In both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, mythology plays an important role. While the paganism of the Crakers, who deify Oryx and Crake, seems at odds with the God’s Gardeners’ monotheism, both groups can be linked by their belief in the waterless flood, an archetype that serves as an apocalypse for one group and an origin myth for another.
The flood, while a myth of end times for the God’s Gardeners, is for many cultures a myth that divides the past from the present. Some variation of this myth is present in the Mesopotamian, Hindu, Norse, Mesoamerican, and Greek cultures, as well as the bible. In Greek mythology, a flood sent by Zeus wiped out an early race of humans who the god viewed as being too militaristic. Only two people, Deucalion and Pyrrha, were left to repopulate the earth by making humans out of stones. This myth has relevance in the world of the MaddAddam trilogy.
In spite of Crake’s attempts to remove religion from the Crakers, they develop a form of paganism in which the key deities are Crake, their creator and spiritual father, and Oryx, the archetypal earth mother. Jimmy acts as a hierophant or religious leader, transforming the truth of what has happened into the stories that form the Crakers’ mythology. Jimmy describes to the Crakers the plague that killed most of humanity in aquatic terms: “Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the Chaos, and he poured it away” (Atwood 103). It is this pouring away that leaves the Crakers to repopulate the earth, just as the mythological flood left Deucalion and Pyrrha. And, like the flood in that myth, the flood Snowman describes in Oryx and Crake was sent by the gods. Jimmy accepts that the flood/plague was artificially created, but seems to justify the loss of lives, even blaming it on a chaotic human society where meat eating is rampant. Jimmy’s explanation of the flood relates to the prediction of the God’s Gardeners.
To the God’s Gardeners, the waterless flood is a prediction of the apocalypse, though not one without human survivors. The God’s Gardeners view the waterless flood as a repetition of the biblical flood, and like Noah (as well as Deucalion and Pyrrha), they have been forewarned. The God’s Gardeners belief in their own exceptionalism is in line with Jimmy’s explanation of the fall as being caused by the chaos of human lives, specifically the over-consumption of meat. The God’s Gardeners stock ararats, named for the mountain on which Noah’s ark supposedly landed, which they believe will allow them to survive the waterless flood. As we have seen, the “flood” was sent by Crake, a onetime ally of the God’s Gardeners. This link leaves us with more questions than answers. Did the Gardeners learn of the flood by the one who would cause it, or are they merely playing off of a mythological archetype? Did Jimmy know of the God’s Gardeners prediction, or is the language he uses to discuss the past with the Crakers just a coincidence? As the timelines of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood begin to converge, these questions may get their answers.
