An Instinct For Dragons - David E. Jones (2000)

~
AN INSTINCT
FOR DRAGONS
~
DAVID E. )ONES
First pub1ished 2002 by Rout1edge
Pub1ished 2016 by Rout1edge

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Copyright © 2000 Tay10r & Francis.
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permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within text.
ISBN: 9780415927215 (hbk)

ISBN : 9780415937290 (pbk)
Library of Congress Cata10ging-in-Publication Data
Jones, David E., 1942-

An instinct for dragons I by David E. Jones
p. cm.
Includes bib1iographica1 references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-92721-5- ISBN 978-0-415-93729-0 (pbk)
1. Dragons. 2. Genetic psychology. 1. Tide
GR830.D7 Ij65 2000

398'.469-dc21 99-462234
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CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments v
Introduction 1
C H AP T E R 1 • The Monkey Hunters 25
C H AP T ER 2 • Running from Certain Shadows 39
CHAPTER 3 • Red Tooth, Red Claw 47
CHAPTER 4 • HowTime Makes a Dragon 55
C H AP T E R 5 • Why Dragons Breathe Fire 73
CHAPTER 6 • Time ofthe Dragon Slayers 95
C H AP T E R 7 • Fate of the Dragons 113
ApPENDIX A • Tree ofLife and theThree Sacred Realms 121
A P P END I X B • More Tales of the Great Worm 135
Bibliography 177
Index 185
This page intentionally left blank
.ili.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my wife, Jane, for her major editorial assistance and
encouragement. My colleague Professor Ronald L.Waliace ofthe Uni-
versity of Central Florida offered invaluable critique on the sections
dealing with biocultural theory, while physical anthropologist Trenton
Holiday of Tulane University reviewed my discussion of human
evolution. Thanks also go to Christopher Savage and Lucus Johnson for
the original illustrations. Of course, the final responsibility for the result-
ing product must be mine.
.ili.
INTRODUCTION
From the shadows of an oak grove on a distant ridge, it watched the

humans move from chore to chore---feeding animals, hoeing a small gar-
den, pulling stumps from a rocky field. A faint curl of smoke rose from
the chirnney of the tidy thatched cottage. A child laughed behind the
barn as she played with her new kitten, and window-box flowers nod-
ded in the gentle spring breeze.
Groaning like a furnace, it hoisted its reptilian body from the ground,
labored into the air on stunted wings, and rolled, belching sulphurous
smoke, like a churning thunderdoud toward the small farm. Its hideous
roar shattered the morning calm, announcing the presence of the most
terrible of creatures. The humans ran for their lives.
Wh at creature does your imagination conjure? Can you name it?
People everywhere have been able to. They have had amental category
for the creature that has been called "the oldest, the first, the most basic
monster" (McHargue 1988, 27) as well as "the most venerable symbol
employed in ornamental art and the favorite and most highly decorated
motif in artistic design ... the inspiration of much, if not most, of the
world's great literature in every age and dime, and the nudeus around
which a wealth of ethical symbolism has accumulated throughout the
ages" (Srnith 1919,77).
The Chinese call it lung; the Hawaiians, kelekona or perhaps mo'o.1t
is zmaj to Croatians and Serbians, lohikaarme to the Finns, and unktena to
the Cherokee Indians of North America.The Polish tell of smok, the
Turks ofthe ejderha, the Maori ofNew Zealand ofthe tarakona, and the
Hungarians of sarkany. The Japanese say tatsu, the Welsh draig, the Ger-
1
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A CLASSICAL WESTERN DRAGON WITH THE TALONED FEET,
FIGURE t:
WINGS, SCALES, HORNS, AND FIERY BREATH TYPICAL OF MOST
OF THE WORLD'S DRAGONS.
---- INTRODUCTION -------
mans lindwurm, the Dutch draak, and the Lakota Sioux unhcegila. The
creature is named in Aztec, Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek,
Hebrew, Icelandic, Rumanian, Russian, Turkish, and others. English
speakers call it dragon (fig. 1).
Most peoples at some point in their history have believed that the
dragon was real. Prior to the sixteenth century, thousands of eyewitness
accounts of dragon sightings were recorded. In the British Isles alone,
from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the following towns
reported encounters with dragons: Dornoch, Ben Vair, Kirkton,Anwick,
Wantley, Penmynnedd, Denbigh, Bromfield, Brinsop, Llanrhaedr-Ym-
Mochant, Deerhurst, Uffington, Ludham, St. Osyth, Bures, St. Leonard's
Forest, Bisterne,Aler, Kingston St. Mary, Churchstanton, Carhmaptin, Exe
Valley, and Helston (Dickinson 1979, 74-75).
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? Let us begin by removing one of the most obvious paral-
lels, the dinosaurs.They cannot model for the dragon, because dinosaurs
had become extinct many millions of years before the evolution of
humans. Some writers, however, have proposed that it may have been not
the experience of real dinosaurs that prompted the appearance of the
dragon myth, but rather the rnisidentification of the fossilized remains of
ancient dinosaurs. Of course, the hoary epistemological question re ars its
head: How can one recognize something as a dragon unless one already
knows what a dragon is? The dragon image is perforce prior to the fos-
sil identification.
Other researchers grappling with the dragon puzzle suggest that the
dragon of world mythology came from primal man's experience with real
creatures. For example, on five small Indonesian islands in the Lesser
Sunda group, a type of monitor lizard popularly known as the Komodo
dragon stalks the thickets, taking down animals as large as deer, wild pigs,
and occasionally people. Then there are the giants of the python family.
Some, like the rock python and the Indian python, reach a length of
almost thirty feet and a weight of several hundred muscular pounds.
These creatures have been around longer than humans, and early contact
with big pythons at a time when protohumans were substantially smaller
than humans today was no doubt traumatic.
3
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---- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS .....-;....
The flaw in the hypothesis that the dragon is derived from ancient
encounters with various kinds of carnivores and large reptiles rests in the
fact that the dragon is universal, while the above-mentioned animals are
not. Most of them, in fact, come from tiny isolated corners of the earth.
The dragon puzzle persists. There seems to be no physically based
theory to explain why the dragon populates the imagination of peoples
in seerningly all cultures. What, after all, is this beast that all the world
knows-this creature that never was?
My in te rest in the dragon problem was ignited one day while I was
preparing notes for an undergraduate lecture on primate behavior. Ta
provide an example, I selected the African vervet, a monkey undistin-
guished for the most part except for one fascinating aspect of its behav-
ior. The vervets give distinctive alarm calls at the appearance of three
different predators: leopards, martial eagles, and pythons. Further, each of
these calls stimulates responses directly related to escaping the predator
(Struhsaker 1967). When the vervets are on the ground and hear the
leopard call, the troop quickly climbs into the trees. The monkeys posi-
tion themselves on the tips of the smallest branches, which will give no
support to a prowling leopard.When the eagle alarm call is sounded, the
vervets automatically look skyward. If on the ground, they run into the
bushes; if in the trees, they immediately drop to the ground to avoid the
swooping attack of the eagle. Snake alarms, on the other hand, cause the
vervets to look down, often from abipedal standing posture to gain a bet-
ter view of the ground.
After completing my notes for the vervet lecture, I was ab se nt-
mindedly gathering the books I had used when one fell open to a page
headed "The Vervets' Predators." Images of an eagle, a leopard, and a snake
were featured. Suddenly, in my rnind's eye, the three predator images
merged.The leopard body took on the outer look ofthe python, result-
ing in a large reptilian body with four clawed feet and a mouth full of
sharp teeth. When the wings of the martial eagle attached to the shoul-
ders of the blended leopard/python, I saw a dragon! (fig.2)
This unsought insight focused my attention on dragons. I found
them everywhere.Actress Sigourney Weaver, a classic dragon slayer-pure
ofheart and defender ofthe weak-has descended four times, as oflast
count, into the dank caverns of the Alien beast.]. R. R. Tolkien's treasure-
4
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THREE PREDATORS WHO MOST THREATENED OUR ANCES-
FIGURE 2:
TORS-THE EAGLE, THE LEOPARD, AND THE SNAKE-MERGE IN
MYTHOLOGY TO BECOME A SINGLE CREATURE, THE DRAGON.
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -----
hoarding dragon Smaug looks down from my Hobbit calendar. Some-

where, thousands of teenage boys are playing Dungeons and Dragons,
while their parents listen to a CD ofWagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen,
a musical tale featuring Fafnir, a dragon. On the Internet dozens, if not
hundreds, of dragon sites throb with life, and around the world the
dragon's potent name and image are widely employed by sports teams.
Further, sightings of creatures that would have readily been consid-
ered dragons not that many years ago continue unabated to the present
day. Most have heard of the Loch Ness monster. A similar creature is
reported by the people living beside Lake Seljordsvatnet in Norway. In
fact, reptilian lake monsters are known from Japan to the Great Lakes of
the United States and Canada.These instances ofthe dragon in modern
life are reminders that tales of the dragon are not merely fascinations
reserved for children and ancient nonliterate peoples. It may be that more
images of dragons exist in our skeptical society's contemporary art, lore,
and cinema than ever existed among the ancients who embraced the
dragon as real.
Classical Greek mythology is alive with dragons. Zeus, after defeat-
ing his father, Cronus, was confronted by Typhon, demon of the whirl-
wind, a beast composed of masses of coiled snakes. It had hundreds of
serpent heads sprouting from its shoulders, leathery wings that darkened
the sun, and a wingspan of several hundred leagues. Its eyes were said to
flash fire, its roar shook the earth, and flames shot from its gaping mouth.
The Greek hydra, on the other hand, was a multiheaded dragon, some-
times rendered as a giant serpent with six to nine heads and sometimes
as a winged, four-footed saurian creature with a number of heads. Its
breath was considered deadly. From the Egyptians, the Greeks borrowed
the image of the Oroboros, the "tail eater."This dragon held its tail in its
mouth and was the symbol of eternity, the "never ending." It was gen-
erally depicted as a giant winged serpent with clawed feet.
For the Romans, the Latin word draco identified large snakes and
dragons. Perle Epstein (1973) notes of the Roman dragon, "This creature
was usually represented in classical art as a fire breather with large bat's
wings, a monster who spends his time in dark caves and sea grottoes
guarding treasures" (34).
6
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~ INTRODUCTION ~
Dragons also populated the Seandinavian eountries.Vikings raided

along the European eoast and the British Isles in boats with earved
dragon head prows. They drew dragon images from legends that reached
back to the sagas of the warrior gods. It is there that Jormungander, the
Midgard Serpent, an immense serpent with a dragon's head, appears.
Folklorist Jonathan D. Evans, in his study (1984) of three dozen
dragon tales in Old English and Old Norse, concludes that dragons
share many common features: "The dragon's body is generaIly very
large, serpentine,equipped with lashing tail, sharp talons, a gaping mouth
with sharp teeth.Where psychologieal phenomena are attributed to the
dragon, they are of a singularly bestial malevolence. The dragon's habi-
tat ... is remote and solitary. The dragon's behavioral characteristics
include maleficent marauding, fire-breathing, taking oflive captives, and
jealous hoarding of treasure" (95).
Europe also claimed the double-headed serpent, or amphisbaena, as
weIl as the griffin, whieh like the amphisbaena is an ancient type of
dragon with a long history in the Mediterranean region and Near East.
Its likeness varied between a eomposite of a lion and an eagle and that
of a reptilelfelinel raptor beast, or griffin-dragon.
Asian dragons are associated with rain, soil feeundity, rivers, oceans,
and floods. The worst floods were generaIly aseribed to a dragon's reae-
tion to some sort of untoward mortal behavior. Referenees to dragons are
found in the earliest Chinese literature, dating to 2700 B.C. Very reeog-
nizable dragons appear during the Shang period (1600-1100 B.C.) as
snake-bodied ereatures with the requisite scaIes, claws, and a mouth fuIl
ofteeth.The Chinese dragon is often depicted with spines or crests ema-
nating from its back (fig.3).
The dragon appears fuIl-blown in the Kojiki, or"Record ofAncient
Things," written in A.D. 712, the earliest ]apanese account of their own
his tory. Dipping into mythology old even at the time of the compiling
of the Kojiki, the story teIls of the storm god Susa-no-ow, a wild and
footloose warrior hero and slayer of the Koshi dragon, a beast so impos-
sibly huge that it eould drape its body over eight hills and vaIleys at onee.
Trees and bushes sprouted from its scaly back, as did eight heads with
blood-red eyes and eight serpentine tails.
7
I'V
THE CHINESE DRAGON, THOUGH DEPICTED AS WINGLESS IN A
FIGURE 3,
NUMBER OF CASES, WAS NEVERTHELESS FLlGHT-CAPABLE, AS THIS IMAGE
FROM THE SHAN HAI KING INDICATES.
~ INTRODUCTION -----
The Mongois tell of leongalli, a dragon that was half lion and half
cock. The Chukchi, reindeer herders wandering the barrens of Siberia,
speak in hushed tones of the worms, giant serpentlike monsters.
The subcontinent of India has a long tradition of dragon tales, and
Indian religious art often depicts the creator god Vishnu reclining on the
back of an enormous naga, or dragon-hydra. The makara, another type
ofIndian dragon, can assume a number of forms, its m;uor manifestation
being that of a creature with the tail of a snake and the head and legs of
a crocodile. It also regularly appeared as a dragon or sea serpent. Heinz
Mode (1973) writes of the makara, "nearly all are water-monsters, which
occasionally develop into dragon-like four-footed creatures. This type
spread from India to Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, Indonesia and Indo-
China .... The makara figures ofSouthAsia can compete in number and
in richness of imagination with the dragons and griffins of the western
world" (140).
In a Sumerian hyrnn dating to 2500 B.C., we hear ofNinurta, the sun
god, a large scaled creature with the forefeet of a lion and the hind feet
of an eagle. And a Babylonian-Sumerian creation epic dating to about
2000 B.C. recounted the tale of Tiamat, mother of the gods, who in order
to avenge the killing of her husband, transformed herself into a dragon
with impervious scales, two forelegs armed with claws, a long snakelike
neck and head, and a pair ofhorns (fig. 4).Tiamat's battalions were com-
prised of sirrush, terrifying beasts that looked part bird of prey, part ser-
pent, part lion, and part scorpion. A very dramatic image of the sirrush was
unearthed by German archaeologist Robert Kodeway in 1899 when he
discovered the Ishtar Gate, erected by King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562
B.c.).The sirrush dragon was carved with scales, a long thin tail, a neck that
ended in a serpent's head, a forked tongue, and pointed horns. The front
feet were those of a lion, and the back those of a rap tor (fig. 5).
In Egypt, a hieroglyph ofthe Great God in the temple ofSeti I (circa
1300 B.C.) shows a winged, snakelike creature with four clawed feet and
three heads.A seal found at Susa, dating to 3000 B.C., featured a dragon
with the front part an eagle and the hindpart a lion (fig. 6). In addition,
the winged-serpent image is found throughout Egyptian folklore and
mythology (figs. 7,8).
9
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FIGURE 4:THIS ANCIENT BABYLONIAN IMAGE OF THE DRAGON TIAMAT
WAS TAKEN FROM A CYLINDER SEAL IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
THIS CLASSIC DRAGON IMAGE FROM THE ISHTAR GATE
FIGURE 5:
OF BABYLON WAS DISCOVERED BY ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN THE
LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
AN ANCIENT IMAGE OF A DRAGON TAKEN FROM A CYLINDER
FIGURE 6:
SEAL FOUND IN THE EXCAVATION OF SUSA SHOWS A BEAST
COMPOUNDED OF THE FOREPART OF AN EAGLE AND THE HIND
PART OF ALION.
WINGED SERPENT IMAGES WERE COMMON IN ANCIENT
FIGURE 7:
EGYPT. THIS PICTURE DEPICTS THE WINGED SERPENT OF THE
GODDESS MERSOKAR.
8: THE MULT[APPENDAGED OR HYDRA EFFECT [S SEEN [N THE
FIGURE
DOUBLE W[NGS OF THE EGYPT[AN W[NGED SERPENT CHANUPH[S,
OR BA[T
~ INTRODUCTION ------
Two of the most famous dragon stories come from Africa. The old-
est account, set in Ethiopia, teIls of the rescue ofPrincess Andromeda and
the slaying of the dragon Cetus by the Greek demigod Perseus. Cetus was
described as an enormous, limbless "serpent whale" with impenetrable
scales, a doglike head, a bright red crest, and two membranous wings. This
type of dragon, a wyvern, is known worldwide.A second epic dragon tale
is set in N orth Africa in the third century. This story, modeled no doubt
on the earlier story of Perseus, describes the rescue from a dragon of
Princess Alycone of Silene, Libya, by a young knight named George. The
princess-eating dragon that the good knight killed possessed scales, a
snakelike tail, four muscular legs, a powerful neck, markings on its wings
that looked like eyes, and smoking vapors issuing from its mouth (fig. 9).
In west -central Mrica, the Ashanti tell of a scaled beast that breathed
fire from its nostrils. It was believed that its eyesight was so keen that it was
able to see a fly moving miles away, and it could move along the ground
so quickly that no one could catch it (Barker and Sinclair 1917,97-101).
The mokele-mbembe, said to look like a sauropod dinosaur, and the inkhomi,
acrested cobra or basilisk-dragon that had a snakelike body and snake
fangs plus the attributes of a rooster, have been reported for centuries by
Western travelers as weIl as the native peoples of central Africa.
Of Oceania, Grafton EIliot-Smith (1919) noted, "We find scattered
throughout the islands of the Pacific the familiar stories of the dragon"
(230).A striped, two-headed snake monster lives among the Arapesh of
New Guinea. It inhabits pools and caves, guards the Arapesh hunting
grounds, and is particularly dangerous to childbearing women. Peoples
of the traditional cultures ofSamoa believed that a dragon abided as king
of the gods; and the Maori, the native inhabitants ofNew Zealand, pos-
sess the myth of a lizard-bodied dragon as big as a whale with a huge
head, a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, four short legs, scales, claws,
sharp spines across its head, and hot poisonous breath.
The aborigines ofAustralia speak of several types of dragons, includ-
ing the Rainbow Serpent and the bunyip; and in Hawaii, tradition teIls
of the mo-o, a large, heavy-bodied reptile that reached a length of thirty
feet more with four legs, scales, and fanglike teeth. Polynesianist Rita
Knipe writes (1989) of the mo-o, "The lizard gods or monsters are
known by several names, including Moko, or Mo'o elsewhere in Poly-
15
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THIS ETHIOPIAN WINGED BIPED DRAGON WAS OF THE TYPE
FIGURE 9:
CONFRONTED IN AFRICA BY THE GREEK CULTURE HERO PERSEUS
AND LATER BY THE MOST FAMOUS OF WESTERN DRAGON SLAYERS,
GEORGE OF CAPPADOCIA.
~ INTRODUCTION ~
nesia, but the mythological resemblance is elear.We can best understand

the primeval Mo'o as dangerous dragons" (146).
The Americas are also populated with dragons.The dragon complex
raptor/serpent/cat appears in many artistic media utilized by the Inca of
SouthAmerica; and among the ancient high civilizations ofMesoamer-
ica, there is a special focus on the plumed serpent, an amphipteres dragon.
The Aztec of the Valley of Mexico knew him as Quetzalcoatl. That he was
more than a green-winged snake, as his name implies, was made elear in
the costuming of Aztec priests when they played his part in rituals by
donning a green feathered cape and a crocodile-like mask with heavy
muzzle and many sharp teeth. Between 500 B.C. and A.D. 900, the
plumed serpent Kulkulkan was an important deity among the Maya of
the Yucatan Peninsula.
In North America the most widely known ancient dragon image is
that of the Piasa dragon (fig. 10). Its image was first described by the
French priest and explorer Jacques Marquette in August 1675. While
exploring the Mississippi River, he came upon several paintings eighty
feet above aseries of rapids and deep pools near present-day Alton, Illi-
nois. Father Marquette described them as portraying a creature possess-
ing horns like adeer; blood-red eyes; a body covered in scales; a tail so
long that it passed entirely around its body, over its head, and between its
legs; the face of a man; large, sharp teeth; the beard of a tiger; four scaly
legs with taloned feet; a pair ofleathery wings that spanned about sev-
enteen feet; and smoke oozing from its nostrils. The dragon measured
thirty feet in length and twelve feet in height. Many Indian tribes of the
Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes regions portrayed such creatures on
eliffs and rocks near dangerous rapids and deep pools.
The plumed serpent, found from the Valley of Mexico to the Great
Lakes, also dwel1s among the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest.
The Hopi, Zuni, and Keres all honor the horned water serpent Pululukon,
a creature depicted in rituals as possessing a thunderous roar, a crest of feath-
ers, a large mouth ful1 of sharp carnivorous teeth, and sometimes wings.
In the Northeast culture area, the Seneca Indians of New York
believed in the existence of a giant horned serpent that lived in deep
waters, the Doonongaes. In the Southeast, the Seminoles ofFlorida told
of the water cougar, a composite cat/reptile that resided in deep water
17
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..J
FIGURE 10: THIS IMAGE OF THE AMERICAN DRAGON, THE PIASA, WAS
RENDERED BY WILLIAM DENNIS FROM FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE'S
DESCRIPTION OF AN IMAGE ON A CLIFF OVERLOOKING THE MISSISSIPPI
NEAR THE PRESENT-DAY TOWN OF ALTON, ILLINOIS THAT HE
ENCOUNTERED IN AUGUST OF 1675.
---- INTRODUCTION ~
and controlled storms, flood, and rain. On the northwest coast, the
Haida and the K wakiutl Indians feared the Sisiutl, sometimes depicted as
a double-headed serpent and sometimes with four clawed feet, a snake-
like tail, and a size large enough to swallow a full-grown man.
Further, strange as it may seem given their arctic range, the Inuit (Eski-
mos) also have their version of a dragon. The Inuit bands on Alaska's
southern coast describe a huge reptilian sea monster looking something like
a giant seagoing crocodile. Around Point Hope, the Inuit tell of the Kiki-
tuk, a large, saurian sea monster that comes ashore to eat humans and to
hunt. In GraphieArt ifthe Eskimo (Hoffinan 1897), we can see a number of
images of dragonlike monsters etched on bone and ivory (figs. 11,12).
In North Carolina and Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians and their
neighbors tell of the uktena, an enormous horned water snake with a
scaly body as big around as a tree trunk, horns on its head, rings or spots
of color decorating its hide, a shining carbuncle mounted in its head, and
wings (figs. 13,14). It was believed that to smell the uktena's breath
would bring instant death.
Lawrence E. Sullivan, editor of Native American Religions (1989),
wrote concerning the New World dragons, "Both in their form and in
the role they played in the larger belief system, the 'uktena' and other ser-
pentine monsters resemble both the feathered serpent of the Aztec and
the dragon ofEurasia.Why these imaginary monsters should have been
structuraHy similar remains to be explained" (142).
Dragons are universal, and the raptor/serpent/cat motifin the over-
all pattern of the dragon image and dragon tales, whether presented in
Polynesia as mo-o or among the Cherokee Indians as uktena or among the
peoples of India as makara, is easily recognized. The winged or flight-
capable, scaled, and often clawed giant reptile with a mouth fuH of sav-
age teeth is found everywhere, and so too are a number of recurring
themes in the world-dragon tales: deadly breath, horns, crests, watery
domains, danger to young women,jewel in the head, hideous roar, mul-
tiple heads, and staring or glowing eyes. But why? How can the univer-
sality of this strange complex of images and behavior be explained?
What, if any, are the physical facts behind the universal dragon? And,
finally, how can the behavior ofAfrican vervet monkeys help untangle the
puzzle of the dragon?
19
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FIGURE 11: AN ESK IMO
DRA GON CON FRO NTS A CAR IBOU . NOT E
THA T THE IMA GE OF THE GIA
NT LEGGED REPTILE OCC URS EVEN
IN ARC TIC ENV IRO NME NTS .
MYTHIC SERPENTS
MYTHIC CREATURES
MYTHIC ANIMAL DEVOURING NATIVE
HOFFMAN, IN THE LATE 18005, TOOK THESE ETCHINGS

FIGURE 12:
FROM VARIOUS INUIT BONE ARTIFACT5. NOTE THE MULTIPLE
APPENDAGES ON SEVERAL OF WHAT HOFFMAN CALLS IMAGES
OF 'MYTHIC ANIMALS' OR 'MYTHIC SERPENTS:
FIGURE t 3: DATING TO ABOUT A.D. 1200, THIS IMAGE OF AN AMERICAN
INDIAN HYDRA DRAGON COMES FROM A CERAMIC VESSEL DISCOVERED
AT THE SPIRO MOUND SITE IN EASTERN OKLAHOMA.
FIGURE 14:THE DRAGON OF THE SOUTHEAST INDIANS, THE UKTENA
WAS ALWAYS FEATURED AS A LARGE, HORNED FLYING SERPENT
THIS IMAGE IS FROM A CERAMIC VESSEL FOUND AT THE MOUNDVILLE
SITE IN ALABAMA.
1
~
THE MONKEY
HUNTERS
he world-dragon was formed by the nature of our own shad-
~ T owy progenitors' encounters with the creatures who hunted

them over millions of years (fig. 15). To fuUy understand this
crucial period in evolutionary history, we must consider the primate
predators, the "primal" inspiration for the dragon, as weU as the evolution
and nature of the primates. Although the basic oudine of primate clas-
sification is generaUy accepted, numerous minor points vary from one
classificatory scheme to another. Since the minutiae of primate taxonomy
are not my interest, I will rely on the classification found in the most
recent edition of a commonly used textbook in the field ofhuman evo-
lution, William Haviland's Human Evolution and Prehistory (1994).
A standard disclaimer is required at this point. At issue is the reliability
of generalizing from ape and monkey behavior to human behavior or of
inferring ancestral primate behavior from that of the euprimates, or "pri-
mates of modern aspect." Anthropology generaUy assumes that studies of
the great apes, such as the chimpanzee and the gorilla-animals dose to
us not only in genetic material but also, and not surprisingly, in behavior-
will shed insight into the social! cultural development of our most
ancient ancestors. However, nonhuman primates have evolved over time
25
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FIGURE 1 5:0VER MILLENNIA, THE RAPTOR, BIG CAT, AND SERPENT BEGAN
TO FORM AS A SINGLE CONSTRUCT - THE DRAGON-IN THE
BRAIN/MIND OF OUR ANCIENT PRIMATE ANCESTORS.
----- THE MONKEY HUNTERS ~
just as humans have, and forms ofbehavior that modern primates exhibit
may not have existed among their ancestors. Further, contemporary
primatological studies have shown variations in primate behavior from
species to species, and even within a particular group. These cautions must
be considered when attempting to explain modern human behavior by
evoking some putative ancient behavior, the existence of which is sug-
gested by the fact that it is displayed by nonhuman primates. With these
qualifYing warnings in mind, we may proceed.
Primates belong to the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, the
subphylum Vertebrata, and the dass Mammalia. This means that they are
dassed with animals that experience live birth; ingest their food; are capa-
ble of voluntary motion; are warm-blooded; and possess sense organs, a
backbone, hair, and mammary glands. The Platyrrhini, the N ew World
monkeys, are native to Central and South America and are characterized
by a flat nose, arboreallifestyle, and prehensile tail. The Catarrhini con-
sists oftwo superfamilies: Cercopithecoidea and Hominoidea.The Cer-
copithecoidea, the Old World monkeys, are recognized by their
downward-pointing nostrils and their lack of prehensile tails. These ani-
mals may be tree dwelling or land dwelling and indude baboons,Japan-
ese macaques, rhesus monkeys, capuchins, and guereza monkeys. The
Hominoidea superfamily includes the Pongidae and the Hominidae.The
Pongidae are the Asian great apes. The Hominidae are chimpanzees,
gorillas, and the subfamily Homininae: genus Homo, species sapiens ... uso
The dassification of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas in the same
family reflects the la test blood and protein chemistry studies, which
establish that the three are more closely related to each than to the orang-
utan, for example. On the basis of tests with blood proteins, scientists have
determined that the chimpanzee and gorilla are dosest to humans, with
the orangutan next, followed by the gibbons and siamangs, the Old
World monkeys, the New World monkeys, tarsiers, and finally, at the
greatest evolutionary distance from humans, the Strepsirhini. Humans and
chimpanzees, for example, share at least 98 percent of their genetic
material.
As far as can be known, primates are the only animals with a special
historical rapport with the sources of the dragon image, and we humans,
the most advanced primates of them all, have gone so far as to sustain the
27
~
presence of the dragon through the entertainment industry, religion, arts,

folklore, and mythology.This deep connection developed many millions
of years ago, and to trace it we must look to the roots of our own kind,
even considering the broader temporal context of those roots, for there
is found the source and cause of the dragon.
Our planet came into being some 4 to 6 billion years ago. During the
first half-billion or so years ofEarth, we are told the planet was a tortured
stone convulsed by volcanic forces, one great barren continent sur-
rounded by a sea empty oflife.About a billion years ago, microscopic life
forms evolved that could sustain themselves by mixing oxygen and
organic materials from plants and other forms like themselves. These were
the first oxygen-breathing animals.
Over the next 400 million years, armored fish, the first animals to have
a vertebral column, evolved, followed by small amphibians, who moved
out of the sea to spend part of their lives on the land. Then, during the
Carboniferous period, about 280 to 345 million years ago, reptiles and
insects arose. In the succeeding Permian period, about 230 to 280 million
years ago, fossils provide evidence that some reptiles were developing in
a distinctive mammalian direction, and by the Triassie period, between 180
and 230 million years ago, true mammals were on the scene.
For the next several hundred million years, mammals remained
small hunters of insects, grubs, worms, and eggs. Toward the end of the
Cretaceous period, about 65 to 135 million years ago, the dinosaurs
approached extinction, opening up many new ecological niches for the
primitive mammals. As the ancient continents shifted, and warm, moist
conditions over the planet favored the spread ofhuge forests, so me of the
inseetivorean mammals experimented with an arboreal adaptation. Life
in the trees naturally favored those animals that had the ability to judge
distanees through spaee aceurately, and to grasp and hold on.
Then, during the Eoeene epoeh, some 34 to 55 million years ago, the
temperature rose, eausing the extinetion of many older mammalian forms,
whieh in turn were replaced by animals that modern humans eould
recogmze.
During the Oligoeene epoch, 23 to 34 million years ago, creatures
resembling the tarsiers and the lemurs beeame somewhat dominated by
the aneestors of the haplorhine primates; that is, they beeame more mon-
28
~
~ THE MONKEY HUNTERS ~
keylike, generally outeompeting more "primitive" primates. Then, some

