Antediluvian age

The Antediluvian age appears in a 1994 text associated with Absurd not as a documented historical period, but as part of an elaborate origin myth: a primordial civilization is destroyed by a flood, its survivors shape later cultures, and ancestral memory may preserve traces of gods said to have existed before the catastrophe. The idea lends a remote, mythic past to the text’s claims about race, heritage, and Germanic identity.

An Imagined Prehistory

The account places the origin of the Indo-Germanic race in ancient Sumer, described as the first urban civilization. From there, it claims, the White Man spread across the earth and founded a Thulean super-civilization, also identified with Atlantis. That civilization was destroyed in the Antediluvian age. These claims belong to the text’s racial mythology; they are not presented here as established history.

The chronology gives the imagined past a two-part structure: an originating civilization, followed by destruction and dispersal. The flood does not end the story. Survivors are said to have influenced the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec civilizations of Central and South America, allowing the supposed legacy of Thule to persist beyond its own destruction. The Antediluvian age thus functions as a hinge between a lost origin and later cultures the text seeks to connect to it.

Ancestry, Landscape, and Identity

The surrounding argument makes ancestry more than a claim about descent. It presents folk identity as arising from the conjunction of blood and landscape, which together shape culture, religion, and civilization. Within that framework, the imagined pre-flood past supplies a deep timeline for claims of kinship and inherited distinction: modern identity is portrayed as the continuation of an ancient inheritance rather than as a recent formation.

This use of prehistory also gives the account a political charge. The text links racial descent to civilizational achievement and treats Germanic heritage as a source of honor and virtue. The Antediluvian age is therefore not simply a setting for a flood story. It helps turn an asserted ancestry into a hierarchy of belonging, while giving that hierarchy the apparent weight of primordial time.

Myth as Inherited Memory

The text offers a speculative explanation for how such a past might remain present. In the accompanying account of Germanic mythology, DNA is proposed as the seat of a collective subconscious that shelters enduring archetypes; an alternative possibility is an eternal force-field that houses those archetypes and projects them into human souls. Deities are consequently treated less as supernatural beings than as archetypal ideals.

Against this background, the suggestion that mythology may preserve a shadowy memory of antediluvian times gives the old gods a double status: they are both inherited symbols and possible traces of a world that supposedly existed before the flood. Odin is described as a ruler and as a figure associated with occult knowledge and the Wild Hunt. The text’s speculation does not establish that the gods existed in that lost age; it reveals how the proposed age is used to make myth feel like ancestral recollection.

Place in the Book’s Account of Black Metal

The book elsewhere describes Bathory’s turn from early Satanic imagery toward heathen mythology as an influential development for later Black Metal, with ancestral archetypes becoming important to the genre. The Antediluvian narrative belongs to a more expansive and explicitly ideological use of the past: it places mythic ancestry within a supposed history of racial origins, a vanished civilization, and cultural transmission after catastrophe.

Its significance lies in that combination of loss and continuity. The flood destroys the imagined center, but the account preserves its legacy through survivors, descendants, landscape, and archetypal memory. The Antediluvian age thereby offers a mythic explanation for why a modern movement might claim ancient roots, without supplying historical evidence for the continuity it asserts.