1.1 Charles Gould and the Exaggerations of Travellers’ Tales

One of these popular writers was Charles Gould, who wrote what appears to be the first book devoted to the question why a belief in dragons exists in many parts of the world. Given the long tradition of dragon ‘sightings’ in his native country, Gould was perhaps predisposed to imagine that, while the good citizens of medieval England did not create outright falsehoods, they or their countrymen who travelled abroad may have seen something real that they misinterpreted as a dragon. Since Europe has few creatures that qualify as monsters, Gould (1886, Chs. 7–9) argued that when European adventurers began to visit other regions of the world during the Age of Exploration, they encountered unfamiliar creatures, some of which were quite menacing. In visiting Egypt or any part of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, they would have seen crocodiles, or very large snakes, and the tales that spread from person to person might well have become magnified in the telling. Gould reasoned that there were enough of these kinds of events to ensure that Europeans had plenty of raw material from the natural world to construct a fanciful world of creatures derived from them. In this way the idea of dragons arose from the repetition and exaggerations of travellers’ tales.

The first problem with this proposed explanation is that reports of dragons in England, not to mention dragons in classical mythology, preceded the Age of Exploration by many centuries. Moreover, the accounts of English dragons could hardly be misinterpretations of sightings of real creatures if these creatures are not found in the British Isles. It is often hard to tell where Gould stands on particular issues, as he constantly alternates between apparent gullibility and skepticism. In one breath he tells us (170) “It is a well-known fact that during the Punic War at the river Bagrada[s], a serpent one hundred and twenty feet in length was taken by the Roman army under Regulus,” and he then tries to rein in this improbable statement by noting that the largest snakes known today are less than 40 feet in length. Nonetheless, he concludes shortly afterwards that

The explanations of these legends attempted by mythologists, based on the supposition that the dragons which are their subjects are simply symbolic of natural phenomena, are ingenious, and perhaps in many instances sufficient, but do not affect, as I have before remarked, the primitive and conserved belief in their previous existence as a reality.

In passages such as this he not only supports the belief that dragons arose from the observation of real reptiles, but he implies that these reptiles may have been different from anything known today—in other words, that dragons may have been actual creatures matching their counterparts in mythology rather than ‘mythical’ monsters, and that the reason no one has produced concrete evidence of them is because they have everywhere become extinct. Much the same mentality is apparent in his description of the Chinese dragon (212):

We now approach the consideration of a country in which the belief in the existence of the dragon is thoroughly woven into the life of the whole nation. Yet at the same time it has developed into such a medley of mythology and superstition as to materially strengthen our conviction of the reality of the basis upon which the belief has been founded, though it involves us in a mass of intricate perplexities in connection with the determination of its actual period of existence.

And finally, in a passage that leaves no doubt he was convinced that dragons are real biological organisms that inspired the widespread traditional belief in them, he notes with respect to the Chinese dragon (259):

The idea of its fondness for swallows, and power of attracting them, mentioned in some traditions, may not impossibly be derived from these birds hawking round and through its open jaws in the pursuit of the flies attracted by the viscid humours of its mouth. We know that at the present day a bird, the trochilus of the ancients, freely enters the open mouth of the crocodile, and rids it of the parasites affecting its teeth and jaws.

At the same time he expressed this belief, Gould (200) dismissed the possibility that dragons could be “symbolic of natural phenomena.” How could something so obviously physical be a product of people observing the rain or clouds? We will return to this question in a subsequent chapter, since the issue is not, and never has been, whether the dragon idea arose from the observation of rain and clouds, but whether it could have arisen from animistic conceptions of the rainbow that were retained after the rainbow came to be understood in a different light.

Gould’s is one of the simplest types of explanations for why the belief in dragons is ubiquitous, namely that they are derived from living prototypes, or from unknown animals that no longer exist. However, this leaves many basic questions unanswered. Why, for example, do dragons combine reptilian traits with traits of mammals or birds? Why do they fly? (Gould refers again to travellers’ tales of fanciful winged snakes). Why do they breathe fire or guard a treasure? And, to anticipate an association that will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter, why are they associated with waterfalls around the planet?

Gould’s naturalistic explanations also tend to be Eurocentric, even though he recognized a belief in dragons in China, Egypt, Ethiopia and India. While European travellers may well have sent back reports of exotic reptiles that became enlarged to dragons in the retelling, it is hard to argue the same thing for China. First, apart from monks making pilgrimages to India after the introduction of Buddhism, China had no tradition of visiting exotic countries from which they might have carried back reports of strange animals they encountered. When a national exploration policy was briefly adopted during the Ming Dynasty, under the leadership of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (1371–1433), the emperor of China sent a series of seven exploratory fleets as far as the coast of east Africa for purposes of trade and the quest for exotic substances that might promote longevity, but this foray into the unknown did not result in the kinds of fantastic travellers’ tales so familiar from the stories of European explorers, in part because they were largely conducted over water. Second, whereas to Europeans dragons were ‘monsters’ to be slain, this was not the case for most Chinese, who generally revered them as beneficent creatures necessary to fertility and harmony. Finally, if the Chinese dragon was a product of encountering real biological organisms, how could it be a controller of the weather? What living animal could possibly serve as a model for such a creature?

