The dragon of pagan and early Christian legend was a winged crocodile with a serpent’s tail. As the word is used by travelers, often a crocodile or a snake rather than a fabulous composite animal is intended. There are three animals listed in natural history which somewhat resemble this creature. The dragon-fly is a frightful-looking but entirely harmless insect; how the supersession of myth by science has shifted values is illustrated by the fact that the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica gives nearly four pages to the insect and only a dozen lines to the fabulous monster, the destruction of which in another age was the crowning exploit of gods and men. There is also a small flying lizard, native to the East Indies, which is called a dragon and which in miniature is a fair copy of fable. The primeval world knew a veritable dragon in the pterodactyl, a flying lizard with a wing span of seventeen feet.
In the Far East the dragon was a four-legged serpent with rugged head and spiked ears, and, though without wings, it flew. There was more of the crocodile in the dragon of the Near East. It had four short paws, a forked tongue, and bat wings, and fire came from its mouth. The dragon of heraldry had a squat, scaly body, a head with horny projections, long clawed legs, a barbed tongue, and bat wings.
There were four noteworthy things about the dragon. It was watchful, it spat fire and smoke, it ejected poison, and it had control of water. The dragon watched the golden apples in the garden of Hesperides where Hercules found and slew it. It guarded the Valkyrie Brynhild in a castle on the Glistening Heath. Although ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages used the word to symbolize sin and particularly pagan worship, yet until very recent times the world accepted the dragon. The elder naturalists, such as Gesner and Aldrovandi, picture it in their works. A mediæval writer says that at the midsummer celebration lads burned bones and filth to generate a noxious smoke, and so to drive away dragons, which, excited by the summer heat, copulated in midair, poisoning the wells and springs by dropping their seed in them.
For what it is worth there is documentary evidence of dragons in the Alps, all of it attested by oath. The depositions were gathered early in the eighteenth century by Prof. Johann Jacob Scheuchzer and are thus summarized in Francis Gribble’s Early Mountaineers: “There are dragons with and without wings, with and without legs, with and without crests; dragons with cat faces, with human faces, and with nondescript faces; dragons that breathe fire and dragons that do not breathe fire.”
Scheuchzer was impelled to this inquiry when he found there were graven images of dragons on Swiss public buildings and a “dragon-stone” in a Lucerne museum. The latter item he says is a jewel cut out of a dragon’s head in its sleep. If the monster awakes before the operation is complete, it will die and the stone will vanish. To forestall awakening, drowsy herbs are scattered about, and sometimes incantations are muttered. The dragon-stone is a remedy against plague, poison, dysentery, and nosebleed. Scheuchzer concludes that the Lucerne dragon-stone is no imposture because it does effect cures, because the Alps afford many caves for dragon haunts and because of the testimony of eye-witnesses as above.
In June, 1673, Joliet and Marquette saw two dragon forms carved and painted along a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi at Alton, Illinois. Says Père Marquette: “As we coasted along rocks, frightful for their height and length, we saw two monsters painted on one of these rocks, which startled us at first, and on which the boldest Indian dare not gaze long. They are as large as a calf, with horns on the head like a deer, a fearful look, red eyes, bearded like a tiger, the face somewhat like a man’s, the body covered with scales, and the tail so long that it twice makes a turn of the body, passing over the head and down between the legs, and ending at last in a fish’s tail. Green, red, and a kind of black are the colors employed.”
These outlines, which have been called the highest attainment of early Indian pictorial art, and which Marquette said the best painters of France could scarcely equal, became known as the Piasa petroglyph. Quarrymen destroyed them shortly before the Civil War, but drawings were made of them by artists who followed descriptions. One surmise is that they represented the Algonquin thunder bird.
A copious and curious literature treats of the dragon as a veritable creature of natural history. According to Ælian, although the Ethiopians call it the slayer of elephants, it conceals itself when it hears the noise of the eagle’s wings. When it lies in wait for man or beast, it consumes deadly roots and herbs. At Lanuvium naked virgins paid it the annual tribute of a barley cake to insure a fruitful year. Passing the cave of a sacred Indian dragon, the army of Alexander was affrighted by hissing and blowing and the apparition of a head with eyes “of the size of a Macedonian shield.” Artemidorus adds the detail that the Indian and African dragons have grass growing on their backs. “You burst asunder vast bulls” is Lucan’s apostrophe. Ignatius reports that the library of Constantinople had the intestine of a dragon 120 feet long on which the Iliad and Odyssey were inscribed.
