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Encyclopedia Britannica



DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with SEpeoay " 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,

This article appears in Volume V08, Page 468 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: DIO-DRO
DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with SEpeoay " 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 3paKwv was used originally of any large serpent, and the dragon of mythology, whatever shape it may have assumed, remains essentially a snake. For the part it has played in the myths and cults of various peoples and ages see the article SERPENT-
WORSHIP
 . 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 Tiamat, 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 heroesof Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristrameven of Lancelot, the beau ideal of medieval
chivalry
 . Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the imaginations of the
Dragon Lizard (Draco taeniopterus).
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 in-accessible 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 Tiamat 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 fromthe 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 (bpaKwv), 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 bpaKOv'recov. 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 pre-served in the Flores historiarum, was as follows. Uther Pen-dragon, 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 Dragon-head, 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 zoth 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 naively stated in the romance of Athis (quoted by Du Cange),
" Ce souloient Romains porter,
Ce nous fait moult A. 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 (see HERALDRY).
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 Graiilly 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, ser pens) 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.
See C. V. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques et romaines (Paris, 1886, &c.), s.v. Draco "; Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopddie, s.v. " Drakon "; Du Cange, Glossarium,
s.v. Draco "; La Grande Encyclopedie, s.v. " Dragon "; J. B. Panthot, Histoire des dragons et des escarboucles (Lyons, 1691). See also the articles EGYPT: Religion, and BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN


End of Article: DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with SEpeoay " 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,


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