Rampaging reptiles

Muse, Nov/Dec 2003

The beginning of the end for dragons came in 1734 when a famous Swedish scientist was asked to admire the corpse of a seven-headed dragon, called a hydra, on display in the city of Hamburg, Germany. Obligingly he praised the skill of the craftsman who had stitched animal parts into so convincing a fake. According to Peter Hogarth, a dragon expert, he was threatened with prosecution by the outraged owners, who had paid an enormous sum for their prize specimen, and had to leave town in a hurry.

By then people had been living with dragons for a long time. One of the first dragons we know of was from Babylon in present-day Iraq. In the Babylonian creation epic, which was written down about 1200 B.C., the first being, Tiamat, fought one of her children in single combat to avenge the death of her husband. She was scaly and horned and generally dragonish, but her son, Marduk, armed himself with bow and arrow, club, fishing net, a poisonous plant, and lightning. He won, and that was the beginning of the world but not the end of dragons.

In the years between Tiamat and the badly stitched dragon of Hamburg, dragons were sighted not just in Babylon, but also in India, Persia (Iran), China, Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, and the New World. Their appearances were carefully recorded in brick, paint, rock, and precious metals. Dragons were carved into cliffs, woven into bracelets, and stitched into kimonos.

The 4000-year reign of this imaginary beast is an astonishing thing. Why was the dragon so persistent and so ubiquitous? Why did so many people believe they were threatened by huge serpents with or without clawed feet, wings, poisonous or flammable breath, and jewels of great price either in their hoards, under their chins, or set between their eyes?

Did the dragon legends arise from glimpses of existing but rarely encountered animals, such as pythons or crocodiles? Were dragons attempts to explain fossil bones of extinct creatures that had eroded out of the earth? Was the dragon strictly a beast of the mind, a nightmare combination of snakes, birds of prey, and other animals people instinctively fear?

Were the various animals called dragon even similar enough to be just one beast with a single explanation? Or is the dragon a creature of culture rather than of nature an ever-changing tale altered by repeated retelling as it spread along trade routes?

Can any of these questions be answered?

Of course, there are real dragons still living among us. The Komodo dragon, a ferocious meat-eating reptile with foul breath, is native to four tiny islands in Southeast Asia. It looks like a dragon, smells like a dragon, and acts like a dragon. It will even eat a person for dinner if given the chance. So could it be the source of all the dragon stories? Not a chance. The islands were not in communication with the rest of the world when dragons reigned.

It is true that dragons often look like animals people fear by instinct. Many dragons resemble giant snakes. In India, for example, there is a creation myth about an enormous serpent known as Ananta, which has snakelike heads with expanded hoods like a cobra's. Other snakelike dragons include the Lambton Wurm, which allegedly terrorized the English countryside in the 1400s, and Jormungander, the gigantic Midgard serpent of Norse mythology.

But this explanation isn't very satisfying. Why should people living near the Arctic Circle fear giant snakes, when the python and the anaconda dwell in Africa and South America? Besides, most dragons seem to combine characteristics of several different animals. Hogarth, who is a zoologist, says Tiamat has features of poisonous snakes from the Middle East, perhaps magnified by travelers' tales of large snakes from India and even Africa, horns from other animals, legs from lizards also common to the Middle East, and claws and wings from a bat or bird of prey. "The artistic style admired in the depiction of dragons has never been realism," he says.

And even during the Middle Ages, when dragons tended to be moral symbols rather than physical beasts, more closely related to the devil than to a snake, they rarely conformed to any standard pattern. "Their variety was the despair of scholars at the time," says Hogarth. St. George, the famous dragon slayer who became the patron saint of England in 1349, fought snakelike dragons, two-legged dragons with and without wings, and four-legged dragons with wings.

But then, George himself is something of a mirage. He is first heard of fighting dragons in Libya rather than England, and that account was written a thousand years after his "last death." It is necessary to speak of his "last death," Hogarth says, because he is supposed to have been crushed to death, made to run in red-hot iron boots, scourged, cast into a well with a heavy stone tied around his neck, beaten with sledgehammers, roasted, poisoned, and buried alive in quicklime before he was finally beheaded by the Empress of Persia.

So are we simply adrift on a sea of myth here? Is the dragon just an imaginary animal? In part, at least, but maybe not entirely. Here's an interesting possibility. Modern people looking at old paintings of dragons have thought they resembled dinosaurs more than snakes or other animals. Karl Shuker, author of Dragons: A Natural History, says the creature called the Sirrush, depicted on the Ishtar gates found in the ruins of Babylon, looks like a sauropod, a long-necked, blimp-shaped, stump-legged vegetarian dinosaur. (You have to cross your fingers and squint really hard to see the resemblance.)