Deucalion and Pyrrha

Deucalion and Pyrrha

(15-19)

This story stuck out at me because of how similar it seemed to the biblical story of Noah. Jove, disturbed by the human race which he describes as a “malady which can’t be cured,” decides to destroy the sacrilegious human race. As he winds up to throw his mighty thunderbolts, he remembers a prophecy that states if the land and water are set ablaze then the heavens too will go up in flames. Since he worried about losing his kingdom, Jove decides instead to drown the human race in a massive flood. Jove with the help of his brother Neptune kills off all of humanity except for Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. If one doesn’t count the massive arc and the animals counted two by two then one can see the direct similarity of the Noah story. In the Bible version, God is upset about the sinning and idol worship occurring all over the world (sacrilegious) and God tells Noah to build a boat and to collect all the animals on Earth (two of each--male and female), so when the Earth is flooded Noah, his wife, and all the beasts of Earth will be saved.
Deucalion is saved mainly because he lived near the peak of a high mountain and he was Prometheus’s son (divine blood=chosen by God). After grieving for the death of EVERYONE, Deucalion and Pyrrha pray for some way to revive humanity. The gods are touched by her piety and tell her to “drop the bones of the great mother.” Pyrrha refuses to scatter the bones of her dead mother but Deucalion convinces her that the gods meant mother as in Mother Earth and bones as in stones. This seems to be an archetype for human beings being formed from clay, as what happens in the bible when God makes Adam. Anyways, the rocks are magically formed into new human beings (also happens in the story of Cadmus and the story Medea & Jason). This Ovid explains is why the new human beings is tough and tenacious because of our “stony ancestry.”