. . .
My own dragon theory is far-fetched - perhaps necessarily so, dragons
being somewhat remote animals. The dragon, I hold, is the
personification of the life within the earth - of that life which, being
unknown and uncontrollable, is eo ipso hostile to man. Let me explain
how this point is reached.
The animal which looks or regards. . . . Why - why an animal? Why not
drakon = that which looks?
Now, what looks?
The eye.
This is the key to the understanding of the problem, the key to the
subterranean dragon-world.
The conceit of fountains or sources of water being things that see
(drakon) - that is, eyes - or bearing some resemblance to eyes, is common
to many races. In Italy, for example, two springs in the inland sea near
Taranto are called "Occhi" - eyes; Arabs speak of a watery fountain as an
eye; the notion exists in England top - in the "Blentarn" of Cumberland,
the blind tarn (tarn = a trickling of tears), which is "blind" because
dry and waterless, and therefore lacking the bright lustre of the open eye.
There is an eye, then, in the fountain: an eye which looks or regards.
And inasmuch as an eye presupposes a head, and a head without body is
hard to conceive, a material existence was presently imputed to that
which looked upwards out of the liquid depths. This, I think, is the
primordial dragon, the archetype. He is of animistic descent and
survives all over the earth; and it is precisely this universality of
the dragon-idea which induces me to discard all theories of local origin
and to seek for some common cause. Fountains are ubiquitous, and so are
dragons. There are fountain dragons in Japan, in the superstitions of
Keltic races, in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in
a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to
dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of
Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect,
with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent
of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece
and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara on
Malta, and another of the same name near Cape Misenum - all are sources
of apposite lore. The water-drac. . . .
So the dragon has grown into a subterranean monster, who peers up from
his dark abode wherever he can - out of fountains or caverns whence
fountains issue. It stands to reason that he is sleepless; all dragons
are "sleepless "; their eyes are eternally open, for the luminous
sparkle of living waters never waxes dim. And bold adventurers may well
be devoured by dragons when they fall into these watery rents, never to
appear again.
Furthermore, since gold and other treasures dear to mankind lie hidden
in the stony bowels of the earth and are hard to attain, the jealous
dragon has been accredited with their guardianship - hence the plutonic
element in his nature. The dragon, whose "ever-open eye" protected the
garden of the Hesperides, was the Son of Earth. The earth or
cave-dragon. . . . Calabria has some of these dragons' caves; you can
read about them in the Campania. Sotteranea of G. Sanchez.
In volcanic regions there are fissures in the rocks exhaling pestiferous
emanations; these are the spiracula, the breathing-holes, of the
dragon within. The dragon legends of Naples and Mondragone are probably
of this origin, and so is that of the Roman Campagna (1660) where the
dragon-killer died from the effects of this poisonous breath: Sometimes
the confined monster issues in a destructive lava-torrent - Bellerophon
and the Chimsera. The fire-dragon. ... Or floods of water suddenly
stream down from the hills and fountains are released. It is the hungry
dragon, rushing from his den in search of prey; the river-dragon. . . .
He rages among the mountains with such swiftness and impetuosity.
This is chiefly the poets' work, though the theologians have added one
or two embellishing touches. But in whatever shape he appears, whether
his eyes have borrowed a more baleful fire from heathen basilisks, or
traits of moral evil are instilled into his pernicious physique by
amalgamation with the apocalyptic Beast, he remains the vindictive enemy
of man and his ordered ways. Of late - like the Saurian tribe in
general - he has somewhat degenerated. So in modern Greece, by that
process of stultified anthropomorphism which results from grafting
Christianity upon an alien mythopoesis, he dons human attributes,
talking and acting as a man (H. F. Tozer). And here, in Calabria, he
lingers in children's fables, as "sdrago," a mockery of his former self.
To follow up his wondrous metamorphoses through medievalism would be a
pastime worthy of some leisured dilettante. How many noble shapes
acquired a tinge of absurdity in the Middle Ages! Switzerland alone,
with its mystery of untrodden crevices, used to be crammed with
dragons - particularly the calcareous (cavernous) province of Rhaetia.
Secondary dragons; for the good monks saw to it that no reminiscences of
the autochthonous beast survived. Modern scholars have devoted much
learning to the local Tazzelwurm and Bergstutz. But dragons of our
familiar kind were already well known to the chroniclers from whom old
Cysat extracted his twenty-fifth chapter (wherein, by the way, you will
learn something of Calabrian dragons); then came J. J. Wagner (1680);
then Scheuchzer, prince of dragon-finders, who informs us that multorum
draconum historta mendax.
But it is rather a far cry from Calabria to the asthmatic Scheuchzer,
wiping the perspiration off his brow as he clambers among the Alps to
record truthful dragon yarns and untruthful barometrical observations;
or to China, dragon-land par excellence; [Footnote:
