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here's something that i learned again while being santa claus. notions of god and functions attributed much later to the superego tend to converge. it is as if there can be no authority without the possibility of retribution. myths like the flood in part lean on this logic and so are formally necessary. there is no reason why it follows that because lots of social groups posit something like the flood that there must have been a flood----there is no need to suppose that these myths are based on some kind of "genetic memory" of one.
or you could look at the flood myths as generalizations of anxieties about death.
or you could look at flood myths as devices fashioned by any number of groups to explain their relationship to a past that extends well beyond themselves, to explain disruption or radical change, to explain the passage of time and of civilizations (whatever). so you could look at flood myths as an aspect of the more general process of backwriting existing social relations---a function that sociologists since durkheim have argued is central to religion (or belief in a transcendent order more generally).
or maybe these myths have to do with the ice age and the extinction of the neanderthals and so do constitute a kind of continuity with a very distant past. but the generality of these myths--that they show up in so many variants--seems to indicate that it follows from structural features that are shared by a wide range of belief systems rather than from a genetic memory.
it doesn't seem to me that there is any way to know.
so it's an aesthetic question.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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