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Title: Perseus or, of dragons
Author: Henry Folliott Scott Stokes
Release date: April 25, 2024 [eBook #73461]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925
Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
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PERSEUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_
By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_
_NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes_
By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_
By F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_
By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_
By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_
By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_PERSEUS, or Of Dragons_
By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_
By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_
By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence_
By Vernon Lee
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
PERSEUS
OR
OF DRAGONS
BY
H. F. SCOTT STOKES, M.A. (Oxon.)
[Illustration]
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright 1925
By E. P. Dutton & Company
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_If Jones of Chelsea should bedeck
With virgin’s head a horse’s neck,
And decorate this monstrous birth
With limbs of all the beasts on earth
And many-coloured wings, would you
Contain your laughter at the private view?_
Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 1–5.
CONTENTS
_Page_
Preface 3
Introduction 13
I. Of Dragons in General 16
II. Of Dragons in Classical Antiquity 23
III. Of Dragons in Early Christendom 29
IV. Of Dragons in Modern Europe 43
V. Of Dragons in Ancient Egypt 57
VI. Of the Birth and Death of the Dragon 63
Epilogue 72
PERSEUS
OR
OF DRAGONS
OF DRAGONS
PREFACE
I have been asked to explain the purpose of this study. I find a
ridiculous difficulty in doing so, for it had none. My interest in
dragons was aroused by some incidental paragraphs in Leslie Stephen’s
_The Playground of Europe_. I determined to find out all that there was
to be known about dragons: with the unfailing assistance of that great
institution, the London Library, I made a fairly careful search; and,
when I had exhausted my authorities (to whom I am greatly indebted), I
set down with some pleasure the facts that had come under my notice.
That is all.
In case it should be objected that no sane man could have done
anything so elaborately purposeless, I will attempt a more plausible
explanation――though the truth is exactly what I have said.
The first four sections give a fair account of the dragon as known
to history: in ancient Greece, in early Christendom, and in modern
Europe. The last two endeavour to explain how the dragon-story may have
originated from the myths and customs of prehistoric Egypt, and how
humanly foolish the whole thing is; and they close with the pious hope
that the species may in time become extinct.
It will be objected that the dragon is already dead, as has been shown
in the course of the study. It is true that the living, breathing,
devouring dragon has passed away with Perseus and the gods of old;
we have to-day only an occasional saga, such as the “Jabberwock,”
a pale reflection of the full-blooded ancient tales, lacking many
essential details and almost apologized for by its author; a herald’s
act of piety, or the unreal enthusiasm of an æsthete vainly seeking
de-sophistication. It is all a faint afterglow of the age of faith. And
yet, in England at any rate, the dragon is not dead.
What are the chief characteristics of modern Englishmen――not the
ornaments of society, nor artists, nor any other lovely ones, but these
poor plain people who earn their daily bread, with or without the sweat
of their brows, because they must; who make up nine-tenths of our
population; who control our political destinies; and whom the Carlton
Club delights to honour?
They are respectability, bigotry, and cant. There can be no doubt
about this. The consequence is that the men have no character and
the women no charm, and we rule over a quarter of the world with
complete satisfaction to ourselves. These three together make up our
modern dragon. Respectability is the deadliest, for it is a plausible
substitute for better things; but it is a dead end, like innocence.
Most men who have realized the existence of this monster apparently
try to meet it by joining the Labour Party. There is nothing immoral
about that, but I pin my faith to the less dogmatic method of general
education. It is curious, by the way, to note that the devil is
historically associated with knowledge and not with ignorance. It would
take too long to explain how this bogey came to be hoisted, but it
is still very commonly made use of to frighten children, and my true
purpose is to plead that it _is_ only a bogey, and that ignorance is
the devil’s most effective weapon.
The devil’s advocate might argue much as follows:
1. “You don’t really like the ‘vulgar’――they are not as interesting
as your own friends.
2. “It will come to nothing. What _is_ the ultimate value of ‘free
discussion’ and ‘reasoning without prejudice’ among people who
don’t read and can’t think?
3. “In so far as you do succeed, you will merely make them miserable:
as thus:
‘Happiness is the end of life.
‘It consists of (_a_) the admiring contemplation of the
truly admirable, and the delighted companionship of the
truly delightful. This is the best. (_b_) The second
best is to enjoy in imagination what you know to be
imaginary. (_c_) The third best is to enjoy mistakenly
what is in fact non-existent or ugly.
‘There is no other good.’
“All this is A B C, and no longer worth arguing about. Then imagine
a man well content with a mistaken religion, a dreary home, and an
unlovely wife (and this describes nearly all mankind). What happens
when you educate him? It is difficult for him to change his wife, very
difficult to change his religion, and impossibly difficult to change
his home――and the man is uprooted and miserable for life.”
The answer is: This is all substantially true (which is the definition
of caricature). Comfortable folk too commonly ignore the prosaic
foundations of imperishable things. Many of the more delightful virtues
are impossible vices to men struggling for the bare necessities of life
(as you may see any day if you try to practise ordinary courtesy in
mounting a ’bus), and it is complacent cant to propose such virtues to
them. And men so struggling are not altogether delightful. The point
about them is, by what right or merit of yours do you live so much
more easily, with so many more opportunities of the good life; and do
you use your opportunities? And can you be of any use to others less
fortunate than yourself? For the rest:
(1) The argument defends too much. It defends every _status quo_
against all change. But change, though not necessarily progress, is
evidently necessary to progress; and, even if progress be despaired of,
change is in itself nearly always healthy. It prevents men from going
to sleep.
(2) When all the world is delightful, all men will be able to enjoy
delightful companionship. Meanwhile, the pioneers must suffer, and
hope for better things for their children.
If it be argued that education does not make men delightful, in fact
very much the contrary, I answer that that depends upon the education,
and that, if genuine education doesn’t, nothing will; which is absurd.
