The origin of dragons?

Bowser

Bowser

Namaste
Valued Senior Member
Watched an interesting video tonight that explored dragon folklore. The theory is dragons are an assemblage of various predators encountered by early primates: snakes, raptors and tigers. I think it curious since dragons occupy some trace in nearly every culture, one form or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dragons_in_mythology_and_folklore

I know and have known people who have an irrational fear of snakes. I think everyone would prefer to keep safely away from tigers and other large predators. However, I have never seen an openly apprehensive consideration of birds.
 
The dragon is a symbol of the unconscious mind. Since dragon symbolism is common to most cultures, it is attributed to the collective unconscious, which is also common to all humans. The collective unconscious are firmware that define humans as a species.

The dragon is a cold blooded creature similar to a lizard or snake. A cold blooded critter acts on impulse, without emotions. Snakes do not feel and empathize, but act with cold precision. Dragons are like our instincts, which act on impulse. Men can get into trouble acting on sexual impulse, using cold blooded instinct; not considering the feelings of the women.

Cold blooded also means the actions of the critter, is not active in a cold environment. Rather their actions appears more pronounced, when the critter is able to warm up in the sun. A good example is sex. Sex is connected to instinct, which warms up, when made more acceptable; light of day.

Dragons were thought to be both male and female, in the same unit, and reproduced by swallowing it own tail. The dragon is a symbol of self regeneration, such is the nature of the collective unconscious in each person. It brings us back to the foundation of the brain's firmware, from which we become reentered and reborn.

The dragons often have wings and can breath fire. Fire has to do with emotions, while wings are used to suspend one in the air. Instead of being grounded on the earth; objective reality, the dragon can also induce the imagination; in the air. We can behave coldly to each other based on imaginary extrapolations which stems from the collective unconscious but not from natural instinct. This reflects higher level firmware, beyond instinct.
 
origin said:
I have. I know several people who are scared of birds.
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The largest carnivorous flying birds (condors) can pick up a very young human and carry it away. But condors live in the Western Hemisphere, and the legend of dragons comes from Eurasia.

Nonetheless, large birds can be pretty scary, even if they can't eat you. When Americans figured out what was killing the bald eagle, our national bird, we stopped using the most deadly pesticides, and the eagle population has increased immensely. Since it's illegal to harm one, they've become fearless. If you're sitting on a park bench here in the Washington DC region, eating your lunch, you might be surprised by an eagle coming right at you and stealing your hamburger.
 
I think it's pretty plausible that dragon mythology came from the accidental discovery by ancient humans of giant dinosaur bones, unearthed due to erosion. Ancient humans woud have stumbled cross these and come up with wild ideas about what these gigantic creatures mgiht have been. The ideas, as with the discoveries, would have changed and coalesced over millenia of legend passed down verbally.
 
Very large lizards with terrible smelling breath, and very large predatory snakes that spit and hiss, were recently native to SE Asia, Australia, and the like - and species are still found on the Komodo Islands and similar refuges.

That origin with the patterns of human migration might account for the shortage of African dragons? We have Asian, European, Mediterranean, odd and remnant American, but afaik no Subsaharan African, dragons properly so called.
 
Maybe they are just another species that got extinct before people inveted suffucient writting skills, so it became a forgotten myth or something.
 
DaveC426913 said:
I think it's pretty plausible that dragon mythology came from the accidental discovery by ancient humans of giant dinosaur bones, unearthed due to erosion. Ancient humans woud have stumbled cross these and come up with wild ideas about what these gigantic creatures mgiht have been. The ideas, as with the discoveries, would have changed and coalesced over millenia of legend passed down verbally.
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Good post.

The Cyclops myth may well have been the discovery of elephant skulls. See here.
 
exchemist said:
Hitchcock knew he could scare people with birds, too.
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The point of The Birds is that something that isn't inherently scary can be made scary. The birds were scary because their behaviour was unexpected. It's quite different from a phobia.

Monty Python's "comfy chair" comes to mind.
 
sideshowbob said:
The point of The Birds is that something that isn't inherently scary can be made scary. The birds were scary because their behaviour was unexpected. It's quite different from a phobia.