Chinese reports are very detailed. In the great Materia Medica of the early seventeenth century it is said that the dragon has nine resemblances—its head like a camel’s, its horns like a deer’s, its eyes like a hare’s, its ears like a bull’s, its neck like a snake’s, its belly like an iguanodon’s, its scales like a carp’s, its claws like an eagle’s and its paws like a tiger’s. It is whiskered and its voice resembles the beating of a gong. The dragon, however, cannot hear itself, for it is deaf. It is fond of gems and jade and excessively fond of swallow’s flesh; but it dreads iron, beeswax, the mong plant, the centipede, the leaves of the Pride of India, and silk dyed in the five colors. It passes the winter in muddy water contemned by the fish and turtle, and in summer the moles, crickets, and ants annoy it. At five hundred years it grows horns. “If you do not ride on a dragon,” says one writer, “you cannot reach the weak waters of Kwan-lun hill.” Another suggests that if you eat dragon’s flesh soaked in acid “you can write essays.”
It was a belief among Chinese that dragons did not die, but merely sloughed off their bones as a snake its skin. These were used to cure a variety of diseases and are still sold in apothecaries’ shops. The records speak of a bone-covered dragon plain east of the hills of Fang-chang, and of isles where the dragons shed their bodies; “teeth, horns, spines, feet, it seems as though they are everywhere.” The identification is perhaps with those deposits of dinosaur and other paleontological remains which modern exploration has uncovered.
The naturalistic side of Chinese dragon lore is not far removed from the position taken by Charles Gould, the stoutest defender of the literal basis of wonder stories (Mythical Monsters, 1886). He finds nothing impossible in the dragon of tradition and thinks it more likely that it once lived than that fancy engendered it: “It was a long, terrestrial lizard, hibernating and carnivorous, which dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew; which devastated herds and on occasions swallowed their shepherd; which, establishing its lair in some cavern overlooking the fertile plain, spread terror and destruction around, and, protected from assault by dread or superstitious feeling, may even have been subsidized by the terror-stricken peasantry, who, failing the power to destroy it, may have preferred tethered offerings of cattle adjacent to its cavern, to having it come down to seek supplies.”
But the dragon reached a place in the political and spiritual life of China such as a mere saurian hardly could attain. The empire was called “the dragon empire”; the imperial throne, “the dragon throne”; the emperor’s countenance, “the dragon’s face”; his beard, “the dragon’s beard.” In pictured effigy, the dragon rears itself upon house fronts and draws its scaly folds over garments and utensils as well as across the imperial flag; and there are annual processions of dragon images, regattas of dragon boats, and sacrificial ceremonies in dragon temples. To a third of mankind, for five thousand years or more, the dragon has been the bestower of rain and the great giver of good, and the emperor its earthly representative.
As in other matters, China has merely preserved and exaggerated beliefs which were world-wide. Nearly all of the thrones of earth were once dragon thrones. On the shield of Agamemnon, king of kings, was “the unspeakable horror of a dragon glancing backward.” Persians, Parthians and Scythians had dragon flags and Rome borrowed them for its cohorts. The dragon flew on the battle standards of German, Celt, and Saxon, and breasted the foam of the seas as the figurehead of Norse longboats. In the older Europe, as in the China of to-day, it was carved on house gables, bells, musical instruments, goblets, weapons, chairs, and tables.
Under these world-wide customs, was there only a giant reptile not long extinct, an inference from fossil remains, some frightful-seeming but diminutive lizard contemporary with man and magnified a thousand times by the aberrations of fancy? All of these things there may have been, for the myth is so complex that its development has been called the history of civilization. But inevitably speculation had to rise higher than a saurian to account for phenomena of such consequence; it was conceived that the dragon was the storm-cloud and he who slew it the sun. So, it may be, ingenious minds surmised thousands of years before modern conjecture first spoke of solar myths and found in forgotten texts not the heart of the thing, but allegories in which ancient solar mythologists had wrapped it. Or, it was guessed, the dragon typified the spirit of evil, a power to be placated by sacrifice and politic devil-worship, but destroyed as opportunity offered. So the world long thought, and so far as it thinks at all of the dragon, that is what it thinks now.
