THE DRAGON
(The Serpent)
Jason and Dragon, Salvator Rosa, c. 1670
The ever-watchful dragon, or serpent, guards the tree on which hangs the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea soothe the dragon to sleep with drugs and seize the Fleece. This article from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica places dragons in the broader context of mythology. Following this is a discussion of the most important piece of Argonaut art, the Douris cup, on which we see Jason vomited forth from the dragon as well as commentary on the symbolism of the dragon.
DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with δέρκομαι, “see,” and interpreted as “sharp-sighted”; O.H. Ger. tracho, dracho, M.H.G. trache, Mod. Ger. Drachen; A.S. draca, hence the equivalent English form “drake,” “fire-drake,” cf. Low Ger. and Swed. drake, Dan. drage), a fabulous monster, usually conceived as a huge winged fire-breathing lizard or snake. In Greece the word δράκων was used originally of any large serpent, and the dragon of mythology, whatever shape it may have assumed, remains essentially a snake. Here it may be said, in general, that in the East, where snakes are large and deadly (Chaldea, Assyria, Phoenicia, to a less degree in Egypt), the serpent or dragon was symbolic of the principle of evil. Thus Apophis, in the Egyptian religion, was the great serpent of the world of darkness vanquished by Ra, while in Chaldaea the goddess Tiāmat, the female principle of primeval Chaos, took the form of a dragon. Thus, too, in the Hebrew sacred books the serpent or dragon is the source of death and sin, a conception which was adopted in the New Testament and so passed into Christian mythology. In Greece and Rome, on the other hand, while the oriental idea of the serpent as an evil power found an entrance and gave birth to a plentiful brood of terrors (the serpents of the Gorgons, Hydra, Chimaera and the like), the dracontes were also at times conceived as beneficent powers, sharp-eyed dwellers in the inner parts of the earth, wise to discover its secrets and utter them in oracles, or powerful to invoke as guardian genii. Such were the sacred snakes in the temples of Aesculapius and the sacri dracontes in that of the Bona Dea at Rome; or, as guardians, the Python at Delphi and the dragon of the Hesperides.
In general, however, the evil reputation of dragons was the stronger, and in Europe it outlived the other. Christianity, of course, confused the benevolent and malevolent serpent-deities of the ancient cults in a common condemnation. The very “wisdom of the serpent” made him suspect; the devil, said St Augustine, “leo et draco est; leo propter impetum, draco propter insidias.” The dragon myths of the pagan East took new shapes in the legends of the victories of St Michael and St George; and the kindly snakes of the “good goddess” lived on in the immanissimus draco whose baneful activity in a cave of the Capitol was cut short by the intervention of the saintly pope Silvester I. (Duchesne, Liber pontificalis, i. 109 seq.). In this respect indeed Christian mythology found itself in harmony with that of the pagan North. The similarity of the Northern and Oriental snake myths seems to point to some common origin in an antiquity too remote to be explored. Whatever be the origin of the Northern dragon, the myths, when they first become articulate for us, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the South and East. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram—even of Lancelot, the beau idéal of medieval chivalry. Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the imaginations of the learned, until comparatively modern times. As the waste places were cleared, indeed, they withdrew farther from the haunts of men, and in Europe their last lurking-places were the inaccessible heights of the Alps, where they lingered till Jacques Balmain set the fashion which has finally relegated them to the realm of myth. In the works of the older naturalists, even in the great Historia animalium of so critical a spirit as Conrad Gesner (d. 1564), they still figure as part of the fauna known to science.
As to their form, this varied from the beginning. The Chaldaean dragon Tiāmat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings. The Egyptian Apophis was a monstrous snake, as were also, originally at least, the Greek dracontes. The dragon of the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 3), “the old serpent,” is many-headed, like the Greek Hydra. The dragon slain by Beowulf is a snake (worm), for it “buckles like a bow “; but that done to death by Sigurd, though its motions are heavy and snake-like, has legs, for he wounds it “behind the shoulder.” On the other hand, the dragon seen by King Arthur in his dreams is, according to Malory, winged and active, for it “swoughs” down from the sky. The belief in dragons and the conceptions of their shape were undoubtedly often determined, in Europe as in China, by the discovery of the remains of the gigantic extinct saurians.