(3) When all the world loves lovely things, then lovely things will be
easily come by, and ugly things will not be tolerated. This is not a
generous illusion but a simple economic truth. Suppose I manufacture
purple handkerchiefs adorned with green dragons: I do it because
there is a demand, and if you want one perfectly plain (and if nobody
else does) you will have to pay twice as much for it because it is a
“special”; but if all the world wanted them plain, they would be a
stock line and you could have them for half the money. Meanwhile, the
pioneers must pay double or go without.
(4) When all the world has passed through the stage of intelligent
scepticism and examined its foundations, it will worship the unknown
god without fear and without reproach――a very right and proper thing to
do. Meanwhile, the pioneers must be damned dissenters.
That is the gist of this study: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and
puissant nation....” Good (_b_) is in itself better than (_c_); and it
is a half-way house to (_a_), which (_c_) is not.
All the textbooks tell us about the nature and origin of belief. I have
but shown a few examples of what incredible things men believed almost
down to our own day, and still believe. One of the chief functions
of History is to show what wrongs good men have tolerated, and what
absurdities wise men have believed, as a warning to their later sons
to look warily about them for the like. In that sense this study may
claim to be true history.
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
We may miss an unit and die; but at least we shall have striven to be
worthy of a grammarian’s funeral.
OF DRAGONS
(An Introduction to the Study of Man)
I must first ask your pardon for troubling you with this digression,
but the facts and the theories are so many and curious and the whole
subject is of such vital importance, that I dared not trust to my
memory alone. It must be admitted that most of the facts recorded are
obviously untrue and that most of the theories are unsupported by
evidence and highly improbable; though the facts are guaranteed by the
highest authorities of the most ancient religions and the theories
upheld by the most eminent modern scientists. Whence it is evident
that I, like Sir John Mandeville, “have taken pains to ascertain the
exact truth”; and yet I think that from this jumble of superstitions
and fables and conjectures and absurdities there does emerge something
that may repay you for the weariness of an hour, and throw some light
upon the hopes and fears with which the unconquerable spirit of man has
progressed through the ages to the crowning triumphs of this twentieth
century. Indeed, as Sir Thomas Browne finely says in his Preface: “A
work of this nature is not to be performed upon one legg: and should
smell of oyl, if duly and deservedly handled.” And, on second thoughts,
I fully and unreservedly withdraw my apology.
I shall begin with some attempt to define our subject, and then take
you through the dragons of classical antiquity and early Christendom
down to the twilight uncertainty of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and the blank incredulity of our modern age. I shall then
go back to the earliest legends of all――the Egyptian, and close with
an attempt to harmonize the whole, and with a critical estimate of the
place of the dragon in human thought and experience.
I
OF DRAGONS IN GENERAL
In Glastonbury, where St. Dunstan took the devil by the nose and where
the Pilgrim’s Inn is dedicated to St. George and the Dragon, the dragon
will always be an object of peculiar interest, not to say veneration.
(So true is this that on the 16th October, 1906, the Somerset County
Council, on the advice of its Chairman, adopted as its sole device
“Gules, a dragon rampant, or,” though the recognition of its increasing
importance has since led it to add――15th October, 1912――the mace of
office, “at a cost not exceeding £20.”)
For Milton writes in one of his most harmonious numbers:
The old Dragon under ground
In straiter limits bound
Not half so far casts his usurpéd sway.
And wroth to see his kingdom fail
Swings the scaly horrour of his folded tail.
and St. John (_Revelation_, xx, 2) speaks of “the Dragon, the old
Serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,” while the Serpent that tempted
Eve in Paradise has been familiar to us all since our earliest
childhood; though commentators differ as to whether it appeared with
a virgin’s head (as some say) and how it was enabled to speak, and
in Eve’s own language; and why the event excited no surprise in her.
(Milton tells us――_Paradise Lost_, ix, 550, and what follows――that
it did, and that “not unamazed” she took up the matter with the
Serpent, which explained that it had been elevated above all the
“other beasts that graze” by tasting of the tree of knowledge. This
answer at once satisfied Eve and lured her on to her fall. The whole
account is circumstantial but undocumented.) Some say that Eve was
inexperienced with animals, not having been present when Adam named
them; Eugubinus suggests that the Serpent was a basilisk, at that time
harmless; and the Emperor Julian said roundly that the whole story
was a fable. However that may be, the dragon has been identified with
nearly all the gods and devils of nearly all the religions of nearly
all mankind――primitive man does not distinguish between the two, both
being primarily non-moral beings of enormous and terrifying power――and
Christian evidence is undivided in associating the dragon with the
powers of darkness. And what could be more natural than that a dragon
should take up its abode in or near Glastonbury, this region of hills
and swamps? For it is universally admitted that dragons are to be
found on the tops of mountains or in the depths of marshes, and it is
a generally accepted test of evidence that what has been believed by
all men everywhere in every age is true――absurd, perhaps, but not more
absurd than the modern opinion that what one man has once believed is
true.
We need not pause long over those other meanings of “Dragon” which so
confused our forefathers and so delight our contemporary compilers
of dictionaries: we do not propose to study that Dragon (Draco) who
gave stringent laws to the ancient Athenians, nor the variety of
carrier-pigeon known to natural history under that name, nor the
star called Dragon, nor quicksilver, nor (directly) the sea-serpent,
nor the flying lizard; nor have we any concern with the dragoons,
who take their name either from the dragon wrought upon their guns
or from the fact that they were originally mounted infantry, and so
a kind of fabulous monster or “popular mystery.” Our subject is the
common (or garden) dragon, one of the major vertebrates, blood-red
or chameleon-hued, with huge snake-coils, web-feet, bat-wings, and
the head of a lion or an eagle, capable of snuffing up the wind
(_Jeremiah_, xiv, 6) and holding companionship with owls (_Job_, xxx,
29) though some say that the bird intended is the ostrich. It dwelt of
old in mountain-caves, and lakes and marshes, and other inaccessible
places (the fiercer sort favoured the mountains), and survives to-day
only in heraldry, for instance, in the arms of the City of London, and
of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. More peculiar and detailed
descriptions of the animal will follow later, but it is well to note
here its special partiality for water and for swallows (whence swallows
flying low are to this day popularly supposed to herald rain), and its
habit of guarding treasures――gold, pearls, and precious stones――and
of emitting thunder and lightning. Eating its heart confers peculiar
qualities, notably fertility and the gift of tongues, and the draconite
or precious stone which lies embedded in its forehead has incredible
properties in the way of medicine and magic, but only if you catch the
animal alive and remove the stone without otherwise injuring it. (The
recorded instances of this feat are remarkably rare, most authentic
draconites having fortunately fallen from the head of the beast while
in flight, very much as a meteorite might fall to-day.)