To assume that the myth is an allegory of satanic forces is to explain much, but does it explain all? Powerful as is the motive of fear, it is negative. Was it potent enough to coil a dragon at the roots of all the world’s religions; and when these arose, were men able to speculate on so abstract a thing as evil and symbolize it as a composite beast? The Bible narrative begins with the dragon of Genesis in the Garden of Eden and ends with the dragon of Revelation, “that old serpent which is the Devil and Satan,” in the bottomless pit. The slaying of the dragon is the central point of Norse and Saxon epic, the great deed of the heroes. The water monster of Navaho legend is a dragon; the elephant-headed thunder god of the Mayan inscriptions is a dragon deity; the legendary founders of both Athens and Mexico were dragon-tailed. Snake worship is dragon worship and, like the Midgard serpent, it encircles the earth. Everywhere the myth is a thing of thrones and temples.
Perhaps its secret is to be found, as later in this study it will be seen that the secret of the Amazon myth is to be found, in the time when thrones and temples were one. Clues that lead to it are: (1) the world has still a dragon throne, or rather a recent memory of one; (2) always in the lore of dragon or serpent, whether as victim, votary, or mate, appears the figure of a daughter of Eve; (3) the snake is the badge of Æsculapius and the symbol of healing; (4) the dragon, whether haunting cloud or pool, is associated with water.
Woman is the physical source of human life. Water is healing, fertilizing, and regenerating. Use the Scriptural figure, “the water of life,” and it relates itself to woman and to the serpent symbol of the art that lengthens life. When the throne and temple were one, the creation and continuation of life was the function of the priest-king, though only in China has his tradition come down to the modern time. The Chinese emperor was himself the dragon. In the spring festivals of his people he supplicated heaven for rains that would revive the land, and in the autumn festivals he rendered thanks for nature’s bounty or took upon himself the blame for dearth.
The dragon myth is not a myth of fear, nor was the dragon in the beginning a personification of evil. It was an expression of the deepest desire of man, the desire to defeat chance and change, to repeal “the sad laws of time” and to live forever. Of all myths, that of the dragon is the fundamental, for the forces with which it deals are the forces which have impelled man, in a long grapple with destiny, to construct societies, build religions, and create an art and a literature. In China both the significance and the origin of the legend lie almost on the surface. In most other places and at most other times its meaning has been distorted, inverted, weighted down with fancies and guesses. As it stands, it is like the fabric of a vision in which tatters of experience are woven on the looms of sleep by the master weavers of hope and fear; and in this faded grotesque one may decipher the eternal dream of mankind.
The theory which will be interpreted here is that of Grafton Elliot Smith (The Evolution of the Dragon: 1919). It is too sweeping in its implications and too revolutionary yet to have received the general sanction of writers upon mythology; but among all dragon theories it must take precedence because alone it has the elemental breadth demanded by the phenomena to be accounted for. A difficult thing about it is that the author rejects the doctrine accepted of the time, that the same beliefs and practices can arise independently in two or more places. Unless there is in any case definite evidence to the contrary, he assumes that “no ethnologically significant innovation in customs or beliefs has ever been made twice.” It is his contention that the dragon myth was born in Egypt, developed in Babylonia, and in a time remote carried to China, India, and the Americas, and to all other parts of the earth. Granting this, it becomes not merely the one world-epic, but the proof that, before history began even as now, all races of men were in effectual contact.
The primitive custom at the basis of the myth is well established. The post of priest-king was enviable but dangerous. With each recurring spring he was expected to bring fertility to his land; but sometimes he was killed and a successor appointed each year, in imitation of the death of vegetation that preceded the resurrection of spring; and always when age overtook him he was slain, for what vital magic over nature was there left in his aging frame? To avoid this fate a mock king was erected to suffer in his stead; or a virgin was sacrificed; or in elaborate mummery a ritual murder was merely simulated.
Here in their simplest form appear all the elements of the dragon myth—a king who was thought to control the sources of water and the fertility of which it was the symbol; a slaying to be accomplished, and a woman who was at once a fertility symbol and a vicarious sacrifice. The king himself was the dragon, in its original form just a serpent symbol of his reputed control over water.