22 million years ago du ring the Mioeene epoeh, the tree-dwelling, ehim-
panzee-sized ape ealled Proconsul evolved. Primatologists eonsider it anees-
tral to Sivapithecus, a Miocene ape that evolved 5 to 16 million years ago.
Of partieular interest to those speeialists who traee the twisting
trails ofhuman evolution are the environmental eonditions that prevailed
toward the end of the Mioeene epoeh. Rising temperatures and
deereased rainfall resulted in a breakdown of the primal forests into a
savanna-forest mixed environment.Two features then eame into play.The
populations of eatlike predators grew in the savanna areas, making life dif-
fieult for the relatively small (forty to fifty pounds) sivapitheeines. Further,
experts hypothesize that some of the sivapitheeines engaged in terrestrial
hunting and gathering on the savanna, eombined with strategie retreats
into the nearby trees to eat, sleep, and find proteetion from predators.
Obviously, those aneient primates who eould gather food and then
earry it to the trees had a survival advantage over their less talented com-
rades. Recent evidenee suggests that apes and humans separated from a
eommon aneestralline so me time during the late Mioeene. Some of the
sivapitheeines evolved toward the human line, some in the direetion of
modern terrestrial apes, and some with a foeus on life in the trees.
About 4.5 to 7.5 million years ago, the first hominine appeared.This
fossil form, known as Ardipithecus ramidus and diseovered in Ethiopia, is
dated at 4.4 million years. Based on fossils from northern Kenya, known
as Australopithecus anamensis, so me anthropologists now suggest that
Ardipithecus ramidus gave rise to Australopithecus somewhere between 3.9
to 4.2 million years ago.
The first member of the Australopithecus genus was identified in
1924 by Professor Raymond Dart of the University ofWitwatersrand in
Johannesburg. The fossil, found at the Buxton Limeworks near Taung,
South Afriea, was that of a three- to four-year-oldjuvenile, henee some-
times referred to as the Taung ehild (fig. 16). It drew Dart's attention
beeause of the apparent mix ofhuman and simian traits. Due to the posi-
tion of the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through
whieh the spinal eord passes, anatomist Dart argued that the creature was
a biped-it walked on two feet-and named it Southern Ape ofAfriea,
or Australopithecus aJricanus.
29
~
FIGURE 16:THE FOSSILIZED SKULL OF THE SO-CALLED 'TAUNG CHILD,"
FOUND IN AFRICA IN 1924 BY ANATOMIST RAYMOND DART, WAS THE
FIRST MEMBER OF GENUS AUSTRALOPITHECUS. THE ANCIENT L1NEAGE OF
HUMANITY, EVER IDENTIFIED. LATER STUDIES BY BERGER AND CLARKE IN
1995 DEMONSTRATED THAT THE ANCIENT CHILD WAS PROBABLY CAP-
TURED AND KILLED BY A RAPTOR SEVERAL MILLION YEARS AGO.
I have paused to consider the circumstances surrounding the find of

the Taung child because arecent study by paleoanthropologists I. R.
Berger and R. J. Clarke (1995), who like Dart worked out of the Uni-
versity ofWitwatersrand, supports the notion that predators, in this case
raptors, were significantly involved in behaviors that offer some answers
to two of the continuing problems surrounding the Taung find. The first
puzzle is that the Taung site has produced only the child's skulI, whereas
other similar sites-Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, Makapansgat, Swartkrans-
have yielded several apemen fossils and associated artifacts. Secondly, the
faunal assemblage-that is, the collection of animal bones found in asso-
ciation with the Taung child-manifests the presence of only small ani-
mals, many of which reveal unusual damage.
Competing theories suggest that the Taung faunal assemblage was
caused either by a carnivore, possibly a leopard, or by water action. The
argument that the Taung bone assemblage might have been washed into
its present location by primordial stream patterns or flooding was dis-
missed on the following grounds: the geology of the si te yielded no
stream cobbles, nor did the bones show the wear ofbones that had been
moved any distance by hydraulic forces.A leopard as the collector of the
bones was rejected because bone collectors, or bone chewers and gnaw-
ers like leopards, wild dogs, and porcupines, leave characteristic marks on
their kills. None of these marks were found. Present on the Taung bone
assemblage were the marks characteristic of the kills oflarge raptors such
as the crowned eagle, the martial eagle, and the black eagle, identifiable
V-shaped punctures left by the raptor's powerful beak. Finally, the Taung
faunal assemblage is unique among all South African early hominid-
bearing fossil sites because of the uniformly small animals represented and
the relative scarcity of this type of animal remains at many other Aus-
tralopithecus sites. Further, there was an absence of broken bones as one
would find in the lair of a carnivore or early manIike creature. Berger and
Clarke end their study by stating, "We thus conclude with the proposi-
tion that the Taung child and much of the associated fauna was killed and
collected by a large bird of prey" (298).
With Australopithecus is found the first evidence of a large-brained,
upright-walking primate with dexterous hands and fingers easily capa-
ble of rudimentary tool making. Its cranium was low, its brow ridges were
31
~
---- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
large, and the lower half of its face was chinless. It probably spent some
time in the trees, as do the modern great apes like the gorilla and chim-
panzee, but it was clearly an advanced terrestrial primate. Then, about 2.4
to 1.5 million years ago, the first member of our genus, Homo habilis,
appeared.The large-brained H. habilis was the first to create stone tools,
known to archaeologists as Oldowan pebble choppers.
The preceding outline of primates and primate evolution offers the
basis for the following discussion concerning primate predators and their
evolutionary appearance. Since the major vervet monkey predators-
raptor, leopard, snake-form the basis of my hypothesis concerning the
roots of the dragon image among humans, the extension of this preda-
tor complex beyond the vervet monkeys must be explored and substan-
tiated. If only the vervets were the targets of the raptor/leopard/snake
predator triumvirate, the conclusion that the universal dragon is derived
from areaction to these primate hunters over millions of years would
ring hollow. However, as we scan the globe and primate-predator rela-
tions, we see that the basic raptor/leopard/snake predator complex,
with very few exceptions, is everywhere in the world where primates are
found.
Among New World monkeys (Platyrrhini), the pygmy marmoset
(genus Cebuella) of the upper Amazon, the smallest monkey in the world
at about 4.4 ounces, is so at risk from rap tors that it instinctively avoids
the upper canopies of forests. This, however, puts it at additional danger
from two ofits other predators, snakes and cats. Likewise, Goeldi's mon-
key (Callimico goeldii), also found in South America, is hunted by birds of
prey and big cats.
The capuchin monkeys of Central and South America, whose males
average 7.25 pounds and females 5.7 pounds, are particularly susceptible
to their predators, which include birds of prey, ocelots, and boa con-
strictors. Studies ofjaguar predation in the Manu National Park in Peru
indicate that a dietary focus of the big cats is black spider monkeys
(Kitchener 1991,137).
In Southeast Asia and the southwestern Pacific islands, clouded
leopards, Necfelis nebulosa, specialize in the hunting of primates. In Suma-
tra they prey upon long-tailed macaques and will attack larger primates
such as orangutans. In Borneo, proboscis monkeys and leaf monkeys con-
32
~
tend not only with the douded leopard but also with crocodiles, pythons,
and black eagles.
The African great apes, although less susceptible to the classical tri-
umvirate because of their larger size and group life, are still wary of the
primate predators. In an area study at Mount Assirki in the Parc National
du Niokolo Koba, Senegal, leopards pose the major threat to the chim-
panzee population, with lions, wild dogs, and hyenas a dose second.
Leopards also prey on mountain gorilla populations. Oue to the size of
the great apes, raptors present no problem except to infants and juveniles,
but poisonous snakes and constrictors present real dangers. Chimpanzees
demonstrate innate predator-avoidance reactions to snakes and birds.
OldWorld monkey (Catarrhini) populations provide many examples
of predation by the raptor/ snake/ cat complex. BIue monkeys (c. mitis) and
red-tailed monkeys (c. ascanius) are hunted by leopards, eagles, and snakes,
as are rhesus monkeys, patas monkeys, howler monkeys, white-nosed
guenons, talapoin monkeys, and gray-cheeked mangabey monkeys. Leop-
ards in the Amboseli area of east Mrica are the major cause of death in the
vervet monkey population.
Descendants of the ancient primate suborder Strepsirhini, which
indudes lemurs and lorises, are found in great number today only on
Madagascar, the world's largest island, aland mass of 232,000 square
miles lying offthe east coast ofAfrica.The ancestors oftoday's lemurs were
isolated on this island about 50 million years ago and have evolved in the
absence of monkeys and apes.
Raptors are the major enemies of all types of lemurs. The mouse
lemurs (genus Microcebus) of Madagascar are hunted by snakes, owls, and
various types of cats and civets. Pottos, members of the loris farnily, are
likewise prey of poisonous snakes, carnivores, and raptors. Tarsiers on
Madagascar and elsewhere are typically hunted by hawks, eagles, mon-
gooses, snakes, and cats.
Lemurs also demonstrate some exceptions to the pattern of predation
reaction: they do not appear to be instinctively fearful of snakes. Alison
Jolly (1966,39) notes the absence of true poisonous snakes on Madagas-
car as a contributing factor to this atypical primate behavior. Likewise, red-
faced Japanese macaques and baboons seem to have little predator anxiety.
The large size of their social groups, the ecological niches they occupy,
33
~
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
and-in the case of the baboon-their ferocious group response to

threats may help explain this.
Another perspective on the relationship between primates and their
predators can be gained by considering more closely the nature and his-
tory of the cats, raptors, and snakes that bedevil primates wherever they
are found. Reptiles, the first full-time land-dwelling animals, appeared
about 350 million years ago, and about 225 million years ago, toward the
end of the Permian period, a group of now-extinct reptiles gave rise to
the earliest mammals. One of the many ironies of evolution is that they
would also become one of the mammals' major predators.
Abrief survey of snakes that prey upon modern primates can offer
insights into the age-old struggle between our most ancient ancestors and
the snake. Some snakes are indeed daunting in size. The reticulated or
regal python (Python reticulatus) from Malaya averages thirty-three to
thirty-four feet in length, while the rock python (Python sebae) can reach
over twenty-eight feet. The larger adults of this species can bring down
small antelopes and are capable of killing and swallowing children and
small adults. The largest known specimen of the tropical American snake
the anaconda (Eunectes murinus) measured nineteen feet in length, thirty-
six inches in circumference at the thickest part of its body, and 236
pounds in weight. Boa constrictors, of the family Boinae, which can
attain twenty feet in length, are located all over the world and have been
collected and studied in New Guinea, Australia, Asia, Malaysia, Africa,
Mexico, India, and Madagascar.
A sample of monkey-killing snakes ofAfrica divulges the serpent hor-
rors ofthe arboreal primate's world.The highly venomous Gabon adder
(Bitis gabonica) from West Africa averages six feet in length, and adults will
kill monkeys as well as hares, genets, and mongooses. Gold's tree cobra
(Pseudonhaje) is a very poisonous serpent that reaches a length of seven feet
and will attack arboreal mamn1als, including small, infant, and juvenile
monkeys, as does Blanding's tree snake (Boiga blandingii) and the boom-
slang, Dispholidus typus.
Reptiles gave rise to primitive birds during the Mesozoic era about
180 million years ago. One of the first recognizable birds, the
Archaeopteryx, evolved during the Jurassic period, some 160 million
years ago. In the following Eocene period, the earliest known true birds
34
~
~ THE MONKEY HUNTERS ------'-
of prey appeared. The oldest SO far discovered, Lithornis, dates to 60 mil-

lion years and was found near London, England. Birds of all kinds
reached their peak about 500,000 years ago, at which time it is estimated
(Everett 1976, 13) that the worldwide bird population was three times
that of today.
Modern raptors, such as falcons, hawks, harriers, kites, vultures, and
eagles, are grouped in the order Falconiform. The largest African rap tor,
the martial eagle, weighs up to fourteen pounds and possesses a wingspan
of eight feet. Like the African tawny eagle, a somewhat smaller relative,
it easily picks monkeys out of treetops and kills small antelopes on the
ground.
The crowned eagle, smaller than the martial eagle but more power-
ful, feeds exclusively on mammals, including monkeys. In so me parts of
Africa, crowned eagles subsist entirely on monkeys-the vervet, samango,
and colobus monkeys, with young baboons being the favored prey. Fur-
ther, these eagles prey upon antelope such as bushbuck and grysbok, ani-
mals that weigh up to thirty kilograms. In 1982 in Zambia, a crowned
eagle attacked and nearly killed a seven-year-old human child, and in
Zimbabwe pieces of a juvenile human's skull were found in the nest of
a crowned eagle (Berger and Clarke 1995,280-81).
African black eagles, with wingspans over six feet, commonly hunt
vervet monkeys and have been known to take small baboons as weH as
antelopes. One of their specialities is tortoise hunting. One pair ofblack
eagles was reported to have killed eighty-four tortoises over a 119-day
period by the interesting method of snatching the tortoise from the
ground and then dropping it to its death from a height of thirty to sixty
meters, after which the eagles dined. In the New World, the harpy eagle
of Central and South America feeds on tree-dwelling mammals, includ-
ing monkeys, as does the New Guinea harpy eagle and the huge Philip-
pine monkey-eating eagle.
The first catlike carnivores, the so-called sabertoothed paleo-felids,
appeared about 35 million years ago. By 20 million years ago, ancient
species ofbig cats had spread to the Old and New World. Modern cats
are in evidence from about 10 million years ago, in the late Miocene
epoch, and the big cats of the modern genus Panthera appear about 2 mil-
lion years ago in Europe and somewhat earlier in Africa.
35
~
Among the most ancient of the Panthera, leopardlike cats predate the
appearance oflions by over a million years.The leopards lend importance
to a discussion of primate predators because of their tree-dimbing abil-
ities; that is, their ability to threaten arboreal mammals. Leopards and
jaguars had dispersed over Africa, Eurasia, Europe, and the New World by
1 to 2 million years ago. Other big cats-tigers, ocelots, lynxes, pumas,
and cheetahs-were also radiating from their centers of origin at this
time. The lion, as noted above, is a relative latecomer. Its oldest remains
come from Bed II of Olduvai Gorge in East Africa and date between
500,000 and 700,000 years.
The leopard has adapted better than other big cats and can survive
in virtually every type ofhabitat, from tropical rain forest to desert, from
sea level to 5,000 meters above sea level. Its dose relative, the jaguar,
although confined to South and Central America today, resides in savanna
regions, deserts, and tropical forests.
Leopards are very active, opportunistic, but not always successful
hunters. Bailey (1993,206) observed that the leopards in an African study
successfully captured prey in only two of thirteen attempts. All daylight
attacks failed, but the two night attacks succeeded. The diet of the leop-
ards in Bailey's study, according to examination of their scats, was com-
posed of about one-third small mammals, including monkeys. In a study
of the scats of leopards in the Parc National de Tai in the Ivory Coast,
monkey remains joined those of thirty different small mammals taken by
the leopards (Kitchener 1991,138).
Leopards often store their kills in trees, which brings them into con-
fIontation with arboreal mammals. Bailey noted that of the fifty-five car-
casses of animals killed by leopards in his study area, 84 percent had been
placed in trees.
The preceding material suggests that the raptor/snake/cat primate-
predator complex is universal and, further, that this deadly relationship
began deep in the evolutionary history of our species. From Borneo to
Peru, from Africa to India, from ancient times to modern day, primates
confront their three basic predators on an alm ost daily basis and have
been doing so all over the world for many millions of years. The success
or failure of the primate to survive these encounters obviously has had
a determining impact on the evolution of our kind of animal.
36
~
The effects of the primordial predator linger in the modern social

and individual nature of contemporary primates. Today's primates stand
larger than their ancient cousins because of their size advantage in daily
battles to achieve sexual dominion, control over food, and choice resting
areas within their own troop, as well as defense against the beasts that
swooped down from the sky, leapt with claws unsheathed and teeth
barred from ambush, or slithered quietly among the branches.
The social nature of primates and the pressure to evolve and main-
tain methods that make social cohesion more likely-the family, mutual
grooming, food sharing, protopolitical structure, and so on-were also
heavily influenced by the daily attacks of predators. The problem of the
predator had to be resolved before any higher form of social development
could occur. Iflife did not ensure relative safety and security, how could
any form ofbehavior not directly related to self-defense evolve? Before
art, before religion, before philosophy-before any of those distinc-
tively "human" behaviors that our kind have developed over the mil-
lennia could become manifest-the issue of defense against the
traditional primate predators had to be settled. Primates had to evolve sig-
nificant alarm calls and innate and therefore automatie responses to
alarm calls or to predator signature behavior-the writhing of snakes, the
rush of the leopard attack, and the fluttering ofbird wings-to assure that
a sufficient number survived to maintain a steady rate of population.
Biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his extremely influential work Socio-
biology:The New Synthesis (1975) wrote, "In higher primate species with
multimale groups, organized defense is the rule. In fact, we can bring this
generalization the other way around-the multimale unit may have
evolved in order to provide coordinated hence superior defense" (46).
And as primatologists Noel Boaz and Alan Almquist (1997) note: "Van
Schaik (1983) believed that predation avoidance offered the only uni-
versal selective advantage of group living. They believe that predation is
what sets the lower limit for group size." (231).
The dragon evolved from the same crucible that produced the most fun-
damental ofhuman institutions, those that we share with almost all pri-
mates. In a way, the creature that we call "dragon" projects through
cultural and individual artistic lenses as a primary feature of human
37
~
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ........-...-
evolution. Evolution is driven by natural selection, and natural seleetion

does not work unless a threat exists in the environment to prevent an ill-
adapted organism from passing along its genetic materials.
In eomparing the evolutionary history of humans and that of three
primate predators, one ean diseover when the roots of the dragon began
to take hold. The first land-dwelling animals and the souree of mammals,
the reptiles, appear about 350 million years ago.The reptile/mammal rela-
tionship is, therefore, one of the most ancient predatorI prey relationships
in the animal world. The raptors evolved about 60 to 160 million years
ago, at a time when the aneient rodentlike aneestors of the modern pri-
mates were experimenting with adaptation to life in the trees, and the big
cats evolved simultaneously with the aneestors of the modern tarsiers and
lemurs.
If SivapithecU5, whieh appeared about 5 to 16 million years ago, ean
be eonsidered aneestral to modern primates, including humans, then we
may note that the snakel eatl rap tor eomplex was aeting in relationship
to aneestral primates, presumably as prey, for tens of millions of years
before the appearanee of our most aneient primate aneestor. The origin
of the impulses that would lead to the world-dragon eomplex must have
begun about 35 to 50 million years ago, when aneestral primates evolved
in the dangerous eompany of raptors, snakes, and eats.
38
~
2
RUNNING FROM
CERTAIN SHADOWS
he dramatic responses of the vervet monkey to the three basic
~ T predator calls indicate not only the complexity of the monkey's

psychobehavioral pattern, but also the critical significance of the
instinctual life-saving behavior patterns that the predator calls elicit in
vervet populations. The presence of the predator in primate evolution
seems crucial in understanding how and why primate social groups
formed and perhaps, by analysis of monkey call systems, how human lan-
guage came to be. But if the universality of various behaviors is to be
demonstrated, it must be shown not only that is it highly probable that
primates have faced the same set of predators all over the earth from the
most ancient times, but that the intensity of what was etched into their
brain was also universally demonstrated in similar predator reactions. Is
it only the vervet monkeys that display highly specific, and apparently
innate, response to predator alarm calls, or is such behavior common in
the primate world? If I am correct in the foundation of my hypothesis,
it should be the case that some of the most complex patterns ofbehav-
ior in primate groups (symbolic calls and stereotyped, complex physical
responses) will be triggered by the presence of predators. Such responses
(fear reactions, avoidance, withdrawal, freezing, movement into "safe"
39
~
17:THE RAPTOR, CAT, AND SERPENT, THE TRIAD OF PREDATORS
FIGURE
THAT HAVE THREATENED THE PRIMATES THROUGHOUT HISTORY,
CAME IN TIME TO FORM THE IMAGE OF THE DRAGON,
THE BEAST OF NIGHTMARES.
~ RUNNING FROM CERTAIN SHADOWS ~
areas, running, climbing, hiding, and mobbing) should be fairly uniform

across primate species, reflecting common experience and common
results in the formation of the primitive awareness patterns of the primate
brain-patterns that I feel formed the basis of the dragon image among
humans (fig. 17).
One may ask, What good is fear? Why would an evolutionary selec-
tion process result in great fear in a particular species when a triggering
event was encountered? In "What Good Is Feeling Bad?The Evolution-
ary Benefits ofPsychic Pain" (1991), psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse out-
lines his answer to this question by noting that of all the negative
emotions, anxiety is the most obviously useful (228). Walter B. Cannon
identified the fight-or-flight response, the best example of the value of
anxiety, in 1915. From ancient times this response was of major benefit in
the daily confrontation of prey and predator. When the predator attacks,
the fight-or-flight response stimulates an accelerated heartbeat that more
quickly pumps oxygen and nutrition in the form ofblood glucose to the
muscles, while at the same time speeding the removal of waste products.
Muscle tension prepares the prey for an attempt to escape quickly or to
stand and fight, while rapid breathing during the fight-or-flight reaction
lends to the hyperoxygenation of the blood. Sweating concomitant with
the fight-or-flight response serves to cool the body, and the secretion of
adrenaline functions to energize the prey and to assist in the efficient clot-
ting ofblood should an injury occur.These physical changes also corre-
late with intense mental or psychological focus. In the midst of an attack
by a powerful predator, the prey-at least the prey that has a chance to
survive-will be strongly "in the moment."
Anthropologist Alison Jolly (1966), who studied several troops of
lemurs in Madagascar, observed that whenever a hawk or other raptors
were spotted, the lemurs roared an alarm call that triggered the troop
members to look up, indicating that the particular call was specific to fly-
ing predators (39-40). Further, though gray parrots also shared the trees,
the lemurs rarely issued alarm calls on a routine basis to them or any
other birds, once more suggesting that their alarm call was voiced very
specifically for the dangerous predators and only rarely for other birds
(and sometimes airplanes).
41
~
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -----.....
Regarding another troop of lemurs in her Madagascar field study,

Jolly noted that they issued their alarm only for hawks flying directly over
the trees and rarely at high-flying hawks or airplanes (84). Further, the
raptor calls sometimes prompted the lemurs not only to look up but to
move guickly toward the ground and cover. Additionally, the lemurs' spe-
cific series of calls that warn of ground predators such as cats and
baboons stimulated them immediately to climb high into the trees.
In 1993 primate researcher Joseph M. Macedonia and his staff stud-
ied the antipredator responses of forest-living lemurs over three years at
the Duke University Primate Center in Durham, North Carolina. The
constant proximity to the lemur troops allowed the research staff to pro-
vide a picture oflemur behavior under threat of attack from avian preda-
tors that illustrated the great complexity of their alarm calls and responses.
Ringtailed lemurs, for example, issued warning calls when a large bird was
seen at a distance. This "prewarning" call caused the other members of the
troop to look toward the lemur who made the original call in order to
ascertain the direction of the potential threat. If the bird was clearly iden-
tified as a raptor, the call and the response of the troop were different. If
in the trees at the time of the close-proximity call, the ringtailed lemurs
moved from the outside branches, where conceivably they could be
attacked by a hunting hawk, toward the trunk of the tree. If the call inten-
sified further, the troop moved down the trunk to the ground to seek
cover.A different call signaled that a raptor was spotted in the vicinity but
not focused on the troop as prey.
The responses of infant lemurs and their mothers to the above
alarm calls were different again. In aB cases, the various ranges of hawk
calls stimulated the mother and infant to locate one another guickly. The
infant would jump on the mother's back, and the mother would follow
the general troop behavior, depending on the nuances of the rap tor call
and what it suggested (climb, look up, and so on). In several cases when
the infants were in the lower branches of the undergrowth, the hawk caBs
stimulated them to release their grip and drop to the ground, where they
would remain motionless as they made retrieval calls to their mothers.
Ruilled lemurs, when hearing the raptor alarm call, initiated a scan-
ning behavior, guickly tuming their bodies on the horizontal plane at 45-
42
~
and 90-degree ares, alternating direction, as if preparing to meet an

attacker but unsure of the direction from which it was approaching.
In one experiment a plywood silhouette of an attacking hawk was
suspended over the lemur range. The lemurs in the immediate vicinity
sent out the alarm call. Others in the area first looked toward the direc-
tion of the call, responded with their own calls, and approached the scene
of the disturbance. They moved short distances-stopping, scanning, and
moving again until they sighted the original alarm callers and the sil-
houette.
An adult female playing with an infant nearby responded to the sil-
houette by running to her infant, picking it up in her mouth, and cIimb-
ing to a branch about twelve feet off the ground. She parked her baby
there before returning to the ground, where she and the other adults
emitted loud roars in the direction of the silhouette.
Ringtailed lemurs reacted to ground predators, dogs in the case of
the Duke study, by immediately climbing the nearest tree.Young raccoons
who wandered into the primate center from nearby woods, however,
were mobbed; that is, the lemurs surrounded them and made threaten-
ing gestures as they roared and barked. In another experiment, a dog was
slowly walked toward the lemurs and, in another, was presented in an
ambushlike setting. In both cases the ringtailed lemurs indicated a ground
predator with their alarm calls and were in the trees within seconds. Only
the troop matriarch stood her ground against the dog. Though many
times smaller than the dog, she bristled and growled at the approaching
threat. The Duke lemurs treated snakes as minor disturbanees, echoing the
same type of alert but nonintense lemur response to snakes in the forests
of Madagascar.
Like vervet monkeys and lemurs, capuchin, rhesus, and howler mon-
keys employ specific behavioral responses to predator alarm calls. Goeldi's
monkeys with infants, for example, will at the sound of an alarm hide
their babies in dense vegetation and flee, running and leaping in a ran-
dom zigzag pattern to confuse a pursuing predator. Further, the escap-
ing Goeldi's monkey will automatically move toward a lower layer of
forest cover, too low to be captured by rap tors and too high to be easily
taken by ocelots and other hunting cats.
43
~
Fear, anxiety, and defensive reaetions appearing in eneounters with

snakes are found among most primates speeies but are minimally present
in some. In a famous experiment by psyehologist Donald Hebb (ci ted in
Konner 1982, 220), ehimpanzee infants with no prior experienee of
snakes manifested extreme fear reaetions when eonfronted with one.
Another experiment with young and adult ehimpanzees (ci ted in Marks
1987,40) revealed that snakes, snakeskin, and erude snake models "ter-
rified young and adult ehimpanzees and evoked strong avoidanee."
In another experiment (Morris and Morris 1965), snakes were
introdueed into the monkey house in a zoo. The monkeys shrieked and
ran to the back of their eages, where they huddled together nervously,
while the lemurs advaneed to the front of their eages, eurious about the
snakes. Then again, some N ew World monkeys, like Callimico goeldii, may
even hunt snakes on oeeasion. Snakes drive rhesus monkeys to displaya
sense of heightened alertness, avoidanee, and even oeeasional aggressive
defensive posturing and voealizations, but seldom withdrawal.
Melville (1977) makes an interesting observation regarding move-
ment and predators:" A fear of snakes is shown by most primates and is
partly based on fear of their sudden, writhing movements. Human
infants also show innate fear of intense, sudden or unexpeeted move-
ment" (117). Primates fear more than the shape of their predator. Char-
aeteristie movements also suggest the predator's lethai identity-flapping
and fluttering ofbirds, slithering of snakes, and the gaping mouth of the
earnivore. Marks (1987), in diseussing animal phobias in general, eoneurs
that "sudden movements of the speeies evoke[s] partieularly intense
fear" (374).
Sluekin (1979) agrees:"A moving predator is often more likely to be
responded to than a stationary one" (89). In the laboratory, two related
experiments demonstrated the degree to whieh the primate's long rela-
tionship with its predators has left automatie survival-based responses in
modern primates vis-a-vis strange or sudden movement. In the first
experiment, young ehimps proved reluetant to reaeh out of their eages
for food if a nearby objeet moved whenever they tried, although they
would reaeh for the treats ifthe objeet was not moving.A seeond exper-
iment pointed out that the degree of avoidanee, in this ease the ehimps
44
~
shunning the food outside the cage, increased as the range of the mov-
ing object increased.
Such instinctual, or innate, responses to predators are not limited to
primates. All species have them. A brief exploration of reactions to
predators in groups other than primates will reveal different patterns in
the response of prey to predators.At the same time, indirect evidence of
the mann er in which prey in general come to respond to certain aspects
of the shape, movement, and general appearance of predators is offered.
The issue ofinnate fear response to movement requires the preced-
ing brief survey because I believe that certain conventional features of the
dragon-its horns, the multiheaded or "hydralike" dragon motif, and the
"beards" found in some dragons-may result from identifYing attack
movements in the predator from the point of view of the prey.
45
~
3
~
RED TOOTH,
RED CLAW
he near-universal similarities in primate responses to the three
~ T basic predators of their order require an answer to the question,

