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“Myths” of Global Catastrophes through the Ages

Here are some excerpts and notes from various sources regarding a few of the many “myths” of global destruction through the ages, including Ovid’s Ages of Man and Hindu scriptures, pole shifts, and “mythical” doomsday events in North America, Egypt, South America, Australia, and more.

In some of the most powerful and enduring myths that we have inherited from ancient times, our species seems to have retained a confused but resonant memory of a terrifying global catastrophe…. Where do these myths come from? Why, though they derive from unrelated cultures, are their storylines so similar? why are they laden with common symbolism? and why do they so often share the same stock characters and plots? If they are indeed memories, why are there no historical records of the planetary disaster they seem to refer to?

Could it be that the myths themselves are historical records? Could it be that these cunning and immortal stories, composed by anonymous geniuses, were the medium used to record such information and pass it on in the time before history began? —Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods


Eschatology (from the Greek meaning “last” and -logy meaning “the study of”, first used in English around 1550) is a part of theology, philosophy, and futurology concerned with what are believed to be the final events of history, the ultimate destiny of humanity — commonly referred to as the end of the world or the “World to Come.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as “concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell’”.


History is often seen as being divided into “ages” (Gk. aeons), an age being a period where certain realities are present. An age may come to an end and be replaced by a new age where different realities are present. This transition from one age to another is often the subject of eschatological discussion. So, instead of “the end of the world” we may speak of “the end of the age” and be referring to the end of “life as we know it” and the beginning of a new reality. Indeed, much apocalyptic fiction does not deal with the “end of time” but rather with the end of a certain period of time, the end of life as it is now, and the beginning of a new period of time. It is usually a crisis that brings an end to current reality and ushers in a new way of living / thinking / being. This crisis may take the form of the intervention of a deity in history, a war, a change in the environment or the reaching of a new level of consciousness. If a better world results, we say it is “utopian”. If a worse, it is “dystopian.” Eschatologies vary as to their degree of optimism or pessimism about the future (indeed, the same future may be utopian for some and dystopic for others – “heaven and hell” for example). —From

The Bible…envisages two ages of the world, our own being the second and last [the deluge having ended the first world, and the book of Revelation said to describe the end of the second world]. Elsewhere, in other cultures, different numbers of creations and destructions are recorded. In China, for instance, the perished ages are called kis, ten of which are said to have elapsed from the beginning of time until Confucius. At the end of each kis, “in a general convulsion of nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring up out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined, and the ancient traces effaced….”

Buddhist scriptures speak of “Seven Suns”, each brought to an end by water, fire or wind. At the end of the Seventh Sun, the current “world cycle”, it is expected that the “earth will break into flames”. Aboriginal traditions of Sarawak and Sabah recall that the sky was once “low” and tell us that “six Suns perished … at present the world is illuminated by the seventh Sun”. Similarly, the Sibylline Books speak of “nine Suns that are nine ages” and prophesy two ages yet to come…. [T]he Hopi Indians of Arizona (who are distant relatives of the Aztecs) record three previous Suns, each culminating in a great annihilation followed by the gradual re-emergence of mankind.—Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods

According to In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley: “[T]he ancient Hindus regarded the switch of the equinoctial point from one constellation to another (the end of an age) as an alarming event.”


Ages of Man, Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford World’s Classics):





Book I:125-150 The Bronze Age and Iron Age Third came the people of the bronze age, with fiercer natures, readier to indulge in savage warfare, but not yet vicious.


“Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America — when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans – to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada….”

According to Peter Kolosimo in his book, Timeless Earth, the Harris Egyptian papyrus “speaks of a catastrophe following which ‘south became north…and the earth turned round upon itself’. Herrodotus, moreover, tells us that according to the priests of Thebes (Luxor), ‘twice in past ages the sun used to rise in a different quarter from where it rises now, and twice it was wont to set in the east instead of the west’.” Kolosimo also relates a Toltec legend that the first age was brought to end by floods and lightning; the second age was peopled by giants called Quinametzin, who were mostly destroyed by earthquakes; and the remaining giants were killed by men during the third age, “just as Goliath was slain by David.”

Kolosimo asks:

What force can it have been that wiped out flourishing civilizations at a single blow, decimating the population of the globe and condemning the survivors to take refuge in caves out of which their ancestors had painfully struggled thousands of years before? Clearly the cause must have been some fearful cataclysm affecting the whole of our planet. There is much evidence that catastrophes on this scale did in fact occur.

