Jehovah and the flood warners in The Romance of Atlantis

In The Romance of Atlantis by Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn (Fawcett Crest, 1975), a band of foreigners preaches one God. They call him Jehovah. They say he will flood the world. At the end of the book they are the only people who knew it was coming, and they have a ship ready. This is a story in a novel. It is not a historical record.

I reviewed the whole book in The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations. This page follows only these people and the flood. The page numbers are the printed pages of the Fawcett Crest edition. The quotes are short excerpts for review and study, and each one has its page. Near the end I compare the story with other warners and ark-builders on this website.

The name Jehovah is spoken only a few times. The people who worship him are in the book from the middle to the last page. The novel gives them no nation, no city and no personal name.

Who they are

On page 50 a strange band has recently appeared in Lamora, the capital. Nobody knows who they are or where they came from. The narrator marks them by their looks.

They were dark men with hungry black eyes and large aquiline noses so unlike the fair, regular features of the Atlanteans.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 50

This is the book’s way of marking them as outsiders. It is a physical stereotype, and the author repeats it. Later they are “fierce, dark-eyed men with barbaric manners”, and at the landing they are “black-bearded prophets of doom”. I report this because it is in the text. I do not share it.

Atlantis has a standing rule that peaceful foreigners may live in the city and nobody asks questions. This group becomes a problem because they are openly impious. They will not pay tribute to the goddess Sati. They never go into the temples. They do not keep her holidays. They preach their own faith to anyone who will listen.

Mahius, Lazar’s first minister, says they publicly declare that they oppose conflict and dissension. The narrator also says they talk “disturbingly about freedom”. That sentence stands next to the fact that about one in four people in Lamora is a slave. The book does not quote a sermon that asks for the slaves to be freed. It puts the two things side by side and lets the reader connect them.

Salustra, the empress, gives her rule for foreign cults on page 51.

Atlantis has always granted religious sanctuary, provided the religionists do not meddle with affairs of state, blaspheme Sati, or cause public disturbance.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 51

At first she thinks they are harmless, with one exception. She does not like the idea of an all-powerful God.

New religions are poison in the bloodstream of an old nation. They cause division and lay authority open to attack.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 51

Her second objection is moral, and it is her own, not a point of law. The strangers call worldly pleasure sinful. She answers that pleasure of any kind is the only thing that makes this world bearable.

What they teach: the first report

Before the God has a name, Mahius reports the creed on page 50. He says they declare there is only one God, and that He is not Sati.

They declare Him just, virtuous, jealous, all-powerful when He wills; that He hates idols, intemperance, incontinence and pleasure of a worldly kind.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 50

Set against Sati, every clause is a reversal. Sati is one goddess in a family. She has many earthly lovers, and her children are Loti, Mayhita, Detria, Parenalia, Denia and Iberia. The pontiff is always a woman. The state cult is kept by rulers who laugh at it. The new God has no pantheon, no mistress and no use for the pleasures the capital is built on.

“Jealous” here means that he will not share worship. “All-powerful when He wills” is Mahius’s phrase. I think it worries Salustra more than the ban on pleasure does. A God who can act when he chooses is a rival to the empress.

The day they are named

On pages 206 to 208 the sea has already risen once and fallen back. The mist is still on the city. It is the first day of the National Games. Salustra tells Signar, as morning gossip, that she judged “a most extraordinary case”.

She repeats her rule. She grants freedom of worship, and she asks only that new religions cause no disturbance and seek no converts. This band has broken the second half. They have been preaching a wrath to come. Then she gives him the name, and the flood.

They declare that their God, whom they name Jehovah, is weary of the sins of the world and intends to submerge all creation in a vast flood and wipe mankind from the face of the earth.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 206

The next sentence in the book adds a condition. It says that “his hand may be stayed by proper repentance”. So the flood is a threat that people can avoid. She would laugh, she says, except that her own people already have old prophecies of the sea swallowing Atlantis. The strangers remind them of those prophecies, so the people listen, and some convert.

Signar asks for the tenets. Her list is longer than Mahius’s. Most of it is the same: one God, a just and loving father, all-seeing and wise. She jokes that this God has no mistresses, which is aimed at Sati.