Without further theorizing or inquiry, we will pass on to the old Greek
legend of Perseus, pausing only for the pleasant task of exploding
one particularly absurd opinion about the origin of the dragon.
Sceptics have suggested that it is nothing but primitive man’s hazy
and terrified tradition of the antediluvian monsters which walked the
early earth and which adorn the first pages of Mr. Wells’ _Outline of
History_; but science now tells us that something like seven million
years elapsed between the passing of the last of these and the first
appearance of the first of our fairly human forebears.
II
OF DRAGONS IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
There were numerous dragons in old Greece, “gorgons and hydras and
chimæras dire,” and all the best heroes had at least one apiece to
their credit; but they were a confusing and unfriendly lot, and we will
confine ourselves to the central legend of Perseus.
“An oracle warned Acrisius, King of Argos, that he would surely die by
the hand of his daughter Danæ’s son. To prevent this, he locked the
fair maiden in a tower of brass, which he built for the purpose. But
Zeus, king of Heaven, visited her in the disguise of a golden shower
of rain, and, much to Acrisius’ annoyance, she bore a son, Perseus.
Acrisius then shut them up in a chest and cast them into the sea;
but, far from being drowned or inconvenienced by the motion, the babe
slumbered as in a rocking cradle, and in due course the chest was
drawn safely ashore on Seriphos by Dictys, brother to Polydektes,
king of that island, who took the pair under his protection. Time
passed, and Polydektes sought to marry the unwilling Danæ, and, to
get rid of Perseus, now a strapping lad, sent him off to kill Medusa
and bring home her head. Medusa was a kind of dragon called a Gorgon,
who, though mortal herself, had two immortal sisters. Their parentage,
though obscure, was extremely distinguished, whence their troubles;
for as half-castes they had no lot or portion with gods or men, which
to three lively young women (as they then were) was insufferably dull.
Their speaking countenances betrayed the depth of their more than
human suffering, so much so that in course of time they became so
terrible to look upon that any man who should see them would be turned
to stone at sight. In this awkward predicament Perseus was fortunate
in possessing friends in high places. The goddess Athene gave him a
mirror, to strike the creature after the manner of a man shaving,
without directly looking on her――an awkward and unconvincing manœuvre.
The god Hades gave him a helmet of invisibility, apparently of a higher
class than the device adopted by Old Peter in the Bab Ballad. (He, you
will remember, duly became invisible, but his clothes did not; whence
divers inconveniences.) Or perhaps the hero travelled in primitive
simplicity (but that wouldn’t account for his weapons). The god Hermes
gave him his own winged shoes, and the god Hephæstus a mortal blade.
Armed with these contrivances, and luckily finding the Gorgons asleep,
Perseus completed his task and started for home with the head in a
travelling-bag with which he had prudently provided himself (for the
head was still fatal to view). On his way he turned Atlas to stone (and
you can see the Atlas mountains to this day), either out of pity for
his sufferings――he had to hold up all heaven on his head, and heaven
was, as in early Christendom, completely solid――or, as some say, in
revenge for some trivial rudeness. If so, it is a regrettable blot
on his otherwise unsullied escutcheon; for even Medusa had longed to
die. Flying on, he next beheld Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus king
of Ethiopia, bound to a rock and waiting to be devoured by a dragon.
This dismal scene had been staged by Zeus to appease the Old Man of
the Sea, because the king’s wife had boasted that she (or, some say,
her daughter) was more beautiful than the nymphs of the sea. Perseus
rapidly appreciated the situation, pressed the terrified damsel to
marry him (about which in her distress she made no difficulty, though
already betrothed to her uncle Phineus, who was safely under cover at
home), killed the instrument of divine vengeance when it lumbered up
clumsily from the sea, so that the waves ran red with its blood――and
duly married Andromeda. The skulking uncle made a regrettable scene
at the ceremony, and the bloody fight was terminated only by Perseus
producing the fatal head of Medusa, which turned his enemies to
stone. Returning home with his bride, he restored his grandfather,
who had been dethroned by a wicked brother, and reached Seriphos in
time to save his mother from Polydektes, whom he replaced by the
faithful Dictys. Shortly afterwards he was throwing the hammer at some
sports organized by a neighbouring monarch, when his aged grandfather
unluckily got in the way and received a fatal blow on the head; and
the old oracle was fulfilled. Perseus inherited his kingdom, and begot
a numerous progeny; but this idyllic scene was overshadowed by the
gloom of the accident, and he found no peace until he exchanged thrones
with the king of Tiryns, where he lived to a ripe old age, and died,
universally lamented, in the bosom of his family.”
Such is the old Greek legend: two dragons, a supernatural birth,
supernatural weapons, faithful and wicked brothers, a rescued maiden,
and the inexorable doom of Fate. We shall come back to this in our
conclusion.
III
OF DRAGONS IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM
There were numerous dragons in early Christendom, “gorgons and hydras
and chimæras dire,” and all the best saints had at least one apiece to
their credit; but they were a confusing and unfriendly lot, and we will
confine ourselves to the central legend of St. George.
