Motifs / flood
flood
Atra-hasis and the Three Destructions
iraq
The flood myth's oldest full telling: the gods destroy humanity three times — plague, famine, flood — because the noise of the world keeps Enlil awake.
Pralaya: the Dissolution of the Universe
india
The universe as a day: at the close of Brahma's day, fire and flood unmake the cosmos, Vishnu sleeps on the serpent Shesha, and after his night the same creation begins again.
Ragnarök: the Doom of the Gods
iceland, norway, sweden, denmark
The most detailed apocalypse in any tradition: a winter without end, a sea of corpses, the gods and the monsters killing each other, and the world burning — then rising green from the waves.
The Baltic Fragments: a Sea That Will Cover the Land
lithuania
An end in fragments: the Baltic tradition imagines the sea rising over the land and the sun threatened — nowhere a final battle, nowhere a judge, the absence itself the subject.
The Book of the Heavenly Cow: the End of Ra's Reign
egypt
The closest thing Egypt wrote to an apocalypse: humanity rebels against the creator, and Ra destroys them with his own eye, then withdraws from the world — the end of a god's reign, told as the beginning of death.
The Five Suns: Four Worlds That Ended
mexico
The Mexica cosmos has already ended four times — jaguars, hurricanes, fire, flood — and the fifth sun, the sun of movement, is fated to end in earthquakes.
The Flood of Manu
india
India's flood: the first man is warned by a fish that grows to a mountain, builds an ark, and reseeds the world — a remnant story with an animal rescuer.
The Flood of Utnapishtim
iraq
The oldest complete flood apocalypse in world literature: the gods drown the earth, one man builds a boat, and the world is reset with a single family as its seed.
The Hopi Great Purification
usa
The world has been purified before: three worlds ended in corruption, and the fourth faces its Purification now — a cleansing that will remove the corrupt and prepare the fifth world.
The Land Without Evil
brazil
The end as exodus: the world ages and corrupts, the prophets sing it into motion, and the people walk toward an imperishable earth — the apocalypse you can outwalk.
The Nommo and the Word: the Dogon End
mali
The end as recollection: the Dogon cosmos is a word spoken by the creator, scattered by rebellion, and gathered again at the close — with the amphibious Nommo as the seed of what returns.
The Popol Vuh and the Failed Creations
guatemala
The K'iche' Maya account of creation as a series of failed endings: humanity is made from mud, then wood, then maize — and only the last attempt works.
The Sermon of the Seven Suns
india
The Buddha's physics of the end: seven suns appear one by one, drying the world, burning it, and washing it away — the kalpa's destruction told as a classroom demonstration.