"This story was already ancient when it was adapted for the biblical text—which is to say, it records a very old fear. Like all old fears, it has the uncanny feel of a vivid memory. It may be a memory of an actual flood in an actual Sumerian city, Shurrupal, ca 2800 B.C.E. In fact, it may be even older than that. Perhaps it’s a fear that lingers from our earliest memories as a species: that the waters from which we escaped will one day come back for us, reclaim us. This perhaps is why, in a later Greek version of the flood saga (Plato mentions it, and it was in pretty wide circulation in the classical Greek world), the goddess took pity on Deucalion and Pyrrha, and offered them some survivor therapy: walk forward, she said, and throw the bones of your mother behind you. Deucalion correctly interprets the oracle to mean that they should throw stones—i.e. the bones of their earth mother—behind them as they walk. These stones turn into people and, thus, humans reclaim earth. We post-Freudians can’t help but hear a developmental insight in this oracle: excavate the bones of your past, your trauma, but put them behind you, proceed forward. The water didn’t consume you, says the goddess, but do not let the traumatic memory of it stunt you, either."