“St. George is one of that numerous class of Saints about whom nothing
authentic is known”: but, piecing together the _Golden Legend_ and the
Portuguese and Balkan variants, we arrive at the following:
“The people of Troyan were sunk in all manner of iniquity, which
greatly shocked Our Lady, who happened to visit the place. Returning
to Heaven, she protested to God, who sent bears to frighten them
into righteousness. This proved of no avail, and, on the suggestion
of Elijah, God then sent them all manner of plagues and poxes for
seven years, but without result; he then sent a drought for a similar
period, and, as they still remained unconverted, he created a lake
in the neighbourhood and in it a dragon which visited the city three
times a day and devoured three hundred inhabitants at each visit; in
addition to these ‘hearty meals’ it demanded a virgin nightly, and
at last the lot fell upon the king’s daughter; after obtaining eight
days’ grace for lamentation, he was finally forced to abandon her with
his blessing; but the blessed George (a child of supernatural birth,
induced by his mother’s eating a peculiar fish), passing by on his
dappled courser with his mortal lance, greeted her in the name of God
and inquired why she was there; after hearing her story and satisfying
himself as to her faith and morals (‘Had her heart always been pure?’
etc.) he dismounted and planted his lance in the earth. He then laid
his head in her lap, saying: ‘Pray examine my head a little, for I feel
strangely sleepy.’ Under the soothing influence of her gentle fingers
he fell asleep, and the abrupt transitions of a traditional ballad do
not enable us to judge whether the damsel was long occupied in removing
the consequences of his saintly disregard for cleanliness; while he
rested, the lake rose in waves and the dragon emerged. The bashful maid
was ashamed to waken her deliverer, but her tears rolled down upon his
face and he leapt up like one possessed, and, fortified with the sign
of the Cross, heavily wounded the dragon. ‘Pass thy girdle round its
neck, nothing doubting (said he) and lead it into the city, and bid
them be converted: if they refuse, set free the insatiable dragon and
he will destroy the people of Troyan.’ The argument thus presented on
his behalf by the Princess proved irresistible and they were converted
to the number of 20,000 excluding women and children. The fate of the
dragon is uncertain, but one version tells, in some detail, how it
was then killed and how four pairs of oxen were required to remove
it. The grateful monarch erected a Church to Our Lady and St. George
(whose promotion appears to have been remarkably rapid) and offered
him money and his daughter to wife. But that holy and unambitious man
replied, ‘Give the money to the poor, care for the Church, honour the
priests, and diligently attend divine worship.’ As to the daughter,
the difficulty is that George, by virtue of vows he has taken,
cannot marry. At this critical moment his brother sees by a magical
life-token that George is in danger, and, hurrying off, arrives in time
to accommodate his tender conscience by taking the lady himself and
leaving George the honours of canonization.” Virtue always triumphs in
fairy-tales.
* * * * *
Such is the early Christian legend: A dragon, a supernatural birth,
a helpful horse, a faithful brother, a life-token, and a rescued
maiden; and “the Church may be congratulated on having converted and
canonized the pagan hero Perseus.” But before passing on to more modern
evidence, it will be well to give some account of the popular variants
which circulated all over the world as fairy-tales, superstitions, or
romances, almost down to our own day. The point in this case is not so
much who told or believed or guaranteed them, but the simple fact of
their having been told.
They consist almost invariably of four incidents: the supernatural
birth, the life-tokens, the helpful animals or the magic weapons, and
the rescued maiden.
(The most recent I believe to be the poem on the “Jabberwock,” which
occurs in _Through the Looking Glass_. The hero, though evidently
somebody’s child (“Come to my arms, my beamish boy”), has no undoubted
sire. The tum-tum tree (“So rested he by the tum-tum tree”) is probably
a life-token. His vorpal sword (“His vorpal blade went snicker-snack”)
is without doubt a magic weapon, and the “slithy toves,” “mome raths,”
and “borogroves” may well be helpful animals. The rescued maiden is not
specifically mentioned, but it is difficult to explain in any other
way the behaviour of the monster (“manxome,” “whiffling,” “burbled”) or
the motives of the hero).
_The Supernatural Birth._ “Heroes of extraordinary achievement or
extraordinary qualities were necessarily of extraordinary birth. The
wonder or the veneration they inspired seemed to demand that their
entrance upon life, and their departure from it, should correspond
with the impression left by their total career.” It is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that every old Oriental tale begins with the words:
“There was a king who had no children,” and the means adopted by them
for achieving their pious purpose may be the eating of fish, fruit,
barleycorns, eggs, saltpetre, or a dragon’s heart. There are dangers
in all these unusual methods, as in the case of the man who was given
a male and a female fish of which his wife was to eat one according
to the sex desired. Wanting a son, and to guard against accident, the
rash man ate the female fish himself, “with the wholly unexpected
result that he himself gave birth to a daughter.” In another case,
the dragon’s heart, while being cooked, “began to emit a pitch-black
smoke so powerful in its effects that the condition not merely of the
queen (who tasted the heart) but of the maiden who cooked it, as well
as of every article of furniture in the room, became interesting.
The old four-post bedstead gave birth to a cradle,” and so on and so
forth――a very economical method of furnishing. In European tales, on
the other hand, “the medicine is more frequently used to gratify spite
against an unfortunate maiden” by putting her unwittingly in blessed
circumstances. In every case at least one child is born “of powers, it
need hardly be said, as remarkable as his parentage.” Other substances
which are “sovran against barrenness” are water, wind, sun, and a magic
touch.
_The Life-tokens._ Very commonly the hero has one or two brothers born
with him in the same miraculous way, and they set out on their fortunes
together. What enables them to keep in touch when they part is a magic
life-token, also born with them in the same way――for instance, a tree
which grows from part of the fish planted in the garden at the time
that their mother ate her part. Each one of them will have such a tree
or branch which thrives or withers according to his own fortunes, and
by this token each knows when the other is in danger, and comes to his
rescue as in the case of St. George. Sometimes it is a magic mirror, in
which only the party concerned can see the fate of his brother――“no
doubt the eye of faith was required to see anything in it.” By this
means the brothers invariably rescue each other, or, if they come
too late or if a witch has turned the unlucky one to stone, either
the witch thoughtfully provides the elixir of life or she is killed
and it is found among her effects, or the faithful animals find it.
