Fire-breathing dragons?

The function of a fire-breathing apparatus would be?

 

The Serpent: an archetype

Then it must have been a very old documentary or else not a very professional production. Any contemporary account would point out that the Dragon is simply one of the more fanciful instantiations of the Serpent, which is an "archetype" in the Jungian paradigm of the human spirit. Meaning that is in our collective unconscious: all humans at all times in all cultures have had bad feelings about serpents without having to be taught and without ever even seeing one. The snake in the Garden of Eden, upon whom we place the blame for giving in to our own curiosity and thirst for knowledge and making us not "perfect" enough to stay in Eden, is the best known ancient instance of the Serpent archetype in our culture. The fire-breathing, winged dragons of the Middle Ages were just fanciful elaborations of the myth.

The Chinese, in the true spirit of the Dao, managed to split the Serpent into two images: the original Snake, which retains some of its original bad connotations, and the Dragon, which to them is positive and benevolent.

I believe (and I have not really researched this) that fear of snakes is universal in arboreal animals. Our not-so-distant ancestors lived in the trees. The original arboreal mammal from which the primates are descended is the sloth. Sloths are the descendants of land mammals who saw all the tasty fruit growing in the new kinds of trees that sprang up about sixty million years ago and said I gotta get me some of that. They got up there and realized that there weren't any predators with the ability to climb trees, so they had a great easy life sucking on fruit and pooping on anybody who walked beneath them.

And, due to lack of natural enemies, they stayed small, slow, and weak. (The Giant Sloth of the Ice Age came much, much later.) So there were some carnivorious lizards on the ground thinking now I gotta get me some of that. Eventually they evolved into long skinny types with vestigial legs who could crawl out onto the skinniest branch without breaking it under their weight. And slithering is an extremely quiet form of locomotion, so with some care and without having to move terribly fast they could sneak up on the sloths.

So any sloth who happened to be instinctively wary of long skinny slithering reptiles had an improved chance of living long enough to breed and to pass on that gene.

This is hardly far-fetched. We raise birds, and as far as we can tell absolutely every species of bird comes right out of the egg with an utterly catastrophic fear of snakes. You walk by a parrot cage trailing a garden hose and they will beat themselves to a pulp trying to get away, and screaming to the whole flock to fly away while there's still time. (Makes your neighbors just love your parrots.) Snakes are the only land-based predators that can follow them up into the trees and out onto the delicate branches where even cats and raccoons can't go.

Lemurs, then monkeys, then apes grew much bigger and faster and more powerful than sloths, but the snakes were evolving too and there are now plenty of snakes in the rain forest that have no problem at all eating an orangutan. However it was that the fear of snakes first arose in the sloth's brain wiring, it stayed there all the way down to Homo sapiens. We've been out of the trees for a long time but apparently we haven't mutated yet to get rid of our feelings about the Serpent.

Exactly. That's what an archetype is. Other examples are the flood that wipes out all life except a few lucky survivors, and the human child raised by wolves.

Casts doubt on the professionalism of the documentary. You'll have a real hard time finding a scientist with good credentials who believes that dragons ever existed. Except, as has already been pointed out, as dinosaur fossils and Komodo dragons.

 

That is quite recent on the scale of mythology. Beowulf was written down slightly more than 1,000 years ago.

We can assume that it existed in oral form for a few centuries more. But it is strictly an "English," that is, Anglo-Saxon legend. The other Germanic tribes do not have it. Therefore it doesn't go back before 400 C.E. when the Romans brought the Anglo-Saxon colonists to Britannia. It could conceivably be a relic from the original Celtic Britons, but I doubt it, because the Anglo-Saxons seem to have assimilated virtually nothing of true "British" culture. Besides, since the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton people are the surviving descendants of the Britons, we would expect to see their legends carried on by at least one of those peoples.

That puts Beowulf in the same category as Paul Bunyan and Bigfoot. Legends created very recently by one specific community. They often have some tenuous basis in fact -- perhaps a Roman war horse's bridle caught fire and he ran through a village destroying the thatched huts. That would be remembered for generations and the story would get better with every re-telling. Archetypes are powerful symbols and it is very common for people who re-tell an old story to "remember" archetypal images in it that were not there in the original version. Fire itself is one of the most powerful archetypes. I bet many of you have had a dream about it. It doesn't take much for fire to have been added to a tall tale after a few generations of storytellers have had their way with it.