And strange to relate, this God hath no mistresses. A stern and austere God, is it not?

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 207

She agrees with them on one point. He is angry at this generation for idolatry and superstition. She does not agree that he is an enemy of joy, feasting and pleasure. She even says she would like to argue him out of it.

Signar is amazed that anyone joins “such a spoilsport God”. She says the preachers appeal to fear. He asks if Jehovah is young and beautiful. She says she gathers that he is old and bearded and ugly, and then she takes it back.

Many of them are old and bearded and ugly, and man has a tendency to create His god in his own image.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 207

Since the sea rose a few nights ago, she says, the strangers are “more obnoxious than ever”. They call the rise a warning, and the people are listening. She has “almost a mind” to turn the high priestess Jupia on them. Jupia is sitting behind the royal pair as this is said.

Then comes the court scene. Several of the strangers were arrested and brought to her. They were not afraid, though they expected to die. They said they had been sent from a distant place, which they would not name, “to warn mankind that their Creator’s wrath was about to fall upon them”. She talked with their leader, a black-bearded man with fierce eyes. She told him that life holds only a few scattered grains of pleasure. He answered with a distinction.

Happiness and pleasure are not one and the same. Happiness is the deep peace in the heart of him who knoweth God's will.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 208

He goes on to say that pleasure is the drug of the man who has fled God. Salustra smiled in court. To Signar she admits the smile was a lie.

No man seeks pleasure as assiduously as the unhappy man. … Even so, I shrink at the austerity of the life which these men advocate.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 208

That is the limit of her conversion. She believes the speaker, and she does not want his life. Jupia says it is strange to hear her speak of the gods. Salustra replies that the gods should be ministers of art and beauty, or be abolished.

The book never says what sentence she gave. The scene breaks off. A shadow like a meteor crosses the arena, and the games go on. The strangers are still alive weeks later, so she did not have them killed that morning. She also did not stop them preaching. Setting Jupia on them stays a thought, not an order.

The same afternoon, a different god

The play in the arena that afternoon is not about Jehovah. I keep it next to him because it is Atlantis telling itself the same kind of story with other names. A righteous man, Ionto, lives in a sinful city. The temples are empty. A god appears as a radiant youth and says the city will be destroyed. Ionto begs. The god will spare the city if Ionto builds an altar in the center and sacrifices his daughter. He finds her with a lover and wonders if the gods will accept an impure offering. The crowd loves that turn.

Jehovah’s version, told the same day, asks for repentance and does not ask for the daughter. Sati’s version, played for the mob, asks for blood and then makes a dirty joke of it. Salustra has just said the gods should be ministers of art and beauty or be abolished. The stage answers her with the older bargain.

The other “one God”

Do not mix the strangers’ God with the God of Zetan. At the College of Total Knowledge, on page 163, the philosopher Zetan teaches a pantheism. Pantheism is the view that God and the universe are one thing. In Zetan’s teaching there is only one God, and nothing else. God and matter are one entity that is not yet perfect. Time and space are illusions. Upheavals in nature and in human affairs are God trying something, failing, and erasing the attempt, “and us with it”.

That God is an impersonal experiment. He is not jealous. He has no will that a man can hear in the evening, and he sends no messengers to build a ship. Jupia hates Zetan because he steals her worshippers. Salustra prefers his light to Jupia’s fear. A scientist in the next room hopes to find out what the Creator is, and calls that search his religion. That is also the college, not the bearded company.

She starts to believe the warning

On page 233 Salustra is near the end of her power. The sky is gray, the air sickens her, and the electricity is dead. She tells Mahius where she thinks the ruin comes from.

Signar's coming is another spoke in Atlantis' ruin, brought on, as those bearded fanatics have warned, by her own lack of moral purpose.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 233

She says that Atlantis has done everything noble and everything rotten. Its people would rather be fed than work. “They are not worth saving”, she says, “and this the gods must surely know as they shake the earth.”

Mahius still prefers a physical cause. He thinks Signar’s reckless use of the atom-splitter explains the elements. An atom-splitter is the novel’s name for an atomic weapon. She allows that all of it may serve an inscrutable destiny. In her mouth the bearded men are no longer a nuisance. They named the cause she has come to accept: the empire deserves what is coming. She still says “the gods”, in the plural. She has not joined their worship. She has accepted their sentence on Atlantis.

