I am about to write of loathly dragons, “gorgons and hydras and chimæras dire.” Every one knows what a dragon looks like, though probably most people could not give a minute description of the beast. A number of quite distinct creatures, some living on land, some in sea, are spoken of in the Bible by a word which is translated as “dragon.” The ancient Welsh chieftains, like many fighting princes of old days, bore a “dragon” on their banners, and were themselves called “dragons” (Pen-dragon), and when a knight slew such a chieftain fabulous stories grew up as to his combat with and slaughter of a “dragon.”
The complete, legitimate dragon of the present day is the dragon of heraldry, which is maintained in proper form and with authorised attributes by the Heralds’ College. I have a drawing of this “official” beast before me (Fig. 16). He is represented as of large size, but whether theoretically the heralds of to-day consider him to be as large as a lion or ten times as long and tall I do not know. His body is lizard-like, and covered with scales resembling those of some lizards (unlike a crocodile in this respect). His head is not unlike that of a crocodile, excepting that he has a short, sharp horn on his nose, and a beard on his chin, and also a pair of large pointed ears which no living reptile possesses. His mouth is open, showing teeth like those of a crocodile, and from it issues a remarkable tongue, terminating in an arrow-head-shaped weapon (presumably a “sting”) unlike anything known in any living animal. His tail is very long and snake-like (an important fact when we come to consider his ancestry), and is thrown into coils. It terminates in an arrow-head-shaped structure like that of the tongue, quite unlike anything known in any real animal. He has four powerful limbs, which are not like those of a lizard or a crocodile. They resemble those of an eagle, and have grasping toes and claws, three directed forward and one backward. In addition, he has a pair of wings, which are leathery, and supported by several parallel bars, a structure which gives the wings a remote resemblance to those of a bat. The wing is quite unlike that of a pterodactyle (the great extinct flying lizard), and has no resemblance whatever to that of a bird, which is, of course, formed by separate quill feathers set in a row on the bones of the fore-arm and hand. The wings are always represented (even in illegitimate and Oriental dragons) as much too small to carry the dragon in flight. The dragon has, further, a crest of separate triangular plates set in a row along the mid-line of his back, extending from his head to the end of his tail. Some lizards (but not crocodiles) have such a crest. The most like it is that of the New Zealand lizard, called the Sphenodon.
Fig. 16.—The heraldic dragon: observe the bat-like wings, the ears, the horned nose, the beard, the arrow-like tongue and tail-piece, the scaly body, the dorsal crest, the snake-like tail with its unnatural arrow-like termination.
Such is the creature called “the” dragon. But heraldry recognises some other terrible beasts allied to the dragon; in fact, what zoologists would call “allied species.” The griffin, for instance (Fig. 17), is a four-legged beast like the dragon, but has the beak and wings and forefeet of an eagle, and the hind-legs and tail of a lion. The heraldic hydra is a dragon, such as I have above described, but with seven heads and necks. The ancient Greek representation of the hydra destroyed by Hercules (as painted on vases) was, on the contrary, based upon the octopus, or eight-armed cuttle-fish, each arm carrying a snake-like head (Fig. 18). The wyvern is an important variety of the dragon tribe, well known to heralds, but not to be seen every day. It so far conforms to natural laws that it has only two legs, the fore-limbs being the wings (Fig. 19). The true dragon and the griffin, like the angel of ecclesiastical art, have actually six limbs—namely, a pair of fore-legs or arms, a pair of hind-legs, and, in addition, a pair of wings. Occasionally an artist (even in ancient Egyptian works of art) has attempted to avoid this redundance of limbs by representing an angel as having the arms themselves provided with an expanse of quill feathers. This is certainly a less extraordinary arrangement than the outgrowth of wings (which in birds, bats, and pterodactyles actually are the modified arms or fore-limbs), as an extra pair of limbs rooted in the back. The wyvern and the cockatrice and the basilisk (Fig. 20) (which, like the Gorgon Medusa, can strike a man dead by the mere glance of the eye) are remarkable for conforming to the invariable vertebrate standard of no more than two pairs of limbs, whether legs, wings, or fins. The name “lind-worm” is given to a wyvern without wings (hence the Linton Worm and the Laidley Worm of Lambton), and appears in various heraldic devices and in legendary art; whilst in the arms of the Visconti of Milan we climb down to a quite simple serpent-like creature without legs or wings, known as the “guivre.”
Fig. 20.—The heraldic basilisk, also called the Amphysian Cockatrice. Observe the second head at the end of its tail—a feature due to perversion of the observation that there are some snake-like creatures (Amphisbena) with so simple a head that it is at first sight difficult to say which end of the creature is the head and which is the tail.