Despite his failure to answer (or even raise) any of the questions about well-known traits of dragons, such as their ability to fly, or to control the weather, and despite his use of ‘mythical’ in the title of his book, Gould (1886:201) pointed out with some satisfaction that dragons were still included in European works on natural history until a little before the renowned French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) established the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology and provided a comprehensive classification of all animal species. However, just because science has advanced does not necessarily mean that the popular demand for evidence has.

I once gave a public lecture on the origin of dragons, and during the question period an old friend insisted that dragons must have originated from encounters with crocodilians. When I asked him why they were associated with waterfalls he replied without hesitation ‘Crocodiles live in water!’. This kind of reply unfortunately typifies the looseness of thinking that has characterized so much research on the origin of dragons. Yes, crocodiles live in water, but this is normally in sluggish rivers, or in saline estuaries, not in association with waterfalls, particularly in view of the fact that dragons are sometimes said to live in the spray of the falls. Water is water, but it is a long way from the comparatively placid rivers in which crocodiles or their close kin tend to congregate, to the crashing cataract of a waterfall, together with the ‘reverse rain’ that it produces from breaking on the rocks below and sending spume back into the surrounding atmosphere.

To summarize, Gould’s proposal for why the dragon idea is found in widely separated and very distinct cultures was the first in a series of claims that continues to be made to this day in defense of the value of cryptozoology, or the search for creatures whose existence has been inferred from myth and legend, but has not stood up to scientific scrutiny.

1.2 Prehistoric Survivals

Under the category ‘prehistoric survivals’ it will be convenient to include claimed evidence for what are assumed by their adherents to be Mesozoic reptiles that have survived into modern times. There are undoubtedly more of these than I indicate here, but my aim is to highlight at least one from Europe, in this case Scotland, and another from North America, where the horned water serpent myth is omnipresent.

1.3 The Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness monster needs no introduction. If it is a biological organism, as some have claimed, it raises the prospect that some survivals from the age of dinosaurs have coexisted with humans throughout the period of hominid development, and that a physical model for the dragon might well exist in the natural world. Some have tried to connect it with Scottish legends of the kelpie or water-horse, a creature that can assume human form. This seems far from the typical image of a dragon, although it will be seen at a later point that although most dragons are blended of a reptilian body with cat-like claws, some have hooves or even partially human torsos.

Needless to say, there have been numerous attempts to prove that a creature like one of the ancient aquatic plesiosaurs that lived at the time of the dinosaurs lies behind the stories of the Loch Ness monster. Exciting and potentially earthshaking as these efforts may be, no replicable evidence of such an animal has ever been uncovered. If Loch Ness were found in North America, ‘Nessie’ could easily be discounted as an extreme expression of the ubiquitous horned water serpent in the mythology of Native Americans. However, without such a supporting mythic tradition in Scotland, it simply remains an anomaly.

1.4 The Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan and Similar Creatures in North America

Lake Okanagan in British Columbia has long been regarded as the home of a large unidentified aquatic animal not unlike the better-known Loch Ness monster—that is, a surviving mosasaur, plesiosaur, or elasmosaurus from the Mesozoic era. A number of reported sightings have been made, but, as with the monster of Loch Ness, they all resolve themselves into something much less newsworthy when they are studied closely. There is no need to dwell on this ‘dragon’ for long, as there is no confirmation that it exists, and by all indications it is simply a highly publicized example of the horned water serpent belief that is found throughout aboriginal North America.

Essentially identical is the so-called ‘monster’ of Lake Champlain (known to its aficionados as ‘Champ’), which has also been the subject of reported sightings, including sightings by experienced fishermen who claim to have observed it from above as it swam below the surface. However, as with the Loch Ness monster and the Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan, there have been no undoctored photographs or other types of objective evidence that might remove the taint of skepticism that surrounds the claims made for such reputed creatures.

1.5 Primitive Palaeontologists?

The last type of dragon theory that can comfortably be called ‘naturalistic’ is not associated with any named individual, but is occasionally mentioned in general books on dragons. This is the claim that humans got the idea of dragons by finding dinosaur bones and somehow visualized the kind of creature they came from. This idea has been expressed as recently as the past quarter century, as seen in the following passage:

Like other creatures, both mythical and real, the dragon has evolved. The giant saurian—the whale-sized fish-lizards, the fifty-foot tyrannosaurs and the tank-like dinosaurs—disappeared from the face of the earth millions of years before man appeared, but it is possible that their fossils and remains inspired the earliest stories about dragons (Phillips 1995:630).

The anthropologist David Jones (2000), whose own ideas will be examined below, dismisses this claim by raising the reasonable question, “How can one recognize something as a dragon unless one already knows what a dragon is?”.

The reason that such claims have been made at all probably depends in large part on the Chinese tradition of using ‘dragon bones’ for medical cures. The term ‘dragon bones’ is not to be taken literally, since Chinese herbalists have traditionally used any excavated bones to pulverize and include in medicinal concoctions: they were all ‘dragon bones’ regardless of the kind of animal they came from, because this naming convention gave them an imaginary potency they would not otherwise have. No doubt, when Europeans heard about ‘dragon bones’ in Chinese medicine, some of them assumed that the bones sold as such in apothecary shops actually were from extinct giant reptiles. However, as Jones correctly points out, this is fanciful. The reconstruction of dinosaur skeletons (hence of body form) only became possible with the rise of paleontology in the nineteenth century. Prior to this, to the untrained observer a bone was simply a bone, and the kind of animal it came from, or its proper position in the body, would have been a matter of sheer guesswork which could hardly be expected to lead to a visual representation of a dragon, let alone a dragon that could fly, control the weather, breathe fire, or guard springs, among many other things.