Why do primates respond to the "dragon complex" predators
the way they do? The answer is to be found in evolutionary theory and
natural selection. This theory best explains, at a physical and material level,
how the dragon came to be.
The origins of the central tenets of evolutionary theory are
weil known. Charles Darwin worked with a long tradition of quasi-
evolutionary thought that began hundreds of years before his time dur-
ing the European Enlightenment-phrased then as the "idea of progress."
These ideas carried forward into Darwin's time through the biological
bent of Herbert Spencer's reading of "evolution," Edward Burnett
Tylor's "cultural" evolutionary focus, and the geological discoveries
deterrnining the immense age of the earth championed by Charles Lyeil
and James Hutton.
Darwin, though he did not discover "evolution;' did convincingly
postulate how and why it worked. He argued for natural selection, the
process by which environmental factors favor the survival of certain indi-
viduals and not others, thus ensuring that the genetic material of those
47
~
individuals advances through the generations. Others, not favorably

selected by environmental pressures, die out along with their heritable
potential.
In 1865,just six years after the publication ofDarwin's monumental
On the Origin 01 Species, Austrian monk Gregor Mendel experimented
with garden peas and discovered the working of genes and the answer to
a question Darwin could not solve: How are variations passed from one
generation to the next? In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson demon-
strated that genes are actually part of the DNA molecule (deoxyribonu-
cleic acid) and that the arrangement of these molecular portions codes
the information that determines the production of proteins, which in
turn, for example, give the eyes one color and not another. Today, the
combination of the most accepted and time-tested of the old and new
ideas about evolution is called neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, or
"the modern synthesis." One aspect of this approach is biocultural
anthropology (an umbrella term also covering sociobiology and evolu-
tionary psychology), aseries of research agendas that study the possible
evolutionary or biological basis of universal human cultural behaviors.
Generally, anthropologists define culture as those conventional behav-
iors acquired through sociallearning. Biocultural anthropology is inter-
ested in understanding the potential biological basis of such "learned"
behaviors. Otherwise stated, it investigates the nature of the interaction
between some biologically etched pattern of behavior, usually con-
strued as to have arisen through evolutionary pressures, and those behav-
iors that can be seen as relatively unique to a particular social group. To
the question, Is it nature or nurture that channels how we evolve? the
biocultural anthropologist answers with a resounding "Both."
The nature of family life (courts hip, sexual patterns, domestie rela-
tions, child-rearing eustoms, management of resourees, and so on) is
widely conceived as primary in human evolution. Such a pattern assisted
our tiny, helpless progenitors to survive by merging into family networks
where everything from infant care to group defense to food could be
shared. However, as biologieally based as this fundamental pattern may be,
as set in "nature," it is also true that cultural traditions exert great influ-
ences on the partieular manner in whieh "nature" is expressed. Particu-
lar societies can present as normal a family form in whieh deseent is
48
~
~ RED TOOTH, RED CLAW -----
traced through lines of women instead of men. The basic family pattern
may be culturally transmitted to direct brothers to merge households, as
among the Algonquin hunters of the Subarctic, or to suggest that a
woman should have multiple ritual husbands, as among the Nyar ofIndia,
or that one can marry a chief's thumb, as is found among certain North-
west Coast Indian cultures. Sometimes the newly married couple is
enjoined by custom to form a new household, while sometimes they nat-
urally move in with the wife's family or the husband's or the mother's
brother's.
As with the family, I think that the dragon impulse is primary. The
forms the dragon takes-the artistic conventions that guide a particular
culture to represent the biologically based beast in sculpture, painting, oral
lore, and so on-are learned in a particular social grouping at a particu-
lar time. They will evolve on their own, not as achanging dragon but as
changing artistic conventions. The inability to perceive the dragon as a
biologically based creature with a great variety of styles of presentation
has caused confusion among most dragonologists. The images of the
dragon are not the dragon. Not acknowledging this is like attempting to
box in the shadow of a tree as the sun runs its daily course, not under-
standing that the tree, not the shadow, is the crucial causal element in the
shifting shapes on the lawn.
It is the search for the biological and evolutionary basis of the dragon
that is of concern and not the use of the dragon as literary symbol or artis-
tic motif. Obviously, if the world-dragon exists (in art, mythology, folklore)
and is universal, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the dragon is
somehow related to the survival of those animals who possess it, or more
properly, is related to its immediate causes in their repertoire of automatic
recognitions of predators.
At its base, evolution works because of inheritable genetic variations
in populations and individuals. The roots of observable traits arising in
evolution are the genes, a word derived from the Greek word for birth.
Genes are now understood as portions ofDNA molecules, which are in
turn located on long strands ofDNA and protein called chromosomes
that are found in the nucleus of each cell and are visible to the naked eye
through light microscopes. Each chromosome contains the genetic
material that determines the physical characteristics of an organism.
49
~
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ------
To understand evolution, one must move beyond the level of the

individual, who does not physically evolve, to populations of individu-
als, a term in evolutionary parlance that refers to a breeding group.
The total number of genes in the population is termed the gene pool. The
physical, or phenotypic, future of a population depends upon the fate of
the gene pool, a body that may be altered in a number of ways, such as
by gene flow, genetic drift, and mutation.
Mutation, the ultimate source of genetic change, affects the gene
pool by altering genetic materials at the cellular level. This change can
occur spontaneously and randomly during the process of meiosis and
mitosis or through environmental factors such as radiation, chemieals
used in some fertilizers, food additives, and dyes. Mutation is important
because it introduces variation into the gene pool, variation that could
prove useful for a population's survival.
The various mechanisms by which gene pools are reduced or
enhanced in complexity do not in themselves cause evolution, but rather
they establish the materials with which evolutionary forces will work.A
population's survival depends, of course, on its genetic makeup, but it is
behaviorally delineated in terms ofhow weil adapted to its environment
that population may be. Adaptation can refer to a population's ability to
access food resources, avoid predators, and successfully replicate itself over
extended periods of time.
The key to evolutionary activity is the process of natural selection,
the actual physical me ans by which a gene pool is affected by environ-
mental pressures so that certain individuals rather than others are selected
to produce the succeeding generation. Though many forces shape the
nature of the gene pool of a population, natural selection hones and edits
it through natural and, sometimes in the case of humans, cultural pres-
sures. The population thus created is adapted to survive and reproduce
successfully over generations because traits negative to its survival have
resulted in the death of those carrying these traits and the elimination of
a negative source of input into the future makeup of the genetic pool.
A classic example of natural selection at work is the case of the pep-
pered moths ofEngland.When first described by naturalists in the mid-
l800s, the moths displayed a range of coloring from light to dark, with the
lighter members in the majority. However, within several decades the
50
~
........... RED TOOTH, RED CLAW ~
dark-patterned peppered moths predominated, and the light-colored

moths diminished rapidly. Over time the coloration of the English pep-
pered moths shifted because of the growth of industrialization.
Prior to the building of pollution-belching industrial plants, the
light-colored peppered moths blended with the light-colored lichens and
bark on the trees they inhabited. Birds, their major predator, had a more
difficult time seeing them against the light background of the trees but
could see the darker moths, and therefore had a better opportunity to kill
them. However, as soot and pollution darkened the trees, the light-col-
ored moths, then increasingly visible, became easy targets for birds, while
the darker moth population grew because its coloring was more adap-
tive. Presumably, as pollution is conquered and the discoloration of the
moths' forest habitat diminishes, returning it to its naturally lighter bark
coloring, the English peppered moth should once more show the dom-
inance of the light-colored type.
Natural selection can quickly instigate changes in a gene pool, thus
resulting in near-future changes in the shape and behavior ofthe popu-
lation, which would tend to enhance the survival of the group. One
researcher (ci ted in Barash 1977, 17-18) collected 136 sparrows that had
been blown to the ground by a hurricane, and he took detailed mea-
surements of the birds. Sixty-four died, demonstrating the effects of
natural selection: the sparrows that survived had more compact bodies
and shorter wingspans than the group killed in the storm.The birds with
the longer wingspans, or more specifically the genes carried by those
birds that resulted in a longer wingspan, were selected against by the con-
ditions of the hurricane, while those birds with a tighter configuration
lived to fly, and reproduce, another day.
The explanatory situation is somewhat different when we turn to a
discussion ofbehavior that is seemingly hardwired in a species, as opposed
to a situation-as with the peppered moth and hapless sparrows-where
natural selection works for or against the continuation of genes that pro-
duce a certain phenotypical result (bodily characteristics). Both cases
involve an increase in frequency of particular genes encoding for par-
ticular physical structure, not behavior, as a result of natural selection pres-
sure. The key fact, however, is that in both instances the genes for the
adaptive and the maladaptive traits were initially present together (i.e.,
51
~
both light and dark moths-and the genes encoding for these colors-
were present before industrialization). Bio-behavioral evolution does not
work in exactly that fashion, at least not among organisms that have com-
plex nervous systems. Because these species inhabit complex and rapidly
changing environments, their nervous systems must be able to respond
flexibly and quickly. Initial1y, many-if not all-of these responses are
norzgerzetic. However, if the behavioral "choice" works out, it is trans mit-
ted by animallearning and becomes a behavioral tradition. Under such
circumstances, any mutation that would reinforce the behavior, for
example, making it easier or more pleasurable to learn, would be selected
for.This is called the Baldwin effect, or probable mutation effect. It is the
mechanism ofbehavior-gene feedback that is in turn the central concept
of sociobiology and biocultural anthropology.
A seemingly trivial behavior of the black-headed gull exemplifies
another example of adaptive behavior. When their eggs hatch, black-
headed gulls remove the pieces of shattered shell from the nest within
minutes of the emergence of their chicks.At first glance, one could sim-
ply observe that most animals try not to foul their nests. However, if this
behavior is viewed with an eye to its adaptive significance, another expla-
nation presents itself-one that can be supported by experimentation.
The view guided by evolutionary theory suggests that the removal
of the eggshells helps protect the chicks by making them less conspicu-
ous to predators.The gul1 egg, though mottled on the outside and there-
fore somewhat camouflaged, is white on the inside. The white shells
remaining in the nest draw predators, advertising the presence ofhelp-
less and tasty gull chicks. Of course, the gull parents who have the innate
genetic propensity to clean their nests of newly broken shells serve to bet-
ter ensure the immediate survival of their offspring, as well as pass along
the complex of genetic heritage resulting from that cleaning behavior,
which is derived from a more primordial pecking behavior.
An experiment in which gull eggs were set in nests and broken shells
placed at varying distances from them supported the natural selection
position. The closer the shel1 fragments were to the eggs, the more likely
predators would find and attack the eggs (Barash 1977, 54-55).
Konrad Lorenz (ci ted in Marks 1987, 41), famed specialist in the
study of animal behavior, performed an experiment in which he sus-
52
/P
~ RED TOOTH, RED CLAW ~
pended a goose cutout from a revolving arm over a pen of newly

hatched ducks and geese. When he flew the goose forward above the
hatchlings, casting a "gooselike" (long-necked, short-tailed) shadow, they
evidenced no escape responses. When he reversed the silhouette, the
shadow of which then looked more like the typical short-necked bird of
prey, the newly hatched brood, though they had never seen a flying goose
or a hawk, instinctively reacted to the "hawk" with panic and harried
attempts to find shelter. Again, the genetic materials that stimulate one
goose to run inunediately and another to res pond more slowly to the sil-
houette of the hunting bird will ultimately result in the death of the slow
to respond, and the greater productive potential of those goslings and
ducklings hardwired through ages of natural selection to inunediately flee
the shadow of the hawk.
Experiments with snake-eating birds also demonstrate the manner in
which natural selection polishes those behaviors that te nd to augment the
survivability of a species and delete those that do not. When sticks with
alternating bands of color-imitating the deadly coral snake-were pre-
sented to hatchlings, they instantly panicked and attempted to escape,
though they had never seen a coral snake. Unadorned sticks produced no
effects. In a related experiment with motmots and great kiskadees, the
birds were shown rods with colored stripes either running lengthwise or
in bands of different colors. The birds avoided only the "coral snakes;' the
sticks with yellow and red bands (Smith 1975,39).
Primate responses to predators and to dangerous situations can be
argued to result from natural selection. Millions of years of nature shap-
ing the worldwide primate population have resulted in a number of
behaviors found in most primates that are directly related to the survival
potential of groups and their members. In chapter 2, I discussed many
primate behaviors that now can be understood as the result of natural
selection. Madagascar lemurs instinctively look up and then move toward
the ground and cover when an alarm call identifYing the presence of a
low-flying hawk is given. In the Duke University Primate Center stud-
ies, ringtailed lemurs, when hearing the raptor alarm call, moved from the
outer branches of a tree toward the trunk; and if the call intensified, they,
like their Madagascar relatives, moved to the ground and sought cover.
Goeldi's monkeys, when alerted to potential predators, run and leap in
53
~
zigzag fashion through the lower levels of the forest to confuse predator
pursuit. They drop below the rap tors' hunting range while at the same
time remaining too high far the local hunting cats. Chimpanzee infants
with no prior exposure to snakes react with fear and avoidance when
confronted with areal snake, snakeskin, or a crude snake model. Baby
rhesus monkeys and human infants instinctively withdraw when a pro-
jected shadow suddenly grows larger, and human infants become fearful
when farniliar toys are handled by researchers in such a way as to make
the toy appear to rush toward them.
In each of the preceding cases, a behavior whose roots can, by the
application of natural selection theory, be understood as a survival behav-
ior shaped over thousands and thousands of generations is instinctively
exhibited. Evolutionary mechanisms ensure that those primate individ-
uals able to recognize the dangerous shape, the neighbor's alarm call, or
strange, erratic, or rapidly approaching motion are more likely to survive
and pass on their genetic materials than those animals who are not so
responsive to the presence of predators or to the alarm calls of their troop.
Those animals are killed, and thus elirninated as carriers of nonadaptive
behavior.
Vervet monkeys, whose reactions to the three major primate preda-
tors first suggested the source of the dragon image, displayarepertoire
ofbehavior that through natural selection has developed their predator
recognition competence and their ability to issue specific alarm calls with
responsive behaviors specific to each.Those ancestral vervets who could
not recognize the predator as quickly as their fellows stood at a disad-
vantage, as did those who too slowly grasped the significance and behav-
ioral responses related to such calls. Those monkeys with successful
predator recognition, predator calls, and predator escape behavior
responses survived to pass on the potential of the adaptive responses
through their genetic materials to the next generation.
54
~
4
~
How TIME
MAKES A DRAGON
he composite predator beast, the dragon, originates from three
~
T different animals--snake, raptor, cat-that have been in a preda-
tor/prey relationship with primates far rniilions of years. At a
particular point in human evolution, a novel conception, "dragon,"
enters human consciousness. When is that point, and what is the means
by which three separate pieces of behavior merge to become one fan-
tastic panhuman image of a giant, many-toothed, winged serpent?
Several researchers in the field of communications theory-as weil
as those studying the problems ofbrain evolution, information process-
ing, and memory-have proposed that the brain merges different but
related items into single information-rich units as a natural process of its
evolving. Apparently, it does this to keep up with increasingly complex
input or changes in input due to the increasing complexity of environ-
mental pressures on the organism, be that predator/prey behaviors or the
necessity of learning and remembering larger and more complex bod-
ies of cultural or technical information.
The observation that the mind merges or lumps like ideas into sin-
gle units for more efficient processing goes back centuries. Famed
philosopher John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
55
~
------ AN INSTlNCT FOR DRAGONS -------
(ci ted in Miller 1956b), states, "Wherein the mind does these three
things: first, it chooses a certain number [of specific ideas]: secondly, it give
them connection and makes them into one idea: thirdly, it ties them
together by a name" (46).
George A. Miller ofHarvard University, a specialist in communica-
tions, memory, and learning theory, explored a number of previously
unconnected but related experiments in several scholarly papers he pro-
duced in 1956. Initially his research was triggered by his encounter with
the "rule of six," astrange hardwired limitation in the brain that caused
it to organize information around units of six. A variety of studies have
shown that when humans scan the world around them, they can accu-
rately perceive groupings of various types in terms of the number six or
under, but beyond six, memory be comes confused and mistakes become
more comrnon.
In "Information and Memory" (1956b) Miller wrote of his first
encounter with a digital computing machine and the men who operated
it.Twenty smalllights on the display panel would indicate the relays oper-
ating at a specific time. Miller was interested in the manner in which the
machine operators could remember the many variations of illuminated
and unilluminated lights on the twenty-light panel. He found that rather
than relying on memory for the patterns and their great number of per-
mutations, the workers grouped the lights into units of three and assigned
a single number as its "name."When three contiguous lights were off, the
identifying number was not (000) but rather 1. When a tripartite unit
showed an off-off-on pattern, or (001), it was dubbed 2; and when the
pattern was off-on-off, or (010), it was called 3; and so forth. Using this
method, the computer workers could, for example, break down astring
of fifteen on and off patterns into only five sets of three. As Miller
noted, "Reorganization enabled the engineers to reduce the original
complexity to something easily apprehended and remembered without
changing or discarding any ofthe original data" (43).
In another experiment cited by Miller (1956a), subjects could
remember on the average five words from a longer list. Each word was
composed of three phonemes, linguistic sounds that make a difference to
the listener in terms of discriminating one word from another. The
words jones, bones, and zones indicate that j, b, and z are phonemes
56
~
~ How TIME MAKES A DRAGON ~
because when added to -ones, three distinct words are recognized by the
English speaker. The research subjects obviously reacted as if they were
responding to five words, not fifteen phonemes. They could remember
five words from a list but not fifteen consecutive phonemes, even though
the information conveyed was identical. Mil1er comments, "We are deal-
ing here with a process of organizing or grouping the input into famil-
iar units, or chunks, and a great deal of leaming has gone into the
formation of these familiar units" (93).
Chunks are, in Mil1er's parlance, not merely a group of items but a
group that has psychological significance, that is, a grouping that will elicit
a recognition and response. In the preceding example, the phonemes-
j, b, z-have no meaning in themselves, but as jones, bones, or zones (a
chunk of information, words in this case) , their meaning is both recog-
nized and conveyed.John E. Pfeiffer (1982) comments,
The result is the formation ofhierarchies of remembered units, com-

plexes of lumped-together information. This process, known as
"chunking," is the secret of our voluminous memory capacity. It is a
way ofbeating the apparent limitations of the rule of six by successively
more compact packaging, by cramming more and more information
into a small number of readily recognized units, and then building
other units into still more compact systems, patterns of patterns. (215)
Pfeiffer brings the discussion into a decidedly anthropological dimension

when he writes,
If their art is any indication, the people of the Upper Paleolithic were
acting precisely in accordance with this principle. Confronted with an
increasingly complex way of life and a pile-up of information, they
were engaged in the first large-scale effort to organize knowledge for
readier long-term retention and recall.The effort called for the inven-
tion of symbols, entire repertoires or vocabularies of symbols, in a burst
of chunking. (215)
Borrowing language from communication theory, Mil1er also writes

about the process of recoding. He notes that when beginning telegraph
operators are attempting to leam Morse code, they initially focus on dit
57
Ifr
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ----
and dah as separate chunks. In time, they group these two chunks into
one chunk, the letter. Dit-dah is A. Dah-dit-dit is B. Dah-dit-dah-dit is C,
and so on. Then the letters are organized into words. As the chunks
become larger, the messages that the tele graph operator can remember
increase. In communication theory, this is referred to as "recoding."The
operator receives a message of dits and dahs, a message with many chunks
but with little content, or bits, per chunk. The operator reorganizes, or
recodes, the input into another code with fewer chunks but more bits per
chunk. What is happening here is that input events are grouped, and a
new name is applied to the group, thereby lessening the amount ofinfor-
mation that needs to be processed without lirniting the quantity ofbit
content.
In "How Big Is aChunk?" (1974) Herbert A. Simon explores the
mechanisms of memory and proposes the means of identifYing the basic
human memory units, a process he arrives at by combining information
from several experiments. In discussing EPAM, or elementary perceiver
and memorizer learning theory, he comments on this theory's orienta-
tion to the problem ofunderstanding human memory processes:"In the
EPAM theory, fixation is identified with assembling compound symbol
structures from components-a familiar notion from association theory-
and storing the compound structures in memory, appropriately 'indexed.'
('Indexing' simply means storing information that permits recovery of the
compound structure upon recognition of its stimulus components)"
(485).
EPAM theory holds up the notions of"fixation" and "indexing" to
suggest something structurally analogous to Miller's "chunk." Both cases
suggest that the brain stores complex memory packages-" compound
symbol structures [derived from] components," as Simon puts it.
The conception of some kind of patterning, or significant grouping,
in brain activity is also advocated by brain researcher Donald R. Griffin
in his AnimalThinking (1984), when he posits that consciousness is caused
by patterns of activity involving thousands of neurons. David J Chalmers
(cited in Franklin 1995, 30ff.) also spoke of consciousness as "patterns" of
neural activity.
Griffin suggests the term template for a particular "sensory pattern"
(Franklin 1995,53) and further notes that these sensory patterns can be
58
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~ How TIME MAKES A DRAGON -----
biologically inherited. To explain his position, he offers this brief discus-

sion of the behavior of the caddis fly. In that genus, the larvae will con-
struct protective cases from grains of sand, cut vegetable materials, and
mud, as weil as their own sticky silk. Each species of caddis fly constructs
its own particular species-specific type of larvae cases. The interesting
point is that if apart of the larvae case is broken off in nature or is
removed by an experimenter, the larvae will find the appropriate mate-
rials and cut them to fit the missing piece. Some type of inherited
template-species-specific caddis larvae cases-must exist in some fash-
ion in order to guide the larvae in its scrupulous maintenance of a par-
ticular type and shape of case, as opposed to repairs that would perhaps
solve the damage to the larvae cases but not in a preordained or species-
specific fashion.
With regard to examples of human templates, Griffin writes (in
Franklin 1995), "We apparently have built-in language capabilities.What
form do these take? I suspect that some of it rnight be in the form of
templates, but of course not visual templates. Such templates rnight, for
example, somehow bias us toward the use of syntax, or toward attaching
names to our categories" (53).
Earl Count (cited in Laughlin, McManus, and d' Aquili 1992,70)
coined the term "biogram" and used it to identifY "the bundle of adap-
tations, social relations, and behaviors that are transmitted genetically and
are thus characteristic of particular species and phyla .... The human
biogram may be seen as an evolutionary transformation of the primate
biogram, which is in turn a transformation upon the mammalian
biogram, and so on down the phylogenetic scale."
Franklin (1995) speaks of "neurognostic structuring," a pattern of
brain activity that, for example, results in the "predisposition to nurture
infants" by "triggering the neurocognitive structures mediating recog-
nition and response to 'babies'" (70). Simon (1974) refers to Miller's use
ofthe "chunk" concept as "artfully vague" and cites Miller to demonstrate
his point (482). "The contrast of the terms bit and chunk," writes Miller,
"also serves to highlight the fact that we are not very definite about what
constitutes achunk of information." But, as I have noted earlier, Miller's
"chunk" and "recoding," Simon's observations concerning elementary
perceiver and memorizer learning theory's use of"fixation" and "index-
59
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------ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
ing," Griffin's use of"template," Chalmers's "patterns of neural activity;'

Count's "biogram," and Franklin's "neurognostic structure" point to the
same general principle. Whether the research is based on experiments in
memory or hypotheses concerning the functioning of the nervous sys-
tem, consciousness and brain function assume the fundamental principle
that the brain groups, collapses, organizes, patterns, or structures com-
plexes of general behaviors and information.
Miller (1956a) suggests that such groupings of information had sur-
vival value for our primal ancestors:
We might argue that in the course of evolution those organisms were

most successful that were responsive to the widest range of stimulus
energies in their environment. In order to survive in a constantly
fluctuating world, it was better to have a little information about a lot
of things than to have a lot of information about a small segment of the
environment. If a compromise was necessary, the one we seem to
have made is clearly the more adaptive. (88)
Perhaps the dragon can be viewed as "a little information about a lot of
things."Then the specific predator calls and responses of animals like the
vervet monkeys would be comparable to "a lot of information about a
small segment of the environment."
The dragon is an expression of such chunks, indexings, biograms, and
neurognostic structure-a brain-dragon that was created during the
time when our ancient arboreal ancestors were adapting to a life on the
ground. The deeply etched patterns of recognition and responses to the
three major predators, honed among arboreal primates for millennia, were
lumped at this point into a general predator category, the culturally
phrased expression of which is "dragon." The rap tor, reptile, and tree-
climbing carnivore alarm and response patterns are three basic patterns
of behavior comprised of numerous smaller ones. The evolution of
"dragon" is like the "operator" recoding input into few chunks with
more bits per chunk; i.e., the dragon is a much more complex image than
is snake, or cat, or rap tor. Miller (1956) writes, "There are many ways to
do this recoding, but probably the simplest is to group the input events,
apply a new name to the group, and then remember the new name rather
than the original input events" (93). It might be said that the "new name;'
60
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~ How TIME MAKES A DRAGON ........-...-
or brain-file label, is "dragon."The "original input events" are the hard-

wired behaviors related to each of the three predators.
It can be assumed that the dragon's embryonie existence began
toward the end of the Miocene epoch, some 5 to 23 million years ago,
when rising temperatures and decreased rainfall transformed the primal
forest into a mixed environment of open plains, or savanna, and forest.
The "dragon" was probably fully fixed 3 to 4 million years ago, about the
time of Australopithecus, the first large-brained, upright-walking primate
with the manual dexterity to make stone tools.
The dragon complex in the evolving primate brain developed slowly
as climatic and environmental changes led to conditions where previously
arboreal animals had to move from the trees and cross open areas to find
food. This led them to face more predators who would have a better
chance of successfully attacking and eating them. Natural selection
favored the larger animals: a martial eagle cannot, for example, pick up an
adult chimpanzee, an animal roughly comparable in size to the earliest of
the upright walking prehumans. Snakes became somewhat less of a
problem as the evolving upright posture and longer legs for running
enabled the ancestral primate to assume elevated postures to more clearly
see the snake before it could strike.The terrestrial carnivores like the big
cats came to have more to fear from a traveling band of primates and
would only prey upon the unattended juvenile or rarely solitary adult.
Today, for example, an African leopard will almost always turn away from
an approaching band of chimpanzees.
The complete brain-dragon complex appears at this point in pri-
mate/human evolution because of the same theoretical assumptions
that seek to explain why the more ancient specific predator responses
would have arisen in the first place-natural selection. It would be
clearly adaptive for a monkey population to evolve specific predator call
and responses, whereas such a generalized predator referent as a "dragon"
call for arboreal animals would be, in fact, maladaptive. The raptor call
elicits an immediate life-saving response, whereas a general predator
call-dragon in this case-would simply freeze the hearer with a signal
that means "very, very dangerous" or "be very afraid."This call would give
no specific escape information, as does a rap tor call or the sight of a
nearby large hunting bird, but the resulting freezing would, in most cases,
61
W
give the advantage to the attacker. The line between life and death can
be measured in fractions of a second: the swoop of a hunting eagle, the
strike of a cobra, the sudden lunge of the ambushing leopard. Any
behavior that prolongs immediate reaction time to a predator would be
dangerous to the population. "Dragon," therefore, had to be born after the
initial stimuli, whieh led to the shape of the dragon in eultural expression,
were no longer of immediate survival reality to the now terrestrial ape-
like aneestors of modern humans.
This ereation of the merged eomposite predator image, the dragon,
may differ from the patterning assumptions charaeteristic of the ideas of
Miller, Count, Chalmers, and company. The pattern of which I speak
eould result from a merger based on the deeay or nonfunction of earlier
behavioral patterns, which in their isolated form were definitely adaptive
or funetional. The idea that the dragon is some type of decaying struc-
ture is suggested by its generalized nature, the low level ofhuman anx-
iety that now greets the dragon image, and its plastieity of eultural
renderings, or perhaps it was due to inhibitory inputs from an enlarged
cortex. More specific brain triggers are, like the predator calls of the
vervets, not generalizable and very specific to a certain stimulus. It seems
that as prehumans evolved and arboreal predator fears became less strin-
gent, the three-predator alarm/response system broke down by first
abandoning the features common to all three-fear, preparation to aet
immediately, and anxiety-and lumping them into an index about max-
imum fear, anxiety, and immediate response requirements. At the same
time, the salient features of each of the three predators were retained and
then merged, whieh in a manner of speaking is more "space-" and
energy-efficient in the brain.
A diseussion of animal phobias in modern human populations will
grant so me insight into the deep biological basis ofthe dragon. It would
seem likely that the cause of the dragon, if it is as biological and aneient
as it seems, would be seen in the behavior of modern-day humans.This
turns out to be the case.
A phobia expresses an excessive fear reaction that might be under-
stood in terms of three components: subjective, autonomie, and motor.
Subjeetively, when confronted with the fear-evoking stimulus, a phobie
individual will experienee intense and immobilizing fear. Some victims
62
If\
report they feellike they are dying, while some feel as if they are suffo-
eating, and still others deseribe the sensation that they are about to faint
or eollapse.
Autonomie responses include rapid respiration, sweating, trembling,
palpitations, museular tension and/or weakness, involuntary exeretion,
breathlessness, nausea, and dry mouth. The behavioral, or motor, response
to intense fear will be flight from the stimulus or the inability to move,
"frozen" by fear. Speeifieally, the bioeultural argument for the dragon is
supported ifthe raptor-snake-earnivore eomplex makes an appearanee in
the phobias ofhumans.
Before the age of six months, human infants show very little fear.
After this, anima! phobias ean manifest in ehildren with no apparent trau-
matie origin. Even though snakes are very rare in the British Isles, for
example, one-third ofBritish six-year-olds have been found to be afraid
of them (Raehman 1968, 19ff.). Most animal phobias begin in early
ehildhood. Between two and six years of age, ehildren most eommonly
fear snakes, birds, and eats-the dragon complex.
Psyehiatrists M. G. Gelder and 1. M. Marks (1966,309-19), in a study
of phobias in a sampie of 139 patients, noted that a fear ofbirds and eats
was typieal and that most of the subjeets experieneed this fear before they
reaehed the age of five. Psyehologists P. J. Lang and A. Lazowik (ei ted in
Raehman 1968,37) studied a population of students in Pittsburgh who
were treated for intense snake phobia. Contaet with snakes in this area is
highly unlikely; however, all the subjeets admitted to an intense fear, a
claim substantiated by Lang and Lazowik by exposing the students to
snakes in the laboratory.
Another study (Agras, Sylvester, and Oliveau 1969,151-56) found
that in a population of 1 ,000 subjeets, 390 will exhibit fear of snakes, the
highest ineidenee in a listing including heights, storms, death, injury, and
enclosures.An average of307 per 1,000 feared heights. Isaee M. Marks
(1987,15) writes that in most countries the human dread of snakes is dis-
proportionate to their danger, and when speaking of"natural" phobias,
the first on his list is the snake. He includes birds and feathers as prime
examples of animal and animal-related phobie triggers and notes that the
most eommon in the clinie is the fear of birds and spiders. In a diseus-
sion of monosymptomatie phobias of animals, Matig Mavissakalian
63
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----- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
(1981) notes as examples "fears and avoidances of dogs or cats, birds or

snakes [emphasis added], as well as particular situations such as thunder-
storms, darkness, and heights" (5-6).
The modern psychological residue of the ancient predatorlprey
relationship between primates and the dragon-complex predators is
profound, still present, and multifaceted. Humans have many innate
responses that can be understood as based in evolutionary responses to
natural selection vis-a-vis predators. In aseries of experiments (Hasierud
1938) human toddlers became immediately fearful of familiar toy animals
if the toy "rushed" at them, that is, was moved by a researcher toward
them in a looming manner. When at rest, the toys were handled by the
children with no apparent anxiety. In another experiment (Russell 1979)
rhesus monkeys and human infants grew wary and tried to move away
when a shadow projected on a screen before them was quickly enlarged,
generating the illusion of a looming attack from dose proximity.
Marks (1987) writes, "Animals, be they tubeworms or men, with-
draw from sudden touch" (34). N.Tinbergen (1969) says with regard to
the reaction to touch, "The touch stimuli given by an insect crawling on
the skin release the response of throwing it off with a quick movement
of the hand. This movement contains both a fixed pattern and an orien-
tation component, and is, therefore areaction of greater complexity than
a mere reflex. It is probably innate and matures relatively late. lt is
accompanied by a subjective phenomenon, disgust" (209).
If touch is not avoided in the predator attack, capture of the prey f01-
lows. But here again, the innate response of the prey is to struggle, an act
that if vigorous enough and timed correctly could produce freedom from
capture. If the prey does not struggle, however, it is surely doomed; thus
nature selects for animals that withdraw when touched and struggle
when seized.
Marks (1987) notes that "fear of two staring eyes is widespread
throughout the animal kingdom. The more conspicuously eyelike the
markings, the more they deter" (35). A. D. BIest (1957) performed an
experiment in which small birds were encouraged to approach a feed-
ing tray baited with dead mealworms.As soon as the birds alighted, a cir-
cuit was completed that lit a design pattern of crosses, parallel lines, or
circles immediately beneath the mealworms.The researchers found that
64
ip
--------- How TIME MAKES A DRAGON ~
the birds flew away more readily from the circular patterns than from the
crosses and parallellines, and that the more the circles were made to look
like eyes, the more potent they were in stimulating rapid escape in the
birds.
A number of researchers point out that sudden, strange, or loud
noises also trigger fear in human infants. A. T. Jersild and F. B. Holmes
(1935) report that young children, unlike adults, te nd on the whole to
fear tangible objects (e.g., real animals and noises). Marks writes (1987),
"Fear is triggered by many stimuli generated by predators and con-
specifics.Arnong these stimuli are abrupt movement nearby accompanied
by sudden noise (like the pounding of feet or beating of wings), as well
as stimuli more characteristic of only a few species" (34).
One of the most common phobias, agoraphobia, a word derived
from a Greek phrase that literally reads "fear of the marketplace," may be
related to evolutionary stresses and predator responses. Agoraphobics
exhibit a fear of going into open public places. Walking alone or being
alone compounds the fear categories ofthe agoraphobic.Those who have
studied this very common phobia have come to think that agoraphobia
may be more about a fear of one's own inefficient responses to certain sit-
uations than a specific reaction to open places. A.J. Goldstein and D. L.
Chambless (1978) have even suggested that the central fear in agora-
phobia is the "fear of fear."
Many studies have demonstrated that when rodents find themselves
in an open space, they react with anxiety and immediately seek cover. If
none is available, they will seek a "wall" and press themselves against it,
a behavior called "wall clinging" in rat behavior studies.A related exper-
iment found that rats in an enclosed open area will always move to the
periphery of the open space. W Sluckin (1979) observes, "Prey species in
which antipredator behavior depends on cover in the form of vegetation,
burrows, etc. may be expected to avoid open, exposed places, since these
increase the chance of being spotted and decrease the chances of suc-
cessful evasion" (110).
The survival value of agoraphobic behavior can be easily understood
as a result of natural selection for behaviors that would lead an animal to
avoid the dangers of open spaces, a zone where the ancient primates were
helpless before the attacks of raptors, snakes, and cats. The fear of being
65
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS .......-.-
alone and the "fear of fear" is also understandable in the context of