Without looking further into the strange and fantastic catalogue of imaginary monsters, one must recognise that it is a matter of great interest to trace the origin of these marvellous creations of human fancy, and the way in which they have first of all been brought into pictorial existence, and then variously modified and finally stereotyped and maintained by tradition and art. It has not infrequently been suggested, since geologists made us acquainted with the bones of huge and strange-looking fossil reptiles dug from ancient rocks, that the tradition of “the dragon” is really a survival of the actual knowledge and experience of these extinct monsters on the part of “long-ago races of men.” It is a curious fact, mentioned by a well-known writer, Mrs. Jameson, that the bones of a great fossil reptile were preserved and exhibited at Aix in France as the bones of the dragon slain by St. Michael, just as the bones of a whale are shown as those of the mythical Dun-cow of Warwick in that city.
There are three very good reasons for not entertaining the suggestion that the tradition of the dragon and similar beasts is due to human co-existence with the great reptiles of the past. The first is that the age of the rocks known as cretaceous and jurassic (or oölitic), in which are found the more or less complete skeletons of the great saurians—many bigger in the body than elephants, and with huge tails in addition, iguanodon, megalosaurus, diplodocus, as well as the winged pterodactyles (see Plate II., where a representation is given of what we know as to the form and bearing of two species of pterodactyle) and a vast series of such creatures—is so enormously remote that not only man but all the hairy warm-blooded animals like him, did not come into existence until many millions of years after these rocks had been deposited by water and the great reptiles buried in them had become extinct. The cave-men of the Pleistocene period are modern, even close to us, as compared with the age when the great saurians flourished. That was just before the time when our chalk-cliffs were being formed as a slowly growing sediment on the floor of a deep sea. No accurate measure of the time which has elapsed since then is possible, but we find that about 200 ft. thickness of deposit has been accumulated since the date of the earliest human remains known to us—whilst over 5000 ft. have accumulated since the chalk began to be deposited, and the great saurians ceased to exist. If we reckon, in accordance with the most moderate estimate, a quarter of a million years for the upper 200 ft. of deposit or human period (Pleistocene), we must suppose that twenty or thirty times as long a period has elapsed to allow time for the deposit of the 5000 ft. of sand and rock since the great saurians ceased to exist. This would be some six or seven million years—a long while for tradition to run, even supposing man existed all that time, which he did not. And the probability is that this estimate of the time is far too small: a hundred million years is nearer the truth.
PLATE II
REAL DRAGONS
THE EXTINCT FLYING REPTILES KNOWN AS PTERODACTYLES. THEIR BONES AND WING
MEMBRANES ARE PRESERVED IN THE OOLITIC ROCKS. SOME MEASURED EIGHTEEN
FEET ACROSS THE EXPANDED WINGS.
From “Extinct Animals,” by Sir Ray Lankester. (Constable & Co.)
Suppose that man came into existence as an intelligent creature, capable of handing on a tradition, as much as half a million or even a million years before the date of the remains of the earliest cave-men discovered in Europe, we yet get no long way down the avenue of past time. Man would still be separated by millions of years and long ages of change and development of the forms of animal life on the earth’s surface, from the period of the great reptiles or saurians who flourished before the chalk was deposited. And there is good evidence that none of those great saurians survived the date of the chalk. They died out and their place was taken by the earliest ancestors of elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, cattle, lions, and monkeys, from which in the course of ages the animals we know by those names were developed, whilst very late in the history man was produced. The reptiles continued as small, furtive creatures—the lizards and a few biggish snakes and crocodiles—but no descendants of “the great Dinosaurs” survived.
Another reason against the supposed survival of a real tradition of dragons is that, even in regard to much later—immensely later—creatures, such as the mammoth or hairy elephant, which we know was contemporary with man, there is no real tradition. The natives of the sub-arctic regions in which the skeletons and whole carcases of the mammoth are found in a frozen state, and from whence many hundreds of tusks of the mammoth have been since the earliest times yearly exported and used in Europe as ivory, have no “tradition” of these creatures. They have fanciful stories about the ghosts of the mammoths, but they call their tusks “horns,” and have no legends of the monster as a living thing. The use of mammoth’s ivory in Northern Europe dates back for a thousand years historically, and probably has never ceased since the days of the cave-men. Three years ago I examined the richly carved drinking horn of a Scandinavian hero, dating from the tenth century, and preserved amongst the treasures of York Minster, and I have little doubt that it is fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth.