2.1 The Dragon as a Weather Phenomenon

Another proposal for where the dragon idea originated is also mentioned in general treatments of the subject, but normally without a specific source. This is that dragons are symbolic of the shifting shapes of clouds in a stormy sky. The Chinese dragon is often shown in this context, twisting its body about among the rain clouds. In most accounts the dragon is said to control these features of the weather, but in some variants it is actually derived from them.

With specific reference to the slaying of dragons, Evans (1987:36) states that the Macedonian general Antipater (398?–319 BCE), and the Athenian playwright Euripides (480?–406? BCE) both maintained that “the dragon-slayer myth derives from the sun’s drying of water vapor, which sometimes resembles a coiling serpent.”

What is most remarkable about this idea is that it comes tantalizingly close to understanding the nature of dragons as argued in this book, without taking the extra step needed to get there. Yes, dragons are associated with stormy skies and the control of rainfall. But, as will be shown, to understand how they became a culture universal we need to find specific traits of dragons that are widely-shared, as these are both diverse and surprisingly consistent in pointing to a specific natural phenomenon and its conceptualization by countless culturally diverse communities.

2.2 Carl Jung, the Dragon as the Unconscious or the Dark Force

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung combined his medical practice as a psychiatrist with a deep interest in mythology as a mirror on the human mind, and these threads are closely interwoven in a number of his books. In some of these, as in Jung (1956), he makes repeated reference to the dragon as a symbol of various psychological forces. Much of his discussion is all but unintelligible to any who have not adopted his unique view of psychology, and his rapidly shifting references to ancient literature often leave it unclear what he has actually claimed. However, in at least some passages he sees the dragon as the Anti-Christ, as where he says (1956:368)

The original unity of opposites is still discernible in the original unity of Satan and Yahweh. Christ and the Anti-Christ of the dragon lie very close together so far as their historical development and cosmic significance are concerned. The dragon legend concealed under the myth of the Anti-Christ is an essential part of the hero’s life and is therefore immortal.

Elsewhere he suggests that the dragon represents the negative elements of the unconscious mind (1956:374) “Taken purely as a psychologem the hero represents the positive, favorable action of the unconscious, while the dragon is its negative and unfavorable action—not birth, but a devouring; not a beneficial and constructive deed, but greedy retention and destruction.” And in still another context he notes (1956:362, n. 110), “The dragon in the cave is the Terrible Mother. In German legend the maiden in distress often appears as a snake or dragon that has to be kissed; then it changes into a beautiful woman.”

Jung’s association of the dragon with the Anti-Christ seems clearly to derive from its function as a foil for Christian knights. In this respect it simply reflects the long tradition in European art of dragons attacking young women, who are duly rescued by a hero who symbolizes civilization and morality. Perhaps a less theory-dependent interpretation of those aspects of the dragon that figure prominently in European iconography is that it represents the pre-Christian past, since the dragon idea clearly preceded Christianity, and its negative connotations are often indistinguishable from the negative connotations commonly attributed to paganism.

Whatever interpretation one chooses to impose on Jung’s often shifting allusions, one thing is clear: to him the dragon is a consistently negative force. More importantly, in nearly all of his sometimes painfully erudite appeals to the dragon motif, Jung shows little interest in how the dragon idea might have arisen in the first place. Rather, his concern is with how it has been used to represent supposed psychological forces since it came into being, a concern that has been taken up by some of his followers, as Gardner (1990), or others who believe that the dragon idea is a projection of negative human emotions (Tuschman 2008, Arnold 2018).

3.1 Carl Sagan, the Dragons of Eden

Carl Sagan was a famous planetary astronomer, much in the public view, who is remembered most for his hundreds of scientific papers, and for his starstruck recitation on the Johnny Carson Show of the words “billions and billions” in reference to the starry vastness of the cosmos. Moreover, in addition to his groundbreaking work in planetary astronomy he was the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The dragons of Eden: Speculations on the evolution of human intelligence.

Sagan’s basic thesis in this book is that the modern human brain incorporates an older ‘reptilian’ brain over which a more advanced mammalian brain (the neocortex) has evolved, and that such features of human experience as dreams are products of the ancient reptilian brain that we still carry within us. Although this is his more general thesis, in the course of what is clearly an exploratory and tentative argument, often framed by questions rather than statements, he has some very explicit remarks to make about the universality of the dragon idea. To avoid possible misrepresentation, it is best to quote his views on this matter in full. After speaking of “our ancient enemies, the reptiles” in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic transition (146), and commenting on the modern Komodo ‘dragon’, Sagan (1977:149–151) has this to say:

The pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures is probably no accident. The implacable mutual hostility between man and dragon, as exemplified in the myth of St. George, is strongest in the West … But it is not a Western anomaly. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Is it only an accident that the common human sounds commanding silence or attracting attention seem strangely imitative of the hissing of reptiles? Is it possible that dragons posed a problem for our protohuman ancestors of a few million years ago, and that the terror they evoked and the deaths they caused helped bring about the evolution of human intelligence? … Could the pervasive dreams and common fears of “monsters,” which children develop shortly after they are able to talk, be evolutionary vestiges of quite adaptive—baboonlike—responses to dragons and owls?

