I return to the legends.

The Gallinomeros of Central California also recollect the day of darkness and the return of the sun: 

“In the beginning they say there was no light, but a thick darkness covered all the earth.  Man stumbled blindly against man and against the animals, the birds clashed together in the air, and confusion reigned everywhere.  The Hawk happening by chance to fly into the face of the Coyote, there followed mutual apologies, and afterward a long discussion on the emergency of the situation.  Determined to make some effort toward abating the public evil, the two set about a remedy.  The Coyote gathered a great heap, of tules” (rushes) “rolled them into a ball, and gave it to the Hawk, together with some pieces of flint.  Gathering all together as well as he could, the Hawk flew straight up into the sky, where he struck fire with the flints, lit his ball of reeds, and left it there whirling along all in a fierce red glow as it continues to the present; for it is the sun.  In the same way the moon was made, but as the tules of which it was constructed were rather damp, its light has always been somewhat uncertain and feeble."[2]

The Algonquins believed in a world, an earth, “anterior to this of ours, but one without light or human inhabitants.  A lake burst its bounds and submerged it wholly.”

This reminds us of the Welsh legend, and the bursting of the lake Llion (see page 135, ante).

The ancient world was united in believing in great cycles of time terminating in terrible catastrophes: 

[1.  Captain Cook’s “Second Voyage,” vol. ii, pp. 232-235;

2.  “Climate and Time,” Croll, pp. 60, 61.

3.  Powers’s Pomo MS., Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 86.]

{p. 223}

Hence arose the belief in Epochs of Nature, elaborated by ancient philosophers into the Cycles of the Stoics, the great Days of Brahm, long periods of time rounding off by sweeping destructions, the Cataclysms and Ekpyrauses of the universe.  Some thought in these all things perished, others that a few survived. . . .  For instance, Epietetus favors the opinion that at the solstices of the great year not only all human beings, but even the gods, are annihilated; and speculates whether at such times Jove feels lonely.[1] Macrobius, so far from agreeing with him, explains the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization by the hypothesis that that country is so happily situated between the pole and the equator, as to escape both the deluge and conflagration of the great cycle."[2]

In the Babylonian Genesis tablets we have the same references to the man or people who, after the great disaster, divided the heavens into constellations, and regulated, that is, discovered and revealed, their movements.  In the Fifth Tablet of the Creation Legend[3] we read: 

“1.  It was delightful all that was fixed by the great gods.