The qualities of dragons being protective and terror-inspiring, and their effigies highly decorative, it is natural that they should have been early used as warlike emblems. Thus, in Homer (Iliad xi. 36 seq.), Agamemnon has on his shield, besides the Gorgon’s head, a blue three-headed snake (δράκων), just as ages afterwards the Norse warriors painted dragons on their shields and carved dragons’ heads on the prows of their ships. From the conquered Dacians, too, the Romans in Trajan’s time borrowed the dragon ensign which became the standard of the cohort as the eagle was that of the legion; whence, by a long descent, the modern dragoon. Under the later East Roman emperors the purple dragon ensign became the ceremonial standard of the emperors, under the name of the δρακόντειον. The imperial fashion spread; or similar causes elsewhere produced similar results. In England before the Conquest the dragon was chief among the royal ensigns in war. Its origin, according to the legend preserved in the Flores historiarum, was as follows. Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, had a vision of a flaming dragon in the sky, which his seers interpreted as meaning that he should come to the kingdom. When this happened, after the death of his brother Aurelius, “he ordered two golden dragons to be fashioned, like to those he had seen in the circle of the star, one of which he dedicated in the cathedral of Winchester, the other he kept by him to be carried into battle.” From Uther Dragonhead, as the English called him, the Anglo-Saxon kings borrowed the ensign, their custom being, according to the Flores, to stand in battle inter draconem et standardum. The dragon ensign, which was borne before Richard I. in 1191 when on crusade “to the terror of the heathen beyond the sea,” was that of the dukes of Normandy; but even after the loss of Normandy the dragon was the battle standard of English kings (signum regium quod Draconem vocant), and was displayed, e.g. by Henry III. in 1245 when he went to war against the Welsh. Not till the 20th century, under King Edward VII., was the dragon officially restored as proper only to the British race of Uther Pendragon, by its incorporation in the armorial bearings of the prince of Wales. As a matter of fact, however, the dragon ensign was common to nearly all nations, the reason for its popularity being naïvely stated in the romance of Athis (quoted by Du Cange),
“Ce souloient Romains porter,
Ce nous fait moult à redouter:”
“This the Romans used to carry, This makes us very much to be feared.” Thus the dragon and wyvern (i.e. a two-legged snake, M.E. wivere, viper) took their place as heraldic symbols.
As an ecclesiastical symbol it has remained consistent to the present day. Wherever it is represented it means the principle of evil, the devil and his works. In the middle ages the chief of these works was heresy, and the dragon of the medieval church legends and mystery plays was usually heresy. Thus the knightly order of the vanquished dragon, instituted by the emperor Sigismund in 1418, celebrated the victory of orthodoxy over John Huss. Hell, too, is represented in medieval art as a dragon with gaping jaws belching fire. Of the dragons carried in effigy in religious processions some have become famous, e.g. the Gargouille (gargoyle) at Rouen, the Graülly at Metz, and the Tarasque at Tarascon. Their popularity tended to disguise their evil significance and to restore to them something of the beneficent qualities of the ancient dracontes as local tutelary genii.
In the East, at the present day, the dragon is the national symbol of China and the badge of the imperial family, and as such it plays a large part in Chinese art. Chinese and Japanese dragons, though regarded as powers of the air, are wingless. They are among the deified forces of nature of the Taoist religion, and the shrines of the dragon-kings, who dwell partly in water and partly on land, are set along the banks of rivers.
The constellation Draco (anguis, serpens) was probably so called from its fanciful likeness to a snake. Numerous myths, in various countries, are however connected with it. The general character of these may be illustrated by the Greek story which explains the constellation as being the dragon of the Hesperides slain by Heracles and translated by Hera or Zeus to the heavens.
DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with δέρκομαι, “see,” and interpreted as “sharp-sighted”; O.H. Ger. tracho, dracho, M.H.G. trache, Mod. Ger. Drachen; A.S. draca, hence the equivalent English form “drake,” “fire-drake,” cf. Low Ger. and Swed. drake, Dan. drage), a fabulous monster, usually conceived as a huge winged fire-breathing lizard or snake. In Greece the word δράκων was used originally of any large serpent, and the dragon of mythology, whatever shape it may have assumed, remains essentially a snake. Here it may be said, in general, that in the East, where snakes are large and deadly (Chaldea, Assyria, Phoenicia, to a less degree in Egypt), the serpent or dragon was symbolic of the principle of evil. Thus Apophis, in the Egyptian religion, was the great serpent of the world of darkness vanquished by Ra, while in Chaldaea the goddess Tiāmat, the female principle of primeval Chaos, took the form of a dragon. Thus, too, in the Hebrew sacred books the serpent or dragon is the source of death and sin, a conception which was adopted in the New Testament and so passed into Christian mythology. In Greece and Rome, on the other hand, while the oriental idea of the serpent as an evil power found an entrance and gave birth to a plentiful brood of terrors (the serpents of the Gorgons, Hydra, Chimaera and the like), the dracontes were also at times conceived as beneficent powers, sharp-eyed dwellers in the inner parts of the earth, wise to discover its secrets and utter them in oracles, or powerful to invoke as guardian genii. Such were the sacred snakes in the temples of Aesculapius and the sacri dracontes in that of the Bona Dea at Rome; or, as guardians, the Python at Delphi and the dragon of the Hesperides.
In general, however, the evil reputation of dragons was the stronger, and in Europe it outlived the other. Christianity, of course, confused the benevolent and malevolent serpent-deities of the ancient cults in a common condemnation. The very “wisdom of the serpent” made him suspect; the devil, said St Augustine, “leo et draco est; leo propter impetum, draco propter insidias.” The dragon myths of the pagan East took new shapes in the legends of the victories of St Michael and St George; and the kindly snakes of the “good goddess” lived on in the immanissimus draco whose baneful activity in a cave of the Capitol was cut short by the intervention of the saintly pope Silvester I. (Duchesne, Liber pontificalis, i. 109 seq.). In this respect indeed Christian mythology found itself in harmony with that of the pagan North. The similarity of the Northern and Oriental snake myths seems to point to some common origin in an antiquity too remote to be explored. Whatever be the origin of the Northern dragon, the myths, when they first become articulate for us, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the South and East. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram—even of Lancelot, the beau idéal of medieval chivalry. Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the imaginations of the learned, until comparatively modern times. As the waste places were cleared, indeed, they withdrew farther from the haunts of men, and in Europe their last lurking-places were the inaccessible heights of the Alps, where they lingered till Jacques Balmain set the fashion which has finally relegated them to the realm of myth. In the works of the older naturalists, even in the great Historia animalium of so critical a spirit as Conrad Gesner (d. 1564), they still figure as part of the fauna known to science.
As to their form, this varied from the beginning. The Chaldaean dragon Tiāmat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings. The Egyptian Apophis was a monstrous snake, as were also, originally at least, the Greek dracontes. The dragon of the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 3), “the old serpent,” is many-headed, like the Greek Hydra. The dragon slain by Beowulf is a snake (worm), for it “buckles like a bow “; but that done to death by Sigurd, though its motions are heavy and snake-like, has legs, for he wounds it “behind the shoulder.” On the other hand, the dragon seen by King Arthur in his dreams is, according to Malory, winged and active, for it “swoughs” down from the sky. The belief in dragons and the conceptions of their shape were undoubtedly often determined, in Europe as in China, by the discovery of the remains of the gigantic extinct saurians.