A third reason for rejecting any connection of the dragon with a real reminiscence of the great extinct saurians is that its origin and its gradual building up in human fancy can be traced in the same way as that of many other fanciful and legendary creatures by reference to the regular operation of the imagination in successive ages of mankind. All races of men have imagined monsters by combining into one several parts of different animals. The centaur of the Greeks is a blend of man and horse, the great “divine” chimera of the Greeks was a two-headed blend of lion and goat, and any such mixed creature is technically called nowadays “a chimera”. The dragon is classed by heralds as a chimera. Sometimes one of these imaginary beasts has its origin in a terrible or weird animal, which really exists in some distant land, and is celebrated or even worshipped by the inhabitants of that distant land, whose descriptions of it are carried in a distorted and exaggerated form to regions where it does not exist.
Fig. 21.—The Chinese Imperial Dragon, from a drawing on a tile of the old Imperial Palace of Nankin. It has five claws. No one outside the Imperial service may use it, under penalty of death. Ordinary people have to be content with a four-clawed dragon. Compare this with the European heraldic dragon, Fig. 16.
Fig. 22.—A flying snake with two pairs of wings—a “fabulous” creature thus drawn in an ancient Chinese work, the “Shan Hai King.” This book dates from about 350 A.D., but probably is based on records of a thousand years’ earlier date.
The dragon appears to be nothing more nor less in its origin than one of the great snakes (pythons), often 25 ft. in length, which inhabit tropical India and Africa. Its dangerous character and terrible appearance and movement impressed primitive mankind, and traditions of it have passed with migrating races both to the East and to the West, so that we find the mythical dragon in ancient China and in Japan, no less than in Egypt and in Greece. It retains its snake-like body and tail, especially in the Chinese and Japanese representations (Figs. 21 and 22); but in both East and West, legs and wings have been gradually added to it for the purpose of making it more terrible and expressing some of its direful qualities. Chinese traditions indicate the mountains of Central Asia as the home of the dragon, whilst the ancient Greeks considered it to have come from the East. As a matter of fact, the Greek word “drakon” actually meant plainly and simply a large snake, and is so used by Aristotle and other writers. There is a beautiful Greek vase-painting (Fig. 23) showing the dragon which guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides as nothing more than a gigantic snake (without legs or wings), coiled round the trunk of the tree on which the apples are growing (like the later pictures of the serpent on the apple tree in the Garden of Eden), whilst the ladylike Hesperides are politely welcoming the robust Hercules to their garden.
Fig. 23.—The dragon guarding the tree in the garden of the Hesperides on which grew the golden apples, in quest of which, according to Greek legend, the hero Hercules went. The drawing is copied from an ancient Greek vase, and the original includes figures of the Hesperides and of Hercules, not reproduced here.
The worship and propitiation of the serpent is an immensely old form of religion (antecedent to Judaism), and exists, or has existed, in both the old world and the new. The Egyptians revered a great serpent-god called “Ha-her,” or “great Lord of fear and terror”; to him the wicked were handed over after death to be bitten and tortured. The evil spirit in the Scandinavian mythology was a huge snake—and the connection, not to say confusion, of the terrible snake with the dragon on the part of the early Christians is shown by the words in Revelation xx. 1, 2, “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan.” The mediæval devil with goat’s feet retained the dragon’s tail with its curious triangular termination.
To the Greeks and Romans snakes were not such very terrible creatures, since the kinds found in South Europe are small and harmless—only the viper being poisonous—and they regarded the serpent as a beneficent creature, the familiar of Esculapius the god of medicine, companion of the household gods (the Lares), and guardian of sacred places, tombs, and concealed treasure (Fig. 27). The snake was the special earth-god, subterranean in habit, cunning, subtle, and gifted with powers of divination. The conception of the serpent as an avenging monster kept continually thrusting itself from the East into the popular mythology of the Greeks, and finally led to the building up of the dragon as a winged and clawed creature distinct from the harmless but cunning snake familiar to them. Even in India there arose a sort of double attitude towards the snake (as is not uncommon in regard to deities). On the one hand he was regarded as all that was terrible, destructive, and evil, and on the other as amiable, kindly, and wise. The services of the beautiful rat-snake in destroying house rats rendered him and his kind welcome and valued guests. In Egypt we find representations of small winged snakes without legs, and the ancient traveller, Herodotus, believed that they represented real creatures, as did the Roman naturalist, Pliny. Very probably the belief in winged snakes is due to the similarity of the snake and the eel in general form, since the paired fins of the eel close to the head (see Figs. 24 and 25) correspond in position with the wings shown in the Egyptian drawings of winged serpents. The particular form of winged snake pictured on Egyptian monuments (see Figs. 26, 27) appears to me to be a realisation of stories and fancies based on real experience of the locust. It was the terrible and destructive locust of which Herodotus tells—calling it “a winged serpent.” The Egyptian pictures of winged serpents have wings resembling those of an insect (see Figs. 26 and 27), and sometimes they are represented with one and sometimes with two pairs.