To extract a scientifically testable statement from this passage is challenging, but there seems no way to avoid concluding that to Sagan the pervasiveness of dragon myths in the world’s cultures may reflect experiences that our primitive primate ancestors at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs had with the last archosaurians. In other words, the mental impressions made on the brains of these remotely related creatures were somehow transmitted through countless generations to the present, where they surface as “evolutionary vestiges” in the brains of children who dream of “monsters”, or in the brains of adults who imagine the existence of dragons. The fact that the dragon is essentially a positive creature in the Chinese tradition is passed over in silence when Sagan declares that an “implacable mutual hostility between man and dragon … is a worldwide phenomenon.”

It is good to remind the reader that the subtitle of Sagan’s book begins with ‘speculations’, because his approach to understanding the universality of the dragon idea is based on speculation rather than on anything resembling the scientific method that he so ardently defended in other contexts. Given his training as a scientist, and his often-repeated remark that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, it is little short of astonishing that there is no consideration of the geographical distribution of the draconic traits noted in Chapter 1, a set of observations that must constitute the foundation of any theory of why the dragon idea exists in so many of the world’s cultures. What we witness in these speculations is a world-class scientist completely abandoning the scientific method once he is working outside his chosen area of expertise. Had Sagan approached the question ‘why dragons?’ as a responsible scientist he would have begun as he did in his work on planetary astronomy by first collecting all observations relevant to the question at hand (something he obviously did not even begin to do with dragons), and then proposing explanations for these observations based on independent lines of supporting evidence and of parsimony.

Perhaps most astonishing of all is the clearly Neo-Lamarckian overtone of Sagan’s proposal that mental impressions on an ancient ancestral organism could still be present in the reptilian brain that modern humans possess. There is no way to mince words here: Sagan’s claim is that an acquired characteristic (fear of dinosaurs) was transmitted through the gene line for tens of millions of years into the brains of modern humans, where it surfaces as the universality of the dragon motif. This is quite simply Lamarck reborn in a most unexpected context. Despite the obvious problems with this proposal, it is still taken seriously in some quarters, as by Allen and Griffiths (1979:126), who mention a theory “which has most recently been put forward by Dr. Carl Sagan, that we still retain a dim race memory of a time when our proto-human ancestors were in conflict with the great reptiles whose primeval shapes and world-wide power haunt us still.”

3.2 David E. Jones, an Instinct for Dragons

David E. Jones, an anthropologist at the University of Central Florida, has proposed an account for the origin of dragons that in its basic features closely parallels that of Sagan, since it also assumes that experiences during the lives of our remote mammalian ancestors have somehow been transmitted genetically to modern humans.

After a whirlwind survey of the distribution of dragon tales around the Earth, Jones begins (2000:3) by stating the problem clearly: “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?”

To answer this question, he begins by dismissing the dinosaurs as possible contenders for the dragons of Eden, and he does so for the obvious chronological reasons. He follows this up by noting that the discovery of dinosaur bones circumvents the problem of coexistence, but can hardly help to explain the mystery since, as he correctly notes, “How can one recognize something as a dragon unless one already knows what a dragon is?”

He then moves on to consider attested large reptilian creatures, such as the Komodo ‘dragon’ (Varanus komodoensis), the large monitor lizard of the Lesser Sunda islands in Indonesia, giant pythons, etc., and also dismisses these as plausible sources of the dragon idea since they are locally distributed, while dragons are universal. Jones then springs his conclusions on the reader all at once. While preparing an undergraduate lecture on primate behavior he was reminded that vervet monkeys in Africa are notable for having three warning calls that signal the most dangerous predators they face: leopards, martial eagles, and pythons. In a ‘eureka’ moment he saw this as the solution to the dragon mystery: the three predators that most threatened our ancestors—the eagle, the leopard and the snake—in his words “merged in mythology to become a single creature” (2000:5, Fig. 2). Although this theme is explored in greater detail throughout the book, the reader is never given a clear idea of when or how this fusion of three distinct creatures into a single mental image took place. Since it presumably happened at a time when these ancestral primates were still arboreal (with predators coming from both land and air), this hypothesized event would have taken place millions of years ago.

Jones states that the three predators “merged in mythology” to become a single creature, but that cannot be what he actually means, since primitive primates still living in the trees would have had no language, let alone mythology. What he must have meant is very similar to the claim made by Sagan—the mental impressions made by these predators on the minds of primitive primates were retained and passed through the gene line to modern humans. Without the possibility of cultural transmission at such an early time this is the only interpretation possible.

If it is accepted, Jones’ argument helps in a novel way to account for why dragons combine reptilian and mammalian or avian features, and why they fly. However, it fails to come to grips with any of the many other widely distributed features of dragons already noted, including why they are givers or withholders of rain in China, the ancient Near East, and Mesoamerica, why they are guardians of springs around the planet, why they are recurrently associated with waterfalls, why they guard treasures, or—another point that will be examined in a later chapter—why they are regarded in Taoist metaphysics and European alchemy as hermaphroditic or androgynous. His own discussion of the geographical distribution of dragon traits is extremely brief, non-specific, and inconclusive (2000:19). The rest of the book explores beliefs about the dragon around the world, and contains much useful material, but in the end, like Sagan’s argument, it is clearly an exercise in Neo-Lamarckian speculation, and is subject to all the criticisms that the inheritance of acquired characteristics faces in any of its manifestations.