Safely reunited, they commonly agree upon the division of their very
considerable spoils; but in some cases they fall out and one kills the
other, in which case the “elixir of life” comes into play again and
they all live happily ever after. It may well be that the repentant
brother will see two snakes fighting: one kills the other, but in
remorse brings it to life again with a magic herb: the sagacious fellow
takes the hint, and all is well again.
_The Helpful Animals._ These are often begotten together with and in
the same miraculous way as the heroes and the life-tokens. Arranged
according to what we may now call “the Bovril principle,” they come
in the following order: horses, dogs, hawks, lions, wolves, falcons,
bears, foxes, eagles, ants, dog-fishes, bulls, calves, hares, boars,
cats, winged horses, and deer.
_The Magic Weapons._ These are an obviously later variant of the same
idea and, on the same principle, stand in the following order: lance,
shield, sword, pistol, gun, magic wand, stick, bow and arrow, knife,
beer, stole, magic water, powder-horn, air-gun, iron staff, 500-lb.
club, mace, and crucifix.
_The Rescued Maiden._ In every case the function of the hero and all
his apparatus is to rescue a distressed maiden from a monster to whom
she is being sacrificed to appease the Gods. Often the hero, having
rescued the lady, “ungallantly refuses to see her home, saying that
he wishes to see a little more of the world.” But, before departing,
he takes some token――the dragon’s tongue or eye or other part, or
the lady’s handkerchief or other ornament. His desertion leaves her
a prey to the first impostor who comes along, claims the victory for
himself and the lady in marriage. In the nick of time the hero returns
and shows up the impostor “and poetical justice is completed by his
marriage with the lady” (who has always fallen in love with him at
first sight), while her sisters (for she has two sisters) are commonly
given to the two other princes (for he has two brothers).
As I have said, all the best Saints performed feats of this nature,
including the Holy Apostles Philip and Matthew, St. Michael, St.
Margaret, St. Hilarion, St. Donatus, St. John, St. Sylvester, Pope Leo
IV, and a man named Smith (at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire). It is also
told of a boy who was carried off by a dragon that, after long years,
he was found in its cave “alive and reading the Gospel, which was held
up before him by St. Friday, while St. Sunday further contributed to
his convenience by holding the candle.”
Scarcely ten miles from Glastonbury a terrible dragon lived once on
Aller Hill over beyond High Ham. His fiery breath destroyed the people
and their flocks and herds, and he was particularly partial to maidens.
The climax came when a young man called one morning to fetch his bride
away to Church: her home
Was levelled to the ground,
And on its ruins, now a funeral pyre
Smouldered the ashes of her aged sire
and the foul monster had carried her off to his cave. The bridegroom
swore, in his despair, that “earth should no longer hold a thing so
vile,” and, marching off with his friends, killed the dragon and
rescued his bride; but the story ends on a classical note of tragedy,
for she died of horror in his house that very day.
_Reference_: E. Sidney Hartland, _The Legend of Perseus_, 3 vols.
(London, 1896).
IV
OF DRAGONS IN MODERN EUROPE
It will be well to begin this section with short accounts of the two
most satisfactory Renaissance dragons: the Dragon of Rhodes and the
Dragon of Bologna.
“The history of the ancient Order of the Knights of St. John (not
yet removed to Malta) records that about the year 1330 Dieudonné de
Gozon, afterwards third Grand Master of the Order, joined the Knights
in Rhodes, and was filled with pious zeal to kill a terrible dragon
which ravaged the Island; but the then Grand Master considered such
extravagant gaieties too dangerous for a knight vowed to the defence
of Christendom, and roundly forbade it. On this de Gozon returned to
the castle of his ancestors near Tarascon in France, and, with the help
of an ingenious dummy dragon (so little does the art of war change),
trained his horses and dogs to face the monster, and, returning, killed
it and removed its tongue as evidence. A lying Greek (so little does
the Greek nature change) found the carcase and claimed the victory; but
de Gozon showed him up by producing the tongue――and was put in prison
for disobedience. The Pfalzgraf Ottheinrich made our first written
record of this feat when passing through on a pilgrimage in 1521, and
the corroborative evidence is indisputable: the feat is said to have
been recorded on the tombstone of the knight (we have the tombstone,
and it isn’t); there are said to be pictures of it in a wall-painting
in a house in Rhodes (which cannot be found); and the family are said
to have preserved the draconite taken by the hero from the monster’s
forehead (the family has disappeared); the head itself was seen by a
seventeenth century traveller still nailed to a gate in Rhodes, though
it disappeared during the last century. For countless years the simple
islanders had displayed it for the glory of God and without thought of
gain, and it would perhaps be uncharitable to connect its disappearance
with the recent development of transatlantic transport, or with the
discoveries of modern science, which have shown that the skeleton of
the dun-cow at Warwick is simply that of a whale. And, finally, they
will show you to this day in Rhodes the cave where the dragon lived.”
The story of the Dragon of Bologna is tame by comparison. It is
recorded in great detail in _The Natural History of Serpents and
Dragons_ by Professor Ulysses Aldrovandus, published at Bologna
by Mark Antony Bernia in the year 1640, at his own charges, with
a dedication to the Prince-Abbot Franciscus Perettus, and with
the approval of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph, the Rector to the
Cardinal-Archbishop of Bologna, and the legal adviser to the Most Holy
Office of the Inquisition in that city.
The story is as follows (p. 402): “In the early summer of the year
1572, to wit on the 13th of May, the dragon appeared in the outskirts
of Bologna, hissing horribly. It was caught the day after Ascension
Day by a cowherd called Baptista of Camaldulus, about 5 P.M. and about
seven miles out from the City, on the high road. His cows saw it and
stopped dead, and Baptista, who was behind with his cart, pricked them
on with his goad; but they went down on their knees and wouldn’t
budge. Then he heard a great hissing and beheld the astounding monster:
but though frightened out of his wits, he up with his stick and knocked
it on the head so that it died. The brave herd, fearing it might not be
dead, cut off one of its feet and brought it into Bologna as evidence.