The flood, in their language

On page 255 she is carried through a mob and a downpour, thrown into a small boat, and lifted onto a ship. She thinks she is dying. Before she goes under, a voice speaks, and the words are from Genesis, not from an Atlantean oracle.

The fountains of the great deep were all broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 255

The voice goes on in the words of Genesis. The highest hills are covered, and the water stands fifteen cubits above the mountains. A cubit is an old unit of length, about the length of a forearm. Then the voice fades and she sleeps.

When she wakes, Siton, Signar’s general, tells her that forty days have passed. She is on Signar’s flagship, the Postia, the only ship of his fleet still afloat. Her half-sister Tyrhia is among the millions gone. Signar is alive. Out of the window there is only water.

Siton tells the story of the sinking on pages 257 to 259. They saw Salustra arrested. Signar was drugged and barely conscious. They told him a great flood was about to fall on the city, and he laughed. They carried him to the harbor, called their own people, and loaded goods and wine. They did not load water, because the rain itself would be water. Then the land heaved, breathed and sank without a sound. Where Lamora stood there was a vast whirlpool. A sulfurous breath came off Mount Atla. Millions died without a cry. For many days the ship took leaks and nearly capsized. An icy cold spread. The provisions held, and the lower rooms stayed dry.

After forty days and forty nights of rain, the sun shone forth on a universe of water.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 259

A sextant is an instrument for finding the ship’s position from the sun and stars. By their sextants, Atlantis and Althrustri lie under that water. Even the frozen tundra of the north has been gouged by a huge glacier. On the morning of the forty-second day they see another ship.

Their ship

On pages 259 to 260 the second vessel is wallowing in the sea like a wounded porpoise. Its decks are crammed with half-drowned people, and it has provisions. The people aboard are the company that lived in Lamora and preached one God, whom they name Jehovah, and his retribution. They are calm.

They told us that they had known of the coming destruction for many years and that on the appointed day, which was revealed to them in a vision, they had gathered their few converts about them, in pairs and sevens

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 260 (first part of the sentence)

The sentence goes on. They took their converts to a vessel they had already prepared, with all the animals and birds they could gather. Read this against Genesis, which the novel has just quoted. In Genesis, Noah is told to bring clean animals in sevens and the others in pairs. The strangers use both numbers in one phrase, “pairs and sevens”, and they add the birds. They had years of warning, not forty days of frantic building. A vision named the day. The ship was ready before the rain.

They are sure that God has not forgotten them. They are surprised that their God also spared the Postia. They still believe he will lead both ships to a safe harbor. A few of them come aboard Signar’s ship to teach the sailors the worship of “their fearsome God”. Siton gives the verdict of the Atlanteans and Althrustrians who have to listen.

We did not like Him, He was too angry.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 260

One more craft appears, once. The moon comes out in a purplish sky. On the horizon is an oddly shaped vessel, “more like a swiftly moving cloud than a ship”. The Postia chases it and cannot close the gap. The strangers are thrilled.

"Hail, beloved of God!" they cried, kneeling upon our decks and extending solemn hands to the speeding craft.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), pp. 260-261

They say the Postia will not overtake it, and they are right. It vanishes as suddenly as it came. The novel does not name that ship, and it does not put Noah on it. It shows only that the Jehovah worshippers treat it as a vessel God loves, moving under a power their own ship cannot match. Salustra hears the whole report, looks at the floor and smiles. She says, “It seems that there is a God!”

Siton then reports the course.

We are sailing east, as these disciples of God have suggested.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), pp. 260-261

After the water

On page 261 about a hundred men, women and children, what is left of two empires, sit on rugs and cushions on the upper deck. They rise and bow to her. They have already turned from the past. They listen to the bearded strangers and look toward a future they cannot yet see. Signar, gaunt and still weak, tells her these few are their empire.

On page 262 she refuses the word.

They are thy empire. I long only for peace, to know more of this God the strangers talk about.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 262

He tells her that Tyrhia, Erato, Creto, Mahius and Brittulia are dead. She tells him she spared his life because she loves him. That night they have their first untroubled sleep.