4.1 Grafton Elliot Smith and the Egyptian Origin of World Civilization

Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) was an Australian-born anatomist and Egyptologist who spent most of his adult life in England, where he worked at the University of Manchester at the time he published his best-known book, The evolution of the dragon (1919). Smith received an M.D. from the University of Sydney in 1895 based on the structure of the brain in monotremes, but his deeper interest was in the function of the convolutions of the human brain, and this led him in turn to an interest in studying the brains of Egyptian mummies. In 1900 he was hired at the Cairo School of Medicine, and through personal connections was appointed advisor to the archaeological survey of Nubia, with the result that by this point his connections as an Egyptologist were firmly established. Apparently during this period Smith became convinced of two basic premises: 1. humans are essentially non-inventive, and are therefore unlikely to strike upon the same idea twice, and 2. Egypt was the cradle of world civilization. It was the union of these ideas that led to his radical diffusionist theory of why the dragon motif is globally distributed.

Smith was not the only radical diffusionist. Harris (1968:380–381) includes him with W.H.R. Rivers and W.J. Perry, as representing British diffusionism, and although Rivers was interested only in diffusion within Melanesia and Polynesia, both Smith and Perry were radical diffusionists in claiming that some culture traits have spread around the world by borrowing. In this respect they resembled the contemporaneous Kulturkreislehre of German anthropology, which operated with the same basic premise that humans are fundamentally uninventive. What distinguished Smith, and later Perry (1887–1949), who was influenced by him, from other radical diffusionists, was the claim that all cultural inventions of any consequence had originated only once, in Egypt.

Smith begins his book (1918:vii–viii) with an apology for its disjointed character, which he tells the reader is a result of the difficulties under which the writing had to take place:

Had it been possible to review the whole book at one time, and if the pressure of other duties had permitted me to devote more time to the work, these blemishes might have been eliminated and a coherent story made out of what is little more than a collection of data and tags of comment. No one is more conscious than the writer of the inadequacy of this method of presenting an argument of such inherent complexity as the dragon story .... This book must be regarded, then, not as a coherent argument, but merely as some of the raw material for the study of the dragon’s history.

Having deflected possible blows from critics in this way, he then began to expound his argument, beginning with the claim that humans are singularly uninventive: in his view the likelihood that a similar invention, no matter how useful, would be struck upon in more than one culture, is virtually nil. Since agriculture, the rise of organized priesthoods, and urbanization arose as early or earlier in Egypt as anywhere else, it was easy for Smith to give Egypt a priori consideration as the source of cultural inventions that happened only once and then spread by diffusion. What made his argument exceptional is that every world culture that possessed a trait even vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian cultural traditions was said to have borrowed it from Egypt. This required him to assume that Egyptian emissaries travelled the globe, spreading the largesse of Egypt to all parts of the planet. No culture was spared: even China, with its rich and highly distinctive cultural history, owed most of its culture to Egypt. In the words of Harris (1968:380–381) who discusses the Egyptocentric theory of world civilization in a critical commentary on radical diffusionism in general:

As the Egyptians progressed in civilization, they set about journeying by land and sea over great distances in search of precious metals and other raw materials. And in so doing, they rapidly spread, through diffusion and colonization, varieties of the original archaic civilization, which had been founded on the banks of the Nile.

As part of this massive cultural transmission the idea of the dragon—originally an invention of the Egyptian priesthood—became globalized, reaching the length and breadth of Eurasia, and extending beyond to the Americas. I will not attempt to explore every detail of Smith’s elaborate scheme on how the dragon motif originated, evolved, and spread, but a few basic guidelines are needed in order to properly evaluate his claims.

First, according to Smith (1919:viii)

In the earliest records from Egypt and Babylonia it is customary to portray a king’s beneficence by portraying him initiating irrigation works. In course of time he came to be regarded, not merely as the giver of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the personification and the giver of the vital powers of water.

To this he adds that the people came to see their well-being as dependent on the king’s vitality, and if he showed signs of decline it was “not illogical” to kill him, since his decline spelled the decline of the community as a whole. However,

when the view developed that the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater gifts of life-giving to the land and people than was the case before. He was the Nile, and he fertilized the land. The original dragon was a beneficent creature, the personification of water, and was identified with kings and gods.

In this rather circuitous and arbitrary fashion, Smith connected the centrality of Chinese beliefs about the dragon’s control of water and the weather with an Egyptian origin, and through arguing that the dragon idea was spread to all quarters of the globe from Egypt he managed to account for the universality of the dragon idea. However, he has no explanation for most of the traits described in Table 1, nor does he seem to have been aware that they need an accounting: Why would dragons have been created as chimera? Why would they be recurrently associated with waterfalls? Why, in widely separated cultures, would they be considered androgynous? Were these traits all fanciful details invented by the Egyptian priesthood for its own amusement?

Like other varieties of radical diffusionism, Smith’s Egyptocentric theory of the origin of the dragon is rejected by most scholars, who recognize that diffusion is real, but is typically more locally confined to cultures that have been in sustained and demonstrable contact. However, a segment of the scholarly community continues to support the idea that global diffusion should be taken seriously, as seen in the work of some art historians, as Grieder (1982), and by the implicit endorsements of this position by Leach and Fried (1972:323) and Hogarth and Cleary (1979:25), the latter of whom state that “The origin of the Aztec people remains a mystery. But aspects of their legendary art, and their belief in dragons, suggest links either with Egypt or with Asia.”

