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Some Facts and Stories about Dragons
Where there are myths, there are usually dragons. But although it would be easy to recongnize a dragon, and descriptions and artistic representations of dragons abound, it is not so easy to define the beast. Like other fabulous monsters as the chimaera and griffin, the dragonis a mixture of several creatures. One of the earliest dragons seemed to leave a permanent mark in the world( he is depicted in white glazeagainst a blue background on a gate in ancient Babylon) appears to have the head and horns of a ram, the forelegs of a lion, a scaly, reptilian body and tail, and the hind legs of an eagle. Each race has naturally drawn on the part of the animal world with which it is familiar in putting this composite beast together. The dragon of the ancient Egyptians is a close relation of the crocodile, while elephant dragons appear in Indian myths, and stag dragons in Chinese.
The dragon is even more dangerously equipped than any of its mythical rivals. The forked tongue and tail, the glaring eyes, ominously flared nostrils, the scorching breath, the sharp teeth and talons, and the armour-plating of the body add upto a formidable array of weapons. Strangly enough, the dragon is by no means always hostile to man. In the East, particularly, he is often a symbol of prosperity, and there are many tales of individual acts of kindness preformed by dragons for the benifit of men.
Though most people nowadays would associate the dragon with fire, his primeval element is water, whether the sea,rivers,lakes,water-spouts or rain clouds, and this watery connection is what chiefly distincts the dragon from other mythical hybrids. Even desert-dwelling people insist on it, and their dragons spend a lot of time lurking in th bottom of wells. Indeed, the bottom of a well is often identified with the dragon's eye, and this link with another distinguishing characteristic of the dragon: its baleful and searching gaze. There is little doubt that the very word'dragon' is derived ultimatlyfrom an ancient Greek word meaning 'to see'. In the Old Testament the dragon is mentioned several times in the same breath as the owl another creature with large, bleak eyes.
Descended from Serpents
Like other creatures, both mythical and real, the dragon has evolved. The giant saurians-the whale sized fish-lizards, the fifty-foot tyranasaurs and the tank like dinosaurs dissapeared from the earth millions of years before man appeared, but it is possible that their fossils and remains inspired the earliest stories about dragons. Amongst extant creatures, however, the dragons earliest identifiable progenitor is the serpant, some authorities belive that they can trace the lineage of dragons all over the world back to one common ancestor,Zu, the monster of watery chaos in Sumerian mythology.
The Sumarians settled in Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC, and their struggle to tame the rivers in that country inspired several myths. Their most important god was Enlil, who himself started life as a river god, but was promoted to the dry land and the upper world. The serpent or dragon Zu stole the tablets, worn by Enlil on his breast, on which were set out the laws governing the universe. On Enlil's orders, Zu was slain by the sun god Ninurta, who thus set the precedent for sun gods who battle with dragons in the myths of other ancient peoples.
The Sumerians were superseded, c 1800 BC, by the Babylonians, a Semitic people, who took over many of their myths and religious beliefs. The legend of Zu left traces in the great Babylonian epic of creation Enuma elish, in which the sea goddess Tiamat leads the forces of primeval watery chaos against the gods. I nher army she has sharp-fanged serpents and ferocious dragons, with crowns of flames, made so like gods that all who look at them die of fright. She is defeated never the less by Marduk, champion of the gods, and son of Ea-Enki, the god of wisdom. After the battle Marduk cuts Tiamat's body in two, leaving one half to form the sea and lifting up the other to form the sky. Marduk was orginally the local god of the unimportant town of Babilu, but his power grew with that of his people, the Babylonians, and he became eventually the god of creation. Every New Year, which the Babylonians celebrated in the spring, his victory over the dragons of chaos was renacted through the recital by priests of the creation epic.
