Now and Here…

An Instinct for Dragons

Groaning like a furnace, it hoisted its reptilian body from the ground, labored into the air on stunted wings, and rolled, belching sulphurous smoke, like a churning thundercloud toward the small farm. Its hideous roar shattered the morning calm, announcing the presence of the most terrible of creatures. The humans ran for their lives.

[…]

The Chinese call it lung; the Hawaiians, kelekona or perhaps mo’o. It is zmaj to Croatians and Serbians, lohikaarne to the Finns, and unktena to the Cherokee Indians of North America. The Polish tell of smok, the Turks of the ejderha, the Maori of New Zealand of the tarakona, and the Hungarians of sarkany. The Japanese say tatsu, the Welsh draig, the Germans lindwurm, the Dutch draak, and the Lakota Sioux unhcegila. The creature is named in Aztec, Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, and others. English speakers call it dragon.

Most peoples at some point in their history have believed that the dragon was real. Prior to sixteenth century, thousands of eyewitness accounts of dragon sightings were recorded. […]

The source of the dragon, however, is a mystery. How can something so impossible exist in the art, mythology, religion, and legend of so many places? […]

[…] From the Egyptians, the Greeks borrowed the image of the Oroboros, the “tail eater.” This dragon held its tail in its mouth and was the symbol of eternity, the “never ending.” It was generally depicted as a giant winged serpent with clawed feet.

For the Romans, the Latin word draco identified large snakes and dragons. Perle Epstein (1973) notes of the Roman dragon, “This creature was usually represented in classical art as a fire breather with large bat’s wings, a monster who spends his time in dark caves and sea grottoes guarding treasures.

Dragons also populated the Scandinavian countires. Vikings raided along the European coast and the British Isles in boats with carved dragon head prows. They drew dragon images from legends that reached back to the sagas of the warrior gods. It is there that Jormungander, the Midgard Serpent, an immense serpent with a dragon’s head, appears.

[…] The dragon’s body is generally very large, serpentine, equipped with lashing tail, sharp talons, a gaping mouth with sharp teeth. Where psychological phenomena are attributed to the dragon, they are of a singularity bestial malevolence. The dragon’s habitat … is remote and solitary. The dragon’s behavioral characteristics include maleficient marauding, fire breathing, taking of live captives, and jealous hoarding of treasure.

Europe also claimed the double-headed serpent, or amphisbaena, as well as the griffin, which like the amphisbaena is an ancient type of dragon with a long history in the Mediterranean region and Near East. Its likeness varied between a composite of a lion and an eagle and that of a reptile / feline / raptor beast, or griffin-dragon.

Asian dragons are associated with rain, soil fecundity, rivers, oceans, and floods. The worst floods were generally ascribed to a dragon’s reaction to some sort of untoward mortal behaviour. Chinese literature, dating to 2700 B.C. Very recognizable dragons appear during the Shang period (1600 - 1100 B.C.) as snake-bodied creatures with the requisite scales, claws, and a mouth full of teeth. The Chinese dragon is often depicted with spines or crests emaneting from its back.

The Dragon appears full-blown in the Kojiki, or “Record of Ancient Things,” written in A.D. 712, the earliest Japanese account of their own history. Dipping into mythology old even at the time of the compiling of the Kojiki, the story tells of the storm god Susa-no-ow, a wild and footloose warrior hero and slayer of the Koshi dragon, a beast so impossibly huge that it could drape its body over eight hills and valleys at once. Trees and bushes sprouted from its scaly back, as did eight heads with blood-red eyes and eight serpentine tails.

The Mongols tell of leongalli, a dragon that was half lion and half cock. The Chukchi, reindeer herders wandering the barrens of Siberia, speak in hushed tones of the worms, giant serpentlike monsters.

The subcontinent of India has a long tradition of dragon tales, and Indian religious art often depicts the creator god Vishnu reclining on the back of an enourmous naga, or dragon-hydra. The makara, another type of Indian dragon, can assume a number of forms, its major manifestation being that of a creature with the tail of a snake and the head and legs of a crocodile. It also regularly appeared as a dragon or sea serpent. […]

In Sumerian hymn dating to 2500 B.C., we hear of Ninurta, the sun god, a large scaled creature with the forefeet of a lion and the hind feet of an eagle. And a Babylonian-Sumerian creation epic dating to about 2000 B.C. recounted the tale of Tiamat, mother of the gods, who in order to avenge the killing of her husband, transformed herself into a dragon with impervious scales, two forelegs armed with claws, a long snakelike neck and head, and a pair of horns.

A very dramatic image of the sirrush was unearthed by German archaelogist Robert Kodeway in 1899 when he discovered the Ishtar Gate, erected by King Nebuchadnezzar II (605 - 562 B.C.) The sirrush dragon was carved with scales, a long thin tail, a neck that ended in a serpent’s head, a forked tongue, and pointed horns. The front feed were those of a lion, and the back those of a raptor.

In Egypt, a hieroglyph of the Great God in the temple of Seti I (circa 1300 B.C.) shows a winged, snakelike creature with four clawed feet and three heads. A seal found at Susa, dating to 3000 B.C., featured a dragon with the front part an eagle and the hindpart a lion.

In addition, the winged-serpent image is found throughout Egyptian folklore and mythology.

[…] in Ethiopia, tells of the rescue of Princess Andromeda and slaying of the dragon Cetus by the Greek demigod Perseus. Cetus was described as an enormous, limbless “serpent whale” with impenetrable scales, a doglike head, a bright red crest, and two membranous wings. This type of dragon, a wywern, is known worldwide. […]

In west-central Africa, the Ashanti tell of a scaled beast that breathed fire from its nostrils. It was believed that its eyesight was so keen that it was able to see a fly moving miles away, and it could move along the ground so quickly that no one could catch it. […] The mokele-mbembe, said to look like a sauropod dinosaur, and the inkhomi, a crested cobra or basilisk-dragon that had a snakelike body and snake fangs plus the attributes of a rooster, have been reported for centuries by Western travellers as well as the native peoples of central Africa.

Of Oceania, Grafton Elliot Smith (1919) noted, “We find scattered throughout the islands of the Pacific the familiar stories of the dragon.” A striped, two-headed snake monster lives among the Arapesh of New Guinea. It inhabits pools and caves, guards the Arapesh hunting ground, and is particularly dangerous to childbearing women. Peoples of the traditional cultures of Samoa believed that a dragon abided as king of the gods; and the Maori, the native inhabitants of New Zealand, possess the myth of a lizard-bodied dragon as big as a whale with a huge head, a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, four short legs, scales, claws, sharp spines across its head, and hot poisonous breath.

The aborigines of Australia speak of several types of dragons, including the Rainbow Serpent and the bunyip; and in Hawaii, tradition tells of the mo-o, a large, heavy-bodied reptile that reached a length of thirty feet more with four legs, scales, and fanglike teeth. […]
Quoted from pages 1-16 of the book An Instinct for Dragons by David E. Jones

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