The qualities of dragons being protective and terror-inspiring, and their effigies highly decorative, it is natural that they should have been early used as warlike emblems. Thus, in Homer (Iliad xi. 36 seq.), Agamemnon has on his shield, besides the Gorgon’s head, a blue three-headed snake (δράκων), just as ages afterwards the Norse warriors painted dragons on their shields and carved dragons’ heads on the prows of their ships. From the conquered Dacians, too, the Romans in Trajan’s time borrowed the dragon ensign which became the standard of the cohort as the eagle was that of the legion; whence, by a long descent, the modern dragoon. Under the later East Roman emperors the purple dragon ensign became the ceremonial standard of the emperors, under the name of the δρακόντειον. The imperial fashion spread; or similar causes elsewhere produced similar results. In England before the Conquest the dragon was chief among the royal ensigns in war. Its origin, according to the legend preserved in the Flores historiarum, was as follows. Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, had a vision of a flaming dragon in the sky, which his seers interpreted as meaning that he should come to the kingdom. When this happened, after the death of his brother Aurelius, “he ordered two golden dragons to be fashioned, like to those he had seen in the circle of the star, one of which he dedicated in the cathedral of Winchester, the other he kept by him to be carried into battle.” From Uther Dragonhead, as the English called him, the Anglo-Saxon kings borrowed the ensign, their custom being, according to the Flores, to stand in battle inter draconem et standardum. The dragon ensign, which was borne before Richard I. in 1191 when on crusade “to the terror of the heathen beyond the sea,” was that of the dukes of Normandy; but even after the loss of Normandy the dragon was the battle standard of English kings (signum regium quod Draconem vocant), and was displayed, e.g. by Henry III. in 1245 when he went to war against the Welsh. Not till the 20th century, under King Edward VII., was the dragon officially restored as proper only to the British race of Uther Pendragon, by its incorporation in the armorial bearings of the prince of Wales. As a matter of fact, however, the dragon ensign was common to nearly all nations, the reason for its popularity being naïvely stated in the romance of Athis (quoted by Du Cange),
“Ce souloient Romains porter,
Ce nous fait moult à redouter:”
“This the Romans used to carry, This makes us very much to be feared.” Thus the dragon and wyvern (i.e. a two-legged snake, M.E. wivere, viper) took their place as heraldic symbols.
As an ecclesiastical symbol it has remained consistent to the present day. Wherever it is represented it means the principle of evil, the devil and his works. In the middle ages the chief of these works was heresy, and the dragon of the medieval church legends and mystery plays was usually heresy. Thus the knightly order of the vanquished dragon, instituted by the emperor Sigismund in 1418, celebrated the victory of orthodoxy over John Huss. Hell, too, is represented in medieval art as a dragon with gaping jaws belching fire. Of the dragons carried in effigy in religious processions some have become famous, e.g. the Gargouille (gargoyle) at Rouen, the Graülly at Metz, and the Tarasque at Tarascon. Their popularity tended to disguise their evil significance and to restore to them something of the beneficent qualities of the ancient dracontes as local tutelary genii.
In the East, at the present day, the dragon is the national symbol of China and the badge of the imperial family, and as such it plays a large part in Chinese art. Chinese and Japanese dragons, though regarded as powers of the air, are wingless. They are among the deified forces of nature of the Taoist religion, and the shrines of the dragon-kings, who dwell partly in water and partly on land, are set along the banks of rivers.
The constellation Draco (anguis, serpens) was probably so called from its fanciful likeness to a snake. Numerous myths, in various countries, are however connected with it. The general character of these may be illustrated by the Greek story which explains the constellation as being the dragon of the Hesperides slain by Heracles and translated by Hera or Zeus to the heavens.
Jason Vomited Forth by the Dragon
Jason vomited forth, Douris cup, c. 480 BCE
Emil Braun
Handbook for the Ruins and Museums of Rome (1855)
Among the numerous drinking cups, mostly adorned with very interesting and finely stylized representations, we can only select a few of the most remarkable, as the enumeration of all the vessels collected here would carry us too far.
The few specimens, which we particularize, will serve but to show the poetical character of these decorative pictures. It is not always easy for us to understand them; on the contrary, we must frequently seek to ascertain their meaning by comparative examination, such as usually assists us in solving an ingeniously and poetically veiled enigma. To the ancients, these pictures may have been more readily intelligible, and the pleasure, which we must laboriously seek after, presented itself, probably, at once to them.
Even with such representations as are explained by designatory inscriptions, there is frequently a difficulty; since, although these aid in establishing the identity of the different personages, they are not conclusive as to the transaction in which the latter are engaged.
To these partially intelligible pictures belongs, likewise, the cup discovered at Cerveteri in the year 1834, in the interior of which Jason is represented in the jaws of the dragon, who guarded the golden fleece.
Pallas Athene, who has turned the point of her lance downwards, and, 'with confident composure, appears to await the result of this magic gesture, stands before the monster. With no farther effort on her part, we see the throat of the scaly serpent convulsively agitated; betraying his violent efforts to disgorge the prey so lately greedily swallowed.