It seems likely that Babylonian or Sumarian influence were at work from an early period in Egypt. The dragon myth in particular it thought to have reached there towards the end of the third millenium BC, and to inspired the legend of the gigantic serpent Apopis ( or Apep, or Apop) the enemy of the sun god. Later in Egyptain mythology, the captive Apopis was identified with the ocean which girt the earth and held it together, but at the same time threaten continually to break its fetters and destroy the word. The Egyptians gradually adapted the dragon myth from one of cration to the one of the daily combat between light and darkness. The sunset was interpreted as the swallowing of the sun by Apopis, or alternatively the sun was imagined to do battle with the dragon everynight as it travelled through the underworld. The dragon rose from a dark river to attack the sun's boat, but by morning had been cut to pieces, or in other versions of the myth, forced to disgorge the sun.
There was a similar story of battle between the sun and storm clouds, which was also represented as a conflict between the god and a dragon or water monster. In related Asiatic myth, which also derives from the Sumerian and Bablonian stories of battles between the dragons and a god, the dragons survived but were held down on the sea-bed by fetters or by the hands of the gods; their vain struggles to free themselves caused earthquakes and violent storms at sea.
The Dragon of the East
Whereas in the ancient Middle East and in medieval Europe the dragon remains an essentially sombre and forbidding monster, lurking in the mythical depths, as it were in the Orient and particularly in China and Japan he has a certain splendour and panache. Indeed, there can be few mythological figures which have so stimulated the oriental imagination. The mere description of the dragon given by the acient Chinese write Wang Fu shows exuberance not to be found in the West: it has a triple jointed body, the head of a camel, the horns of a stag, the eyes of a demon, ears of a cow, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales of a carp, the claws of an eagle, and the soles of a tiger. The Chinese dragon is, however, just as intimately concerned with water, caves and treasure as his cousins in the West. And cousins all these dragons are, sharing common ancestors, though the Chinese dragon has picked up some traits of the Burmses lotusserpant on his journey from Mesopotamia and India, has assimilated a buddhist adaptation of ancient Asiatic snake cults, and has of course acquired some distinctively Chinese features on his native soil.
The most striking of these is that the dragon in China is not, as in the West, a representative or a symbol of the powers of evil. On the contrary, according to the old Chinese Book of Rites, the dragon as the chief of all scaly animals is one of the four benevolent spritual animals, the unicorn, phoenix, and tortoise being the others. How this transformation came about can only be guessed. It reflects the general principle stated by Jung that ' every psychological extreme secertly contains its own opposite' which is expressed in Chinese thought through the classical doctrine on Yang and Yin, the good and bad influences. That this prinicple underlies the dragon's transformatioon into benefient being is confirmed by Wang Fu's statment that the dragon's scales number117, of which 81 are imbued with Yang and 36 with Yin, because the dragons is partly a preserver and partly a destroyer. Yang is also the male element and, as its representative, the dragon also became at an early period a symbol of the Emperor, and appeared on the Chinese flag( which may have suggested its use in heraldry later in the West). During the Manchu dynasty the dragon was held in especial esteem, and everything used by the Emperor was described in terms of it: there was the dragon throne, dragon bed, dragon boat and so on.
This kindly view of the dragon entailed significant changes in the dragon lore which the CHinese adopted from other Asiatic peoples. Whereas the Sumerian Zu stole the tablets of destiny from the god Enlil, Chinese dragons frequently appear as the givers of laws. They are also instructors in magic and givers of swords, While the art of painting was introduced to China by a dragon.
Although Chinese dragons appeared at favourable moments to presage periods of prosperity, and had been known to emit foam which had supernatural powers of fertilization, they could be also, when offended or disturbed, cause a drought by gathering up all the water of a district in baskets, or they could eclipse the sun. To propitiate them, the Chinese flew dragon kites, especially at the mumming parade in the New Year.
In Japanese legends the dragon is a more ambivalent creature than in Chinese. There are dragons who demand the sacrifice of a young virgin every year, and in one myth the storm god Susa-no-wo rescues the princess Inada by making a dragon drinksaki then chopping it to pieces. In Japan, too, the dragon is associated with water. The Dragon King lives in a mysterious marine realm, with a retinue of serpants, fishes, and other sea monsters, and tribes of dragons have the power over rain and storms. There are many stories of wise Buddhist priests who can tame these creatures and make them give rain in time or drought, or of holy men on pilgrimages who command the dragons to calm the stormy sea.
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