In describing, in the Elder Edda, the corrupt condition of mankind before the great catastrophe occurred, the world, we are told, was given over to all manner of sin and wickedness.  We read: 

“Brothers will fight together, And become each other’s bane Sisters’ children Their sib shall spoil.  Hard is the world; Sensual sins grow huge.  There are axe-ages, sword-ages Shields are cleft in twain, There are wind-ages, murder-ages, Ere the world falls dead."[1]

When the great day of wrath comes, Heimdal blows in the Gjallar-horn, Odin rides to Mimer’s well, Odin puts on his golden helmet, the Asas hold counsel before their stone doors.

All these things indicate a people who had passed far beyond barbarism.  Here we have axes, swords, helmets, shields, musical instruments, domesticated horses, the use of gold, and stone buildings.  And after the great storm was over, and the remnant of mankind crept out of the caves, and came back to reoccupy the houses of the slain millions, we read of the delight with which they found in the grass “the golden tablets” of the Asas—­additional proof that they worked in the metals, and possessed some kind of a written language; they also had “the runes,” or runic letters of Odin.

[1.  “The Vala’s Prophecy,” 48, 49.]

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In the Norse legends we read that Loke, the evil genius, carried off
Iduna, and her apples.

And when we turn to the American legends, similar statements present themselves.

We see the people, immediately after the catastrophe, sending a messenger to the happy eastern land, over the sea, by a bridge, to procure drums and other musical instruments; we learn from the Aztecs that while the darkness yet prevailed, the people built a sumptuous palace, a masterpiece of skill, and on the top of it they placed an axe of copper, the edge being uppermost, and on this axe the heavens rested.[1]

The Navajos, shut up in their cave, had flute-players with them.  The Peruvians were dug out of their cave with a golden spade.  In the Tahoe legend, we read that the superior race compelled the inferior to build a great temple for their protection from floods; and the oppressed people escaped in canoes, while the world blazes behind them.

Soon after the Navajos came out of the cave, we find them, according to the legend, possessed of water-jars, and we have references to the division of the heavens into constellations.

In the Arabian legend of the City of Brass, we are told that the people who were destroyed were great architects, metallurgists, agriculturists, and machinists, and that they possessed a written language.

We turn now to the more reliable evidences of man’s condition, which have been exhumed from the caves and the Drift.

In the seventeenth century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running an adit into a hill near Callao,