predator/prey relations.The lone primate presents a relatively easy target
for a number of predators, but when in groups, the prey can withstand the
stalking predator. Likewise, the "fear of fear," or the fear of the ineffec-
tiveness of one's own reactions in a given situation, is understandable in
that such a situation would cause the animal to panic, impeding its abil-
ity to react with smooth haste to escape danger.
The comments of therapists concerning treatment of the agora-
phobie tend to support the suggested predator/prey origin of the syn-
drome. Many agorophobics are helped by using a stick, pram, shopping
cart, or dog. Further, anxiety decreases in the dark or under an overcast
sky or when wearing dark glasses and sucking strongly flavored sweets.
The "stick" as a means to dispel fear is instinctual and is commonly
seen among chimpanzees in their defensive maneuvers against attacks by
carnivores.The pram, shopping bag on wheels, or dog is the artificial cre-
ation of the safety of a group, a "more than one alone" situation.And in
the darkness, or even in the suggestion of darkness produced by dark
glasses or an overcast day, the ancient prey within feels some relief from
the potential surveillance of the hunting predator. Darkness or dimness
signals relaxation and safety, while bright lights can suggest danger.Wit-
ness the classic use of the bright, unremitting light in stereotypical seen es
of police interrogation or the use of lights that are never turned off in
brainwashing techniques. Connect a bright, glaring, constant light and
isolation of the primate from its comrades, and the ingredients to men-
tally "break" any primate-monkey, ape, or human-are in place.
Another series of classic experiments, though not directly related to
animal phobias, shows how natural selection has worked to create an
innate fear of heights in primates and other animals. The survival value
of avoiding open space, which from the perspective of primate arboreal
origins is a more likely interpretation of the "fear ofheights" experiment,
is obvious. The more arboreal animals can detect empty space beneath
themselves and avoid it, the more likely they are to survive and pass on
their genetic inheritance. This presumably includes sensitivity to finding
oneself with no surface underfoot, a condition that would produce
death or injury to our arboreal ancestors.
66
;;p
The format of the "visual cliff" experiment is set up as folIows. A

sheet of transparent plastic or glass is elevated a foot off the floor, with a
patterned material attached to the underside ofhalf the sheet. Patterned
material is also placed on the floor beneath the glass, leaving the visual
impression of a shallow side and a deep side to animals placed on the
transparent surface.A variety of experiments have been performed with
the "visual cliff." Many land-dwelling species-chicks, rats, goats, lambs,
pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys, and human infants-when placed on the
boundary between the deep and the shallow sides, move onto the shal-
low side and away from the deep side.When placed on the deep side, kit-
tens and young goats become tense and freeze, while baby monkeys
exhibit a number of fear reactions such as crouching, calling, and self-
clasping. On the other hand, aquatic species such as ducks and turtles typ-
ically venture onto the deep side.
Conclusions from research concerning such factors as the age at
onset of animal phobias, the age of predictable remission, and observations
about the gender of animal phobics are well documented. Most animal
phobias originate in childhood. Before puberty, animal phobias are found
in both boys and girls, but they dramatically decrease by the age of ten or
eleven, and this decrease is more apparent with boys than girls. Rachman
(1968, 18) notes that fears of animals, though very comrnon in childhood,
show a high spontaneous remission rate. Further, animal phobias are
generally easily treated by simple exposure therapy. Interestingly, animal
phobias are seldom associated with other psychiatric disorders.
The origin of animal phobias generally puzzles therapists, as does the
fact that though most patients overcome their animal phobias in the
course of their maturation, some do not. Rachman (1968, 31) believes
that "phobias are learned responses"; however, Dr. Isaac M. Marks (1987,
374) disagrees. He notes that the majority of animal phobias begin in
childhood with no convincing traumatic origin and that only 23 percent
of a related sam pie identified the onset of the phobia with some terrify-
ing encounter with an animal. Further, he writes that in that 23 percent,
no child experienced pain in the animal encounter. He concludes that
young children seem prepared to develop intense fears of animals with
little or no cause.
67
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ...--...-
Sigmund Freud, likewise, was unsure of what childhood animal

phobias indicated. He wrote (cited in Marks 1987),
The child suddenly begins to fear a certain animal species and to pro-
tect itself against seeing or touching any individual of this species ....
Sometimes animals which are known to the child only from picture
books and fairy stories become objects of the senseless and inordinate
anxiety which is manifest in these phobias.lt is seldom possible to learn
the manner in which such an unusual choice of anxiety has been
brought about. (374)
Sometimes an event that triggered an animal phobia will be discov-

ered in therapy, but the particulars of the event appear problematic to the
therapist. In one reported case (Marks 1987), a feather phobia began
when an infant was startled by astrange woman with a large feather in
her hat bending over the carriage to look at hirn. The researcher com-
mented, "Why the ensuing phobia was of feathers, rather than of the pre-
potent stimulus of strangers, remains a mystery" (374).
Most animal phobias can begin without the traumatic triggering
event typically searched for in therapy. Young children simply appear pre-
eonditioned to aequire intense fear of animals with litde or no eause.
Freud noted that animals never direetly experieneed, but perhaps learned
of through fairy tales, ean be the base of the anxiety and fear of the ani-
mal phobia. He concluded that it is seldom possible to learn the manner
in whieh sueh an unusual choice of anxiety has been brought about.
Marks surmises that the fear of animals unmet must come from some
behavior other than direct eonditioning and weakly concludes that the
fears are presumably passed on verbally by parents. In the ease of the
stranger with the feathered hat startling an infant and ereating a fear not
of strangers but of feathers, the ehoice mystified the therapist.
All of the above quandaries can be resolved if it is allowed that
humans, through the long experienee of their arboreal primate forebears
have--through natural selection for behaviors that limit the suceess of the
classie primate predators and increase the adaptive fit of the population-
derived automatie behaviors that rendered avoidanee and anxiety related
to primal predators a deeply etehed feature of the human brain. No trau-
68
~
matic event in the life of the child need exist for the ancient predator
responses to find expression. Freud's conclusion that the precise cause of
the animal phobia is seldom possible to learn is flawed because he was
looking in the wrong place for the cause. It is found rooted not in the
contemporary psychologicallife of the victim, Freud's hunting ground,
but in the evolutionary history of the species. Why the feathers and not
the stranger became the fear fixation of the child in the baby carriage
may be related to the primates' age-old relations with the raptors, appar-
ently a more profound and deeply based fear than that of strange humans.
Raptors and arboreal primates engaged in a death struggle many rnil-
lennia before the evolution of the human and the possibility of the
human stranger.
Three features of animal-phobic behavior throw additional light on
the suggested decaying, or perhaps only highly generalized, nature of the
brain-dragon. First, not everyone is an animal phobie; in fact, most are
not. Second, an individual can be afraid of snakes but not ofbirds or large
animals; and third, it is relatively easy to eure an animal phobia.Whereas
fear reactions to height in the "visual cliff" experiment and reactions to
reflex stimulation (knee-jerk reflex, foot- and hand-clenching reflex
behavior in newborns, closing the eyes when one sneezes, and so forth)
are uniform across the board, animal phobias are not. It is as if the iron
grip that innate predator calls have on the uniform reactions of arboreal
primates has weakened through time. The pattern does remain in the cul-
tural expressions of the dragon and in the continuing confusion of psy-
chotherapists in understanding the cause of animal phobias when typical
psychoanalytic causes such as traumatic conditioning do not fit the case.
Likewise, the vervet monkey case and others show that all the pop-
ulation respond equally to all the predators, but in humans the animal
phobia is selective. One patient fears feathers, is only rnildly anxious
around snakes, and in fact loves cats and dogs.Another fears furry animals
but loves snakes. Generally, modern psychotherapeutic literature yields lit-
tle evidence of an individual showing intense fear of birds, snakes, and
carnlvores.
Lastly, a further example of the weakening of the basic complex is
found in the fact that the animal phobia is one of the easiest to eure. On
the other hand, fear ofheights and agoraphobia may be extremely diffi-
69
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~ AN INSTlNCT FOR DRAGONS ......-;-
cult to impact in the therapeutic setting, and reflex behaviors are almost
definitively impossible to "eure," or stop.
Animal phobias in humans suggest that the brain-dragon can exist
while specific animal phobias may continue to function. Here may be
evidence that orders of magnitude of stimulus/ response exist. The same
brain structure may contain information that causes fear of serpents and
at the same time have a generalized label, or a high-level categorization
or index, as "dragon." In the earlier example of the instinctual behavior
of the caddis fly, it was seen that the fly has a general pattern that might
be labeled "larval case," which allows it to instinctively create such cases,
an indispensable feature of its life cyde and existence. In addition, the
caddis fly can also respond to repair on parts of the cases, even possess-
ing the specific information to re-create pieces that could have countless
variation in size and shape. Obviously, this underscores the fact that the
brain could not store specific responses to every possible permutation of
"missing fragment" of a caddis-fly larval case.Thus both the general and
the specific information maintain existence in the caddis-fly brain. It can
respond to the big picture and to pieces of the picture.
Similar is the beaver's amazing instinctive ability to build hydrody-
namically correct dams and lodges. The beaver might be said to have a
pattern called "lodge and dam in moving stream."The beaver clearly can
deal with minute pieces of the larger picture-reacting to specific water
conditions such as depth, temperature, and rate of flow, as weil as to for-
est cover amenable to beaver dam or lodge construction-through
genetic programming available to ail successful members of the species.
W Sluckin (1979) makes an interesting point: Phobias of such things
as knives, hammers and electrical appliances are very rare or nonexistent,
despite the fact that they are quite likely to be associated with pain or
other trauma. This leads to the suggestion that certain stimuli and stim-
ulus features are more readily associated with fear-evoking stimuli than
are others as a result of preparedness through human evolution (124).
The dragon evolved as a presence in the brain about 3 to 4 million
years ago, when our ancient ancestors abandoned arboreal life and
adapted to life on the ground. This process, the creation of the brain-
dragon, took place over many hundreds of thousands of years and rested
in the brain, perhaps slowly decaying, until a certain point in human evo-
70
~
lution, when it burst forth as a composite beast believed by those who

daimed to behold it, or to do batde with it, to be very real and very
dangerous.
Locating the lair of the brain-dragon requires abrief aside to review
the structure of the human brain. Brain specialist Paul MacLean (ci ted in
Laughlin, McManus, and d'Aquili 1992,70-71) offers a simplified (but
adequate for our purposes) model of the brain by dividing the human
nervous system into three evolutionary strata: the new mammalian
(telencephalon or neocortical structures), the paleomamrnalian (rhinen-
cephalon or limbic system), and the reptilian (induding the upper spinal
cord, portions of the mesencephalon or midbrain, the diencephalon or
thalamus-hypothalamus, and the basal ganglia). Laughlin explains,
The organization of the reptilian brain has changed litde in the higher
animals. In humans this part of the nervous system mediates archaic
regulatory functions such as metabolism, digestion, respiration, and the
like. The limbic structures were added to the reptilian brain roughly a
hundred million years ago to form the primitive mammalian brain, and
their models mediate activities such as procreation, eating, searching,
fighting, fear,joy, self defense, drinking, terror, foreboding, empathy, and
hormonal regulation.
The brain-dragon rests then in the limbic structures of the brain. Marks
(1987) more specifically pinpoints the parameters of the dragon's lair:
"Mammalian deep structures that mediate certain components of fear
and other defensive behaviors indude the dentate and interposital nu dei
of the cerebellum,locus ceruleus and median raphe nu dei, hypothalamus,
septum, hippocampus, amygdala, cingulum, and thalamus" (222).
In this chapter I have oudined the basis of the dragon in space and time
and how it became the composite creature that it is today. In briefly
addressing the issue of animal phobias, we have seen how the brain-
dragon continues to exert its influence on hundreds of thousands of pho-
bia victims worldwide. The biocultural hypo thesis concerning the dragon
might offer an insight to the psychotherapists' quandary concerning the
origin and nature of most animal phobias.
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However, rnany details of the story of the world-dragon rernain to

be addressed. Why are dragons routinely deseribed as having fiery, toxie
breath? Why do dragons often have horns? Why are dragons assoeiated
with deep pools or wells?Why does the dragon basieally look like a giant
variation on a serpent or saurian? Why does the dragon roar? Why do
rnany dragons have beards? Why are dragons so notoriously unfriendly
to young wornen?
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5
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WHY DRAGONS
BREATHE FIRE
rhe preceding discussion proposed the basis for understanding
~ T the world-dragon as the result of a long history of natural

selection in primate populations as they confronted the three
basic primate predators. There is much more to the dragon, however, than
the conventional image of the gigantic, flight-capable, snake- or saurian-
like, clawed, and many-toothed beast. The details strongly suggest that the
world-dragon is not merely the result of the fortuitous viewing of
dinosaur fossils; these particulars-the beards, the horns, the fiery breath,
the living in deep pools, the danger to women-could not be apparent
in any way from viewing even the best preserved and most discernible
dinosaur remains.
Natural selection theory will once more prove useful in explaining
how the details of dragon form and behavior were shaped in the human
brain. It will aid in understanding exactly how these details came to be
in terms of the evolution of defensive behavior in primates.
First the obvious: the dragon is almost always implacably hostile and
violent toward humans. Specific dragons are depicted as friendly and
benign (as witness Puff the Magie Dragon, faery dragons), but this is a
modern reading, or one that is used by an artist to create dramatic con-
73
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trast, like "the gentle giant." Also, in cases where the dragon has come to
be a symbol of state, it will be viewed as hostile only to enemies of the
state. In the majority of cases, however, the dragon, like the primate
predators, is dangerous and deadly.
A prey species tends to react to signals indicating the danger of the
predator from a particular point of view or perspective. Note that the
experiments with baby geese and ducks and with the lemurs at the Duke
Center, in which a black silhouette of a hawk was hung above the sub-
ject animals, clearly assumed that the point of view of the observed ani-
mals was from the ground upward. Conversely, the various experiments
with monkeys and infants in which snakes or models of snakes were
introduced into a test situation suggested a perspective from above,
looking down.
The Duke Center experiments, as weil as the various field studies
cited earlier, point out that primates react to the presence of predators
when the potential threat is still some distance away. Obviously though,
the most intense moment in this ancient engagement is the instant
when the predator is attacking at dose range. Seeing a big cat at a distance
of a hundred yards and dimbing a tree is dearly less crucial for survival
than standing face-to-face with an attacker. That is, a wider parameter of
efficient behavior exists in the former than in the latter.A monkey who
responds slowly, but still within the parameters of safety, to the approach
of a leopard will be in company with others of its group that may
respond sooner, or with greater or lesser anxiety behavior.
THE DRAGON'S FACE
The most intense instant of the life-and-death encounter with the

predator is the moment it attacks. The attack of the cat, the swooping
eagle, or the striking snake is generally going to be a matter of ambush
or surprise. At that instant, responses of less than a fraction of a second
determine the difference between life and death. Therefore, many signals
in the face of a charging predator, any one of which can ignite appro-
priate motion, will save life and perpetuate the genetic materials at least
partially responsible for the continued existence of the prey. The most
crucial signals of possible annihilation in the world of the ancient pri-
74
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~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE -----
mates are premised upon the attacker being most often directly in front
of the prey, staring it in the face: if some trigger or signal in the face of
the attacker does not stimulate the potential victim to move quickly and
appropriately, the animal will perish.
Another element in understanding how the ancient ancestral pr i-
mate's point of view could affect how the brain-dragon came to be what
it is involves the dimensions of the biologically triggered recognition of
a dangerous predator. The signals, or triggering effects of the predator that
move the prey to escape quickly, appear to be of a two-dimensional or
flat, as opposed to a three-dimensional, nature. This is related to the reac-
tion time of the prey to the attack or presence of the predator. If depth
were part of the picture that the brain would have to recognize before the
appropriate signals were sent to the body to facilitate escape, the ances-
tral primate would have taken longer to process; that is, it would not
respond until the entire body of the predator was viewed and analyzed.
The reaction time would be extended, thus reducing the survival poten-
tial for those who had to wait to see the entire animal as opposed to those
ancient primates who could react to signals of danger immediately in
front of them and from signals found in only two dimensions.
The flat perspective further suggests that the face and the extended
appendages are the leading edge of the attack. One would assume this is
probably true of any animal; the focus on the face to obtain information
is no doubt more than merely a primate trait. It would be universal in
animals that have faces.
The leading edge of the attack of a rap tor is neither the beak nor the
wings, but rather the extended taloned feet. Carnivores typically attack
with their mouths, using appendages for running or springing at the prey,
and in the case of cats, holding the prey while the mouth kills it. Snakes
likewise lead with the mouth to inject venom, crush, and puncture, or in
the case of constrictors, to acquire a purchase with the mouth while the
coils wrap the prey in their suffocating embrace. The face and the lead-
ing appendages should be the dominant areas of predator recognition
among primates, and should therefore be major aspects of the dragon's
appearance and image.
It can be seen from the survey of the world-dragon (dragon images
in a representative sampIe of world cultures) that the features of the
75
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dragon as they are revealed in art and myth worldwide seem to be the
result of the "long distance" senses-seeing, hearing, smelling-as
opposed to the "contact" senses such as taste and touch. Further, when
the contact senses come into play, the assumption is that the dragon is
already dead. Clearly the signals revealing the ancient struggle in the pri-
mate world between them and their hunters assume that confrontation
is not a safe option; escape, when there is still lack of contact between
predator and prey, is the desired goal.
The contact senses, touch and taste, are associated with power, while
the long-distance sens es suggest absence of power. The potential victims
of the dragon will react to the sight of the beast or its smell or its roar,
whereas the dragon-slaying culture hero experiences physical contact,
touching the dragon as he wages his ultimately victorious batde. He then
often drinks the blood of the dragon-that is, tastes it-to acquire var-
ious supernatural powers, a plot motif of many dragon tales worldwide.
It is probably the case that the contact senses are more ancient in evolu-
tionary terms than the long-distance sens es.
The dragon found in cultural materials resulted from a biologically
innate projection, which is filtered through the artistic norms of a par-
ticular culture. The sensibilities of the story teller or artist must remain
within universally recognized parameters for the viewers or the Iisteners
to understand that they are being shown or told about a dragon. The
form and traits of the world-dragon, the culturally manifested dragon,
may suggest something about the history of the brain-dragon.
THE SCALED BODY
From the perspective of the primate, what is the major visual thrust of
the dragon's presence? From dragon images worldwide, the most obvi-
ous trait is that the creature is reptilian. In terms of sheer mass of infor-
mation, here equated to the mass of the image, that is the largest display
of visual information. The scales and serpentine body are predominant,
whereas the wings and carnivorous mouth occupy proportionally less
"space" in the image.Why should this be ifthe preceding has suggested
that three, not one, predators have formed the cultural dragon?
76
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~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE -------
Perhaps the historical sequence of the appearance of the predators of

the ancient primate might offer a clue.As was seen in chapter 4, reptiles
evolved long before raptors and cats, so that ancestral primates had mil-
lions of years more experience with them. Maybe the predominantly rep-
tilian body characteristics of the dragon image reflect the length of time
the primates were being attacked by a particular predator and therefore
undergoing selective stress. Those ancestral primates who could perceive
and react to reptilian attackers more quickly and successfully would be
favored over their slower kinsmen. That many of the large snakes are con-
strictors, using their bodies to crush and suffocate their victims, is yet
another reason for the body of the serpent being a featured aspect of the
dragon image.
Sue Parker and Kathleen Gibson (1979,380 ff.) discuss the idea of
"terminal addition" to explain the evolution of intelligence and cogni-
tive abilities in our ancient ancestors. This concept is set within comments
concerning ontogeny, the development of an individual organism; phy-
logeny, the evolution of a genetically related group; and the recapitula-
tion hypothesis, which suggests that the ontogeny of the individual
resembles the evolution of the group to which it genetically belongs.
Parker and Gibson preface their comments on "terminal addition," using
this quote from Steven S. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977): "Evo-
lution occurs when ontogeny is altered in one of two ways: When new
characters are introduced at any state of development ... or when char-
acters already present undergo changes in developmental timing" (4).
Parker and Gibson continue, "Recapitulation is the repetition of the
stages of phylogeny during ontogeny. Recapitulation is due to two
processes: the first process is the extension of ancestral ontogeny, involv-
ing 'terminal addition' of new features at the end of ancestral ontogenies;
the second process is the acceleration of the development of the new fea-
tures" (380). Gould adds the very important observation that terminal
addition is a product of natural selection.
What this suggests is a kind of layering effect of genetically based
cognitive abilities through natural selection over vast ranges of time. The
most ancient primate predator batde, that of the snake versus the ances-
tral primate, has been enhanced by the "terminal addition" effect of the
recognition of the succeeding evolution of rap tors and tree-climbing car-
77
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nivores. Thus, the image of the dragon becomes a reptile with wings and
a carnivore's mouth, a reflection through artistic images, perhaps, of the
amount of time the primates have been dealing with the snake, the rap-
tor, and the tree-dimbing carnivore. The dragon image may be read as a
kind of dock, or a temporal map of an important aspect of the history
of primate predator/prey relations.
LARGE SIZE
The large size of the dragon is also understandable from the perspective
of natural selection theory. Though small dragons are depicted-the
basilisk is a famous example--the overwhelrning majority of dragons are
much larger than their human antagonists. If the basilisk's size is based on
its potential for destruction, then it too would be "Iarger" than humans
who rnight confront it, a creature who though only a few feet high is so
deadly that merely seeing it brings death to the viewer. Cases of dragol1s
of cosmic proportions, world-girdling beasts, also exist. But they, like the
diminutive basilisk, are rare relative to the majority of dragon accounts.
"Big," "potent," "powerful" can be communicated in a number of ways
not necessarily related to physical dimensions.
The relative size relationship between humans and the dragon
described in cultural art and lore is noteworthy. The size of the dragon
relative to the culture hero who often confronts it is comparable to the
size relationship between ancestral primates and rap tors, big cats, and large
snakes. Dragon combats, or encounters, scanned in a number of pictures
and tales reveal that the human is on average about a fifth the size of the
dragon. The size of the human relative to that of the dragon compares to
that of the ancestral primate and its major predators.
There does seem to be variation in the size of the dragon depend-
ing upon whether the image is described in language or depicted in some
visual art form. In folk tradition, one hears of the Japanese Dragon of
Koshi, which was large enough to drape its body over eight hills and val-
leys; the Chinese Chien-Tang dragon, which measured nine hundred feet
in length; or the various world-girdling dragons such as the biblical
Leviathan, the Greek monster Typhon, with its wingspan of several hun-
78
"I'p
~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE ----
dred leagues, and the Norse creature the Midgard Serpent. In paintings,
however, dragons are typically depicted in smaller sizes, both to meet the
demands of the artistic medium being used and to display the dragon
slayer, the culture hero, at work. It would be impossible in the Japanese
case, for example, both to focus the picture on the hero, Susa-no-ow, and
to depict the Dragon of Koshi in its hill-straddling splendor. If the
Dragon of Koshi were depicted visually as the oral tradition describes
him, it would be impossible even to see Susa-no-ow, except as a human
figure about the size of the Koshi dragon's toenail. The dragons of oral
tradition probably best represent the most ancient ideas about the beast,
whereas more modern mo des of presentation (painting, ceramic design,
and so on) and more contemporary concerns (culture heroes and the rise
of the state or new religions) are relatively more recent in appearance.
SPOTS AND CIRCLES
One design feature of the dragon's hide appears as a motif suggesting

spots or circles.These are seen in the tale ofSaint George's confrontation
with the dragon in Libya, among other places. Before me now are
images of dragons from Europe dating to the Middle Ages, from the Han
period in China, and from an etching on a piece of pottery taken from
aburial among the prehistoric peoples of the southeastern United States.
All show patterns of spots and circles that, in relationship to each other
and to the general size of the beast, resemble the spotted patterns ofleop-
ards, ocelots, and jaguars. These tree-climbing big cats, with their unique
habit of caching game kills in trees, haunted the world of the ancestral
primates.
A number of studies demonstrate that infants and monkeys often
show fear of staring eyes, and one might suggest that the spots on the
dragon are related.The circles and spots on dragons should not be inter-
preted as eyes because they are found all over the body of the dragon.
When one finds animals with markings suggesting large eyes to a preda-
tor, as in various types ofAmazonian moths and several varieties ofbut-
terflies, the spots will be large, clearly two in number, and set basically
where a face might be expected.
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ...-.....-
ROARING
The dragon makes a lot of noise; its roar terrifies. But why should a
dragon roar? The answer lies in the behavior of the primate predators. All
of them make an explosive noise at the instant of attack, probably due to
the rapid constriction of the body muscles that propel their spring or
strike, forcing air from the mouth opening and resulting in a loud and
frightening noise.Again, if one keeps in mind the relative perspective of
the predator to the ancient primal ancestors ofhumans, the noise ofthe
predator is very intense. Further, a sharp noise at the moment of attack
momentarily freezes the prey, providing an additional advantage to the
predator. In Asian martial arts, a loud shout (ki-ai in Japanese) is often
issued at the moment of the attack. This focuses the energy of the
attacker and allows hirn to expel air at the moment of the strike. Loud
noises also irritate the inner ear, causing a momentary disturbance in
muscle tone and balance, two elements of the physical system that must
be in peak operation if the potential victim is to quickly respond and
have a chance to escape the dangerous confrontation alive.
The sound of the attacking raptor can be of a slightly different order.
One evening while fishing along the shores of a Florida lake, I witnessed
a hawk attacking a gray dove, a strike that took place about fifty feet
directly above me. I clearly heard a sonic shrill as the hawk dropped on its
prey. The hair on the back of my neck rose as the sound froze the dove an
instant before the hawk struck. Raptors also have very impressive shrieks,
which would be amplified from the perspective of a small primate in dan-
gerously dose proximity.
THE FEET
Dragons have interesting feet, one of the contributions of the raptor to

the world-dragon (fig. 18). Talons are the killing points of the raptor, and
they are presented to the prey at the instant of impending death, not the
teeth, beak, or body. The dragons' feet are structured in a raptorial
mode, with the daws on the toes typically longer and thinner than the
blunt daws of animals such as turtles, alligators, and crocodiles. In the pre-
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WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE
8:INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, THE FEET OF THE WORLD-DRAGON