A somewhat narrower defense of the dragon idea spreading by trans-Pacific diffusion was offered by Hentze (1966), who maintained that artistic motifs found in grave goods from Shandong province in northern China resemble others found in Chimbote, a coastal city located on Chimbote Bay, south of Trujillo some 250 miles north of Lima, Peru. The image that impressed him most forcefully was that of a double-headed Rainbow Serpent (Regenbogenschlange) in a Han dynasty burial from 150 CE, and a Chimbote ceramic vessel showing a lightning god with jaguar teeth, and under it a similar double-headed Rainbow Serpent. In addition, he cites another artistic parallel of the same kind in artefacts from the grave complex of Colima-Nayarit-Jalisco on the west coast of Mexico which date to 200–300 CE, roughly contemporaneous with the Eastern Han materials, and concludes (1966:259) that the artistic motifs in the American sites were inspired by the Wū-Liang-tsŭ culture of China.

It is not entirely clear whether Hentze intended his claim to be restricted to the borrowing of an artistic motif, or whether he believed that the idea of the Rainbow Serpent/dragon itself was transmitted via long-distance contact. In either case there are serious problems with his claim that the artistic motif in the Americas was acquired from China. The first of these is sailing technology. The Chinese have never been sea-oriented people and, as already noted, it was not until the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE) that a Chinese emperor endeavored to explore areas outside China, when he sent the famous eunuch admiral Zheng He on a series of expeditions along the coast of the Malay peninsula, and then on to India, eventually reaching the east coast of Africa repeatedly between 1405 and 1433. However, this was not open-sea voyaging, but rather a fleet of Chinese junks that hugged the coast the entire distance, going and returning.

The Eastern Han dynasty existed well over a millennium before the Ming, and its capital was at Luoyang, on the Yellow River, hundreds of miles inland, with no ready access to the sea. These considerations of culture and geography make it very unlikely that any Chinese ship would have been able to contact the Americas in the second or third century CE, or even a thousand years later. Hentze does not consider the difficulty of crossing the Pacific in pre-modern times. Even the Polynesians, who were vastly more accomplished navigators than the Chinese, were stalled in western Polynesia (Fiji-Tonga-Samoa) for two millennia before improved sailing technology enabled them to reach eastern Polynesia, with a first landfall in the Society Islands no earlier than about 1025 CE (Blust 1999b: 77–82, Wilmshurst, et al. 2011). Add to this the impressionistic nature of the artistic comparisons in question, and there seems to be little reason to reject the interpretation that the double-headed rainbow snake in the art of both areas is a product of convergence.

Although presented differently, another dragon study in the same radical diffusionist mold is that of the Egyptologist George Davis Hornblower (1933), which looked at the dragon idea exclusively in urbanized, literate cultures, and speculated that the idea first arose in Mesopotamia or Egypt, as a way of showing the power of the local deities:

Briefly, we may reasonably suppose that composite animals were pictured to represent concretely the special qualities attributed to each of them: the fierce strength of the lion, the keen swiftness of the eagle, or the mystery and deadliness of the snake. In Mesopotamia such creatures were connected very early with deities ... and it seems likely that they were intended to convey the idea that the gods were endowed with the combined virtues of the animals included in the composition (Hornblower 1933:80).

From the Levant this idea then spread east as far as northern China. Like other studies of its kind, this one provides no explanation for many widely distributed traits of dragons, including why they are controllers of rainfall, why they dwell in waterfalls, why they guard springs, and a host of other critical observations that are simply ignored.

5.1 Mary Barnard, a Dragon Hunt

In a short but original paper Barnard (1964) rejected explanations of the universality of the dragon that appeal to contact with archosaurians, vague references to the weather, extreme diffusion, or psychological archetypes. To her the shortcomings of each of these types of explanation had become all too apparent, and she sought an entirely new way to account for this phenomenon ---one that was, in effect, a social explanation.

Barnard begins her story by arguing that a careful study of dragon myths leads inevitably to the conclusion that they have been invented repeatedly, rather than spread from a single source of origin. In considering appeals to symbolism she can hardly conceal her annoyance with the arbitrariness of this position, since it leads in so many different directions:

As for its symbolism, that differs from one myth to another, and the effort to make all dragons emanate from one unconscious fear or desire is useless. Dragons have been described as symbolic of clouds, fire, rivers, darkness, time, evil, the unknown, one’s father, the status quo, the Milky Way, the heavenly movements, and other assorted phenomena. St. George’s dragon is symbolic of heresy (Barnard 1964:422).

After this brief dismissal of ideas that have been touted in the literature since at least the 1880s, she reminds the reader that dragons are a part not just of mythology, but also of folk culture, as in the Chinese public New Year celebration, or the dancing dragon called La Tarasque, of Tarascon in southern France, in which a dragon body is animated by a line of partly concealed human dancers. In a type of eureka moment reminiscent of the formulation of some other theories of the dragon, she then reverses the relationship between myth and dance, and asks the reader whether the dragons of myth might not simply be projections of the dragons seen in dances. In her own words she asks (1964:423) “Was the archetypal dragon first conceived in the imagination and then later impersonated by dancers, or was he not rather invented by the dancers themselves when one of them suddenly cried: “Look, we’re making a big snake!” ”

According to Barnard snake-dancing in public festivities is sufficiently common and ancient that it could have served as a model for the form of the dragon through the form of the dance. In other words, people involved in snake-dancing for whatever purpose, then projected the shape of the dance onto a beast that blended reptilian traits with those of mammals or birds, that could fly, that breathed fire, guarded treasures, etc. She attempts to account for some of these properties (as its bodily form) by variations in dance costume (as the use of feathered headdresses). However, the reader is left to guess how the dragon of the dance originated if it did not already exist independently of the dance, or more generally why anyone who was dancing for a completely unrelated purpose would find a reason to project the form of the dance onto a rich mythical tradition about a creature which had no obvious connection to its physical model. Finally, despite its references to the Chinese dragon, as with several other theories considered here, Barnard’s theory is Eurocentric: how can it account for the dragon idea in places that have no tradition of line-dancing, such as Mesoamerica, or aboriginal Australia?