After three days the noble Horatius Fontana gave orders for the carcase
to be sent to the great naturalist Aldrovandus, who declared it to be
unique in all Italy and all Europe, and had it stuffed and put in the
museum (whence it has unluckily disappeared). It was about this same
time that the flying dragon appeared by night in the sky, and no sane
man will doubt that these portents were sent in honour of Pope Gregory
XIII, who took office in that year and who sported a dragon on his
coat-of-arms.”
This same Aldrovandus is our chief source of information on the modern
dragon. He sets out, in due scholastico-scientific style, first the
alternative meanings of the word “dragon,” with a note that Virgil
is very haphazard in his use of “dragon” or “serpent” for snakes in
general; then the synonyms, as “syren,” “leviathan,” and the Hebrew
_oach_ (whence perhaps our word “hoax”); then size――5 to 100 cubits (we
may split the difference and safely say about 50); habitation――Libya,
India, Atlas, Æthiopia, Florida, etc. (with a caution that the species
born of a wolf and an eagle is probably fabulous and nowhere to be
found); colour――red, black, ashen, pea-green, indeed the evidence is
hopelessly conflicting; description――head of a virgin or wild-boar,
goose-feet or talons or hoofs (they probably vary); St. Augustine
confirms Herodotus’ opinion that they fly; poison――more virulent in
the hotter climes; jaw――some say very large, some say very small,
some say two rows of teeth, some say three, and the number is in
any case uncertain; manners and customs――very vigilant and fond of
gold (so we see why they are normally set to guard treasures), not
afraid of men, and able to throw elephants with their tails: four or
five, says Pliny, will twine their tails together for a long flight
and so cover the distance at an incredible speed; very fierce, but
Heracleides, the philosopher, had one so tame that it followed him
about like a dog; birth――the evidence is conflicting as to whether
from eggs or immediately. Remedies against their poison――red mullet
applied externally or (better) internally, or (best of all) the head
of a dragon skinned and applied to the bite. Capture――men of the
most magnificent courage drug them with opium-seeds, so as to obtain
the draconite; a scarlet cloak and the appropriate incantation are
effective, and an axe has been tried with success: a useful trick is
to catch them when they are preoccupied with an elephant-fight (their
customary recreation), and another very good plan is to put down
sulphur, which the creature eagerly gulps down and then moving to the
nearest river drinks until it bursts. (This was the device of the
great Cracus, who gave his name to Cracow. It is an elaboration of the
Prophet Daniel’s method of dealing with Bal’s dragon――that holy man’s
mixture, it will be remembered, itself exploded the dragon; but the
march of science and the closer study of animal-habits no doubt made
Cracus’ scheme more convincing.)
The eyes are precious stones and the teeth ivory; the fat is a
sovereign remedy against poison, fever, and blear-eyes; the spine is a
great cure for toothache; the gall-bladder and intestines mixed with
wine effect more than was ever claimed for Colman’s mustard in the
bath, removing warts. It is very lucky to bury a dragon’s head under
the front doorstep, and the eyes make a fine poison and send away
nightmares: and so on and so forth――all this less than three centuries
ago.
A little later, about 1660, the learned Jesuit Kircher visited the
Alps, and, though discounting many devils as due to the credulity
of the peasantry, could not resist the conclusion that so horrid
and inhospitable a country could only have been intended by God to
harbour dragons, especially when a public notice in the Church of St.
Leodegarius (our old friend St. Leger, the patron-saint of bookmakers?)
in Lucerne told how a man “paused some months in a cave with two
dragons, who were either naturally amiable or were calmed by his
energetic appeals to the Virgin, and finally escaped by holding on to
their tails when they flew away after their period of hybernation”
(History does not record whether they adopted Pliny’s plan, or whether
by a merciful dispensation of Providence they flew so close together
that he suffered no strain).
The anonymous author of _The Golden Coast, or a Description of Guinney_
(London, 1665) has little reliable information on this or any other
subject. The people, he tells us, are Nigritæ “from their colour,
which they are so much in love with that they use to paint the Devil
white”; and of the elephant, “which some call Oliphant,” that “they
have continual war against dragons which desire their blood because
it is very cold.” The book abounds in such old tales out of Pliny and
Bartholomew Anglicus, and has all the appearance of a literary puff
of the Company of Royal Adventures of England trading to Africa (est.
1662); for what honest man could have waxed so enthusiastic over that
death-trap of a country, where (says he) “a man may gain an estate
by a handfull of beads, and his pocket full of gold for an old hat;
where a cat is a tenement and a few fox tails a Mannor; where gold is
sold for iron, and silver given for brasse and pewter?” The Company
failed shortly afterwards and was replaced by the Royal African Company
(1672), and this may well have been to over-spending in the Advertising
Department.
Doctor Thomas Browne, in his “_Enquiries into very many received
tenents, and commonly presumed truths_” (London, 1686) (commonly called
Browne’s _Vulgar Errors_) is more modern, but, he, like a sensible
man takes a middle path between scepticism and faith――thinks we cannot
safely deny that there is such an animal as the basilisk; but we are
not to confuse it with the cockatrice, a mere hieroglyphical fancy,
though even the cockatrice he will not declare to be impossible (he
does not see how such an oddity _can_ be hatched from “a cock’s egg”
(_sic_: the phenomenon occurs only in a cock’s eighth year, and causes
it acute discomfort put under a toad or serpent)); but many inventions,
he says, are really “the courteous revelations of spirits,” and we must
not be too cocksure of our merely human faculties.