FIGURE t
DOES NOT TYPICALLY SHOW A FELINE PAW, BUT RATHER, SEPARATED
TOES AND LONG CURVING NEEDLE TIPS-TALONS.
viousIy presented example of a Han dynasty dragon of China, for exam-

pIe, the right foreleg is depicted with toes and sharp talonesque claws,
while the left foreleg has the paw or padded foot of the cat.
The killing signal of the rap tor to which an ancient primate had to
react, in that it was the last image he may have had, was two reaching
taloned feet with a beak behind them and wings behind the beak. If the
dragon's image derived ultimately from collapsing the signals or triggers
of the three predators, the forefeet of the raptor apparently became one
of the most prominent of these.
Most often the two leading legs of the four-legged dragon, the
most typical arrangement, are the most active and dangerous, whereas the
back two legs support the body or propel it forward but do not kil1.The
dragon's feet would not be pawed or padded like cats' feet, but rather
would have separated toes and long, needle-pointed talons. A sensitivity
to the look of two separated talon-toed feet rushing at the body would
have to be precise.
THE HYDRA EFFECT
Most dragons are conventional be asts in that they have two or four legs,
a set of wings, one head, and one tail; however, some dragons are hydras,
or multi-appendaged beasts (fig. 19). The classic hydra of Greece has a
number of heads emanating from the same neck. This type of dragon,
found in many parts of the world, suggests a principle of design devel-
oped in relationship to the ancient primate's struggle with its predators.
We can see in conventional cartooning and certain modern artistic
movements (such as the Italian futurists, with their emphasis of depict-
ing motion in two dimensions [Huneker 1915,262 ff.] or in Marcel
Duchamp's famous painting Nude Descending aStaircase) the replication
of a particular piece of an image to convey motion. An ancient example
of this technique is engraved on a bow found at Teyjat in southern France
and dating between 30,000 and 10,000 B.C. (Fig. 20).The author ofthe
book (1955) in which the engraving appears, Erwin O. Christensen,
describes the image as a "herd of reindeer." This is not a likely interpre-
tation because reindeer do not move en masse in straight lines. The draw-
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FIGURE 19:THE GREEK HYDRA. THE MANY APPENDAGES APPEAR TO
SUGGEST MOVEMENT WITHIN THE IMAGE.
ing immediately below the "herd of reindeer" in Christensen's book, and

described as a painting from the Altamira site in Spain, shows a crowded
band oflarge mammals, a much more persuasive image of a herd than the
curious drawing above it. There, the reindeer stands outlined on the left.
Eighty to ninety slightly vertical strokes from left to right suggest oudines
of the reindeer's rack riding above them. Finaily, at the end of the visual
scan, a complete reindeer is once again presented on the right. The
effect perhaps was to depict the motion of a reindeer.
Paolo Graziosi (1960, pI. 89) presents another example from the same
historical era, the Magdalenian, which might suggest motion. A horse
stands on the left (fig. 21). The ancient artist has placed dozens of smail
vertical strokes side by side from right to left, with a bare suggestion of
the outline of a horse's head above the strokes.As in the reindeer engrav-
ing described above, the last figure in the horse sequence is rendered with
a fuil-body view. Once again, reindeer and horses do not arrange them-
selves in straight lines, and the ancient hunters would have known that
very weil. They did paint, engrave, and draw many convincing images of
herds of the animals they hunted, with the tumult and chaos that such a
scene would provoke, but the animals unnaturaily presented in straight-
line groupings were, I feel, about something else-motion. Analogies
from other artistic traditions, noted above, suggest the possibililty of
such an interpretation.
Moving predators are always more attention-grabbing than station-
ary ones. Note that some dangers do not move: quicksand, deep holes,
cliffs, and boiling hot springs. Movement is a crucial feature in the fear
of snakes.The writhing motion is particularly upsetting, as is the flutter-
ing of feathers to many bird phobics. The hydra effect found in dragons
with many legs or multiple wings says, "It moves," and the typical repli-
cating of the head as part of the predator information suggests that the
head is the most dangerous moving part of the predator. The many
replicated images ofhead (mouth, teeth, eyes), legs, and wings might be
seen as a recognition of the dangers of predator movement. The hydra
effect could also me an "very much," a kind of exclamation, though the
argument regarding motion is more to the point.
84
IV
FICURE 2o:THE HERD OF REINDEER DEPICTED IN THE MIDDLE IMAGE
FROM THE TEYJAT SITE IN SOUTHERN FRANCE SUGGESTS A DEPICTION
OF THE MOVEMENT OF A SINGLE ANIMAL, WHEREAS THE LOWER
IMAGE FROM THE ALTAMIRA SITE IN SPAIN OFFERS A MORE
REALISTIC IMAGE OF HERDING ANIMALS.
THE HORSES FROM THE CHAFFAUD SITE SHOW THE STYLE
FIGURE 21:
OF DEPICTION FOUND IN THE REINDEER IMAGE FROM TEYJAT BOTH
SUGGEST MOVEMENT
~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE ~
HORNS
The hydra effect, the stylization of motion, might also explain several
other features of the world-dragon: horns, crests, crowns, and beards. Two
factors here could suggest a shape that would portray the dragon with
horns or prominences on the head. Both of these po ssibili ti es arise from
the flat perspective of the face of the predator, a cat in this instance. First,
the ears of the cat stand erect from the top of its head, whereas the ears
of most primates protrude from the sides of their heads. So a rushing ani-
mal that would be identified as alien to the ancestral primates would fea-
ture a face with two or more protuberances on the top of the head. This
image indicated that something was very wrong and very dangerous
about the creature rapidly approaching. Likewise, when a cat moves in for
the attack, its tail gene rally stands upright with a slight cud at the tip.The
tail poised in this way probably aids in balance. As the primal ancestor
looked into the face of the cat during an attack, he would have seen the
tip of the tail projecting from behind the head. Again, seen in a flat per-
spective, the tail would seem to arise from the top of the attacker's head.
But if a cat has only one tail and dragons generally have two horns, and
pronged horns at that, how can the cat be the ancient model?
The characteristic shape of the dragon's horns supports the flat per-
spective of a big cat's flickering tail. Dragon horns do not suggest the
pointed tangs of the buck or caribou or the massive thickness of the
moose's rack or the straight, pointed horns of various antelopes. Rather
they gene rally appear as slightly blunted and rounded at the tip-like the
tail of a big cat. The multiplicity of horns is related to the hydra effect.
The cat's tail twitches nervously as it carries out its attack.
CROWNS
Dragons sometimes are described as wearing crowns (fig. 22). In some

instances of the imaging of the dragon, no clear attempt has been made
to set two horns on its head, but rather stylistic protuberances (points,
crests, or "crowns"), which I propose are derived from the same reality.
Further, hornlike protuberances on a variety of dragon images do not
87
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FIGUR!: 22:DRAGONS ARE ROUTINELY DEPICTED AS POSSESSING CRESTS,
HORNS, CROWNS, OR FEATHERED PROTUBERANCES AROUND THE HEAD.
THE AUTHOR SUGGESTS THAT THIS FEATURE, FOUND IN DRAGONS
WORLDWIDE, IS ABOUT MOVEMENT
----- WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE --------
seem to be clearly horns or crowns, but simply stylistic or balancing

devices for the artist. The viewer does not rebel against this added touch
because it echo es the flickering tail of the attacking carnivore behind the
head of the face-forward attacker, an image set deeply in the brain.
BEARDS
The dragon's beard probably reflects the beards of the big cats. The chin
hair of cats is of a stiff texture and projects outward, while their pelt lies
flat to the body, is often slightly longer, and is sometimes of a different
color than the chin beard. Female African hons, for example, have dis-
tinctive white chin beards. But the dragons' beards are relatively longer
than those of the big cats. Why? Again, I think that depiction of motion
has something to do with it. The beard of the female hon is a fourth or
less the length of the face of the cat, whereas dragon beards are usually
as long as or longer than the face. It has to do with the movement of the
attacking animal-the cat in this instance. Imagine the perspective of the
cat's face looming toward you, and understand that the cat will rock its
head up and down, positioning itself to sink its teeth into you. And
though you may not be focusing on the beard, the beard is there and
would appear to be 10nger.The model oftime-lapse photography is use-
ful. If one photographed a lion's face at the moment of attack using this
method, the chin beard would be simultaneously both higher and lower
than its central positioning, resulting in a mental image of a longer
beard, as is usual in the depiction of dragons.
Culture obviously plays a major roIe in which features of the dragon
will be accentuated under various circumstances. Cultural ideas about
senior males with beards, or beards as indicative of experience, religious
status, or leadership, would be assured in such a culture's rendering of a
bearded dragon, whereas in a culture where human beards have no
symbolic significance, the beard of the dragon may or may not be shown
or described. In a world where deer hunting is ofkey importance, horns
suggested by the brain-dragon may be exaggerated, but they may be very
minimal features in a culture that does not hunt or depend upon horned
or antlered animals.
89
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------- AN INSTINCT fOR DRAGONS ------
DEADLY BREATH
The dragon's breath is uniformly commented upon and is always nox-

ious, hot, fiery, smoky, and/or poisonous.Again consider the attack of the
cats. The breath of the attacking animal will be hot and reeking of
putrid animal meat, particularly from the perspective of arboreal vege-
tarians. Thus, the breath of the attacker is connected with danger. The
smoky look ofthe dragon's breath might be related to the condensation
of the carnivore's hot breath being expelled into the relatively cool air of
the early morning or evening when the big cats hunt.
"Immediate danger," however, is the major signal of the breath. In a
very few cases, the dragon issues floods of water from its mouth-not
smoke and fire but definitely dangerous in that these expulsions gener-
ally are connected with deadly floods.
WATER
This naturally leads to a possible explanation of dragons being almost uni-

versally associated with water, especially deep pools and wells. "Dragon
weHs" are found in native North America in the lore that teHs the
Cherokee of the Southeast that the uktena lives in deep pools far back in
the mountains and informs the Hopi of the Southwest that Pululukon
lives in deep springs and wells. "Dragon weHs" are found in China, Ire-
land, Scotland, Egypt,Yucatan, Hawaii, and in the vacinity ofJerusalem,
to name but a few locations. Our most ancient association with the
dragon places it in water. When cultures became horticultural, with an
accelerated interest in rain, the dragon's connection with water expanded
to include the rain, since dragons also live in the air or come from the sky.
Why, however, would the dragon be associated with water? The
answer lies in the dangers of the water hole. As noted earlier, the trans-
formation of the arboreal primates into the terrestrial forms that gave rise
to humans occurred when the earth's primal forest cover was in places
ravished by drying climatic conditions, forming a mixed forest and
savanna habitat. The arboreal creatures, though they could obtain water
from rain puddies and notches and holes in trees, found that in dry sea-
90
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~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE -----
sons this form of easy water evaporated. They were forced to the ground
to locate water holes.
At these holes predators were provided with abundant prey that
were compelled into the open and, in the case of the primate, had to bow
their heads with their eyes facing downward to drink. The snake often
lived in association with the water, cats hunted by the water holes, and rap-
tors watched from their perches as small game came to drink. The raptors
could hunt on the edges of water holes without the problems inherent in
picking monkeys out ofthe branches of dense tree cover.Approaching the
pool of water would become for the ancient primates an activity fraught
with feelings of danger. T. T. Struhsaker and J. S. Gartlan (cited in Bram-
blett 1976,137) note that"the severity ofthe dry season in the Cameroons
leads to concentration of patas monkey troops around permanent water
holes, with an increased frequency of antagonistic encounters."
EYES
The wide and staring eyes of the dragon are distinguished in folklore as
possessing the power to paralyze victims. In many European languages
the word for"dragon" suggests penetrating gazes or sharp-sightedness. In
paintings of dragons worldwide, the eyes are most typically wide open,
bright, fiery, and large. During attacks, predators' eyes remain in very dose
proximity to their prey and are, in the case of our three major predators,
wide open. This serves two purposes: to help the predator gauge distance
and to momentarily freeze the prey, as would a loud noise.
YOUNG WOMEN AND DRAGONS
Another very typical dragon-Iore plot element worldwide is the antag-

onism between dragons and women of prime childbearing years. It is sig-
nificant that dragons rarely bother postmenopausal women or
prepubescent females. It is the young maiden who repeatedly appears as
the special target of dragon harassment. One way of understanding this
theme is to appreciate the different level of investment or cost between
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males and females in terms of perpetuating the genetic heritage of the

group to whieh they belong. Edward O. Wilson (1978) writes,
The human egg is eighty-five thousand times Iarger than the human
sperm.The consequences ofthis gametic dimorphism ramifY through-
out the biology and psychology of human sex. The most important
immediate resuit is that the female pI aces a greater investment in each
ofher sex cells.A woman can expect to produce only about four hun-
dred eggs in her lifetime. Of these a maximum of about twenty can be
converted into heaIthy infants.The costs ofbringing an infant to term
and caring for it afterwards are relatively enormous. In contrast, a
man releases one hundred million sperm with each ejaculation. Once
he has achieved fertilization his purely physical commitment has
ended. His genes will benefit equally with those of the femaIe, but his
investment will be far Iess. (124)
In terms of natural seleetion, females of ehildbearing years would

exercise extreme eaution toward predators as eompared to other age and
gender eategories. The female with a newborn is the future of the
group. Males, who eould theoretieally impregnate thousands of females
in their lifetime, are genetieally somewhat less valuable to the group's
future.An attaek against a female presents more danger for the group than
an attaek against a male. In primates, most erueial ehild eare rests in the
hands of females, who are hampered by juveniles and infants; thus behav-
ior in females that ereates a heightened sense of alertness to danger
toward them and their offspring would be seleeted for. This is refleeted
in the partieular sexual antagonism of the dragon toward females and in
eontemporary predator-related phobias in females.
All studies verify that females suffer as the major vietims of agora-
phobia, and though agoraphobia presents many manifestations, the fear
ofbeing alone in an open spaee is a reeurring theme.The relationship of
this sensitivity to the survival requirements of aneient primates has been
noted earlier. It is related to the "wall-elinging" behavior of rats and miee,
likewise an instinetual behavior seleeted for over time in rodent popu-
lations.
Most females develop the symptoms of this phobia between the ages
of fifteen and thirty-five, prime ehildbearing years, and partieularly high
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~ WHY DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE ~
rates of phobie disorders exist among mothers. In 1975, a survey of over

1,000 agoraphobies at the Sparthfield Clinic at Rochdale in Lancashire,
England, determined that 90 percent were mothers (cited in Melville
1977). Also noted was a significant tendency for children to report the
same kind and number of fears as their mothers (Marks 1969, 170).
Perhaps more relevant to this discussion, the same picture reappears
in animal phobias. The vast majority of animal phobics are females of
childbearing age.Although animal phobias occur often in both sexes, the
few that remain after puberty are mainly suffered by females. Girls
showed significantly more fears than boys (50 percent vs. 36 percent).
TREASURES AND MAGIe JEWELS
Dragons are often portrayed as guardians of treasures. The dragon lore of

both China and of the aborigines of the southeastern United States
claims that if acquired by a culture hero, a gemstone or a pearl in the
dragon's head can grant great powers. Even the Lapps of Fin1and have the
tradition of the "snake stones," rare white rocks produced by snakes that
can give the finder certain powers. The Lapp Johan Turi (1966) writes,
He who finds one [snake-stoneJ will never be overcome by the

law ... ah, the man who could find one! First you must find the snakes'
mating place, when they are pairing they cast a white stone here and
there, and he who goes and watches in secret where they are casting the
stone here and there, he must snatch the stone and run to water and if
he reaches the water before the snakes, then he gets the stone, but if the
snake gets there first, then it is dangerous. But the one who has made
sure beforehand where the nearest water is, he reaches it first ... the
snakes have been hindered for a little, while they looked for the stone,
and in the meantime the man has run to the water. And if he has the
stone, then he is a law-cunning man all the days ofhis life. (147)
The "treasure guardian" aspect of the world-dragon may relate to the

three primate predators' blocking or guarding. They protect the riches of
trees' upper branches, the location of the most succulent leaves and
flowers, which are the hunting zones of the raptors, and the riches of the
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ground (the source of roots, fruits, nuts, leaves, and insects), which is the
hunting territory of snakes and carnivores. The jewel generally described
in the head of the dragon can be understood as part of the more recent
history of the dragon (as the association of dragons with rain among hor-
ticultural peoples), a generalization of the association of the predators
with water holes.
Further, the shining, faceted gems obtained from dragons are not
products of nature. Stone cutting and polishing is a cultural act perpe-
trated on a rare and valuable commodity. Pearls do not simply appear on
the beach but must be acquired through direct human action, perform-
ing an operation on a pearl oyster.
It is the killing of the dragon that allows the culture hero to obtain
the gern, the product of culture. This might be connected to the oft-
repeated theme in world mythology of a hero or god performing an act
by which he transcends his lower tendencies to become a cultured crea-
ture, sophisticated and advanced beyond the lower life forms. It may sim-
ply mean "beyond the past,""beyond nature," or"cultural" as opposed to
"natural." Perhaps the jewel in the head relates to the often noted intel-
ligence of dragons, permitting some of them even to converse with their
attackers and victims.
The dragon is a composite of shapes, smells, and images that trigger

defensive behavior, fear, or avoidance in primates. The various sig-
nals-like the diving shrill and shriek of the raptor attack and the vision
of two sets of separated toes with talons attached-would select for those
ancient primates that could perceive the true nature of these signals
quickly. The signals of the attacking big cat that would enable the primate
to escape would include any of the various physical traits or groupings
of traits of the dragon Qarge eyes, horns, and roar). Maybe the same escape
procedure would occur in an animal that might be genetically pro-
grammed to respond to ablast of hot air or "horns" above the head or
wide open eyes, singly. Likewise, in the attack of the serpent, the body is
most significant. Collapse these traits, and one finds all of these elements
combined in one beast, the brain-dragon, and its cultural manifestation,
the dragon of world art and mythology.
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6
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TIME OF THE
DRAGON SLAYERS
n interesting problem arises when one compares the presence
~ A of the cultural dragon with the basic models of sociopolitical

organization recognized by most modern anthropologists. The
brain-dragon, though built in to the human psyche through natural
selection over millions of years, is surprisingly not universally manifested
to the same extent in all forms of sociopolitical organizations. In some
cases areal flesh-and-blood dragon haunts the landscape, while in oth-
ers the dragon exists not as areal entity but as a symbol of the highest
level ofleadership and power.And sometimes the dragon lives only as a
figure in various forms of entertainment or as an image in children's
fairytales, and nothing more.
Heinz Mode is one of the few modern dragon commentators who
recognizes the relationship between dragon fascination and types of
social organization. In his discussion (1973) of various types of dragons
found around the world he notes,
It may have been noticed that no mention has been made of ancient
America nor of ancient Africa, the South Seas and Australia. That
these areas may in fact largely be left out of the account is due to a fact
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already stated: namely that the idea of monsters arises at a relatively late
stage in cultural development .... The observation that monsters were
not created originally by the so-called "primitive" peoples, as one
might have expected, but are in fact to a large extent the product of
highly developed civilizations is surprising enough.(15)
I do not agree with Mode in his assertion that ancient America,

Africa, the South Seas, and Australia "may, in fact, largely be left out of the
account," as my discussion in the introduction concerning universal
dragons indicates, but I do agree with his observation that the dragon
seems to flourish more at later than at earlier stages of cultural evolution.
To sharpen the focus and provide some context for the succeeding
discussion of cultural evolution, we might pause briefly to outline some
of the ways anthropologists have sought to organize the tremendous vari-
ety ofhuman sociocultural types found over the globe and through time.
One of the earliest was to classifY societies by their subsistence behavior
(how they made a living) as hunter/ gatherers, pastoralists, horticultural-
ists, or agriculturalists. It has generally been assumed that hunter/ gatherers
represented the earliest forms of society, and those focused on gardening
and agriculture the most recent.
A current model is based on neoevolutionary cultural theory. It
assumes that cultures evolve in relationship to their efficiency in har-
nessing power, and that power harnessing begins at the level of human
organization-more succinctly, political organization. Hence, a model is
put forward that suggests the evolutionary unfolding ofless to more com-
pIe x forms of sociopolitical organization. That this model is more than
a historically based theory is seen in the fact that all forms of sociopo-
litical organization described by this school of anthropological thought
continue to exist to this day.
Billions ofhuman beings have walked the earth since the appearance
of our line of humanity several million years ago in East Africa. During
that immense span of time, the ancient human ancestors clustered them-
selves, much as modern-day primate troops still do, into groupings called
bands. About 90 percent of all humans throughout time have lived in
bands, typically small, nomadic or seminomadic hunting and gathering
groups numbering between fifty and one hundred individuals.
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~ TIME OF THE DRAGON SlAYERS ------
Again, as with most nonhuman primate populations, the band is inte-

grated on the basis of kinship, providing for its members the feeling of
being one large family. Commonly band members refer to each other not
by name but by kinship terms. Following from this, bands are usually
exogamous; that is, they require their members to marry outside the band
because to do otherwise would be incestuous.
Bands tend to be egalitarian groupings where all members, theoret-
ically at least, have equal access to resources and prestige. Generally
there is no concept of private ownership of property in band societies.
Territory and food are communal resources, usually shared among mem-
bers to some degree each day. Leadership in bands is noncoercive. Senior
males with good records of citizenship and leadership are looked to for
advice concerning camp movement, relations with other nearby groups,
problems over the division of game animals, and interband disputes; how-
ever, the members of a band are free to ignore this counsel. Lacking such
institutions as courts of law, police, and jails, bands must depend upon
their ability to socialize their members to feelings ofkinship and the qual-
ities of generosity, kindness, compassion, and freedom from bad temper.
Further, not only do bands continue to exist in various parts of the world,
but the general nature of band living is still experienced even by mod-
ern Americans in the day-to-day pattern offamily life, the contemporary
remnant ofband society in the modern world.
As food production-horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture--became
more complex somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 B.C., a new form of
socio-political organization, the tribe, evolved where these modern
forms of food production took hold. Tribes can also arise where natural
food supplies are extraordinarily plentiful, as was the case with the
Calusa of southwest Florida or the Nootka and K wakiutl of the North-
west Coast culture area. Such conditions, however, are rare.
Tribes are collections ofbands that usually speak the same language,
follow the same methods of subsistence, consider themselves culturally
sirnilar if not identical, and operate in the same general territory. Tribes
are integrated by institutions, such as clubs and clans, that cross-cut band
membership, bonding the largely autonomous bands at a more complex
level.
97
W
Tribes, in that they are comprised of a number of bands, can have

large populations.Whereas American Indian tribes may have populations
ranging from several hundred to several thousand,African tribes, such as
the Nuer, have several hundred thousand members.
Bands gene rally form as tribes to defend themselves against enernies,
attack enemies, or facilitate large-scale economic or political actions on
a scale beyond the capabilities of bandsmen. Tribes are generally more
sedentary than bands because of the necessity of controlling territories
for Neolithic forms of food production: farming and herding. They
show a fissionIfusion characteristic with respect to constituent bands.
Often tribes will organize in full array with all bands together, while at
other times bands may split away from the tribai group and follow their
own interests before regrouping at the tri baI level. The Cheyenne Indi-
ans of the North American High Plains, for example, would come
together as a tribe in the la te spring, hunt bison and raid through the
summer, and then split into band units as the winter closed in and game
became scarce. Sometimes these band units would, as the winter deep-
ened, disperse into family units. When good weather and game returned,
the families would rendezvous to form bands, and the bands would re-
form as the Cheyenne tribe.
Leadership in tribes tends to follow the example ofbands. Kinship
is the basis of organization, and senior kinsmen in each band form its
advisory board. Tribes usually operate through councils comprised of
band representatives.As with the bands, decisions are noncoercive.A band
that does not like a tribai decision is free to go its own way. Methods of
leadership may rest on subtle, and not so subtle, economic and political
pressures.The line between suggestion and force is therefore very fine in
such societies.
As warfare evolved with the rise of sedentary and semisedentary food
production, pastoral ranges, and village life about ten to twelve thousand
years ago, a new type of sociopolitical organization, the chiefdom, rose.
Chiefdoms possess certain features also found in the tribe. They both
depend heavily on kinship as the basis of social organization and on gar-
dening and herding for subsistence. However, something novel appears
that separates the chiefdom from the tribe, namely the rise of permanent,
centralized leadership, the position of the chief. This individual wields
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~ TIME OF THE DRAGON SLAYERS -------
power, varying in degree from chiefdom to chiefdom, and coordinates

economic, military, political, social, and religious activities. Chiefdoms, at
the top of their organization, are no longer egalitarian. Leadership
becomes an inherited position with the power to coerce or enforce deci-
sions made by the chief. The ability of the chief to force adecision stems
from the military context that often surrounds the evolution of the
tribe to chiefdom.
Tribes generaHy have a peace chief/war chief type of organization.
Certain members of the tribe routinely argue in tribai or band counsel
discussions for the use of force through military action to solve various
problems concerning external political relations, territory, trade, and
such. These are the war chiefs. Peace chiefs, on the other hand, champion
compromise and peaceful solutions to problems. If, however, a chronic
state of warfare develops, the role of the war chiefbecomes entrenched
and often inherited through the male line. It is through his position as
military commander that the chief comes to power.
Regardless of the way the chief achieves his position, his presence
means the potential for a greater degree of coordination of social units
than was found at the triballevel of society. In chiefdoms, because of cen-
tralized control, we find the first appearance of fuH-time specialists,
whereas previously all individuals, even ifthey were part-time healers or
artisans, also had to see to their own subsistence. The chief thereby
assists in increased productive levels.As centralized controller he gathers
wealth from the population as taxation, usuaHy in the form of offerings,
donations, or ritual presentations, and redistributes this wealth in the areas
of public works, military support, and so on. He takes a sizable cut for his
troubles, which means that he and his family become wealthy relative to
the general population. With real wealth and its connection to political
power, the egalitarian world of the bands and tribes is transcended, and
the way is paved for the later rise of states.
A chiefdom evolves into a primitive state, or kingdom, when the
integration of the social group involves a monopoly of force both to pro-
tect the group against outsiders and to control the home population. War-
fare was the condition that set certain African chiefdoms, such as the Zulu
and Ashanti, on the road to becoming primitive states. As the primitive
state becomes organized by law, as opposed to the whims of its heredi-
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tary leadership, the form of the modern state is approached. We do not

need to delineate the traits of the modern state at this point, as sufficient
information has been presented to discuss the relationship between
dragons and political groupings.
An additional method of organizing societies of the world for study
by scholars is based on differentiating between uncentralized and cen-
tralized political systems. Bands and tribes are uncentralized, in that the
most important decisions are made in a democratic manner through
group discussion where the comrnents of all ages and both genders may
be taken into consideration in reaching a final resolution of some prob-
lem. In centralized political systems, decisions are made by a single indi-
vidual, as in a chiefdom, or by a legally restricted and elite body of
individuals, as in astate.
Using the above typologies, one can observe that dragons, considered
as real creatures, enjoyed popularity at a point in his tory when the tribe
was evolving into a chiefdom, or more broadly speaking, when an
uncentralized political system was evolving into a centralized system.
Prior to this time, surprisingly enough, dragons were not significant in
everyday life or mythology, and after this time the dragon quickly
domesticates and is reduced to first a symbol of political power and later
to a mere fairy-tale element. Dragons are indeed found among band level
societies. The dragons of the Australian aborigines and the Inuit, both
classic band-type societies, evidence this. Likewise, a few cases of drag-
ons are found in tribai societies.
Dragons become real and begin terrorizing villages and entering
combat with culture heroes at the dawn of the primitive state, at a time
when a particular society seems to have one foot planted in a tribai
world of multiple bands and/or villages united under a loose tribai iden-
tity and the other in the embryonic centralized structure of chiefdoms or
kingdoms.When the centralized organization has entered its earliest level
of solidification, the dragon becomes a symbol of state, and its nature
changes to reflect that fact. No longer the definition of savagery, it
becomes civilized. No longer real, no longer conceived as a beast to be
hunted and killed, it becomes a symbol of earthly power.
In this respect, it is instructive to compare the period in European
history when dragon sightings reached their peak with an observation of
100
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~ TIME OF THE DRAGON SLAYERS ~
the political situation.Though ac counts speak of dragon combat as early

as the eighth century, as in the saga of Beowulf in the British Isles, and
the sixth century, in the case of the French dragon the gargouille, the peak
of Europe's fascination with the living, breathing dragon seems to fall
between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, during the European
medieval period. By widening the temporal parameters to include a
period roughly from A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500, we witness a time ofmajor
growth and development in many parts of the world, a time when the
roots of the modern nations of the world were being formed, a time of
the dragon. The Middle Ages in the history ofWestern Europe are often
divided into the Early Middle Ages ("the Dark Ages"), aperiod of dis-
order and decline between the fifth and tenth centuries, and the High
Middle Ages, dated from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time
of rapid advance toward a more modern and centralized form of state
government.
In the mid-eleventh century, Byzantine culture was spreading north
through trade and warfare to Christianize the Slavic peoples. After A.D.
911, the Russian city ofKiev became a major trade link betweenAsia and
Europe, and Moscow rose as the "Third Rome" in the mid-fifteenth cen-
tury. On the Arabian Peninsula in A.D. 610, Muhammad, a businessman
in Mecca, had a religious vision from which derived the religion ofIslam.
Within several hundred years Islam came to dominate much of the
known world, preserving Greek art and philosophy and advancing the
arts, literature, and architecture, as well as setting much of the basis of
modern mathematics, astronomy, geometry, and medicine.
Europe, relative to the energetic history ofIslam and the Byzantine
cultures, lagged behind in developing of the roots of nationhood. Charles
the Great (Charlemagne) , king ofthe Franks, united much ofEurope in
the mid-ninth century. After his death, however, this union unraveled
because of internal struggles as weil as foreign invasion. The feudal sys-
tem resulted in succeeding ages of conflict. It was based in the need for
protection from raiding Moors,Vikings, and Magyars, a people of cen-
tral Asia who raided into Europe from bases in modern-day Hungary.
The vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, who in turn provided protection
and expected in return payment in the form of taxes and periods of mil-
itary service. The important point is that each unit possessed its own set
101
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oflaws and gave no allegiance to a central government. Even though the

position ofkingship was present at this time, medieval kings were noto-
riously weak rulers, usually mere figureheads.When they did exist, they
were easily controlled by a collection oflords who lived self-sustaining
lives on their great manors.
However, around A.D. 1000 the European economy began to grow.
New farming techniques increased food supplies.Trade expanded as the
knights of the manors gained control oflawless elements in the popula-
tion. Markets flourished.Towns were established along trading routes.A
money economy was born that ultimately led to the rise of a new mer-
chant dass and the fall offeudalism.Wealth meant more taxation, which
also led to the rise of truly powerful kings.
In A.D. 1215 the Magna Carta placed some legal limits on the grow-
ing power of the English king. In France the monarchies were flexing
their musdes under Philip Ir, Louis IX, and Philip IV To use terminol-
ogy introduced earlier, the period of the dragon, from the eight century
to the thirteenth century, saw a move in European history from the mul-
ticentric polities of groups of constantly squabbling feudal warlords to the
later rise of unicentric authorities, kings hip, the immediate precondition
of the modern state.
That the peak of dragon excitement in Europe seems to correlate in
some way with the shift from the Early to the High Middle Ages is clear,
but why this happened is not.A few points may suggest a tentative solu-
tion. First, the shift from a multicentric type of society to a more uni-
centric one, from a collection ofloosely organized villages and manors
to a modern state, happened fairly rapidly because it was often accom-
plished by military means. The end of noble family lines, control of ter-
ritory, and political ascendancy could be accomplished with a few sword
cuts delivered in a matter of seconds. However, if the death of so me noble
occurred because a king was attempting to solidifY central authority, a
typical scenario in the Middle Ages, the vassals of that downed knight
would experience a major shift and dislocation of their life fabric. Sec-
ond, such rapid social change tends to upset societies, typically leading to
the rise of new religions, warfare, and a concomitant increase in psy-
chopathology, so ci al violence, crime, and drug and aIcohol addiction-
dassic signals of social stress.
102
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~ TIME OF THE DRAGON SLAYERS -----
Anthropologist Anthony E C. WalIace provided some useful concepts

in his discussion (1970, 188-99) of the manner in which people construct
new religions, "revitalization movements" in his terminology, to cope
with crisis. The central motivating force leading to the creation of revi-
talization movements is a coIlectively perceived disruption in what Wal-
lace caIls the "mazeway."
The mazeway is the individual's perception of the world around him.
It encompasses everything from assumptions about the way the natural
world should act to understanding and acceptance of the nature and
functioning of the sociocultural domains, acceptance of traditional val-
ues, religion, and philosophy, and self-concept at the level of mind,
body, and spirit. In aperiod of relative equilibrium, changes in the
mazeway occur slowly and in such a way that the individual can integrate
these changes without stress or anx.iety However, when external changes
in the mazeway interfere with the integration and dynamics oflife for a
substantial number of people, disillusionment with the previous mazeway
sets in. Those affected will experience fear, panic, anxiety, shame, guilt,
depression, or apathy-deep and primal emotions residing in the vicin-
ity of the brain-dragon. Perhaps the powerful conflicts that occur when
a significant percentage of a population experiences mazeway dislocation
touch the same emotional strata occupied by the brain-dragon. Maybe
the dragon manifests as a means of attacking the fear and uncertainty that
may arise from rapid social change, particularly such a fundamental
change as that from multicentric authorities to unicentric authority, or
more dramaticaIly from the band/tribe to the chiefdom/kingdom/state.
In a more technical vein, these rapid social changes could have
overloaded the hippocampus of those who were swept up in the dragon-
hysteria.The circuitry connecting the cortex and hippocampus (cortico-
hippocampal loops) is responsible for novelty detection and memory
storage. The hippocampus could be the "gateway" to the ancient mem-
ories stored in the cortex, memories triggered by the "novelty overload"
of the times.
To attack and destroy the dragon may be aprerequisite of this state
of cultural evolution. It is significant to note that the tale of the European
dragon is always presented ultimately to highlight the dragon slayer. This
dragon slayer generaIly succeeds because he represents a pan-European
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS .......-..-
Christian religion or a newly emerging state. Disruptive changes in