Monty Python's "comfy chair" comes to mind.
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Yes fair enough, I suppose you have a point.

But there is something cold and neutral about birds that lends itself to a horror movie in a way that isn't true of, say, well, rabbits, for instance. I refer of course to that masterwork "Night of the Lepus". :smile:
 
Bowser said:
However, I have never seen an openly apprehensive consideration of birds.
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The early flightless "terror birds" in South America would have been certifiably scary to humans, if humans had existed at the time. They stood some 10 feet tall, had huge beaks, ate meat and were the apex predators in South America from some 60 million years ago until a comparatively recent 1.8 million years ago.

They seem to have occupied some of the same ecological niches occupied by dinosaurs before them and even had broadly similar anatomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae

Terror%2BBird%2BHuman%2BComparison.jpg


I don't think that they had anything to do with dragon mythology though, since they lived long before the time of humans and were largely in South America, which was rather isolated at the time.

I don't know what accounts for dragon folklore. The fact that dragon myths are so widely distributed in Eurasia makes me wonder whether they are very old and had paleolithic origins in the times when humans were spreading around the planet, or whether they are examples of convergent cultural evolution.

Of course there were many cultural contacts between east and west Eurasia in neolithic and early historic times, involving the steppe nomads such as the early Indo-Europeans. Some agricultural practices, horsemanship, chariots, bronze metallurgy and such things were transmitted along that route of cultural dispersion, so maybe they transmitted the idea of dragons too.
 
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Dragons are not based on a physical animal or fossil remain. They are a product of the imagination, generated by the unconscious mind.
Randwolf said:
How do you know this? Citation please - I always thought dragons were warm blooded. I mean, where do they get all that fire they breathe?
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Nobody has even captured and tested a dragon to be sure either way. However, they could breath fire by producing a chemical that can ignite in the air. Many animals can produce acids. Dragons are often associated with the element sulfur, which comes from hot vents and hot springs. The Dragon does not need the sun to for heat, if he chooses his cave wisely. Usually their caves stink of sulfur. Dragons are mythical beasts which are immortal.

In middle age alchemy, the dragon was symbolized by the element mercury; mercurial serpent and quick silver. When they would heat mercury in their beaker, this would quicken the dragon. He would disappear and be reborn in the condenser. His quick silver aspect increased with heat.
 
wellwisher said:
Dragons are not based on a physical animal or fossil remain. They are a product of the imagination, generated by the unconscious mind.
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Many (most?) products of the imagination are based on existing physical observations. Unicorns weren't dreamed up out of thin air.
 
If you recorded your dreams, over a long period of time, your dreams will change from things in your known environment, to themes which become more mythological. These appear from the unconscious mind, since the ego is asleep. These symbols start to piece together things in unique arrangements not seen in nature. These type of dreams are symbols that personify various aspects of the unconscious mind. Often what happens in history, is someone important has one of these key dreams, which then becomes part of a cultural mythology. While the observation that dragons are common to so many cultures, suggests that all humans are grounded on the same unconscious foundation, allowing parallel development of common themes. Once these key dreams or visions are externalized, they will resonate in others since they touch the same deep places of the psyche.

In middle ages mythology, the dragon is often portrayed as guarding a treasure. This is the Treasure that is hard to obtain. In this mythology the Knight needs to muster all his courage, to seek out the dragon, and confront him in the dragon's den, to extract the treasure.

This dream symbolism was connected to the dark and middle ages taboos about the unconscious mind; instincts that was imposed by the Church. There were conscious rules of behavior that required one be with the church program, and not with any of the impulses from natural instinct. This was the devil. The dragon personified instinct, unconsciousness and even Satan. The unconscious was very scary due to the centuries of conditioning.

Yet, this inner source of impulse was sensed to be good and useful; treasure. A Knight was someone with lots of autonomy and authority, as given by the king. He personifies will power and choices, apart from the collective mind. But even to such a person of choice, the unconscious mind was not something to be approach lightly. It was symbolized as a dragon. Yet the knight had to confront this, to extract the good or treasures that comes from natural instinct.
 
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