A horse with his mane on fire, wreaking destruction, becomes a huge serpent, the embodiment of evil, and the fire just makes him that much more fearful. A young child is separated from his parents by a war or a natural disaster. A hermit or a tribe of "barbarians" finds him and raises him. When his family finally accidentally rediscovers him he doesn't speak a "human" language so he can't tell them how he survived. After a few re-tellings it seems that he was taken in by a wolf and raised with her cubs.

Just take a look at one of the many websites that de-bunks the "urban myths" of our time. It's amazing how quickly a front-porch boast becomes a story and a good story becomes a better one. The poodle in the microwave never happened, but in a thousand years it will be the story of a woman who opens her microwave and finds a fire-breathing dragon inside. The man on the stretcher bouncing down ten flights of stairs and surviving, that never happened, but in a thousand years it will be the story of a man who was found dead after falling off the roof of a skyscraper, and three days after his funeral he rose from the dead.

Archetypes are focal points for fiction. They are where stories eventually converge.

Look at Saint Patrick and the snakes. We know darn well that there were never any snakes in Ireland. That's very common, for an island not to have a complete set of animals to fill all the ecological niches. So if the story has any basis in fact at all, what animals do you suppose he actually did eliminate? Probably from just one village or one town. But a saint has magical powers. A saint could use those powers to drive all the individuals of an entire species off of one of the Earth's 25 largest islands. And what would the people most appreciate? Snakes, the ones that they have a genetic fear of!

Do you wonder whether just a few of the snakes would have made one last stand on the beach before crawling into the ocean to certain death by drowning? Hey we got nothing to lose, let's see what a saint tastes like! Talk about genetic fear, the average snake would probably try to fight off a hundred saints before going into the damn water! They got no legs to swim with!

 

Dragons and Christianity

Well it's been an interesting evening trying to find answers to your questions. Not that I'm a scholar that you should trust, but just that I am also curious as to their answers. The following:

http://www.unc.edu/depts/rel_stud/pilgrimage/essays/pdf/Meisner123.pdf

is an interesting and quite recent paper on the topic of dragons. Most of it is devoted to the dragon in biblical mythology, which hints at its metamorphosis into the form it takes in European literature: wings, fiery breath, devil horns instead of the antlers of the Chinese dragon. Apparently the dragon began as a water creature, which it still is to the Chinese, bringing rain in the growing season and retreating into the ocean during winter. Medieval sailors used maps on which the seas that rimmed a flat Earth were marked, "Here there be dragons." How the dragon came to be associated with fire is, well, spoken of in this text, but I'm not sure I'd use the word "explained." Something to do with the various interpretations of the Book of Revelations, although apparently dragons also breathed fire as far back as the time of Job. The author does say that fire-breathing dragons are not unique to Christian cultures, but this paper does not explore in great detail what to you, and hence now to me, is a key issue.

To go back to archetypes, and the four elements as known to the Greeks, you can't find two that are more opposite than Water and Fire. For one creature to be associated with both is something that deserves a lot of discussion. The Dao could be a big help here, as it always is when dealing with opposites, but this paper does not cite it in discussing Chinese dragons.

Much of LOTR has been traced to earlier English literature and mythology. I once saw two lines quoted from a medieval text that listed about 3/4 of the names of the members of the Fellowhip of the Ring. Tolkien strove to make Middle Earth feel familiar to Englishmen.

Sounds like one of Gollum's healthier kinfolk, hmm, my precious?

That was when the story was written down, but Beowulf's adventures clearly took place in an earlier era. The fact that he is Scandinavian could imply that the entire epic is set in the mists of the prehistory of the Germanic people, before they crossed through Denmark and spread into Europe proper around 1000 BCE. An interesting question that may never be answered. By carbon-dating organic rubble found at archeological digs, we have only lately been able to establish the sequence and chronology of the diaspora of the pre-literate Indo-European tribes. It is highly questionable whether they could have known as much about their origins as we do.

You've got me there. I'd ask my wife with her degree in English literature, except I know that's not her era of study. Not every element in a story is drawn from the Collective Unconscious or consciously from the current mythology. Some of them are creative inventions of the author, after all.

The existence of a British Herpetological Society suggests otherwise, and indeed their web page informs us that lizards are common and snakes are not exactly rare on Great Britain, one of Earth's ten largest islands. Remember that the English Channel was a valley during the Ice Age. They also have plenty of turtles, but there are absolutely no alligators, not even in the sewers.

That's what archetypes and the collective unconscious are all about. As the paper points out, although the author's understanding of Jung's work is hardly much deeper than mine, dragons come from inside us, not from the external world. It was purely my own conjecture, as a person who is not a student of Beowulf, that the characters might have been inspired by real people or incidents. Again, Beowulf is a work of fiction, which means any or all of it could have been made up by its author.


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