both religion and political organization greatly, and negatively, shift the
mazeways of those buffeted by the changes, those attacked by the dragon.
They are in turn saved by the agents of the new religious and/or polit-
ical order, the dragon slayer.This act generally is a prelude to the realign-
ment of the preceeding epoch's religious and political organization.
A faint echo of the relationship between a dragon and its slayer, and
the resultant heroic opinion of the slayer, is found in a variety of con-
temporary cultural manifestations that connect the taming of serpents
with spiritual advancement. In images of yoga and yogic heroes in India,
cobras drape around the saint's neck, wrap around his waist, or coil at his
feet. In the highest levels of a Pentacostal Holiness sect, most represented
in West Virginia, handling rattlesnakes and copperheads without being
bitten is a sign ofHoly Ghost possession.Among the Hopi Indians ofAri-
zona, a famous "rain dance" entails the members of the religious dance
troop moving to a slow drumbeat as they hold live snakes in their teeth.
That the differences in the mazeway between the earlier multicen-
tric forms and later unicentric forms are dramatic is easy to appreciate.
In a band, for example, alI members are family. In astate, family orien-
tation becomes diminished in importance, and kinship increasingly fades
before the functioning of the state. In a band, all have some say in lead-
ership; in astate, only a few do. In a band, each member is equal and free,
while in astate, people find themselves unequal in terms of wealth and
power. Whereas slavery does not exist in bands, it finds its highest devel-
opment in states. In a band, information flows freely.A state, on the other
hand, must keep secrets from the people. In a band, alI theoretically have
access to wealth and scarce goods and resources, but in astate, access to
wealth is strongly controlIed by a few. Religious experience in bands is
typically very individualistic, whereas state religions are generally monop-
olies run by a priestly caste. These are terrifying differences, profound in
their denial of the premises of sociallife that have been part of the pri-
mate experience for millions of years. Paths burned into our conscious-
ness by cultural and natural selection over millions of years are suddenly
turned upside down.And what happens when people find that their most
fundamental images of the world are crumbling? They often turn to reli-
gion. They become fascinated with the largest concepts of good and evil,
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------ TIME OF THE DRAGON SLAYERS ~
and they arrange to perceive the good in the form of the culture hero,
the god, and the evil in the form of an image their brains have been har-
boring as the most fundamental evil for hundreds of thousand of
years-the dragon.
This magnitude of change reaches beyond the mere need to shift
philosophical paradigms concerning the nature of religion, family, and
politics to fit a new order of sociopolitical existence. We turn to Wallace
(1970) again:"There is some reason to suspect that such dramatic resyn-
thesis depends on a special biochemical milieu, accompanying the 'stage
of exhaustion' of the stress syndrome, or on a similar milieu induced by
drugs" (99).1t is the biochemical dimension that summons the dragon to
be confronted and hopefully destroyed by an agent of the new order.
Wallace's conception of mazeway disruption and resulting revital-
ization movements shares some common ground with the study of the
behavior known as mass hysteria, or in more recent years, "collective
exaggerated emotions." Sociologist John Farley (1998) describes "rnass
hysteria" this way: "Mass hysteria oeeurs when many people in a sizable
geographie area pereeive and respond frantieally to some danger. Often
the danger is not real or, if real, is not as great as people believe" (488).
Examining some of the beliefs that eontemporary populations in the
United States have entertained as "real" might help to explain the behav-
ior of the thousands of individuals in the Middle Ages who reported see-
ing dragons, being attacked by dragons, or engaging in combat with
dragons. In 1938, far example, CBS Radio earried a life broadeast ofH.
G. Wells's seienee fiction classie The War of the Worlds. In dramatie fashion,
a program of dance musie was suddenly interrupted by a news bulletin
announeing that Martians had landed in New Jersey and were set on
conquering the world. Even though the radio announeer stated before,
during, and after the broadeast that the show was fietion, over a million
Americans believed that Martians had landed and set about arming
themselves, barrieading their houses, hiding in storm cellars, or taking to
the road in ears and trueks to eseape the extraterrestrial attaekers! A sim-
ilar panie took place in Portugal in 1988 when The War of the Worlds was
staged to eelebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the original broadeast.
Farley's explanation of the panie assoeiated with the famous radio
broadeast reflects what I have been suggesting about the belief in drag-
105
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ons; that is, the setting of the panic event features deep anxiety feh by a
large percentage of the population. "Part of the reason that this radio play
about an invasion of ho stile Martians led to mass hysteria was that the
world was on the brink ofWorld War 11. People felt insecure and afraid;
events seemed out of control" (1998, 488).
The theme of attack seems to permeate not only the dragon beliefs
of the Middle Ages in Europe but also most modern occurrences of mass
hysteria. During World War II, in the "Great Los Angeles Air Raid," siz-
able portions of the population of the city believed they were under
attack by the Japanese. The panic gripped not only the civilians who
poured reports of Japanese sightings into local police and newspaper
phone lines, but also the military who manned and fired antiaircraft guns
at phantom Japanese planes.
Sociologists Nehum Medalia and Otto Larson wrote (1958) about
the "Seattle windshield pitting epidemie of 1954," which erupted in a
town north ofSeattle when local citizens reported tiny pits and bubbles
in the windshields of their cars and trucks. Often this pitting was accom-
panied by the presence of minute metallic fragments seemingly embed-
ded in the glass. Within a few weeks, police in Seattle had received
reports of such damage to over three thousand vehicles. As the popula-
tion sought an explanation for the pitting, the most common assumption
related it to H-bomb testing in the Pacific. As the hysteria rose, the mayor
ofSeattle appealed to the governor ofWashington and to the president
of the Uni ted States on the evening of April 15 for emergency assistance.
Soon after, the hysteria died away.A group of researchers later concluded
that the windshields had always been pitted. No one had noticed it before
because drivers generally look through the windshield, not at it.The anx-
iety level in the general population had generalized a threat that did not
exist.
I remember a lecture about mass hysteria in Sociology 101 during
my freshman year at college. The example was the case of the "Mad
Gasser" ofSassoon,Wisconsin.As I recall, in the mid-1950s many ofthe
citizens ofSassoon came to believe that they were under attack by a mad-
man who would pump sleeping gas into their bedrooms at night through
a smali tube and then enter the hornes for a variety of criminal activities
on the property and inhabitants.After the hysteria had diminished, stud-
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ies found that the "Mad Gasser" had never existed and related the event
to local stresses in the population. From an earlier period in American
history, the witch hysteria of Salem, Massachusetts, presents another
example of a population perceiving itself to be under attack by nonex-
istent entities.
In almost all cases, the attack perceived in mass hysteria issues from
the involved population's belief in an ultimate danger: Martians attack-
ing the earth; Japanese attacking Los Angeles during World War Ir;
H-bomb testing attacking automobiles; witches and "Mad Gassers"
attacking the local citizens with Satanism, secret chemistry, and stealth.
In the European Middle Ages, the dragon was the greatest danger that
could be imagined. It was the H-bomb, the Martian attack, and the "Mad
Gasser" all rolled into one.
It is not surprising then that the dragon was quickly associated with
Satan, and the European dragon slayer was in almost all cases depicted as
a Christian hero.The dragons tended to be local or provincial in nature,
whereas the God of the Christians symbolized an order that transcended
local concerns. The defeat of the dragon might be seen as the final sev-
ering of the local kinship-based social unit to make way for the nation-
oriented social unit. The dragon seems to fade as a real force when
kinship affiliations become less significant, a typical factor in the devel-
opment of the state. Further, the Christian knights who slayed dragons
to prove that the God of Christianity was more powerful than the min-
ions of the devil also prepared the way for the rise of the state by acts that,
though self-serving, ultimately laid the infrastructure upon which the
European state could rise: formation of armies, maintenance oflaw and
order, protection of travelers, consciousness of the rights oflandowners,
and building oflarge castles and fortifications that became the basis for
almost all the cities of modern Europe.
One of the most efficient means of unif)ring a fragmented group is
to present them with a common enemy. The dragon was an equal-
opportunity destroyer, attacking civilized locations such as villages, farms,
markets, and churches from zones of utmost mystery and strangeness to
the European citizens of the Middle Ages. Dragons traditionally were said
to sally forth from their lairs in the wildest mountains or the deepest
forests, places that normal humans did not traverse. All villages, regardless
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of their eonneetion to loeal patterns of feudal relationships, stood help-

less before a eommon foe, and that foe eame from environments gener-
ally alien to those living in the agricultural basis of Medieval European
eeonomles.
This situation replieates in modern times the relationship of the
aneient arboreal primates to their predators. When not under attaek by
predators, the aneients, as suggested by the behavior of eontemporary pri-
mate troops, behaved in individualistie ways: seeking food, mating,
grooming, and so on. When the predator eame, the group responded.
Likewise, as the Europeans of the Middle Ages saw the souree of the
dragon as areas of extreme alienness to humans-dank eaves, deep pools,
wild mountain reaehes, sea bottoms, haunted forests-the aneient pri-
mates would also "understand," as indieated by the patterned nature of
their predator ealls and responses, that the killer was eoming from a zone
alien to the arboreal primate aneestor-the sky and the dark forest floor.
Though having a dragon as a foil during aperiod when multieen-
trie soeieties were being pushed toward aeeeptanee of a unieentrie form
would be handy, the real souree of the dragon is not the eynieal manip-
ulation of symbols to provide a means of unif)ring scattered polities,
though this surely happened onee the beast was loose in the publie imag-
ination.The question is,Why would the dragon suddenly erupt into pub-
lie awareness even though its souree, the brain-dragon, was present even
prior to the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, though somehow dor-
mant? The following eomparisions to widely reeognized innate behav-
iors may offer parallel examples.
Language learning abilities of ehildren are a typieal example of a
behavior that is believed to be innate but whieh seerns to aetivate at a pre-
dietable time in the growth of the ehild. In all soeieties, infants learn to
speak at roughly the same age (between one and two years of age), in a
relatively short time span, and at roughly the same speed. Similarly,
researehers have found that human infants have no fear of snakes until
about two years of age. Cautionary reaetions to snakes begin by age three
and a half, and definite fear by the age of four. The fear inereases until the
age of six, and generally by puberty the intense snake fear is greatly
diminished or gone entirely.
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~ TIME OF THE DRAGON SLAYERS -----...-
Variations in fear of heights studied through the visual cliff experi-

ments described earlier are also found. No clear evidence exists that the
human can perceive depth prior to the age of two months. But by the age
of two months, when an infant is placed on the deep as opposed to shal-
low end of the visual cliff experimental apparatus, his heart rate slows, indi-
cating attention. Between six to nine months, however, the infant placed
over the deep end will exhibit fear, as judged by increased heart rate.
Infant fear reactions to separation from the mother peak at ni ne to
thirteen months and then wane from thirty months onward.Agorapho-
bia usually begins at eighteen to thirty-five years of age and in approxi-
mately 80 percent of the cases never moves into remission. Fear of
animals, a normal feature of childhood, activates between the ages of two
and four and then subsides. In terms of general fears, 90 percent of chil-
dren between the ages of two and fourteen show at least one specific fear.
The frequency dirninishes with age. The peak occurs at the age of three,
and interestingly enough, happens again at age nine to eleven among boys
and at eleven for girls. Children's reactions to strangers vary. Astranger
elicited fear in 31 percent of two-year-olds, 22 percent of three-year-olds,
7 percent of four-year-olds, and none of the five-year-olds Gersild and
Holmes 1935,168).
Animal behavior specialist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt writes in Human
Ethology (1989), "Some behavior patterns do not have to be fully devel-
oped at birth. Some behavior patterns mature during the course of
ontogeny. Thus, freshly hatched male ducks show no trace of their
species-specific courting patterns. Even if they are raised, however, in
complete social isolation, they will nonetheless develop these species-typ-
ical courtship behaviors" (19).
The parallel between the above behaviors and their timetable of
appearing, peaking, and waning with the development of beliefs that
dragons are abroad in the world (not from the beginning of cultural evo-
lution but at a certain "age") is obvious, though not at all clear. The
mechanisms that trigger certain innate behaviors to manifest themselves
at a particular time in the maturation of the individual are, no doubt, a
composite result of the interaction of internal and external factors-
between the biochernical and the cultural, as it were. Wallace's previous
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W
suggestion of the biochemical aspects of religious conversion, or maze-

way resynthesis, seems to suggest that when learned (cultural) responses
no longer solve biopsychological problems, the human organism is upset
at its deepest physical levels; and this upset leads to a variety of primal
releases in the form ofhysteria, fear, warfare, and so on. These emotions
are brought forward from a brain-space where the dragon lives. It seems
possible that the living, breathing dragon results from a concatenation of
emotions stimulated into expression as humans experience a shift in their
sociocultural existence from the ancient model of the band to the radi-
cally different, and not anticipated by the nature of primate his tory, form
of the centralized state, a very nonprimate type of social organization.
It also seems possible that the belief in active dragons correlates with
a monotheistic form of religious belief. This is not surprising; most
states support religions in which the central god is glossed as analogous
to the centralleader of the newly formed unicentric polity. The diverse
segments of state populations are brought together at a psychospiritual
level by the belief in one god in the same way that scattered specializa-
tions and social classes are unified under a centralleader.
Further, it is tempting to observe that the dragon, as the image of
ultimate danger to the life of a complex social group, must logically pre-
cede the conception of a good, central god, if the predator hypothesis
concerning the nature of the dragon is correct. The "good" to the
ancient ancestral primates would have been what is "good" for all pri-
mates: safety, food, company of friends, and kinsmen. These conditions
are, in fact, normal everyday life for most of the primates, including
human beings, most of the time; therefore, there would be no need to
single out a conceptual statement of the epitome of good as coming from
a single god. Evil, on the other hand, is ultimately about death and ces-
sation of mental, physical, and spirituallife, the purview of the predator.
It would seem then that the Great Evil, the dragon, would in evolu-
tionary terms set the stage for an awareness of contrast between itself and
a composite entity that is not it, i. e., the good and all-powerful god of the
state forms.
Other suggestions regarding the transitional position of the dragon
in social-evolutionary terms stern from the targets of the dragon attack,
as weil as its death by a culture hero. The beast traditionaily attacks live-
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stock, crops, and women of childbearing years; that is, it attacks the basis
of the future. The culture hero who slays the dragon is also a special pro-
tector of maidens, and in ending the life of the dragon, he ends the threat
to horticultural and pastoral productivity, thus serving to ensure the
future of the population as it moves toward a statelike governmental
form.
The relationship between stages of political evolution and belief in
the dragon as areal creature also helps explain a common observation
made about the Western dragon and the Eastern dragon. In most general
accounts of dragon lore, the Eastern dragon (of China, Korea, Japan) is
benevolent, friendly, and symbolic of imperial office and authority,
whereas the Western dragon is bloodthirsty, antisocial, and violent, the
quintessential image of evil. This Eastern dragon, the friendly consort of
emperors, is being described from a point in Chinese history far
advanced, relative to Western state development, in political centraliza-
tion and control. It is not that the Eastern dragon is friendly and the West-
ern dragon decidedly unfriendly; it is that the comparative descriptions
that support the good-versus-evil comparison were made at two differ-
ent points in a state's evolutionary trajectory and that China was advanced
beyond the West at the time of comparison. If the observation of the
Western dragon that forms the typical basis of comparison with the East-
ern dragon had been made a few centuries later, the Western dragon
would be seen on the shields and coats of arms ofheads ofWestern states,
a creature clearly symbolic of earthly power, as in the Chinese case. Sim-
ilarly, in Africa the kings of the Benin as weil as those of the Dahomey
were depicted as half human, half dragon in state art.
Though I have used the European historical belief in living dragons to

suggest some connection to the shift from earlier multicentric forms to
more modern unicentric forms, the model I am suggesting holds for the
majority of cases in which the dragon worldwide has been seen to be
real. The New World cases of the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec dragons are
found in the context of centralized political forms, pre-states, ancient
kingdoms, and primitive states. Likewise, the images of winged serpents
and uktenas found in the archaeological and ethnological record of the
American Southeast are connected to forms of social life in which
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hereditary chieftains held sway over castes of nobles, warriors, and com-
moners in large urban populations. One found at the site of Cahokia, a
Native American town dating between 1050 and 1250 along the con-
fluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, covered an area of five
square miles and supported a population ofbetween 30,000 and 40,000
people. The same can be said for the context of the belief in Pululukon
among the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest. These societies
were (are) highly organized urban populations with centralized leader-
ship.The dragons ofHawaii lived during the rise ofthe kingdom found
when the first Europeans entered the islands.The New Guinea dragons
co-exist with interior New Guinea groups, such as the Dani, who were
moving from scattered village organization to a centralized type of
structure based on their chronic warfare and the concomitant rise of the
war leader, a standard scenario worldwide during the rise of centralized
polities. The same evolutionary correlation between rising centralized
forms and the belief in real dragons clearly exists also in China, Japan,
Southeast Asia, the Near East, India, and Africa.
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7
~
FATE OF
THE DRAGONS
ow are peoples of diverse cultures all over the world able to
~ Hexpress through their arts the existence of a fantastic, flying,

many-toothed, reptilian monster-which never existed? Addi-
tionally, how are they able to relate the same fundamental story about the
animal's behavior, strengths and weaknesses, nature, breath, facial fea-
tures, haunts, and proclivities?
Explanations put forth in the past have been unfocused, as if the sub-
ject matter of the dragon made modern scholars skittish. It seems that
most specialists wish to move directly to the assumption that the dragon
has no physical basis in reality; that it is powerful, yes, but after all, a mere
symbol and therefore by definition inherently nonexistent and empty. Is
this reluctance by contemporary scholars to offer materialistic explana-
tions of the dragon-instead immediately relegating the dragon to sym-
bol, and therefore by definition to an unreal status-a faint echo of the
fear of the dragon carried by our kind through the millennia even into
the halls of academe?
The puzzle of dragon lore is that, even if the dragon is pure imagi-
nation, why does it look the way it looks? Why does a dragon look like
a dragon? So me writers have suggested that the dragon rnight be the
113
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result of primordial "memories" in the human line, passed down from the
days of the dinosaurs. That idea fails for two reasons. Dinosaurs were
extinct more than 60 million years before the first upright-walking, tool-
using ancestor of modern humans walked the earth. Second, even though
the most ancient ancestral roots of the human line existed at the time of
the dinosaur, they would have been but tiny snacks for the large reptiles
of the Jurassic period, and probably not systematically preyed upon.
Even if they were, our primal ancestors would come to have a relatively
longer history with the three basic primate predators of the contempo-
rary era than with the dinosaurs, thus tilting the scale in favor of the three
predators and not the dinosaurs as the most likely dragon models.
Some who reject the dinosaur as the source of the dragon suggest that
the fossil remains of dinosaurs led to the tales of the world-dragon. The
problems with this hypothesis are many. Clearly recognizable dinosaur
skeletons are few, and before modern techniques to clear land, dynamite
mountainsides for roads, excavate with great earthmoving machines,
mine with bit and drill, and tunnel, uncovering dinosaur fossil remains
would, of course, have been rare.
Cultures to a great degree provide the stuff with which we think
about the world.As I observed in the opening chapter, a fossilized foot-
print of a giant, three-toed creature from the Jurassic period would
have been perceived as the footprint of piamupits, the cannibal owl, by the
traditional Comanche Indians of the southern Great Plains, and as a giant,
fire-breathing lizard by an English peasant of the eleventh century A.D.
Finally, even if there were thousands of clearly identifiable complete
dinosaur fossils (and there are not), they could not provide an explana-
tion for the widely dispersed common notions concerning the dragon's
behavior and specific facial features-horns, crests, beards, piercing eyes,
sharp teeth, aggression toward young women, poisonous breath, reptil-
ian body, tendency to live in deep pools or dank caves, and fascination
with obtaining and guarding treasure.
Another hypo thesis suggests beasts like the Komodo dragon, Varanus
komodoensis, of Indonesia as the origin of dragon mythology. This and
other species of the great monitor lizards are as dose to living dragons as
can be found. However, the Komodo dragon, discovered by the Western
114
Ifr
----- FATE OF THE DRAGONS ~
world only in the early twentieth century, has had a very restricted
range throughout its long history. It does not seem likely that a rare ani-
mal from the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia could have been the
model for the universal dragon. It lives far off the beaten path, which, of
course, is the reason it stilllives. And even if the Komodo dragon were
the model, how could all the specifics ofthe dragon's look and behavior
be derived universally from observing a monitor lizard?The same can be
said for the python or the "flying dragon" lizard ofJava or the alligator
and crocodile as the models of the world-dragon.
Finally, most of the literature that attempts to discuss the dragon in
some sort of scholarly fashion falls into either mythological studies or
symboIic analysis in literature. In both cases, the dragon is interpreted as
symbol of this or that but never really identified. Its shape and nature are
not explained; the writers who deal with dragon-as-symbol ass urne that
it somehow leapt from human consciousness fully formed, and do not
wonder why this thing spawned by the mind should look and act exactly
as it does.
The weakest of all arguments simply holds that the dragon springs
from the imagination. That, of course, does not explain its universality,
appearance, or behavior. Humans are wonderful at imagining, and as far
as we know, we may be the only animal in the world with this talent. No
human being, however, can imagine what he cannot image, or go beyond
what his culture and education give hirn to imagine. Before the dragon
idea existed, no one could recognize the footprint of a dragon. So the
problem returns: What is the source of the dragon that can be imagined,
and why do we humans recognize it when we see it or hear it described
to us?
lt was an afternoon's study of so me scientific articles concerning the
behavior of vervet monkeys in the face of attack by their three basic
predators-snake, rap tor, and leopard-that triggered the idea that the
world-dragon was in so me way specifically connected to the predators
of arboreal primates. Further study revealed not only that vervets are
hunted by the snake, raptor, and tree-climbing carnivore, but also that this
is a very typical relationship for arboreal primates in all parts of the world.
Specific reactions to alarm calls identifYing various types of predators have
115
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------- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -----
been demonstrated globally in arboreal primate populations, further

evidence that the vervet monkey situation is indicative of a widespread
behavior pattern among arboreal primates.
Natural selection theory, focusing on the nature of behavior-gene
feedback, presents the idea that extant universal behaviors might be
understood as the result of environmental pressures on an ancient pop-
ulation. This selective pressure would favor certain individuals who pos-
sess the qualities that assist survival in a given environment and act to
eliminate those with less adaptive capabilities. Natural selection serves to
ensure that the genetic inheritance of a successful member of a popula-
tion is sent forward into the next generation, there to be refined by the
great process of natural selection even further.
The innate predator responses of arboreal primates can be under-
stood as the result of our ancient primate ancestors' struggle to survive
and propagate for millions of years in the midst of three types of killers
who sought them for a meal.The innate aspect means that this complex
of predator recognition and response must be "hardwired," built into the
brain. This being so, the genetic propensity to recognize and react to the
presence of the snake, raptor, and big carnivore has come through the
generations of our forebears, deeply etched by time and the inherent
intensity and absoluteness of confrontation with the killers. We find it in
animal phobias and other prey-related phobias, such as fear of open
spaces.
Many studies that suggest that the brain operates in terms of chunk-
ing, lumping, grouping, indexing, and biogramming help to explain
how the arboreal primate reaction merged the three predators into the
composite predator, the dragon, at a point in human evolution when the
arboreal existence was slowly giving way to terrestrial life. Roughly
speaking, this took place 3 to 4 million years ago during the development
of the early forms ofbipedal, upright, tool making creatures such as Aus-
tralopithecus.
For hundreds of thousands of years the dragon siept, perhaps decay-
ing, perhaps existing as some nightmare in the troubled thoughts of the
ancient humans. It was not capable of finding expression until art and lan-
guage had sufficiently evolved, allowing for increasingly fanciful and ulti-
116
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~ FATE OF THE DRAGONS ~
mately local cultural manifestations, maintaining to this day its shape and
nature. Though we glimpse the dragon in the world of the ancient
bandsmen, it does not spring into life from the murky depths of the pri-
mate brain until a particular point in cultural evolution, specifically that
point where a multicentric, or loosely organized, polity moves toward
centralization and ultimately statehood.
At this point the dragon is confronted by agents of the new order,
the culture hero.Typically in armor and bearing a sword (a scenario even
existing among the uktena combatants of ancient Cherokee Indian
times), he kills the beast or tames it; and its image is added to the sym-
bols of state: the crests ofEuropean warlords and ancient monarchs, the
coats of a Chinese emperor, the shield of an Aztec king, the flag ofWales.
As if the destruction of the dragon cannot be too thorough for the
human spirit, the dragon next appears to metamorphose into a palpably
unreal character of fantasy. Today the Chinese dragon dancers, a feature
of public celebrations anywhere in the world Chinese populations are
found, show us that the dragon is empty, generated by human energy, a
thing to play with and store away until next year (fig. 23).
The curious feature of the dragon's demise is that even in fantasy it
unifies the human community. Once the unification resulted from the
fear of the beast, and now we enjoy our final conquest over it by using
its name and image in sports teams, in children's foIktaIes, movie mon-
ster manifestations, and the shoddy pIaster statues of cute, absolutely non-
threatening and whimsical creatures found in all tourist haunts.
In this study I have been guided by biocuItural anthropology, a perspec-
tive that suggests that certain universal cuIturaI constructs, e.g., dragons,
should- in the absence of evidence demonstrating diffusion from some
cuItural center-be investigated from the standpoint of their possible bio-
logical origins. We are biological entities who have shared descent over
the millennia from creatures who were arboreal during most of their
existence, shaped by life-and-death struggles ac ted out in the primordial
forests ofhuman beginnings. Slowly honed through natural and, later, no
doubt also cultural selection, the ancient primates' sensitivity to the
three animals that hunted them came to form the substratum of the
dragon, a form that we can all perceive as fundamentally the same from
117
~
FIGURE 23: THE DRAGON DANCE OF CHINA. THE DANCER IN THE LEFT
FOREGROUND HOLDS A POLE UPON WHICH RESTS THE MAGIC PEARL,
A TREASURE PURSUED BY THE DRAGON.
~ FATE OF THE DRAGONS -----
one culture to another.At the same time the dragon's image was of ne ces-
sity expressed through the customary artistic conventions of a culture
manipulated by the artistic individual, thus providing well-nigh infinite
variations on the primal, biologically based design motifs. In the end, we
find that our psyches are stalked by a fabulous creature whose outlines,
etched by evolution and polished by natural selection, rernind us that we
are still ancient beings possessed of an instinct for dragons.
119
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A
~
THE TREE OF LIFE
AND THE THREE
SACRED REALMS
he ideas, experimental findings, field observations, and basic sei-
~ T entific information marshaled thus far to argue for the biolog-

ical basis of the world-dragon carry in their wake observations
concerning the possible biological basis of two other panglobal myth
components: the tree of life and the common cosmological belief in the
three realms of existence--the here, the below, and the above. These two
themes are implicit in the ancient prehuman behaviors and context
relating arboreal creatures with the world of their predators.
THE WORLD TREE
The relationship between the tree oflife and the dragon is found in many
areas. Donald Mackenzie (1994), for example, notes, "In China and
Japan there are references in dragon stories to pine trees being forms
assumed by dragons. The connection between the tree and the dragon is
emphasized by the explanation that when a pine becomes very old it is
121
~
covered with sc ales of bark, and ultimately changes into a dragon. By

night 'dragon lanterns' (ignis fatuus) are seen on pine trees in marshy
places, and on the masts of ships at sea" (83).
Indian nagas were likewise described as not only water deities but also
tree spirits; and in Gaelic stories, the holy tree is protected by the "beast,"
one form of which is the dragon that lives in the sacred weil.
The tree oflife motif, no matter where it is found or in wh at artis-
tic context, like the dragon is basically the same entity from culture to
culture and generally recognizable across cultural-aesthetic boundaries.
It is in its most basic form simply an immense tree that is symbolic oflife,
safety, and fertility and functions to connect the earth and the sky realms
(fig. 24). Among the Norsemen, for example, the great ash Y ggdrasil, the
World Tree, was believed to join the underworld to the world of men and
then move up to the horne of the gods. Eagles hovered over the great
tree, and snakes fed among its roots, while a squirrel named Ratatoskr ran
up and down the trunk, carrying messages between the eagle and a
dragon that waited at the base of the tree.
In an ancient Scandinavian poem, Voluspa, written sometime before
the eleventh century, the "seeress" predicts the final fate of the gods and
in doing so makes reference to the World Tree and related notion of three
levels, or in this case, levels comprised of numbers divisible by three:
I remember the giants born at the dawn of time,

and those who first gave birth to me.
I know of nine worlds, ni ne spheres covered by the tree
of the world,
That tree set up in wisdom which grows down to the bosom
ofthe earth. (Cook 1974,11)
A Han Chinese tomb rubbing from the Chamber of Offerings by

Won Yong and dated to A.D. 168 shows a luxuriant tree oflife envelop-
ing the world, connecting animal, bird, and human realms to the heav-
ens. Scythians in central Asia worshiped trees and drew tree of life
designs on their scabbards. The Lapps of Finland believe that the World
Tree unites the three levels of underworld, earth, and sky.
The shamans of Siberia often depict the tree of life on their cloth-
ing. In healing rituals they utilize a small, decorated birch tree, cut with
122
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~ THE TREE OF LZFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS ~
nine notches to represent the ni ne heavens through which the shaman

will spiritually pass. It is placed in a specially prepared tent as a symbol of
the tree of life, through which the spirit rises to the world above or
descends to the world below.
The tree oflife appears on bowls between the thirteenth and tenth
century Re. in ancientAssyria. It dates to A.D.1350 in the Mayer Fejer-
vary Codex from Mexico. In Black Elk Speaks, the Oglala Sioux holy man
tells of a profound vision in which the tree oflife stood at the center of
alllife, Wakantanka, God.
An Egyptian tomb painting from between the sixteenth and four-
teenth centuries B.e. in Thebes depicts the sycamore fig, the Egyptian tree
oflife, where the Great Earth Mother comes to provide all things for the
living and to welcome the deceased into her eternal realm. In the famotiS
Javanese Wayang, or "shadow theater;' the kekayon tree is the sacred cen-
ter around and upon which the forces of gods and devils batde. In Tibet
the ta'ogs-shing, theAssemblyTree ofthe Gods,has roots that reach from
the deepest depths of the primordial waters to the realms of the gods.
The prayer carpets of traditional Muslims often depict the gardens of
paradise built aroundthe central motif ofthe tree oflife, with its associ-
ated symbols of flight and ascent. An eighth-century illumination from
Ireland shows two dragons climbing on the tree oflife, and in a painting
by Pacino Da Bonaguido, a fourteenth-century Italian artist, we see the
life of Christ in a tree oflife motif with twelve branches.
In Nara,Japan, a seventh-century altar bas-relief at the Tamamushi
temple depicts a tree oflife. In Buddhist cultures, because of the centrality
of the Bo under which Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, experienced
Nirvana, Enlightenment, the tree of life is a very widespread design
theme.
The Or-Danom Dayak ofBorneo believe that the tree oflife grows
from the belly of a giant serpent that lives in the underworld; and far the
Navajo Indians of the southwestern United States, the tree of life is a
giant, sacred corn plant, rooted in th~ deepest earth and ascending to the
heavens. The Navajo say that the "path ofblessing" runs through the cos-
mic cornstalk, and it symbolizes life, health, and weIl-being. Their myths
tell that their gods often travel through various dimensions in the cen-
ter of the cornstalk.
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FIGURE :24:THE OLMEC, A COMPLEX CIVILIZATJON OF EASTERN MEXICO
THAT PREDATES THE AZTEC AND THE MAYA, DEPICTED THE TREE OF LIFE
IN THIS FASHION.
~
THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS ~
The Navajo version of the tree oflife points to another aspect of this
motiE. Sometimes the basic feature of the tree, its vertical trunk, is isolated
and shaped like a pole, pillar, stupa, mountain, obelisk, or ladder, to
name a few of the most common abstracted or refined images. Some-
times the basic image is distilled even further to represent the Axis
Mundi, or center of the world.
A good example ofhow the tree can literally become a pillar is found
in the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "duration and stability." The pillar
is based on a symbol, the Djed Pillar, for the immortal god Osiris. The
image is that of a tree with the branches removed, leaving the trunk, or
pillar. In spring festivals in ancient rural England where celebrations were
based on the reverence for life and fertility, the celebrants danced around
a maypole, a custom that has persisted in the Uni ted States, usually in
rural areas, to the present day.
Poles were central images in the mythology and religious behaviors
of many native American peoples. The Chickasaw and Choctaw of Mis-
sissippi tell in their origin myths of a sacred pole that led them from dis-
tant lands in the west into the fertile Mississippi River Valley.
Archaeologists excavating in Georgia and Alabama find evidence of
poles, some as large as three feet in diameter, erected in plaza areas
around which council houses and hornes of the elites were built. EarlY
explorers in the Southeast described these poles as eight to ten feet high
and recounted the many ritual activities that took place around thern.
Indians of the High Plains, peoples like the Blackfoot, Lakota,
Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, and Kiowa, practiced as their central tribai rit-
ual the sun dance, a world-renewal ceremony that took place early each
summer. The central feature of the ritual structure built for the occasion
was a tree, cut and erected for the dance, which was believed to connect
the human level to the divine. Upon the sun dance tree were placed offer-
ings, and it was while attached to the tree with thongs piercing the flesh
of their chests that brave men danced, pulling away from the tree until
their skin tore open, releasing the wood pins to which the thongs were
attached. In so doing they believed that their god would speak to them
through the tree and that their suffering would alleviate that of their peo-
pIe over the coming year. The Plains Indians correctly suggest that this
behavior is similar to the Christi an account of the crucifixion, where the
125
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----- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -----
cross of Golgotha is the tree upon which Jesus hung in pain and suffer-
ing as a prayer for his people.The incorrectly named "totem poles" ofthe
many Indian cultures along the Pacific Coast from Oregon to Alaska like-
wise suggest the essential meaning and structure of the tree oflife.
In the belief of the Arunta, a native people living in the middle of
Australia, a sacred pole stood at the center of creation where, after mak-
ing the world, the god Numbakula ascended to the sky-world, never to
be seen again. Like the Chickasaw and Choctaw of Mississippi, the Aus-
tralian aborigines tell of sticking a pole in the ground at the end of a day's
march and traveling in the direction in which the pole tilted the next
morning. The pole was connecting their world and the upper world.
The Buddhist stupa and the Japanese temple pagoda are meant as
cosmic axes: as connectors between the here, the below, and the above,
and as emblems that promise eternallife if the beliefs for which they stand
are followed in daily life. And as noted earlier, these structures are gen-
erally symbolically or terminologically linked to the sacred Bo tree
under which Siddhartha gained enlightenment and became the Buddha.
A tree, this time the sal tree, is connected to the place where Buddha was
born. The notion that the tree oflife is the source of gods is also found
in the Greek tale in which the god of vegetation, Adonis, is born from
the trunk of a myrrh tree.
The idea that the tree is nurturing to the soul and body occurs
throughout Africa, where many cultures associate sap-filled trees as man-
ifestations of a "divine mother," or source oflife. Similarly, the back of a
Chinese bronze mirror from the Tang dynasty, seventh to ninth century,
pictures the sacred tree and describes its sap as the elixir of immortality,
the ambrosia of the gods.
In Islam, as noted previously, the image of the tree of life stands cen-
trally in the celestial gardens. In the tale "The Night Journey," when
Muhammad traveled into the depths and then ascended from Mecca, the
center oflslam, into the seven planetary spheres that populate the heav-
ens, his journey is sometimes through a tree and sometimes up a ladder.
In Japan trees are often decorated with a shime-nawa, a rope of
twisted rice straw from which hang white paper strips cut in a zigzag
design, a symbol suggesting the Shinto idea that the tree houses a kami,
or spirit. The famous Druids, priests of the Celts, are widely described in
126
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THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS ......-....
Roman accounts as worshipers of trees; and in many rural villages in