Scheuchzer, the learned Botanist who toured the Alps in the first
ten years of the eighteenth century, frankly adopted the compromise
implicit in Aldrovandus――always to believe half of what he was told;
but he thought the dragon-stone in the museum at Lucerne entirely
convincing; for (says he) a dishonest man would not have invented so
simple a story as its falling from the sky――but rather some fabulous
tale about its coming from the farthest Indies; and the stone not only
cures simple hæmorrhages, which ordinary jasper or marble might well
do, but dysentery and fevers and all those ills of which, to judge
from the advertisements in the local press, Glastonians may now rid
themselves so much more simply. Item, a respectable citizen returned
home one evening lately “with a swimming in the head and a marked
uncertainty about the motions of his legs, and how can we doubt his
word when he attributes these unprecedented phenomena to the influence
of the dragon who encountered him in the forest?” Scheuchzer’s
scientific journals were published at the expense of the Royal Society
of London. Credible witnesses of to-day maintain that “not the vestige
of a dragon is to be found, even in those wildest regions of the Alps
which ... were especially adapted for their generation.” Thus do beauty
and romance fade before the advance of Winter Sports and Grand Babylon
Hôtels.
_References_: Aldrovandus, _op. cit._
Thomas Browne, _op. cit._
Leslie Stephen, _The Playground of Europe_ (London, 1871).
E. Ray Lankester, _Science from an Easy Chair_ (London, 1910).
F. W. Hasluck, _The Dragon of Rhodes_ (British School at Athens, 1914).
V
OF DRAGONS IN ANCIENT EGYPT
It is reported of Mr. Winston Churchill that, being challenged one day
by a Frenchman as to the remarkable uniform he was wearing, he replied
in the same language that he was an Elder Brother of the Trinity. “Ah!”
said the Frenchman, “that is indeed a unique distinction.”
It is not so unique as might be supposed. If we could betake ourselves
to the Egypt of 5,000 years ago, we should find them worshipping a
Trinity of their own: Isis the all-Mother; Osiris the Son, and Horus.
Isis, the forerunner of all the gods of all mankind was the goddess of
fertility――goddess, not god, for what could be more evident than the
female fact of birth, whereas male assistance went long unrecognized.
The savage mother, finding herself with child, would attribute her
condition not to a “commonplace event which took place perhaps many
months before,” but to a recent thunderstorm or other striking
phenomenon to which all could bear witness.
So Isis ruled alone for a while, and then in her own inimitable fashion
gave birth to the water-god Osiris; and between them in due course they
produced the warrior Horus, who in the fullness of time became the
avenger of Osiris, when the powers of darkness slew him.
This is the bald and essential outline of their faith. The details
are extremely confusing, partly because of variants, but principally
because the savage-mind _is_ so confused. “Anne’s Mother’s daughter,
Mother’s Anne’s daughter,” reasons my baby; and the small boys who
deliver messages round the factory find a similar difficulty in
distinguishing between the Buying Department and the Sales Department.
In exactly the same way the gods of old Egypt became inextricably
mixed. The tale told of one is easily applied to another, and God
the doer easily becomes God the done-by; while the symbol of the god
will equally well pass for (say) the enemy of the god, or the weapon
with which he fought. Like the old lady in the story, they “do not
distinguish.” (Compare how our Arthur and the Saxon Cedric, whom he
fought at Langport, were both identified with the dragon.)
After this warning, the chief events of the Egyptian Old Testament may
not seem so absurd. They centre round “The Destruction of Mankind,”
the original of all our myths.
The story is that Isis became angry with mankind because of their
infidelity, and determined to slay them all. She set about it with a
will and the earth ran red with their blood; but when she was near the
end of her task, the other gods took pity on those who were left, and
determined to thwart her. This they did by giving her some doctored
beer, whereupon she became “genially inoffensive”――and so the remnant
escaped; and to this day their descendants generally regard beer
with an almost superstitious veneration. The Flood is an obvious and
world-wide variation of this theme.
The next stage is that Isis the slayer becomes Isis the slain, whose
sacrifice will atone for the sins of mankind. The grandmother goddess
then becomes a mere mortal, “a beautiful and attractive maiden”――say
a virgin: the virgin is then abandoned to her fate, and rescued by the
conquering hero, and we are hot on the trail of Perseus and St. George.
But, you will say, what has all this to do with dragons? It must be
admitted that in Egypt, “the great breeding-place of monsters,” no
dragons survive in full-blown splendour; but these legends are the
germ of all, and from them springs the essential dragon-conflict, the
vendetta of Horus against the powers of darkness. The dragon has also
been identified with Osiris the good controller of water, with Set
the evil who killed him, with Isis in so far as she is confused with
Osiris, and with Horus as the successor of Osiris, but we shall only
become confused if we try to follow all its transformations.
We have come now to the end of all our tales, and I shall try in the
last part of this section to link up all the parts; to show you how
remarkably little essential change there has been in man’s thinking
for fifty centuries, and how the commonplace incidents of originally
prosaic stories became distorted and elaborated with corroborative
detail, quite regardless of the original and often forgotten meaning.
_Reference_: Elliot Smith, _The Evolution of the Dragon_ (London,
1920).
VI
OF THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE DRAGON
The chief satisfaction which learned men appear to derive from these
tales is quarrelling about their common or separate origin. The
Separatists say that their resemblances merely show how very much
alike men are, the world over; the Communists that they are so very
intricate and so far from obvious that they must have sprung from a
common stock (_cf._ Mr. W. J. Perry’s and Professor Elliot Smith’s
theories as to the common――Egyptian――origin of militarism, mining, and
many other branches of megalithic and modern culture). Personally I am
a Communist; for it is a perfectly good principle, common to science
and theology, that miracles are not to be multiplied, beyond necessity.
The question is, in any case, of no fundamental importance to us, but
it will simplify what follows if I make my standpoint plain.
When our first fathers found themselves at large in this already
ancient world, the first fact they noticed was that they were alive.
Like all their descendants after them, they wisely worshipped facts,
and they made a religion of fertility; like us too, and like all those
who will follow us, they knew nothing certain of the two infinities
from which we come and to which we go, before birth and after death.
