of the cycle of time, involvingfire as well as water, so that the flood now appears more as a solution than as a problem: It puts