India today, the citizen venerate a tree, usually a large, old, or dramatic
one, as sacred and symbolic of birth, death, and rebirth. The Jewish
menorah, the seven-branched candleholder, origina11y was derived from
an ancient Mesopotarnian tree oflife symboLThe Christmas tree and the
Washington Monument as modern cultural emblems rnight be related to
the more exotic examples of the tree of life motif found above.
James Frazer, author of the classical anthropological study of religion
The Golden Bough (1961) was very much interested in the worldwide dis-
persal of ideas that celebrate trees as sacred. His work adds two related
ideas to the tree of life motif: that groves of trees may be considered
sacred, and that the tree itself may be the subject of worship. He notes the
probability that the Teutonic word for "temple" derives from the ancient
German concept that certain sma11 woods were sacred sanctuaries. The
Celts, of course, are noted for the oak-grove worshiping of the Druids.
Near Uppsala, the old religious capital ofSweden, is a sacred grove.The
Slavs, Lithuanians, Greeks, and Italians a11 have tree worship in their early
histories. The seriousness of sacred grove worship among the Germans
is suggested by the severity of an old German penalty for one who dared
to strip bark from a standing tree. The crirninal's navel was cut out and
nailed to the tree scar resulting from the stripped bark. Then, according
to Frazer, he was driven round and round the tree "ti11 a11 his guts were
wound about its trunk" (41).
In the Forum of ancient Rome, the center of Roman life, the
ancient fig tree ofRomulus was worshiped. Not far away, on the Pala-
tine Hill, a dogwood tree grew that was considered sacred by the
Romans.
Frazer discusses many cultures in which trees are considered both
sacred and conscious, a sampling of which fo11ows: the Finnish-Ugrian
peoples, the tribes of the Volga, the Ostyaks and Woguls of Siberia, the
Dyaks ofBorneo, the Fiji Islanders, the ancient Chinese,American Indi-
ans of the Upper Missouri River, the Ojibway of Canada, the peasant vil-
lagers of Austria, the Dieri of south Australia, the Bontoc of Luzon, the
Miao-Kia of western China, the Lkungen Indians ofBritish Columbia,
the Siaoo of the East Indians, the Warramunga of central Australia, and the
Ga11a of East Africa.
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -----..-
Like the dragon, the tree oflife concept and design is found world-
wide, and it, like the dragon, is variously rendered from culture to cul-
ture. It is universally recognizable and carries everywhere a complex of
ideas that associate the sacred tree (pillar/pole/obelisk/grove) with fer-
tility, life, and birth: the future.
THE TRIPARTITE COSMOS
The sacred tree of the Norsemen,Y ggdrasil, mentioned at the outset of

this chapter, clearly illustrates the second dimension of myth to be
addressed, a dimension related to the tree ofhfe and to the basic argument
far the origin of the dragon image in world culture. Conveniently for our
working hypothesis,Y ggdrasil is generaIly depicted with a dragon at its
base. Serpents crawl in its roots, eagles float in the top reaches, and a furry,
four-footed animal (in the Norse case, a squirrel) traverses the trunk con-
necting the above and the below.The connection ofthe tree oflife with
three levels is widespread.Alexander Eliot (1976) writes,
There is a quite remarkable consistency in the use and symbolic sig-

nificance of the tree in almost all cultures, and in the most ancient
myths. Its original mythic function is as the center of the world. The
tree itself usually incorporates three levels: its roots grow down through
the earth to the underworld, while the trunk rises through the world
of men and holds the crown up toward the unattainable heights of
heaven .... It is the symbol oflife. (110)
The here, the below, and the above probably comprise the most fun-
damental expression of cosmological structure [ound in the world.And
even when the number is not three, the tripartite structure can be main-
tained when the numbers are divisible by three as in the above cases. For
example, there may be a singular here but a three-level pattern to the
above and below, as among many tribes of the Southeast cultural area, or
a here, above, and below with four directions on the here level (and
sometimes on the above and below levels as weil) among many Plains
Indian cultures. Further, the world's most populated religions all feature
a clearly delineated three-level picture of the cosmic world-here,
128
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----- THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS ~
heaven, hell. The below commonly serves as the realm of creatures of the
dark, often depicted as reptilian, and the above, the realrns oflight where
flying beings abound. The creatures of the here gene rally share common
features with humans, also creatures of the here, but are definitely affected
by the powers of the above and below. The major gods of the world are
commonly depicted as descending from the above to the below, as well
as ascending from the below to the above, like the dragon who carries the
image of the above in its wings, the here in its claws and horns, and the
below in its reptilian aspect. The One God is a dragon transformed by the
rise of state consciousness religions to be a force of all dimensions that are
on the side of the Good, who have the formula (prayers, rituals, priests)
to bind the great power of the god/ dragon to the control of states.
Examples of a three-Ievel cosmos not only abo und in contemporary
Asian-rooted religions such as Christianity,]udaism, Hinduism, Islam, and
Buddhism but are also found in all parts of the world and in a wide vari-
ety of technological contexts, from hunting bands to horticultural village
life to modern urban societies. As with the dragon and the tree of life
motif, the tripartite cosmos will demonstrate many variations as we
move in our survey from culture to culture, but all will have the funda-
mental concept of some version of the here, the above, and the below.
Reindeer herders ofSiberia, peoples such as the Tungus andYakuts,
believe that there are "three worlds." In the lower world reside ancestral
spirits, while the middle world is the abode of living humans; and the
upper or sky world houses vague sky spirits as well as the powerful spir-
its ofSun, Moon, and Stars.
The Dyak peoples of Borneo, small-scale farmers and gatherers of
Melanesia, picture the cosmos as a house with a tree growing through the
rniddle of it. The branches of the tree, commanded by an eagle, represent
the upper world; the floor of the house, this world; and the roots of the
trees, among which a dragonlike serpent slithers, the lower world.
The Norsemen held a sirnilar idea in which the upper world, the
horne of the gods, is watched over by an eagle, and the underworld, dark
and inhospitable, is commanded by giant snakes. The world of living
humans is the world of the here and now. Also reminiscent of the Dyak
peoples, the Norsemen often portrayed a great tree as the emblem ofthe
upper, middle, and lower worlds.
129
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The San, hunters and gatherers of southwest Africa and the Kalahari
Desert, believe that the earth was created by the supreme being N!adima,
who lives with his wife in the upper reaches of the sky world. Land, the
second level of the San cosmos, is the horne of the San, while the third
level, the underworld, is populated with monsters and spirits of the dead.
In the American Southwest, peoples such as the Zuni, Hopi,Tewa, and
Keresans believed in a tripartite cosmos, each level having a variety of sub-
levels. Likewise, the Iroquis Indians of the Northeast (a farming, trading,
and hunting people to whom the earlier English colonists referred as the
Five Nations and who controlled vast territories from south-central New
York State to Lake Ontario) saw the cosmos as composed of three tiers.
The sky world and the underworld stood as extremes and in opposition
to each other. The sky world represented order, goodness, and light,
while in the underworld dwelled chaos, evil, darkness, and death.The in-
between world was that of everyday human experience.A single pine tree
with five white roots symbolized the lroquois confederation.
Native Americans of the Southeast, peoples such as the Creeks,
Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee, believed this world, the realm of
everyday life, to be a circular island that rested upon a primordial sea. The
upperworld was peopled by the Sun, Moon, and large perfect specimens,
or "Kings," of aU the creatures that lived on this world. In the underworld,
monstrous entities inhabited a place of darkness and confusion.
The nomadic, bison-hunting Lakota of the northern Great Plains
believed that before the creation of the earth, the gods lived in a celes-
tial domain; and the ancestors ofhumans lived, without culture, in a dark
and forbidding underworld. In aseries of soap-opera-like events, the chief
of the gods, Takuskanskan, became angry when the spider trickster Ink-
tomi seduced Ite, daughter of Old Man and Old Woman, into having an
illicit affair with Sun (who was rightfuUy n1arried to Moon, the mother
of his daughter Wohpe, or Falling Star). Takuskanskan created the earth
and banished Old Man, Old Woman, lte, and Wohpe to its surface. Ink-
tomi, out ofboredom, acted on arequest by lte to find company for the
gods. Inktomi, in the guise of a wolf, traveled into the underworld,
located a village ofhumans, and convinced one of them, Tokahe, to move
to the earth's surface. Tokahe, called the First, later brought others to the
surface, and these were thought to be the first Lakota.
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~ THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS ~
South of the Lakota, and like them nomadic buffalo hunters, lived the
Cheyenne. They believed in Heammawihio, a supreme being of great
knowledge who eons ago left the earth to live in the sky. He is the Wise
One Above, and his emblem is the sun. The underworld is controlled by
Aktunowihio, the Wise One Below, while the earth is seen as aseparate
entity but related to the topmost layer of the underworld.
The Iroquois Indian confederation-Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga-who in ancient times hunted and farmed through-
out much ofNewYork State as well as parts ofCanada and Pennsylva-
nia, believed in a tripartite cosmos in which the spirit forces in each
ascending level possessed broader power and control than the spirit
forces on the layers beneath. The highest level comprised Spirit Forces
beyond the Sky and contained the Four Beings, Creator, and Handsome
Lake. The second tier, Spirit Forces in the Sky, contained Wind, Thun-
derers, Sun, Moon, and Stars. The third level, Spirit Forces on Earth, com-
prised People, Animals, Earth, Grasses, Birds, Fruit, Trees, Water, and the
Three Sisters-corn, beans, and squash.
In the Far North, in the frigid lands stretching from the northern ter-
ritories of Canada to Greenland, live the Inuit (Eskimo). Their cosmol-
ogy describes Adlivun, "those who live beneath us," and its mistress
Sedna. Adlivun is typically depicted at the bottom of the sea. Here,
Sedna lives in a house made of reflective walls, where she is guarded by
astrange doglike creature with black hindquarters and no tai!. She is the
central focus of the Inuit in these regions, since they believe that she sup-
pli es the llsh and animals of the sea. Souls of the dead come to Sedna until
they become adliparmio} or "at rest," at which time they go to a heaven-
like place, which the Inuit see as "below," or a hell-like place,"above." The
upper world, associated with Sila, a sky spirit who controls the sun, is
cold, with nothing to eat; while the lower world, associated with Sedna,
is the reward for those who in life were good workers and hunters, those
who accomplished great feats, and those who died by violence or in
childbirth.
In Mesoamerica the Maya, city builders to rival the Aztec, thought
of the heavens as thirteen layers, each presided over by a principal god.
The lowest of the thirteen layers became the earth's surface, stage of
human activity, while the underworld had ni ne layers, the lowest of
131
~
which, Metnal, was ruled over by Ah Puch, the Lord of Death. A study
of a modern Mayan community, the northern Lacandon Maya of south-
eastern Chipas, Mexico, revealed another variation of the threefold cos-
mic classification. The Lacandon Maya believe in a cosmos that has
three major levels and two others oflittle to no importance in daily life.
In the underworld reside the souls of the dead, and inhabiting the earth,
humans and terrestrial deities.The Celestial God's Sky is the kingdom of
sky gods as weIl as Sun, Moon, and Stars. The two additional layers are
"higher" levels. One is called K'akoch's Layer ofSky, where the creator
god K'akoch lives but remains separate from the affairs ofhumans; and
the other is the Minor God's Sky, the most remote realm conceivable,
where all is cold and dark.
The Aymara of Bolivia display their understanding of the three-
leveled cosmos in many ways. During the Feast of the Dead, the Aymara
build in their kitchens a mesa, or "table" for the dead, which is constructed
of three levels. The lowest is covered with sampies of coca, apples, bananas,
and chicha-Iowland products-while the the next ascending tier is dec-
orated with cooked potatoes, beer, oca, and bread, symbolizing the cen-
trallands. A square box forms the third and highest level, where flowers
and effigies and products ofbirds, fish, and cattle are found.The Aymara
say that the three-Ieveled table represents Mount Kaata.Joseph Bastien,
author of Mountain cf the Condor (1978), writes, "The Indians understand
the mountain as asolid three-leveled center with an ephemeral heaven
above a hollow neatherworld foundation. The Sun, the living and the
dead, circulate above, below and around the mountain" (179).
The Yanomamo Indians, a horticultural people with a population of
about 20,000 who live in widely scattered villages in Brazil and
Venezuela, conceive of the cosmos as four layers. The topmost layer, how-
ever, contains nothing that relates to the life of the Yanomamo. Below the
top level is the sky world. The Yanomamo believe that people can see
only the bottom of the sky world, where the stars, sun, and moon display
themselves. They feel, however, that the top of the sky world looks very
much like the earth where they live, with jungles and gardens and ani-
mals. The Yanomamo believe the souls of the dead go there and carry on
an existence into eternity very much like the one they left behind on the
earth's surface.
132
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THE TREE OF LIFE AND THE THREE SACRED REALMS -----
The Yanomamo further believe that the level on which they live was
formed when a piece of the sky world broke off and fell down to its pre-
sent location. The bottom-most layer, which exists underneath the earth,
came about when a very heavy piece of the sky world fell onto a par-
ticular villa ge with such force that it pushed it through the earth's sur-
face to a new lower level. However, since the catastrophe left their
gardens and hunting grounds behind when their village was driven
below, the people of that level are thought to be cannibals who are par-
ticularly fond of preying on the souls of children.
The same questions can be posed about the three sacred levels and
the tree of life that were asked about the dragon:Why?Why does it look
the way it does? What is the source of the common images and me an-
ings that attach to such global myth elements as dragons, trees oflife, and
the three sacred levels? Cultures have attempted various ways to depict
the axis of the world, the connecting link from here to there. In some,
the image of cosmic connection is a mountain (as with the Aymara just
discussed), in some a rainbow upon which gods glide. In others, clouds
or lightning bolts or sunbeams play the role. But the presence of the tree
oflife far surpasses other symbols on the world stage, and it is found even
where the above images also exist, suggesting that the tree may be older
than the others, the result of evolving creative use of fundamentally and
biologically based religious symbolism.
Likewise, why the number three? The widespread notion of three
cosmic dimensions,like dragon beliefs, is similar in that neither is based
in physical fact but yet occurs in cultural units all over the planet. Why
not four or seven, two other popular numbers in the organization of cul-
tural materials?
As noted previously, one can simply elicit the argument for the
evolution of the dragon and find in natural selection the reasons that the
tree of life and the cosmology of three levels are as widespread as the
dragon. The roots of the dragon, the tree, and the three levels are all part
of what has to be one of the most crucial elements in understanding how
culture evolved, the arboreal experience of our most ancient ancestors.
If, as with the attempt to understand the dragon, we look at the world
from the perspective of our ancient primate ancestors, the tree oflife is
not mere symbol; it is the most fundamental truth and reality. Likewise,
133
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~ AN INSTlNCT FüR DRAGüNS ~
the three levels: they result from the spatial discriminatiün and sensitiv-
ity forced upon ancient primates by the life-and-death encounter with
the predators of the sky, of the tree, and of the ground.
In all studies of monkeys, baboons, orangutans, chimpanzees, and
lemurs, their first goal in the face of attack is to seek the safety of trees.
To gain the tree is to live. This is fundamental in our origins. Obviously
those ancient an ces tors who lacked the deep connection to the tree were
killed, while those who evolved through millennia of predation an
instinct to flee and to climb in the face of attack survived, and their
genetic propensities with them, to be carried forward into the future gen-
erations. The result today is the widespread use of trees as celebrations of
life-a gigantic tree (remember the perspective of the small ancient
primates) that reaches from the depths of the earth to the heavens.
The importance of the trunk of the tree as pillar, stupa, or obelisk is
understandable in that the major drive of the ancient arboreal ancestors
was to access the trunk, not necessarily the branches.The trunk provided
the main highway up and down in the run for life-up from the leop-
ard, down from the eagle, and up and down, depending on the location
of the hunting arboreal snake.
The realities of primate evolution, which include the role of preda-
tors as mechanisms of natural selection, have biologically predisposed
humans to a sensitivity to the dragon image, as weH as to the tree oflife
motif and the tripartite cosmos. The near-universal presence of these
mythic entities and conditions cannot be explained by appeal to diffu-
sion from a single source. Further, the unique complexity of the dragon,
tree of life, and tripartite cosmos forestalls any attempt to explain their
universal presence by an appeal to independent invention. A biocultural
mode of explanation seems to account for the mythic universals under
discussion more elegantly than alternative theories.
134
W
B
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MORE TALES
OF THE GREAT WORM
ragons! Dragons! Dragons! They are everywhere. They ramble
~ D through space and time as no other beast, imaginary or real, has

ever done. Look into world mythology; they are there. Peek
into the most remote corners of the world, and you will find them. Walk
down the main street of any modern city, scan the store windows, and I
guarantee you will eventually see one.
Professional hockey claims the San Antonio Dragons; the American
Arena Football League, the Pordand Forest Dragons; and the National
Football League's European division, the Barcelona Dragons. The Des
Moines Dragons compete in the International Basketball Association,
while the Orlando Dragons play in an all-women's baseballleague. The
Bethesda Dragons won the Under-Eleven Maryland State Soccer Cham-
pionship in 1996. The Batde Dragons fight it out in the Paintball com-
petition in Michigan, and the Sonoma Sea Dragons win tournaments in
the California swim club competition. In Australia, the St. George Drag-
ons play other members of the Australian National Rugby League,
while in Brisbane, the Dragon Vollyball Association maintains offices and
an extensive website for its fans. In the United Kingdom, the Durham
135
~
City Dragons play in the u.K. lce Hockey League, and the u.K. rugby
worId includes the Doncaster Dragons.
In the People's Republic of the Congo, hundreds of native peoples
as weil as foreign visitors have reported seeing a creature called the
mokele-mbembe. They describe a large dinosaurIike body and four massive
legs with clawed feet, a thick, tapering tail, and a long, slender neck. About
the size of an elephant, it reaches a totallength of thirty feet. It is said to
live in the trackless wastes of the Likouala swamps in the Congo. Reports
of its existence have been so persuasive in modern times that in the 1980s
a number of expeditions, including one mounted by biologist Roy
Mackal of the University of Chicago, went in search of it.
What drew Professor Mackai into the field was obviously not the
search for a dragon but the interesting fact that ail of the many eyewit-
ness accounts of the mokele-mbembe seemed to be describing a small
sauropod dinosaur; and of course, it is weIl known that dinosaurs have
been extinct for many miilions of years and were never seen by humans.
Still, the natives living on the edge of the Likouala swamp were shown
pictures of nonlocal animals as weIl as prehistoric animals, and every time
they identified the sauropod dinosaur as mokele-mbembe.
The Greek myth dealing with the battle between Zeus and the
dragon called Typhon, a tale alluded to in the text, has a few other
exciting plot elements that were not detailed earIier. Zeus and the other
gods ran from Typhon and took refuge in Egypt; but after being accused
of cowardice, Zeus returned to give batde to Typhon. Zeus lost the first
few encounters with the creature that could huri entire mountains but
finaily wounded hirn in a batde in Thrace and chased hirn to Sicily, where
he succeeded in crushing the beast under Mount Aetna.
Gaea, an ancient Greek earth goddess impregnated by a single drop
of blood that feil from Typhon's head, gave birth to the autochthons
Actaeus, the first king ofAthens; Cecrops, the second king ofAthens; and
Crannaus, successor to Cecrops, who renamed his kingdom Attica after
his daughter Atthis. Legend describes Actaeus, Cecrops, and Crannaus
with human heads and large reptilian bodies featuring four clawed feet
and stunted wings.
The Greek tale of Zagreus, son of Demeter the Earth Mother, fea-
tures his resurrection, after his dismemberment at the hands of the
136
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~ MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ~
Titans, as a horned serpent. In the ceremonies ofDionysus-Sabazius, a

snake was passed over the body of the initiate as the assembled dignitaries
chanted, "The Bull is the father of the Dragon, and the Dragon is the
father of the Bull." Another related Greek dragon reference states, "A ser-
pent never becomes a flying dragon until it has devoured another ser-
pent" (Charbonneau-Lassay 1991, 154-55).
Just as the Greeks believed that both monsters and heroes were
spawned by the gods, so too did the monstrous Typhon beget, with the
serpent-bodied Echidna, the chimera and the hydra Ladon, protector of
the garden of Hesperides and its golden apples. The chimera was
described in a number of ways. Fundamentally it was a fire-breathing
creature with a body that was, from front to back, that of a lion, a goat,
and a dragon. Sometimes it was depicted as lion-headed, with a living ser-
pent for a tail. Homer, in Book VI of the Iliad, showed the chimera as
capable of breathing fire. The Aeneid stated that the creature was native
to Lycia.
The most famous Greek hydra dragon, Ladon, the Lernaean hydra,
was killed by Hercules as the second ofhis legendary twelve labors at the
order of Eurystheus, king of Mycenae. Ladon, born in the swamp of
Lerna in southern Greece, destroyed farms, villages, and livestock, turn-
ing the district of Argolis into a sterile wasteland. Hercules confronted
Ladon at its lair, a dank cavern near Amymone, and though Hercules had
help in the batde from his companion Iolaus, so did the hydra. A huge
crab snapped at Hercules' feet as he struggled with the dragon.
The Greek god Apollo was forced to contend with a potent dragon
in the form of Python. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells of his search for
a site on which to build an oracular shrine. After a number of false starts,
he arrived at Delpbi and began to lay the foundations ofbis temple. How-
ever, he was soon challenged by a female dragon named Delphyne, a sav-
age beast that dwelt in aspring and ravaged the flocks and villages of the
people who lived in the area. In later versions, the dragon had become a
male and was called Python.
The Greek hero Jason, in his quest for the Golden Fleece, confronted
a guardian dragon in the service of the king of Colchis. With the help of
Medea, he drugged the beast and escaped with the Fleece. Centuries later
Alexander the Great, striking out with his armies from Macedonia,
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----- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
reportedly encountered a gigantic, hissing, cave-dwelling dragon so ter-

rifYing that his army offered it gifts and worship lest it destroy them.
In later times, the Roman writer Propertius told of a town twenty
miles trom Rome that was protected by an ancient dragon. The large rep-
tilian creature lived in a deep muddy pit and demanded a novel form of
payment for its protection: a pure young maiden with a basket of food
lowered into its cave to serve hirn with her own hands. If she flinched as
the dragon sucked the food from her fingers or if she proved impure in
heart and body, the dragon would shred her. lfher courage and virtue sat-
isfied hirn, she would be returned to the surface unharmed. The difficult
relationship between dragons and maidens repeatedly appears as a theme
in worldwide dragon lore.
The Roman army often featured dragon emblems on shields and
banners, and a windsock type of military standard was made in the
shape of a dragon. The dragon image, perhaps borrowed from the
Romans, was also used as a batde standard by the early British kings.]oe
Nigg (1995) writes, "The heraldic dragon has the toothed jaw and scaly
stornach of a crocodile, pointed ears, the talons of an eagle, the ribbed
wings of a bat, and a serpentine tail" (109).
During the First Punic War (264-241 Il.C.), when Rome was battling
the African city of Carthage over control of Sicily, the Roman army
under General Marcus Atilius Regulus confronted a giant serpent dur-
ing its march on Carthage. As the Roman battalions approached the
banks of the Bagrada River, they were met by a snakelike monster one
hundred feet in length. lts eyes burned liked fire, and its roar stunned the
army's front lines, forcing them to fall back. It lifted its huge body from
the reeds along the river and defied the Romans to pass. General Reg-
ulus consulted with his captains, and though their troops were armed
with many kinds of weapons, covered in armor, and in possession of a
number of wall-shattering war machines, they counseled the general not
to engage the monster. Regulus wisely backed his forces away from the
creature and marched to another point on the river to cross into
Carthage.
In many parts of the world, the dragon image is basically that of an
unnaturally large snake. However, as a house cat is not a lion, a snake is
not a dragon. The sheer nuss difference renders the lion a fundamentally
138
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~ MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ...--.;...-
different force than a house cat. Likewise, a mere snake does not equate
with the hundred-foot-long serpent reportedly confronted by the
Romans outside Carthage.
The dragon boats of the Vikings were believed to give these Norse
warriors cunning, courage, and keen eyesight. The Vikings drew their
dragon images from legends that reached back to the times recorded in
the Aesire, the sagas of the warrior gods of the Norsemen. It is there that
]ormungander, the Midgard Serpent, appears. Son ofLoki and Angerboda,
the god of evil, this immense serpent sported a dragon's head.When it was
brought before Odin the All Wise, he recognized its potential danger and
threw it into the depths of the sea. There it was ordered to remain, tail in
mouth, girdling the world like the Greek Oroboros until Ragnarok, the
Day of the Last Batde, at which time the giants, monsters, and warrior
gods would engage in their final struggles, the outcomes of which would
define eternity. Thor, the mighty god of thunder, however, was to
encounter ]ormungander several times, and in the last encounter he was
to die.
His first meeting with the great dragon occurred on a fishing trip
with his friend the giant Hymir. Thor, his hook baited with an ox head,
so on found hirnself embroiled with the Midgard Serpent. However,
just as Thor readied to kill the creature with his famed hammer, Hymir
lost his courage and cutThor's line, releasing the dragon back into the sea.
A picture from an Icelandic manuscript dating to 1680 depicts Jor-
mungander about to take Thor's bait. The horned head of the heavy-
bodied reptilian beast is about ten times the size of the ox-head bait, and
the mouth full oflong, sharp teeth.]ormungander's tail is drawn to sug-
gest feathers rather than a reptilian tip, and the creature has two short
clawed feet at the forward part of its body.
Eons later, on the Day of the Last Battle,]ormungander rose from the
sea to seek combat with Thor, the only warrior god worthy ofhim. The
fight was, of course, incredible. Thor hurled thunderbolts, and ]or-
mungander slashed, roared with rnind-rending blasts, writhed, and thun-
dered until Thor finally succeeded in striking hirn on the head with his
great hammer Miolnir. The dreaded Midgard Serpent fell to the ground
dead, but rninutes later, so too did Thor, killed by the monster's poisonous
final breath.
139
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~ AN INSTINCT FüR DRAGüNS .....-;...-
Another Scandinavian dragün, Nidhogg (also Nidhoggr, Nydhogg,