Although complete carcases and skeletons are sometimes found, the remains usually look as if they had been torn about by some gigantic force. In some places there are heaps of bones as high as a small hill, the remains of mammoths being interspersed with those of horses, antelopes, bison, huge felines, and other smaller animals…. In 1901 a sensation was caused by the discovery of a complete mammal carcase near the Berezovka River, as this animal seemed to have died of cold in midsummer. The contents of its stomach were well preserved and included buttercups and flowering wild beans: this meant that they must have been swallowed about the end of July or beginning of August. The creature had died so suddenly that it still held in its jaws a mouthful of grasses and flowers. It had clearly been caught up by a tremendous force and hurled several miles from its pasture-ground. The pelvis and one leg were fractured — the huge animal had been knocked to its knees and had then frozen to death, at what is normally the hottest time of the year. —Scientist Charles H. Hapgood in Timeless Earth.

Kolosimo notes that, while traditionally science has held that Antarctica has been covered under a mile-thick ice layer for millions of years, there is reason to think the ice cover is much more recent, and related to the most recent worldwide cataclysm:

American scientists fished up from the bed of the Antarctic Ocean specimens of a muddy sediment which showed that in comparatively recent times Antarctic rivers had borne down to the sea the alluvial products of an ice-free territory. This was apparently the case ten or twelve thousands years ago, i.e., just before the time when the mammoth suddenly became extinct….

Movement of North Pole: Kreichgrauer says that during the fossil coal era the north pole was situated near Hawaii, while in later times it was at Lake Chad in Africa. (huge lake has no tribs nor outlets – created by melting of glacier?)

Pole is moving 40 miles a year, National Geographic article:

Potentially hazardous asteroids


Mahabharata Drona Parva Chapter Eleven Drona’s son then began a colossal carnage on the front line of battle. He piled up a mountain of heads from the Pandava army. Then touching water and invoking the Narayana astra, Ashvatthama aimed that invincible weapon at the Pandava army. The earth began to tremble and a great wind storm appeared on the Kurukshetra plain. In the heavens hundreds of thousands of celestial arrows appeared with flaming mouths. Maces, battle axes, Sataghnis, javelins and discs, effulgent as the sun, appeared in the sky, numbering tens of thousands. Coming down upon the Pandava army, those weapons began to destroy countless men. That divine weapon, owned by Lord Narayana, began to consume the Pandava army like a wild fire consumes dry grass.…

Ashvatthama invoked the Agneya weapon which caused intense fire to appear. Arrows with intense flames fell upon the Pandava soldiers scorching their bodies. Ashvatthama then directed that weapon toward the chariot of Krishna and Arjuna. The Agneya weapon killed thousands upon thousands of chariot fighters, elephants and horsemen like a forest fire destroys trees. To save the Army, Arjuna invoked the Brahmastra weapon which countered the weapon released by Ashvatthama. When both weapons were withdrawn, the Pandavas saw that a full akshauhini division had been burnt by the weapon. So scorched were the soldiers that they could not be distinguished. Both armies thought that Krishna and Arjuna had been killed by the weapon, but upon seeing them in their chariot, the Pandava warriors cheered loudly and blew their conchshells. —

This antique carpet from India shows Arjuna and Krishna in their chariot.

Doomsday Events

Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record.

Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as “major”, and the data chosen to measure past diversity. —

A doomsday event is a specific, plausibly verifiable or hypothetical occurrence which has an exceptionally destructive effect on the human race. The final outcomes of doomsday events may range from a major disruption of human civilization, the extinction of humanity, the extinction of all life on the planet Earth, the destruction of the planet Earth, the annihilation of the Solar system, to the annihilation of our galaxy or even the entire universe.

Even though the term “doomsday” is taken from Christian eschatology referring to the Last Judgment, the term “doomsday event” as used here refers to alleged realistic dangers from natural or man-made causes, to be distinguished from catastrophic events in religious eschatology understood as an act of divine retribution or unalterable fate.