5.2 Paul Newman, the Viking Connection

In a 12-page chapter on ‘Theories’ Newman (1979:202–204) suggests that the concentration of dragon stories in certain parts of Britain may not be accidental. He refers in particular to the area of northeast England once known as the Danelaw (where, following repeated Viking attacks and settlements, the laws of the ‘Danes’ dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons), commenting

it is often acknowledged that the frequent occurrence of worm legends in the counties of Northumberland and Durham may be connected with the impact of the Norse sea-pirates on this region .... It is possible that, on settling in northern England, the Norsemen created a mythological tradition of their own reconciling their old beliefs with their new environment. Alternatively, it has been construed that the worms are no more than the Vikings personified as mindless reptilian killers (Newman 1979:202).

By “their old beliefs” what Newman appears to mean is the way Viking long-ships were outfitted with “brightly painted dragon figureheads”, implying a belief that the dragon was their companion and protector in war. Regrettably, like every other theory of the dragon that has been proposed to date, this one is far too narrow to account for even a small percentage of the globally distributed traits of dragons displayed in Table 1: why, in widely separated parts of the world are dragons considered to be controllers of rainfall? Why do they guard springs, wells, lakes and the like? Why do they fly high up among the clouds? Why are they basically reptiles, but with added traits of mammals or birds? Why are they recurrently associated with waterfalls? The list goes on, but is routinely ignored by those who prefer to indulge in speculation rather than pursue the trail that they must follow if they begin with the globally distributed traits that are given in Table 1, and discussed in detail in later chapters.

5.3 Barber and Barber: One Dragon, Many, or None?

Barber and Barber (2006:231–244) are particularly concerned with where the idea of Germanic dragons originated. In pursuing this question, they look at the dragon of the Icelandic sagas, dating from as early as the ninth century CE, and its equivalent in the Old English Beowulf epic (first written down in 975 CE), and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, composed around 1200 CE. In so doing they are attracted to the idea that in breaking into an ancient barrow (burial mound) to search for treasure an intruder would have experienced a sequence of events that could have been mentally combined to form the idea of a dragon. They describe what they call a ‘Stripping Procedure’, with the following steps (2006:234):

1. Someone steals a cup from an old barrow.

2. Fire erupts from the barrow and spreads.

3. Near the stone entrance, our hero stabs blindly at the source of flames while shielding himself (ineffectively) from them.

4. It smells bad

5. People stab deeper, and eventually the flame goes out

6. Inside the barrow is treasure but no trace of a dragon’s body.

They then add: “We don’t know the dragon’s appearance, however, because while it’s alive all you can see is flame and once the fire is out, there is nothing left.” In this way they try to show why dragons breathe fire, have toxic breath, and guard treasures, but may otherwise vary in appearance.

This is certainly a novel approach to understanding how certain dragon beliefs might have arisen, one which implies that a single theory of the origin of dragons is futile, since one can hardly assume that the idea of dragons arose from breaking into burial mounds in every part of the planet.

After all, the Chinese classics tell us that Chinese dragons also breathe fire, as we will shortly see, the horned water serpent, or dragon of native North America, is described in several parts of the continent as having fetid or toxic breath, and dragons guarded treasure in classical Greece. Barber and Barber are aware of this problem, and in an effort to cope with it they adopt a catholic definition of dragons as a class of partly similar creatures, concluding that Germanic and Chinese dragons were not necessarily the same type of beast, and neither of these was necessarily the same creature as “the cosmic dragon of early Mesopotamia and Greece” (2006:240). In this way they evidently hope to reconcile the obvious variations that every observer has commented on in the form and behavior of the dragon in different regions of the world.

The observant reader will see two features of this argument that by now are familiar. First, like Jones, they assume a stable concatenation of ideas based not on direct observation of a single phenomenon, but on serial association (their steps 1–6). Moreover, they assume that this associative matrix then produces a coherent unity (the dragon idea) that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Unlike Jones, their argument has the advantage that the complex of images that gave rise to the dragon idea arose at a much later period in human history, and they can therefore appeal to transmission via language, rather than invoking a mysterious transmission of ideas through our DNA. However, the claim that enough people would codify the same physical experience in the same way so as to produce a culturally stable concept of the dragon seems far-fetched at best. Second, for all its originality this theory overlooks one critical point: that despite their cross-cultural variations dragons around the globe share certain apparently arbitrary traits which point to a convergent development that must have been motivated by observations of the real world that were available to humans everywhere. In short, this approach takes us back to Chapter 1, where our first concern was to establish that dragons are a conceptual unity. Once they had arisen from a common source they could be molded in ways suitable to individual cultures, as with the pearl in the mouth, or the passion for eating roasted swallows distinctive of Chinese dragons. The claim of Barber and Barber (2004:241) “that some “slain dragons” originated as methane, others as lava, rain-clouds or stars” thus totally fails to explain the agreement across widely separated cultures even of the traits they consider most central to their argument, as why they can fly, why they breathe fire or guard treasures—are these traits of dragons in other parts of the world also products of the activities of grave-robbers?