Fig. 24.—A votive tablet (ancient Rome) showing what is meant for a snake, but has been “improved” by the addition of fins like those of the eel.
Fig. 25.—Ancient Roman painting of a so-called marine serpent—really an eel-like fish—inaccurately represented. The fins show how, from such pictures, the belief in winged serpents might take its origin.
Aristotle says that, as a matter of common report in his time, there were winged serpents in Africa. Herodotus, on the contrary, says there were none except in Arabia, and he went across the Red Sea from the city of Bats in order to see them. He did not, however, succeed in doing so, though he says he saw their dead bodies and bones. He says that they hang about the trees in vast numbers, are of small size and varied colour, and that they are kept in check by the bird known as the Ibis, which on that account is held sacred, since they increase so rapidly that unless devoured they would render it impossible for man to maintain himself on the earth. They invade Egypt in swarms, flying across the Red Sea. All this agrees with my suggestion that the winged “serpents” heard of by Herodotus were really locusts; and the creature drawn in Fig. 27 may well be a locust transformed by fancy into a winged snake.
Fig. 27.—Two-winged serpent, symbolic of the goddess Eileithya, from a drawing on an Egyptian temple.
It would be a very interesting but a lengthy task to trace out the origin and history of the various traditional monsters, such as the basilisk, the gorgon, the cockatrice, the salamander, and the epimacus, which have come into European legend and belief, and to give some account of the special deadly qualities of each. St. Michael and St. George slaughtering each his dragon and rescuing a lovely maiden from its clutches are only appropriations by the new religion of the similar deeds ascribed to Greek heroes, such as Hercules, Bellerophon, and Perseus. Often a belief in the existence of a monster has arisen by a misunderstanding, on the part of a credulous people, of a drawing or carving showing a strange mixture of the leading characteristics of different animals, which was meant by the man who made it to be only symbolic of a combination of qualities. Just as the Latins and mediæval people credulously accepted Greek symbolic monsters as real, and transmuted Greek heroes into Christian saints, so were the Greeks themselves deluded by strange carvings and blood-curdling legends which reached them at various dates from mysterious Asia into a belief in the actual existence of a variety of fantastic monsters. “The Greeks,” says M. E. Pottier, a distinguished French writer on Greek mythology, “often copied Oriental representations without understanding them.” The conventional dragon probably came from Indian sources through Persia to China, on the one hand, spreading eastwards, and to the Latins of the early Roman Empire, on the other hand, spreading westwards; but at what date exactly it is difficult to make out.
In mediæval, as well as in earlier times, marvellous beasts were brought into imaginary existence by the somewhat unscrupulous enterprise of an artist in giving pictorial expression to the actual words by which some traveller described a strange beast seen by him in a foreign land. Thus the “unicorn,” which was really the rhinoceros, was seen by travellers in the earliest times, and was described as an animal like a horse, but with a single horn growing from its forehead. The heraldic draughtsman accordingly takes the spirally twisted narwhal’s tusk, brought from the northern seas by adventurous mariners (the narwhal being called “the unicorn fish”) as his unicorn’s horn, and plants it on the forehead of a horse, and says, “Behold! the unicorn.” Meanwhile the real “unicorn,” the rhinoceros, became properly known as navigation and Eastern travel extended, and true unicorns’ horns, the horns of the rhinoceros, richly carved and made into drinking cups, not at all like the narwhal’s tusk, were brought to Europe from India. One was sent to Charles II. by “the Great Sophy,” and handed over to the Royal Society by the King for experiment. These horns were asserted to be the most powerful antidote or destroyer of poison, and a test for the presence of poison in drink. There was no truth whatever in the assertion, as the Royal Society at once showed. Yet they were valued at enormous prices, and pieces were sold for their weight in gold. A German traveller in the time of Queen Elizabeth saw one which was kept among the Queen’s jewels at Windsor, and was valued, according to this writer, at £10,000.
Credulity, fancy, and hasty judgment are accountable for the belief in mythical and legendary monsters. Yet they have great interest for the scientific study of the growth of human thought and of the relationships of the races of mankind. They are often presented to us in beautiful stories, carvings, or pictures, having a childlike sincerity and a concealed symbolism which give to the wondrous creatures charm and human value.