Doomsday events may include, but are not limited to these:

Natural occurrences
, including:

  • A close approach of a black hole to the solar system.
  • A drastic and unusual decrease or increase in Sun’s power output; a solar superstorm leading to partial or complete electrical or technological death of human civilization. (See solar flare.)
  • The solar system passing through a cosmic dust cloud, leading to a severe global climate change.
  • An abrupt repositioning of Earth rotation axis.[6] It could be caused by extremely powerful internal geological or/and external cosmic factors. If it happens abruptly (and not slowly within a very prolonged interval of time) it will generate enormous multiple earthquakes, multiple volcano eruptions, a hypercane or multiple megacyclones, giant tidal waves and megatsunamis all around the globe.
  • An impact event causing a collision (or extremely close passage) of a large meteorite, asteroid or comet. A common theory postulates that the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred approximately 65 million years ago as a result of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event when a large asteroid struck the earth, producing atmospheric dust which blocked solar energy and caused a significant lowering of temperatures worldwide (“nuclear winter”). Evidence for this theory includes a sedimentary layer of iridium in the geological record and a large crater in the area of Chicxulub, Mexico. The Tunguska event (1908) was on a much smaller scale. In the case of a close passage of an object (a large asteroid, comet or planet) with a significant gravitational impact on Earth, the consequences could be the same as in the case of an abrupt repositioning of Earth rotation axis. And such a repositioning of the axis would not necessarily have to take place for the earth to see the same global effects.
  • A geological event such as massive flood basalt, volcanism, or the eruption of a supervolcano leading to the so called Volcanic Winter (Similar to a Nuclear Winter). One such event, the Toba Eruption, occurred in Indonesia about 71,500 years ago. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, the event may have reduced human populations to only a few tens of thousands of individuals. Yellowstone Caldera is another such supervolcano, having undergone 142 or more caldera-forming eruptions in the past 17 million years. Massive volcano eruption(s) will produce extraordinary intake of volcanic dust, toxic and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with serious effects on global climate (towards extreme global cooling (nuclear winter when in short term and ice age when in long term) or global warming (if greenhouse gases prevail)).

Manmade events, including:

  • A nuclear, chemical, or biological war. A “softer” and “stealthier” case of each of these three types of warfare could be nuclear, chemical, or biological terrorism. Again the source could be an individual, a laboratory workers group, a terrorist group, religious zealots, governmental or international organization.
  • A grey goo scenario, in which self-replicating machines (often imagined to be nanomachines) get out of control and indiscriminately consume all kinds of matter in the process of building more replicas of themselves, eventually making earth inhospitable for biological life altogether. —

For an interesting list of ways the Earth could be destroyed, see Discover Magazine’s “20 Ways the World Could End” — although it doesn’t even mention one of the most likely ways, nuclear power plant accidents.

The very interesting academic paper, Echoes of Ancient Cataclysms in the Baltic Sea, by Ain Haas, Andres Peekna, Robert E. Walker, is well worth a read.


Contemporary Hindu eschatology is linked in the Vaishnavite tradition to the figure of Kalki, or the tenth and last Avatar of Vishnu before the age draws to a close, and Shiva dissolves and Brahma regenerates the universe.

Most Hindus acknowledge as part of their cosmology that we are living in the Kali Yuga, the last of four periods (Yuga) that make up the current age. Each period has seen a successive degeneration in the moral order and character of human beings, to the point that in the Kali Yuga where quarrel and hypocrisy are prevalent. Often, the invocation of Kali Yuga denotes a certain helplessness in the face of the horrors and suffering of the human condition and a nostalgia for a golden past or a future salvation.

However, Hindu conceptions of time, like those found in other non-Western traditions, is cyclical in that one age may end but another will always begin. As such, the cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and renewal at the individual level finds its echo in the cosmic order of all things, yet affected by the vagaries of the comings and goings of divine interventions in the Vaishnavite belief.

The Four Yugas
A Divya Yuga comprises four yuga’s and lasts for 4.3 billion years (close approximation to earth’s age Age of Earth of 4.54 billion years. One cycle of these four yugas complete the existence of the universe and the universe starts to contract backwards in time followed by a new beginning of big bang. Yuga Dharma is a self-realization in each yuga.

KRUTHA YUGA (SATYA YUGA) lasts 1.632 billion years. (Human beings as heavenly bodies)

TRETA YUGA silver age lasts 1.3 billion years.

DWAPARA YUGA Bronze Age lasts 884 million years.

KALI YUGA Iron Age of hypocrisy and quarrel lasts approximately 448 million years. (Lord Krishna’s Avatar – KALKI) —

The End of the Early Bronze Age








Also see my posts on the Deluge: Noah and the Deluge, with Details and Illustrations; and The Sumerian Noah Built an Ark — and So Did Others.

sourceThe Deluge by Paul Gustave Doré, from Doré's English Bible, 1865.
The Deluge by Paul Gustave Doré, from Doré’s English Bible, 1865.