In the morning the two doves that the strangers brought aboard are overdue.

Two doves brought on ship by the strangers had been released and were now overdue. The passengers scanned the sky hopefully.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), pp. 261-263

A sailor shouts that there is land. The company crowds the rail, Atlanteans and Althrustrians together. The novel does not say that the doves came back with a leaf. It says they were expected, they were late, and then a man saw the shore. The Noah gesture is there. The olive branch is not.

On page 263 the smell of earth reaches them. Mountains show like blue and white mist, and there is a wall of forest, the smell of flowers, and a virgin silence. People fall on their knees. Some stay kneeling to thank their one God.

These were the black-bearded prophets of doom, and their prayers were said in an alien tongue to their jealous Jehovah.

Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (1975), p. 263

Signar calls the shore a new empire. Salustra calls it a new world, where they can live again and start another generation. She ends with the words “for this we have been brought from the other side of the flood”. “Brought” is the theological verb. She does not say that she sailed out by her own wisdom. The strangers knew the day, and she was carried.

How the book frames them

An epigraph stands alone on its page before the story. It is Hebrews 11:16, in the King James wording: they desire a better country. Hebrews 11 is also the chapter that names Noah, warned of things not yet seen, building an ark. The novel does not quote that part. In my reading, Salustra’s last line, “a new world” instead of “a new empire”, is the novel’s earthly version of the better country. She wants to know their God. She does not yet pray in their language. On the beach, the people who pray are the black-bearded company, and the God they name is still the jealous one.

Gathered in one place, the book gives this:

• They are foreigners of unknown origin, dark, aquiline and often bearded, and openly unwilling to honor Sati.
• Their God is one, named Jehovah. He is a father, just, loving, merciful, wise, all-seeing, all-powerful and jealous. He has no mistresses and no idols. He hates intemperance, incontinence and worldly pleasure.
• He wants people righteous, and then at peace for ever. He is weary of the sins of the world.
• He warns. He lets repentance stay his hand. Then he floods the world when the warning is wasted.
• A black-bearded leader separates happiness, which is peace in God’s will and clean work, from pleasure, which is the drug of flight from God.
• They have known about the destruction for years. A vision names the day. They take their few converts aboard in pairs and sevens, with animals and birds, on a ship prepared in advance.
• They are surprised that the Postia was spared. The dislike is mutual. A few come aboard to teach a God the sailors find too angry.
• They hail a third, uncatchable ship as beloved of God. They set the course east. They release two doves.
• On the new shore they pray in a language no one else speaks.
• Salustra began by calling them poison in the blood of an old nation. She ends by wanting peace and a knowledge of their God, and by refusing to found a second Atlantis on the beach they led her to.

Other warners and ark-builders on this website

The novel’s story has many relatives on this site. These are six of them. I quote each page as it stands on the site, and I add one line of context.

Utnapishtim and the secret warning. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh the god Ea warns one man in secret. The novel’s warning is the opposite: it is shouted in the streets of the capital. The bird test is a close relative of the doves. This is the quote on my page Flood Stories from Around the World, from George Smith’s 1873 translation of the tablet. I give the full text of that translation in The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.

I sent forth a dove, and it left.

Utnapishtim, in George Smith's translation, "The Chaldean Account of the Deluge" (1873), as quoted on Flood Stories from Around the World

Noah in Genesis. On the same Flood Stories page I note that the clean animals come aboard in sevens. I also quote how the dove comes back in Genesis. The novel’s doves do not come back with anything. For the Bible chapter, see Flood Stories from Around the World.

in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf

Genesis 8:11, World English Bible, as quoted on Flood Stories from Around the World

Manu and the fish. The warning in the Indian story comes from an animal that Manu rescued. The page Who Was Vaivasvata Manu? covers it. The line below is from Julius Eggeling’s translation, as I quote it on the Flood Stories page.

Rear me, I will save thee!

The fish to Manu, Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1.1, trans. J. Eggeling (1882), as quoted on Flood Stories from Around the World

Nuh in the Quran. Here the warner speaks to the whole people, as the strangers do in Lamora, and for a long time. My page We sent Nuh to his people lists the surahs. A second page asks whether Noah knew about the flood long before it came, which is close to the strangers who had “known of the coming destruction for many years”.