5.4 Summing Up

Why are there so many mutually incompatible, and in some cases surprisingly fanciful ideas about why the dragon-belief is universal? Is it because we have no way to study cultural universals? Is it because the dragon—a creation of our own minds—is actually trying to elude us, as Allen and Griffiths (no doubt tongue-in-cheek) suggest in the quotation cited at the beginning of this chapter?

Or it is perhaps because no one has previously adopted the right approach to this topic, namely not to pursue the dragon itself, but instead to pursue the natural source of the dragon and see where it might lead? Or has a century of accumulated intellectual prejudice in academic circles made it impossible to believe that the dragon might have arisen from preliterate attempts to understand events in the natural world, as proposed for other mythological themes by the distinguished, but now discredited nineteenth century linguist, folklorist and scholar of comparative religion, Friedrich Max Müller?

The preceding survey of theories of the dragon may be incomplete. Nonetheless, even in its present form one thing about it is particularly noteworthy: there is little agreement among scholars who have researched the dragon literature about how the concept of the dragon originated. Some believe that the dragon was inspired by real creatures, even though it has characteristics found in none of these. Others propose that the discovery of buried animal bones could have led to a ‘mental reconstruction’ of dragons without a model to follow. Others insist that dragons are symbolic in some vague way of clouds and rain, or of negative psychological forces in the human personality—the latter despite the obvious point that the Chinese dragon has overwhelmingly positive associations. In a premature rush to explanation a world-class astronomer and a professor of anthropology both abandoned what they surely knew about the wrongheadedness of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. A distinguished professor of anatomy argued that the dragon idea originated just once—in Egypt—and from there it was carried around the world by ancient Egyptian explorers. And others, who have become disenchanted with the rank speculation, or ‘turning a blind eye’ of much of the literature, argue that dragons began as dance figures that were later projected onto belief-systems, or that they originated in many ways, and should not be considered a single phenomenon.

It is hard to imagine another question that has attracted human curiosity for as long as the origin of the dragon, which has led to such utter chaos in the scholarship associated with it. It is as though the fantastic nature of the dragon itself has infected the thinking of nearly everyone who has addressed this issue, causing them to favor wild speculation over basic, well-established principles of science. In any scientific field how do we begin to find an explanation for observations that are puzzling? Here is a set of guidelines:

• First, we record and study the observations relevant to the question we address in order to ensure they are accurate. In the case of dragons this means carefully noting the physical and behavioral traits that are attributed to them across a wide range of human cultures. This has been done in a preliminary way in Chapter 1.

• Second, with comparative research in the social sciences we must take note of Galton’s Problem (ensuring the historical independence of the units of comparison). Thus, we would not base a theory of dragons on traits found only in Europe, China, or any other single geographical location, or only in societies that speak related languages, since these may be purely local developments that are truly arbitrary (that is, products of culture) rather than apparently arbitrary (that is, surprising ideas that turn out to be motivated by natural causes).

• Third, we isolate those apparently arbitrary traits that are found in a least two regions of the Earth that are not likely to have been in intensive cultural contact, as the dragon’s ability to fly, or its propensity for guarding springs and treasures. These traits can be called ‘universal’, not because they are found in all cultures, but because their distribution cannot plausibly be explained by assuming that they began in a single culture that passed them down to its descendants, or in a single geographical area from which they spread.

• Fourth, universal traits of dragons must be explained as having arisen independently in many human cultures, and this could only have happened if perceptions of the world were similar in different regions of the Earth. This implies that whatever physical or psychological stimuli led to the creation of the dragon idea, had to be found everywhere.

• Fifth, the universal traits of the dragon must then be explained by reference to carefully recorded features of the physical and cultural environment in which dragons were created.

• Finally, we look for correlations between the traits of dragons and features of the environment and try to minimize the chances that they could be fortuitous by following the usual procedures of seeking converging lines of evidence, and adhering to Occam’s razor.

It is surprising how close some writers of general books on the dragon have come to understanding its true nature, without making the connection between belief and observation. To cite just one of several possible examples, Allen and Griffiths (1979:6) hold that “There are no such things as dragons. Yet the dragon as a symbol has been used by virtually every culture throughout the history of the world. Most mythologies agree that he was born of clouds and water. Like them he is everywhere, and his appearance is as mutable as theirs.”

This is a perceptive beginning, but it stops short of tracing dragons to their source. Why would many cultures simply invent a quasi-reptilian chimera that controls the weather, guards springs and treasures, etc. out of pure imagination? And if this is what happened, why would we see striking agreements in details of the dragon’s physical and behavioral features in widely separated regions of the Earth? The tremendous variation of the world’s cultures shows without question that the workings of the imagination may vary dramatically from one culture to the next. However, beliefs about the real world tend to be tightly constrained by observation, and this is why we must look for correlations between the traits of dragons and features of the natural environment if we are to explain the striking similarity of the dragon idea around the planet. Only in this way can we hope to make progress in understanding one of the longest unsolved mysteries of the human mind.

Having laid out the path before us we will now look at one of those correlations, namely the fact that dragons are associated with waterfalls in widely separated areas, including at least North and South America, Insular Southeast Asia, and discontinuous parts of Africa.