It is true that we are not aware from the legend of Jason, that he ever, even for a short period, became the prey of the dragon. An adventure of Hercules, however, developed by poetry in an analogous manner, seems to render it probable, that the contest and final deliverance of Jason had been similarly conceived. It is stated of Hercules, that he was first swallowed by the sea-monster, who watched over Hesione, but afterwards disgorged, when he had cut up the monster's entrails with his sword. Another vase-painting, discovered at Perugia, represents Jason at the important moment, when with drawn sword he enters the monster's jaws, evidently with the intention of overcoming it in this manner; its impenetrable coat of scales securing it against every external attack. Fanciful as such an idea may, at first sight, appear, experience proves its correctness; many animals, for example, the crocodile, being hunted and overcome in a manner similar, though not equally hazardous.
Pallas Athene wears, over her finely draped under garment, a broad-hemmed mantle, falling below the knee. The aegis, which has on the breast the form of a collar, falls down behind like a cloak. The serpents, forming the border, erect themselves hissing. In her left hand she holds a bird, certainly, resembling a dove, rather than an owl.
The outside of this cup is ornamented with a double row of figures engaged in conversation with each other. As we are unacquainted with the striking mutual relations of such representations, these have but little interest for us. To the ancients, on the other hand, such may have presented a source of enjoyment, resembling that, experienced by us, at the sight of a pictorial reflection of the proceedings of every-day life. A thousand minute references, exercizing a magic power upon the imagination, are only intelligible to those, who have, themselves, been eye-witnesses of such incidents. Before we can feel the same interest in them, we must, first of all, transport ourselves into the daily life of the ancients; and, above all, endeavour to comprehend their pantomimic language of signs, — the definite, but, to us, almost entirely alien, mode of expression, which constitutes the main charm of these harmoniously rounded compositions.
Source: Emil Braun, Handbook for the Ruins and Museums of Rome (London: Williams and Norgate, 1855).
Symbolism of the Dragon
The following discussion comes from the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1891), s.v. "Medea," in which the author asserted that the Jason myth was primarily solar in nature, and intimately bound to phallic worship, anticipating Freudian readings by several decades:
In all these legends about the sun the performance of certain imposed "toils" or labours is included, the idea expressed being the hard necessity of the sun going his daily course in the appointed time in spite of thickening storm-clouds and opposing powers of darkness, through which he has to fight his way, both visibly above and invisibly underneath the earth. Thus Hercules has his twelve labours (the number corresponding to the lunar months), while Jason is not only required by his uncle King Pelias to bring the golden fleece, but is commanded by Aeetes to tame the bulls as a condition of obtaining it. The name Medea may possibly be referred to [the word for] "to care for," as Jason may contain the root [for] "to heal," which is the meaning that Pindar attaches to it, or to lon, the violet-coloured dawn, as in Iocaste, Iamos, and Iolaus. In his relation to the snake, which guarded tho fleece, and to the dragons' teeth which he sowed on the ground ploughed by the fiery bulls, compared with the serpent entwining the staff of the healing god Asclepius, we see that almost invariable connexion that subsists between solar and phallic worship. This view is confirmed by the "ship Argo," one of the many sexual symbols of cup-shaped and boat-like form. It is the "ship" which was the Teutonic symbol of the goddess Isis.
In all these legends about the sun the performance of certain imposed "toils" or labours is included, the idea expressed being the hard necessity of the sun going his daily course in the appointed time in spite of thickening storm-clouds and opposing powers of darkness, through which he has to fight his way, both visibly above and invisibly underneath the earth. Thus Hercules has his twelve labours (the number corresponding to the lunar months), while Jason is not only required by his uncle King Pelias to bring the golden fleece, but is commanded by Aeetes to tame the bulls as a condition of obtaining it. The name Medea may possibly be referred to [the word for] "to care for," as Jason may contain the root [for] "to heal," which is the meaning that Pindar attaches to it, or to lon, the violet-coloured dawn, as in Iocaste, Iamos, and Iolaus. In his relation to the snake, which guarded tho fleece, and to the dragons' teeth which he sowed on the ground ploughed by the fiery bulls, compared with the serpent entwining the staff of the healing god Asclepius, we see that almost invariable connexion that subsists between solar and phallic worship. This view is confirmed by the "ship Argo," one of the many sexual symbols of cup-shaped and boat-like form. It is the "ship" which was the Teutonic symbol of the goddess Isis.
Photo credit: (Top) Wikimedia Commons; (Bottom) Wikimedia Commons.