"Indeed, We sent Nuh to his people, [saying], 'Warn your people before there comes to them a painful punishment.'"

Surah Nuh (71:1), as quoted on the page about Prophet Nuh in the Quran

Aph and the Faithists in Oahspe. The Oahspe tells of a flood in the arc of Noe. Its God is named Jehovih. I keep that name apart from the novel’s Jehovah, and I do not say they are the same. The Oahspe God sends the etherean God Aph to deliver the earth, and the Faithists are told to prepare an “arc”. See Noe (I’hin Prophet) and the Book of Aph, Son of Jehovih.

Go you, My Son, deliver the earth.

The voice of Jehovih to Aph, Book of Aph, Son of Jehovih (Oahspe), as on this site

Warned Atlanteans who escaped. On The Fall of Atlantis I quote the Theosophist Arthur E. Powell, who writes about a warning given in Atlantis. In his account the kings lead the people away in vimanas, which the page calls aeroplanes, not on a ship. The Oera Linda Book, on The Oera Linda Book Reviewed, tells the sinking of its own Atland. In the passage I quote there is no warning and no ship. Here are the two lines.

The servants of the Great Four warned their people, and many escaped.

Arthur E. Powell, as quoted on The Fall of Atlantis

Aldland, called by the seafaring people, Atland, disappeared, and the wild waves rose so high over hill and dale that everything was buried in the sea.

The Oera Linda Book, trans. W. R. Sandbach, p. 71, as quoted on The Oera Linda Book Reviewed

My page Atlantean Wars says, in my own summary, that warnings were given before the last destruction and that many from the Law of One group escaped or kept records. The novel’s strangers are a similar idea in a different form. I did not check whether Caldwell and Stearn knew these other sources.

What the novel adds

I compare the novel only with the stories above. I did not look for every flood story on this site.

• A public warning. In the Mesopotamian stories on this site the warning goes to one person, often in secret. In the novel a whole band preaches it in the capital, is arrested, and is heard by the empress. The Quran account is closer, because Nuh also speaks to his people.
• A way out through repentance. The novel’s God can have his hand stayed by proper repentance. I did not find that offer in the other accounts I quote here. It makes the flood a threat that can be avoided, and the book says it was wasted.
• Pairs and sevens. The strangers join the two numbers of Genesis in one phrase, and they add birds. This is the novel’s clearest echo of the Bible, and it comes right after the book quotes Genesis in a voice.
• A day given in a vision. The day is shown to them. The ship has been ready for years.
• A ship that was ready in advance. In the other stories the hero builds when told. Here the strangers had known for many years.
• An east course. The strangers suggest sailing east. In my page on the flood stories, Ziusudra is settled in Dilmun, a paradise land in the east. I do not claim a link. It is a small parallel.
• Doves without an olive branch. The Noah gesture is there, and the leaf is not.
• A heroine who is carried. Salustra does not build or choose. She is taken aboard, and she calls it being brought. That is the novel’s own theme, and I find no direct match for it on this site.

Sources

• Taylor Caldwell with Jess Stearn, The Romance of Atlantis (Fawcett Crest, 1975), pages 50 and 51, 163, 206 to 208, 233, 255 to 263, and the epigraph. Quotes are short excerpts for review and study.
• My review of the novel.
• On this site: Flood Stories from Around the World, The Chaldean Account of the Deluge, Who Was Vaivasvata Manu?, Prophet Nuh in the Quran, Noe (I’hin Prophet), Book of Aph, Son of Jehovih, The Fall of Atlantis, The Oera Linda Book Reviewed and Atlantean Wars.

Related

1. The Romance of Atlantis: A Review, with Notes on Customs, Names, and Locations: the novel in full.
2. Flood Stories from Around the World: the flood stories I compare here.
3. Atlantis in the Holy Bible: Genesis and the Flood.
4. Temple Beautiful: the rejuvenation chamber of the same novel, at the base of Mount Atla.
5. The Fall of Atlantis: misuse of power and abuse of advanced technologies.