You should read this great essay by Owen Barfield on the history of the word 'ruin'. He traces its use all through the history of poetry, from the Greeks/Romans through Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson etc. It's maybe only tangentially related to what you're on about, but I think tracing the meaning of words back this way to their origins is a good way of tapping into that universal memory, and the word itself is relevant to some sort of catastrophe
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
www.unz.com
This is how it starts.
"Schoolboys are taught to translate
the Latin verb 'ruo' by one of two words, 'rush' or 'fall.' It does in a sense mean both these things; yet to the imagination neither rendering alone is an adequate equivalent. There is, indeed, no equivalent, and it is only possible, from some familiarity with native contexts, to feel the word's full significance.
Nearly always it carries a large sense of swift, disastrous movement (eg; of a deluge of rain). The Greek xxx 'to flow,' and cognate words in other European languages, suggest that the old rumbling, guttural 'r,' which modern palates have so thinned and refined, may have been mouthed for the first time in inarticulate mimicry of
something swiftly and noisily rushing — a waterfall, perhaps, or a tumbling tree. When the forces of Nature are still untamed and strange, a rushing noise is often the prelude to disaster; the swiftest motion is a downward motion; things are always falling. Hence
it is not surprising that the stem from which the Latin language made 'ruo' should have come to convey a special and very lively notion of collapse.
When the substantive
ruina came to be formed, it contained this part only of the original notion of the verb; moreover, it could mean the thing fallen as well as the falling itself. But in Latin the four letters r-u-i-n never lost the power to suggest movement. They may have a concrete meaning; to some readers this may be all: '
La plupart des lecteurs, et meme des ecrivains, ne leur demandent qu'un sens.' But in point of fact the word has a soul, too, and its soul is in motion.
Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae,
says Horace; the world is still falling when the stanza ends..."