The next fact they noticed was that other men died, though their minds
shrank in horror from the fact that they too must die, and could not
entertain it. They hankered after immortality, for their dear ones
and (later) for themselves, as we hanker after it, and as our children
will; for in course of time it became a commonplace of all the world
that all men must die, and this doom of the “sad-eyed race of mortal
men” is the theme of pathos throughout antiquity. Their souls rebelled
against the bitterness of death, and the search for the elixir of
life (to renew man’s youth and to give him immortality) has been “the
inspiration of most of the world’s great literature in every age and
clime, and not only of our literature but of all our civilization.”
They worshipped life, and feared and hated death. And so they
worshipped women, and the womb from which they all sprang. For good
luck they carried amulets, shells especially; and from being amulets
these shells came to be worshipped as the actual source of life, were
personified and made symbols again of the Great Mother, the giver of
life. (So Aphrodite, the goddess of love, came floating in a shell on
the foam of the sea to gladden the hearts of men). They noticed, too,
that water was the first necessity of men and beasts and plants, and
that dead men and things stiffened and withered as though the water
was gone out of them; and so they worshipped water as the principle
of life, and the water-god was the second-born. Then, turning their
vision further a-field, they took note of the regular motions of the
moon, her monthly course, and her strange connection with the tides
of the sea; and so the Great Mother became identified with the Moon.
And then as they pondered they felt the greater glory of the Sun, and
set him up above his mother the Moon; but the moon long remained the
personification of order and light and goodness, set over against
chaos and darkness and evil――though in time it was the sun, or his
successor-sun, who came to be regarded as the prince of light.
They hated death, and in the presence of it protested their belief that
somehow, somewhere, the dead continued to live, needing all the gifts
his family could bring――a primitive doctrine of immortality. And then,
in the presence of corruption, they made plans to preserve the body:
they burnt incense to restore the odour of life; they poured libations
to replace the vital juices. They tried to infuse blood, the life-giver
(for “blood,” as we say still, “is thicker than water”) or to find some
painted substitute. They hung the tomb with magic shells, that the dead
might be born again. And when, after all, the body still decayed, they
made statues instead for the soul to inhabit, and tried their charms
on them; and from the idea that statues can come to life grows the
contrary idea that men can be turned to stone. The crowning triumph of
their statuary was the eye, making the statue (as we say) “a living
image”; and from the idea that the open eye means life, came the belief
in the power of the eye for good or evil. To this day the neglect of
the poorest grave is regarded as a more than callous crime, and there
are not wanting those amongst us who shudder at the desecration of the
age-old tombs of Egyptian kings.
Thus it was in the beginning. And when in process of time a wise king
discovered the arts of irrigation (it may be that this discovery made
him king; or perhaps kingship originated with the discovery of the
calendar, which conferred the gift of prophecy: “king” here is in
any case premature), and spread fertility throughout the land, they
worshipped him too and made him a living god, and cherished him as the
soul (as it were) of their land’s fertility. And when he grew old,
and his powers began to wane, terror fell on them lest their fortunes
should fail with him and they be all dead men. So they transferred
their worship for the king to his office, killed him, and made his son
divine. And when he too began to age, they killed him in turn, and his
sons after him, so that they always had a young and vigorous king-god.
Until in time an ageing king refused to submit, and this was the origin
of the story of the wrath of the gods and the destruction of mankind.
Time passed, and the monarch was replaced by a maiden among his
subjects, and we are at the stage of ordinary human sacrifice, “human
blood being thought of as the only elixir.” But in time that, too, was
ended, by a kind of religious reformation, through the belief that any
other blood would do as well; and this was the origin of the story of
the rescued maiden and her deliverer.
They worshipped water, and they worshipped shells, and so the pearl
within the oyster-shell; and diving for pearls, their natural enemy was
the shark, the guardian of the treasure and the only true and original
dragon. But in the course of ages all this was naturally forgotten,
and the dragon came to be adorned with all the terrors of all the
monsters of travellers’ tales, from the python to the octopus and the
lion that lives in the waste. Any terrible or impressive fact of life
or nature――the existence of evil, or of hoary mountains――gave rise to a
fresh dragon-tale; and the fact was then brought in as evidence of the
truth of the tale, very much as a politician to-day will convince men
of his general veracity and wisdom by stating some obvious truth; and
in the absence of facts, the vague terrors of untutored minds became
embodied in similar monsters; and so in a sense they are still, though
nowadays we call the result a “complex.”
EPILOGUE
I would not wish man rid of the dragon as death; partly, no doubt,
because I know it to be impossible (“This business of death is a plain
case and admits no controversy”); partly because death is such a
satisfactory thing: it is always something to look forward to. Death is
perhaps the oldest of the dragons, long since domesticated and become
the friend of man through familiarity.
But there remains that dragon of which we spoke in the beginning,
compounded of respectability and bigotry and cant; or rather these
things are the evidence that the dragon still exists, for they are all
the effects of terror: terror of truth and knowledge and hard fact,
the old terror of man “a stranger and afraid, in a world he never
made.” This monster dwells not in the desert places of the earth, but
in the hearth and home of every man. Its appetite is enormous and its
destructive powers are equalled only by its fertility. Like all the
other dragons, it is begotten by dogma out of ignorance.
It would be a mistake to suppose (as some have done) that religion
is altogether a bad thing because it has fostered many errors, or
altogether a fraud because it is profitable to priests. Every science
under the sun has fostered innumerable errors, and every doctor on
earth practises pious frauds daily, seldom solely for his private
ends. Mankind as a whole has had a hand in these imaginings for
half-a-hundred centuries; our certain knowledge of our surroundings
is to this day infinitesimal; and “it is part of our human make-up to
bridge the gaps in our experience with rumours, with conjectures, and
with soothing traditions.”
Not many months ago there came to these shores a Chinese game, Mah
Jongg, so perfected in the course of centuries that not even a Chinaman
can cheat at it. Is it too much to hope that, with the general increase
of knowledge and the general recognition of the limits to which our
knowledge can attain, this old world may yet produce some saint or hero
who will finally rescue Andromeda from the dragon?
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
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