Thus stated the story is understandable, but it becomes confused and infinitely complex when it is dramatized in the mythology of ancient Egypt. A king who through his beneficent irrigation works is identified with the river Nile is translated by legend into the skies and becomes the water god Osiris, a member of the earliest Trinity. The second member of the Trinity, but the first in point of time, is Hathor, the Great Mother,—at one time identified with the cowry shell, the earliest form of fertility emblem, and then identified with the moon and translated into the sky when primitive minds saw the lunar rhythm repeated in the sex life of woman. The third member of the Trinity is Horus, the Warrior Sun God, a son of Osiris. How an aging king, not yet a god, resolved that he would not be slain to make way for a younger man and called upon the Great Mother, already a goddess, to provide him with an elixir of life, which was blood, and how, in compliance with his entreaty, she nearly wiped out mankind before a substitute was provided—in reality the red waters of the Nile inundation—is allegorically recited in the ancient Egyptian narrative called the Destruction of Mankind.
In this and its companion legends, the Story of the Winged Disk and the Conflict between Horus and Set, are all the elements of the dragon saga. It would be futile to recite them in detail, for the thing has become so confused that in the words of Doctor Smith it amounts to this: “The early Trinity as the hero, armed with the Trinity as a weapon, slays the dragon, which is the same Trinity.” But the confusion has produced a concrete and comprehensible result, a composite wonder-beast in which are blended parts of real animals that symbolize both regeneration and destruction and that are the attributes of the several members of the early Trinity, and of Set, enemy of Horus and lord of chaos.
An archaic conception this may seem now, but what is there of the human or the cosmic that does not lie in it? The desire for unfading youth and continuing life on one side of the grave or the other is in it, and that is the heart history of humanity. The conflict between order and chaos is in it, and that is the story of nature. The theme of vicarious sacrifice is in it, and that is the deep mystery of religion. There is that in the tale which impelled the story-tellers of five millenniums to repeat it, to enrich its incidents and to weave the tissues of new meanings through it until it was at once a treatise on astronomy, a theory of meteorology and a philosophy of destiny; a record of the strife between winter and summer, night and day, justice and injustice, and good and evil fates, which is the world as men have found it.
Unquestionably the dragon of classic story and mediæval blazonry is the devil of Scripture; the biblical identification is complete, and the bird-like features, leathern wings, and forked tail of this elemental creature of fable all are reproduced in familiar portraits of the enemy of mankind. This and the inner meaning of the dragon myth may be accepted, while its origin in Egypt and dissemination from one place throughout the world is probable. Doctor Smith, whose contentions are all-embracing, makes other inferences which here will be outlined without comment:
The serpent in the Garden of Eden, the tree of life and Eve herself are all one. The deluge of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebrew legend is a disastrous Nile inundation dramatized. The ark is the moon-boat of Hathor. The pig owes its evil name to its identification with Set, who represents the evil side of the dragon’s nature. The cowry shell, suspended from the girdle as a fertility emblem and not from any motives of modesty, became the origin of all clothing. Inland tribes which had no access to the shore copied the cowry in a plastic yellow metal, and this was the origin of the world-old quest for gold and the occasion of its use as money. The object of mummification was the continuance of life beyond the grave, the purpose in burning gums and spices was to restore to the mummy the odor and warmth of life; and these customs, related to each other and to the theme of the dragon saga, are also related to the development of architecture, sea trade, and medicine. Jade reached its mystic estate in China and other lands, because the men who sought gold for cowry amulets in Turkestan sought jade at the same time for seals, and in popular thought the two substances became confused. Through a similar confusion, diamonds attained in India the value they have since had everywhere. Pearls ranked beside both because they were thought to be particles of moon substances, emanations of the moon goddess herself. The precious metals and precious stones became so not because of their rarity or beauty, but because of their magical power as symbols of the divine actors in the dragon story. The griffin of legend is merely a tentative dragon. The mandrake of legend is merely a stranded pearl shell, and the dog used to extract it from the earth is a terrestrial version of the Mediterranean dogfish to which had been transferred the demoniac powers of the sharks that guarded the pearl treasures of the east. With the dragon began the unending search for the elixir of life.
These conclusions, some of which offer novel explanations for enigmatical things noted in this study, are at least a testimony that the dragon myth has traveled far, and in its travels has become related to many things. It is the most vital of all growths that have found root in the fecund soil of the imagination. It is a richly pictorial history of the groping sublimities of human thought. The dragon is one of two portraits which man has painted of himself.