Niddhogg), dwelt in the pit called Hvergelmer at the base of Y ggdrasil,
the World Tree. This place was both a pillar which separated the earth and
sky and supported the universe, and the location where the gods rendered
judgment. The "Dread Eiter;' as this dragon was cailed, chewed nightly at
Y ggdrasil's roots to destroy the universe, while workmen returned each
day to repair the damage. This, according to the Norsemen, would con-
tinue forever. Nidhogg, whose main preoccupations were evil and destruc-
tion, is rendered in many paintings and drawings as a large lizardlike beast
with wings and huge claws and teeth.
Fafnir is perhaps the most weil known of the dragons of Norse
mythology, due to Wagner's opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, which teils of
the adventures of the hero Siegfried. The story was also alluded to in
Beowulf, Njal's Saga, and the thirteenth-century Icelandic Saga 01 the Vol-
sungs. The original legend told of a man named Kriedman who had three
sons, Otter, Regin, and Fafnir. When the god Loki accidentally killed
Otter, he paid for his actions by offering a great payment in treasure to
the father. Fafnir, in time, lusted for his father's gold and finaily killed hirn
to possess it.Then, to more effectively guard the treasure, he used his tal-
ents as a shape-shifter to transform into a fearsome dragon. To feed
hirnself, he ravaged the villages and farms of the countryside.
Regin, his brother, convinced the knight Sigurd (also known as
Siegfried) Volsung that he could gain farne and fortune by killing Fafnir,
and together they searched out Fafnir's lair. Knowing that only a sword
thrust through the dragon's belly could kill hirn, Regin and Sigurd dug a
pit across the path to the dragon's daily watering hole; and after Sigurd
crawled into the hole, Regin covered it with brush.When Fafnir walked
over the pit, Sigurd rammed his sword horne, killing the dragon. In the
myth Fafirir appeared as a large reptilian creature with stunted wings, great
teeth and claws, and a breath of fire and smoke. Fafnir was celebrated in
many artworks. In the eleventh century a Swedish woman named Sigrid
commissioned a large stone carving on an outcropping near a bridge that
she had built and dedicated to the memory ofher husband, Holmgr.There
Fafnir was rendered as a serpentine two-headed dragon.
He appeared again, battling with Sigurd, in carved wooden panels
that originally bracketed a medieval church in Norway. The panels show
140
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Sigurd driving his sword into the dragon's stomach. Fafnir appears with
gaping mouth, tigerlike head and teeth, and a long reptilian body. The
original work, the Sigurd Portal, has been moved in recent times to the
Oldsaksamlingen of the University of Oslo.
An Old English tale featuring the dragon is the eighth-century
heroic saga of the Danish king Beowulf. The poem comprised three basic
tales, the third of which told of Beowulf's combat with a dragon who
became angered when one ofBeowulf's servants discovered his treasure
trove and stole a golden cup. The angry dragon vented its rage by ram-
paging through Beowulf's country, burning villages and killing people
and livestock. The hero engaged the beast at the mouth of the dragon's
cave as the large winged saurian creature belched flames and poisonous
gas. Beowulf was almost devoured when he broke his sword against the
dragon's scaly back, but fortunately his companion Wiglaf rushed to his
rescue, and together they killed the beast.
Dragon images have fascinated the peoples of the British Isles for
centuries. Beowulf carried a shield with a dragon painted on it, as did
King Arthur. In time it became the customary batde standard of many
English kings. The chiefs of the Celtic knights were called Pendragon, and
when such a leader was downed in battle, the event was referred to as
"killing a dragon." A dragon decorated Oliver Cromwell's coat of arms,
and the creature became a feature ofthe shields ofHenryVIl, HenryVIII,
and EdwardVI. In modern times a red dragon was incorporated into the
heraldic ensign of the Prince of Wales, and the same dragon appears on
the modern Welsh flag.
A Welsh tale with a curious twist told of the killing of a dragon that
terrorized the town of Denbigh, attacking people and flocks from a
ruined castle it occupied. The townsmen sought the aid of Sion Bodiau
(Sir John of the Thumbs) because he had two thumbs on each hand. Sion
tempted the fire-breathing saurian out of its castle, and while it stared in
fascination at Sion's strange hands, the knight cut the dragon's head off.
Though the town is called Denbigh in English, it is Dim-Bych in Welsh,
a phrase that means "No more dragon."
As late as the middle 1800s, the people who lived in the vicinity of
Penllyne Castle in Glamorgan, Wales, reported winged serpents (fig.
25). They were also seen at Penmark Place, and snakes with feathered
141
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FIGURE 25: THIS IMAGE OF A WINGED SERPENT FIRST APPEARED IN
THE HISTORIE OF SERPENTS, WRITTEN BY EDWARD TOPSELL IN 1608.
wings were described in the Vale of Edeyrnion in 1812. The locals who
claimed to have seen them in the early days said they were brightly col-
ored and very beautiful, but because they preyed on the farmers' poul-
try, they were hunted to extinction.
Many types of dragons were found in the British IslesVery sirnilar to
the winged serpents described above are the amphipteres-large, winged,
legless serpents with dragon heads.The citizens ofHenham in Essex, Eng-
land, experienced one on May 27 and 28, 1669. Sporting stunted wings,
it stood ni ne feet long, was covered in seales, and had a mouth full oflong
fangs and two tongues. The villagers succeeded in driving it away by
throwing stones at it.
Wyverns were dragons with scales, large batlike wings, and a single
pair of legs. Leonardo da Vinci drew a wyvern attacking a lion and clearly
expres-sed its scales, claws, crest, gaping mouth, and wings.
Legless and wingless dragons called worms (also wyrms or wurms)
were also found in the British Isles. Specialists in dragon lore consider
them to be very ancient dragons, with the Lambton Worm being one of
the best known. The story of this dragon revolved around the exploits of
John Lambton, heir to Lambton Hall, who one Sunday morning chose
to go fishing in the Wear River instead of attending church. He caught
a three-foot-long eel-like creature with a large mouth fuH of sharp
teeth and spiked crests running along the top of its dragon head. Con-
sidering the thing too ugly to eat, he tossed it into a deep old weH.
As the years passed and John lett for war, the worm grew to enormous
proportions, abandoned the weil, and attacked the villagers who lived
around Lambton Hall. When John returned from his adventures, he was
toId by a local witch that he must kill the dragon and afterward the next
living being he encountered.The worm proved no problem to the brave
knight, but he next saw bis father, who had come out to congratulate hirn
on his victory against the creature. John refused to kill his father, and a
curse was placed on the Lambton farnily. For the succeeding nine gener-
ations, all Lambton heirs were doomed to die outside their own country.
Witch's curses played a part in the tale of the Laidly Worm. The
daughter of a king ofNorthumbria was cursed and turned into a worm.
In the manner of Sleeping Beauty with a little of Beauty and the Beast
thrown in, the prince was required to kiss the hideous worm three
143
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ...-;....-
times before the beautiful princess Margaret was restored to her human
form.
A eonventional saurian fire-breathing dragon living in Wantley
Lodge in a Yorkshire village was killed by the heir of More Hall during
the time of Queen Elizabeth 1. He utilized a technique that would
appear in a number of dragon-slayer tales found in Greeee, France, and
Ireland, as well as in the Ameriean Indian tale of the dragon-monster
Mashenomak. Sir More ordered a special suit of armor covered with
spikes to be made at Sheffield. This suit prevented the dragon from
swallowing hirn while he eoneentrated on defeating the beast, in this ease
by kieking it stoutly in the rear end. Another fire-breather was killed by
Sir John Smith ofDeerhurst, England, during the Middle Ages. Sir John
plaeed a huge bowl of milk, of whieh this dragon was deeply fond, on a
trail near the dragon's eave. After the dragon had drunk his fill, he lay
down to rest, and Sir John slipped his sword between the otherwise
impenetrable scales.
Early Freneh history also resounded with the roar of the dragon. The
guivre was a reptilian, horned monster whose breath was so toxie that
when it touehed humans, disease and plague followed. Most dragons,
however, had some type of weakness that a potential slayer must discover.
In the case of the guivre, its flaw was revealed one day by a farmer who
removed his clothes to bathe in a stream after a hard morning's work. As
he approached the stream, which unbeknownst to hirn was the horne of
the loeal guivre, it reared up from the water's edge but quickly turned
away when it saw that the farmer was naked. In fact, it even blushed.The
inability to face the unclothed human body proved to be its downfall.
The river Huisne in France provided ahorne to a dragon called the
Peluda, who in medieval times lived in the vieinity of the village of La
Ferte-Bernard.lt was a fire-breather with four stubby legs and turtlelike
claws. lts novel body featured a combination of scales along the tail,
shaggy green fur, and a mass of needle-sharp quills on its back. When it
gamboled in the river Huisne, its enormous size caused flooding that
destroyed farms for miles around. It developed a taste far teenage girls;
and a young local man, whose fianee was eaten before his eyes, sought the
adviee of a wise woman concerning methods to defeat the Peluda. She
divulged the monster's weakness, the serpentine tai1; and the young
144
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~ MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ----
man, armed with that knowledge as weil as armor and a sharp sword,
confronted the beast and kiIled it. It was said that the Peluda had refused
to enter Noah's ark and yet somehow survived the world flood.
A fourteenth-century French tale, Voeux du Paan, teils of the count
ofAnjou and his quest for a bride.After searching for a number of years,
he returned to his palace with a beautiful woman named Melusine.
Charrning and aristocratic, she produced four heirs for the count, but a
peculiar habit finaily forced the curious count to chailenge her. Melusine,
the few times that she did attend mass, always left before the priest
raised the consecrated chalice before the congregation. One Sunday
when she was in attendance, the count placed four knights at the church
door. As was her custom, she rose to leave midway through the service
but found the door blocked. In arage, she sent forth a shattering roar,
metamorphosed into a dragon, and grabbing two of her children, flew
from the church. Her remaining children were to become the founda-
tion for the house of Plantagenet, one of the most prominent royal
families ofEurope.An eighteenth-century Russian print ofMelusine pic-
tures her with a woman's head and a dragon's body. Her serpentine tail
has a dragon's head at its tip, and her four feet are likewise rendered as
dragon heads.
The dragons of France played a part in early Christian tales, in
which they represented Satan or pagan religions, and European saints
often killed them. In the sixth century, for example, an enormous winged
dragon decided to occupy a cave ne ar a convent located in Poitiers,
France. When it began eating the local nuns, the abbess Saint Radegund
confronted and kiIled it by making the sign of the cross. The original gar-
gauille described earlier was eventuaIly defeated by Saint Romain, arch-
bishop of Rouen.
Saint Martha faced the terrible Tarasque that hunted along the river
Rhone between Avignon and Arles in the Middle Ages. When the
Tarasque focused on the viIlage ofNerluc and commenced to method-
ically destroy everyone and everything in the community, the saint took
action. The Tarasque stood somewhat larger than an ox, and its six thick
limbs were each equipped with bear paws. Its tail was that of a large ser-
pent with a pointed tip.A horny shell protected its back, and its long teeth
were like daggers. Saint Martha, "her holiness, her shield;' captured the
145
"V
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ----.....
Tarasque and led it back to the village by a tether she fashioned from her
fragile shawl. The locals promptly killed it.
Saint Columba defeated a Scottish dragon of the Ness River as a
demonstration to the local Picts of the superiority of Christianity. The
monster later moved into Loch Ness.A brieflisting of other saints respon-
sible for defeating various kinds ofWestern dragons includes Saint Andrew
of Aix-en-Provence, Saint Victor of Marseille, Saint George of England,
Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saint Armentaire of Draguignan.
The Polish capital city of Krakow was established on a site over-
looking the village ofWavel, where the hero Krak killed a huge, purple-
winged dragon. To the south in modern times, the people of the Swiss,
Austrian, and Bavarian Alps have reported seeing the Tatzelwurm (some-
times called the Stollenwurm or "clawed worm"), a reptilian creature
four to five feet in length with two clawed forelegs and the head of a large
cat. In 1921 ne ar Hochfilzen, Austria, such a creature was shot at by a
herds man. A similar creature was seen attacking a herd of pigs ne ar
Palermo, Sicily, in 1954. The Tatzelwurm is referred to as a drake and is
defined as a dragon with a large, scaled serpentine body, sharp slashing
teeth, and four heavily clawed feet, but no wings. Fire drakes are said to
be capable of shooting fire from their mouths.
In England between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, "grypeseye,"
or griffin eggs, were highly prized collectibles, listed in the inventories of
noble houses and often made into cups in which beverages thought to
possess powerful health-giving qualities were brewed.A putative griffin's
paw, taken by a knight in batde, once hung on the wall of Sainte-
Chapelle in Paris (Dooling 1991,404).
Dragons, like all human constructs marked by cultural or learned
influences, evolve through time. That the dragons responded to chang-
ing social, cultural, and historical environments is amply demonstrated in
the shifting history of the dragon called the basilisk, or "little king," by the
Greeks and regulus by the Romans.Though the cultural rendering ofthe
basilisk (size, superficial physical characteristics, coloring, and shape) will
be seen to change through time, its essential dragon nature does not.
Pliny the EIder, in his Natural History, presented the basilisk as a type
of snake that moved along the ground holding its front half in the air. He
described this dragon as about twelve inches in length with a number of
146
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~
MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ~
bright white marks on its head, a trait that he thought looked like a dia-
dem, or jeweled crown. Later Christian cultures would see it as a cross.
The hiss of the basilisk drove other serpents away in fear, and its breath
scorched grass and bushes and exploded rocks. Its lethality caused animals
that gazed upon it to perish. It could knock birds out of the air with its
venomous saliva, and dragon slayers could kill it by holding a mirror so
that it looked upon its own deadly visage. The following is a modern
account of a dragon sighting:
On ]uly 30, 1915, during World War I, a German submarine, the U-28,
torpedoed the British steamer Iberian near the Fastnet Rock, off Ire-
land; but less than a minuter after the ship had sunk, a huge underwa-
ter explosion blas ted a gigantic, writhing monster out of the sea.
According to the account later given by the captain of the U-28, it was
about 60 feet long and shaped like a crocodile, with a long pointed tail
and four limbs with powerful webbed feet. It fell back into the sea a
few moments later and disappeared without a trace. (Shuker 1995,115)
Sightings of sea dragons by sailors have a long history. For example,

Captain George Drevar, master of the Pauline, made the following entry
in the ship's log on January 8,1875 (fig.26):
BARQUE PAULlNE. ]ANUARY 8TH, 1875, LAT. 5 13', LONG. 35 W, CAPE

ROQuE, NORTH-EAST CORNER OF BRAZIL D1STANTTWENTY MILES,AT
11 A.M.
The weather is fine and clear, the wind and sea moderate. Observed
some black spots on the water, and a whitish pillar, about thirty-five feet
high, above them ... good glasses showed me it was a monster sea-ser-
pent coiled twice around a large sperm whale. The head and tail parts,
each about thirty feet long, were acting as levers, twisting itself and vic-
tim around with great velocity.They sank out of sight about every two
minutes coming to the surface still revolving .... the sea in this vacin-
ity like a boiling cauldron ... a loud and confused noise was distinctly
heard.This strange occurence lasted some fifteen minutes .... Allowing
for two coils around the whale, I think the serpent was about one hun-
dred and sixty or one hundred and seventy feet long and seven or eight
147
~
ON JANUARY 8, 1875, THE CREW OF THE BARQUE PAULINE
FIGURE 26:
OBSERVED A SEA SERPENT ATTACKING A WHALE OFF THE COAST
OF BRAZIL.
---- MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM -----
in girth. It was in colour much like a conger eil, and the head, from the
mouth being always open, appeared the largest part of the body.... I
wrote thus little thinking I would ever see the same or a similar mon-
ster; but at 7 A.M.,July 13th, in the same latitude, and some eighty miles
east ofSan Roque, I was astonished to see the same or a similar mon-
ster. It was throwing its head and about forty feet ofits body in a hor-
izontal position out of the water as it passed onwards by the stern of
our vessel. ... This statement is strictly true, and the occurrence was
witnessed by my officers, half the crew, and myself; and we are ready at
any time to testifY on oath that it is so, and that we are not in the least
mistaken. (Gould 1886,312-14)
A year later in Asian waters John WWebster, eornrnander of the S. S.

Nestor, made this log entry (fig. 27):
Being on the bridge at the time (about 10 A.M.) with the first and third
offieers, we were surprised by the appearance of an extraordinary
monster going in our course and at an equal speed with the vessel, at
a distance from us of about six hundred feet. It had a square head and
a dragon black and white striped tail, and an immense body, which was
quite fifty feet broad when the monster raised it. The head was about
twelve feet broad, and appeared to be occasionally, at the extreme, about
six feet above the water. When the head was placed on a level with the
water, the body was extended to its utmost limit to ail appearance, and
then the body rose out of the water about two feet, and seemed quite
fifty feet broad at those times. The long dragon tail with black and
white scales afterwards rose in an undulating motion, in which at one
time the head, at another the body, and eventualy the tail, form each
in its turn a prominent object above the water. The animal, or what-
ever it may be cailed, appeared careless of our proximity, and went our
course for about six minutes on our starboard side, and then finally
worked around to port side, and remained in view, to the delight of ail
aboard, for about half an hour. Its length was reckoned to be over two
hundred feet. (Gould 1986,308-9)
Turning to the dragons ofAsia (figs. 28, 29, 30), we must aeknowl-
edge onee more that artistie style will vary from eulture to eulture,
sometimes radieally and sometimes, admittedly, only slightly. The drag-
149
~
FIeURE 27: ACRESTED SEA SERPENT ATTACKING A SAILING VESSEL
CHINESE FIVE-TOED IMPERIAL DRAGONS CAVORT IN THIS
FIGURE 28:
STONE PAINTI NG. THOUGH LACKING WINGS , THE CLOUD MOTIFS
IN DI CATE THAT THE DRAGONS WERE IN FLIGHT
FIGURE 29: THIS CHINESE DRAGON DEPICTS THE EARTH, WATER, AND
SKY DOMAINS OF THE DRAGON
FIGURE 30: THE CHINESE DRAGON FLIES OVER THE WAVES IN THE
DRAGON GATE IMAGE. NOT SHOWN IN THIS IMAGE, A CARP HAS LEAPT
TOWARD THE GATE AND COMES OUT THE OTHER SIDE AS A DRAGON.
IT IS AN IMAGE SUGGESTING ATTAINMENT AND GROWTH.
ons of the East, however, are clearly identifiable as dragons by the West-
ern viewer because the dragon is easily recognized everywhere.Also, the
ancient and modern arts of the Orient have been familiar to Westerners
for many centuries. Asian drawings, paintings, sculpture, and ceramies,
which often depict dragons, have been considered desirable as household
decorations, particularly by the educated and wealthy of the West, for
many years. Dozens of motion pictures and a number of television series
have familiarized westerners with the dragon images of China, Korea, and
Japan through costumes, painted backdrops, screens and decorations in a
variety of mediums utilized for authenticating an "Oriental scene."
An expert minority, however, heatedly contests the comparison of
the Western and Eastern dragon. L. Newton Hayes (1922), for example,
writes, "We do not know who first attached the English name 'dragon'
to the Chinese conception lung, but it is hardly fair to the oriental mler
of the sea to be branded with the stigma which accompanies the Eng-
lish designation .... A misconception of the use of the word 'dragon' has
caused the (devout Western) speakers to confuse the evil monster men-
tioned in the book ofRevelation with the animal so highly revered by
the Chinese" (24-25).
Generally, the comments of writers like Hayes are couched in mod-
ern Christian associations ofthe Western dragon as a symbol ofSatan. It
is not the image of the dragon that these writers dispute, but rather the
meaning of the dragon to the East and West. It is not as simple as they
would have it, since the dragon's meaning changes over time. In fact, most
accounts of Western dragons do not associate the creature with the
Christian archnemesis, Satan. Likewise, not all Eastern dragons are benev-
olent.Those who wish to separate the claimed positive image ofthe East-
ern dragon from the largely negative image of the Western dragon often
point to the Eastern dragon's role in generating fecundity, clouds, and
rain. However, to such farmers and fishermen, wh at would be the great-
est curse? Too much or too litde rain, flooded rivers, or ocean storms: all
the purview of the lungs, or dragons. In fact, the worst floods were gen-
eral1y ascribed to a dragon's reaction to some sort of untoward mortal
behavior.
The sea-dragon kings were believed to live in opulent underwater
palaces, where they fed on pearls.When they moved their four-mile-long
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scaly bodies, earthquakes resulted. Their muzzies were whiskered, and

from their gaping mouths came such a fiery breath that, even underwa-
ter, whole schools of fish would be roasted. The ancient Chinese believed
that when sea dragons rose to the surface, they generated typhoons, the
great storms that ripped houses apart, destroyed crops, and flooded the
countryside.
During the Han period, Chinese emperors utilized the dragon as
their central emblem, as did many of the early kings in Europe. The
emperor's throne was "the dragon's seat"; his clothing, "the dragon's
robe"; his face, "the dragon's face"; and when he died, he was believed to
ride into the heavens on the back of a dragon.
Lu Tian (A.D. 1042-1102) identified a number of dragon types in the
Bei Ya. He wrote that if the dragon had scaIes, it was called jiao long; but
if it had wings, it was designated ying long. A dragon with horns was qiu
long, and one without horns was chi long.
Another popular breakdown of Chinese dragon types includes Tien-
lung, the Celestial Dragon who guards the palaces of the gods; Shen-Iung,
the controller of wind and rain; Ti-Iung, the Earth Dragon, who is in
charge of rivers and all bodies of water; and Fut's-lung, the Underworld
Dragon, who guards treasures, metals, and precious stones. In addition, the
rivers of China are each under the control of separate dragons, who in
turn are all controlled by Chien-tang, a three-hundred-yard-long scarlet
beast with a flaming red mane. Eastern dragons often have horns, beards,
tufts of hair, and sometimes feathers at either shoulder. They are occa-
sionally shown with a few long whiskers, also referred to as "feelers,"
growing from their large-mouthed muzzles.
Some Eastern dragons are thought to have possessed a magical
pearl, located in the head or mouth or under the chin, that was capable
of granting wishes. It could bring clouds and rain by breathing in a spe-
cial way, and its flight created thunder and lightning.The Chinese dragon
is often described with spines or crests emanating from its back.
Now to some specific visual representations of the Chinese dragon.
The first examples are from Abe Capek's fascinating book Chinese Stol1e-
Pictures (1962). The pictures represent a cateogry of art called t' a-pen-in
English, "stone rubbings." Figures 31,32,33, and 34 show rubbings of
decorative carvings found at a Han period tomb built around A.D. 100.
155
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FIGURE 3 t: ONE OF THE
MAN Y VERS IONS OF CHINESE
NOT E THE CLOSE REL AnO NSH DRAGONS
IP BETWEEN THE SHAPE OF THE
DRAGON AND THE DRAGON CHINESE
S OF THE INU n AND OTHERS
FIGURE 32: A CHINESE DRAGON WITH SPOTS, HORI\:S, TALONS,
AND WINGS FIGHTS A CULTURAL HERO, GENERALLY DEPICTED
IN THE TALE OF THE WORLD-DRAGON AS WIELDING A SWORD.
FIGURE 33: THIS DRAGON DATES TO 206 B.C. AND WAS FOUND AT
THE INAN SITE IN CHINA. THE SCALES, WINGS, LARGE TEETH, HORNS,
AND TALONS OF THE WORLD-DRAGON ARE CLEARLY INDICATED.
FIGURE 34: ANOTHER DRAGON IMAGE FROM THE INAN SITE IN CHINA.
THIS IMAGE IS CALLED "THE DRAGON SHOW'"
The dragon is a four-footed, clawed saurian with horns, serpentine tail,

and vestiges of spiky crests down his neck. In several of the renderings,
a snakelike tongue protrudes from its mouth. Its relationship to water is
indicated in figure 31, where a fish swims before the dragon's mouth.
There is also an Oroboros-type theme here in that each dragon is biting
the tail of the dragon in front of it.
Rubbings from the tomb of Wu Liang Tz'u portray a variety of
dragon images as weIl as dragon costumes. In figure 32 a typical dragon
slayer, sword and shield in hand, attacks a dragon that fundamentally looks
like the images described above, in that it has a snakelike body, massive
claws, horns, a large mouth, and a protruding tongue. However, in this
case, stylized, perhaps winglike, protrusions twine from its shoulders as
well as from its lower back.
Another rubbing from the Wu LiangTz'u tomb (fig. 33), entitled The
Dragon Show by Capek, shows a creature that stylistically differs again
from the above-mentioned images, but retains the fundamental dragon
look with its scaled body, four clawed feet, horns, catlike face with gap-
ing mouth, sharp teeth, and abbreviated wings clearly rendered at the
shoulder. Figure 34, also from the Wu LiangTz'u tomb, shows a circus
wagon with three horses costumed as dragons much like that in figure 33,
with clawed feet, catlike faces, large sharp teeth, horns, and wings that are
clearly suggested at the front shoulders of the horses and slightly protrude
above the back.
The imperial dragon-that is, the dragon image that became asso-
ciated with the emperor and aIl things surrounding that august person-
age-is called in the Western tradition a drake, a reptilian dragon without
wings.Although often shown without wings, Chinese dragons, by virtue
of magical powers, could fly, but this was a rare accomplishment for the
Western drakes.
A portrait from the Tang dynasty (626-649) pictures on Emperor
Tai-tsung's court robe two drakelike snake-bodied, clawed, and sharp-
toothed blue dragons.A vase from the reign ofChia Ching (1532-1455)
is decorated with a serpentine, clawed dragon swimming in the ocean,
while a sculpture from the same era illustrates the saurian body, claws, ves-
tigial wings, scales, large head, and teeth of the classic world-dragon.
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On the" 100 Boys" jacket ofEmpress Xiao Jing, a contemporary of

Queen Elizabeth I of England, we see a yellow imperial dragon with a
large snakelike body, four clawed feet, and large teeth. In a portrait of
Emperor Kanxi of the Ching dynasty, several dragons are depicted. All are
four-legged, clawed, and scaled, with horns, "feeler whiskers," and a
large mouth full of teeth. Similar types of dragons are delineated on a
wine jar from the Ming dynasty of the early sixteenth century, imperial
portraits of the Ching dynasty (1736-1795), and a lacquered brush pot
from the Wan-li period (1573-1620). In fact, thousands of such images
have graced the arts of China for many centuries, and in every case the
pictures, sculptures, and reliefs present the basic dragon: a clawed and
toothed, reptilian, and flight-capable beast. Though the cultural! artistic
styles of Chinese culture influence the manner in which the dragon is
represented, the basic creature is clearly visible.
The Eastern dragon's generally good behavior, often contraposed to
its Western counterpart's reputation for evil, is explainable as a difference
not in type but rather of perception. The classical Eastern dragon was usu-
ally described after it had become identified with the emperor-the
good, the kind, the benevolent-while the Western dragon, though like
the Eastern dragon becoming benevolent in time, was usually described
before it became a symbol of state and therefore "under control."
It has been said that Eastern dragons lose toes as they travel east.The
imperial dragon of China has five toes, whereas the dragons ofKorea and
Indonesia generally possess four toes, and the Japanese dragon, three.
Japanese dragon myths have borrowed much from China and Korea but
also show their own local evolution. The Japanese word tatsu is equiva-
lent to the Chinese lung.As in Europe and China, dragons in Japan man-
ifest in a number of types. The sui riu pro duces red rain, and the ri riu can
see prey a hundred miles away. (Emphasis on sharp eyesight is very
common among world dragon motifs.) The bright red ka riu is only six
or seven feet in length, while the han riu is a striped creature that can
grow up to forty feet.
The dragon motif is pervasive in Japanese art because of a belief
about the nature of dragons. In Japanese lore, a dragon gives birth to ni ne
babies, each having a different major attribute. One type likes to carry
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~ AN INSTlNCT FOR DRAGONS -----
heavy loads, so the legs of tables are often earved to represent dragon feet.
Dragons adom cups and bowls, sinee another is fond of drinking. One
dragon enjoys bloodshed; therefore swords and sword aeeoutrements
earry dragon images. Pagodas and temples display dragons beeause one
is partial to steep and dangerous locations.Another loves musie, another
reading, another gongs, and so on; and in eaeh ease the dragon's image
appropriately deeorates the pertinent artifaet.
From the Nihon-gi, a his tory ofJapan eompiled in A.D. 720, we leam
that the blood that dripped from the sword of the hero-god Izanagi after
he deeapitated the fire god became three gods: Kura-okami, Kura-yama-
tsumi, and Kura-mitsu-ha. "Kura-okami is a dragon- or snake-god who
eontrols rain and snow, and has Shinto temples in all provinees ... Kura-
okami me ans 'the dragon god of the valleys' ... Kura-yama-sumi, is trans-
lated 'Lord of the Dark Mountains,' and 'Mountain Snake' ...
Kura-mitsu-ha is 'Dark-Water Snake' or 'Valley Water Snake.' " (Macken-
zie 1994,354).
The Japanese hai-riyo, or "dragon bird," is a ereature with the head
and feet of a dragon and the wings and body of a large bird (fig. 35). A
number of "dragon birds" manifest themselves in Japan. Near Kyoto,
loeals claim that a sealed, serpentlike white dragon lives in the center of
a lake ealled Ukisima. Every fifty years it takes the form of o-gon-cho, a
golden-plumed bird, and rises out of the lake to sing its terrible song-a
song more like that of a howling wolf than a song bird. When the song
of the o-gon-dlO is heard, the people know that a season of siekness is upon
them.The o-gon-cho was last heard to sing in April 1834; famine and dis-
ease spread over the loeal area several months later.
The Japanese also tell the story of an eleventh-eentury samurai
named Tawara Toda who eneountered a large, hideous snakelike ereature
on a bridge one night as he returned horne from a party. He did not dis-
turb the ereature but rather walked calrn1y past. Later, a beautiful young
woman appeared and told hirn that she was the dragon princess he had
seen. After he helped her defeat a giant eentipede, she took hirn to the
bottom of a lake, where he met her father, a dragon king, and reeeived a
number of magieal gifts.
Whereas Chinese dragons usually lived in wells, rivers, and lakes
(though there also was a sea dragon),Japanese dragons are very heavily
162
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FIGURE 35: THE JAPANESE HAI-RIYO, OR "DRAGON BIRD," IS A CREATURE
WITH THE HEAD AND FEET OF A DRAGON AND THE WINGS AND BODY
OF A LARGE BIRD.
------- AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ~
depicted as sea creatures. The Koshi dragon killed by Susa-no-ow was

such a creature, as is the famous contemporary fire-breathing Japanese
cinema monster, Godzilla. The "Dragon's Court" is located on the bot-
tom ofthe sea near the Ryu Ku Islands, which run south from the main
islands ofJapan. Here lives R yu-jin, the "Luminous Being," the Japanese
sea dragon king, also referred to in Japanese as "Sea Lord" or "Sea
Snake."The relationship between dragons and jewels or precious stones
is found here in the belief that R yu-jin controls the tides with his mag-
ical "tide jewels," which are sometimes described as pearls.
Donald Mackenzie in Myths of China and Japan (1994) writes, "In
addition there are horse-dragons, snake-dragons, cow-dragons, toad-
dragons, dog-dragons, fish-dragons & etc., in China and Japan. Indeed,
all hairy, feathered, and scaled animals are more or less asociated with
what may be called the 'Orthodox Dragon'" (47).
The Ainu, the aborigines ofJapan, venerate the bear as a major cul-
tural symbol. In traditional times, the Ainu would capture a bear cub in
the spring and keep it as a village pet until the following year, when it
would be sacrificed in an important religious ritual.The Ainu associated
bears and dragons, believing that the bear goddess was the wife of the
dragon god.The Nihon-gi describes a "bear-dragon" that stretched almost
fifty feet in length.
Regarding dragon beliefs of the Chukchi peoples of Siberia, Walde-
mar Bogoras, author of the definitive work on the Chukchi (1904),
comments:
I mentioned the celestial worm, which is described with the features

of a boa-constrictor. ... Another "giant worm" lives in the sea. It is so
strong that it can kill a whale by squeezing it between its coils.A third
great Worm also figures in the tales. It is owned by a ke'le (nature spirit)
and sent by hirn to drive back the captive maidens who fled from his
house. Its tail is fastened in the sleeping-room of the ke'le, but its body
is so long that its head can overtake the fugitives and run them back.
(327)
Many Siberian tribes, including the Chukchi, tell of the "giant fish,"
or the "giant pike." Unnaturally large, these fishlike creatures live in the
164
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FIGURE 36:THIS DRAGON IMAGE COMES FROM THE LOLO,
AN AB ORIGINAL POPULATION OF WESTERN CHINA.
~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS -------
deepest lakes.Those who have seen them report that the distance between
their eyes measures the length of a boat paddle.With their strongjaws and
ferocious teeth, they can snap a boat in half with one bi te (fig. 36).
Mackenzie (1994) writes, "In various countries certain fish were
regarded as forms of the shape-changing dragon. The Gaelic dragon
sometimes appeared as the salmon, and a migratory fish was in Egypt
associated with Osiris and his 'mother' " (59).
On the southern periphery ofAsia, the Vietnamese have the long-ma,
or"dragon horse."Their traditions describe the scales oftheir dragons as
fishlike and say that dragons are ancient relatives of the fish that have
evolved the ability to fly.
In the Wayang, or "shadow theater," mythology ofJava, the king of
the dragons, Anantaboga, "Serpent King," lives in his underground lair.
Malay Raja Naga, "King of the Serpents," however, lives in the Pusat
Tasik, the "Navel of the Oceans," the deepest part of the sea.
The primal dragon image of the giant feathered saurian is evoked in
the Indonesian folktale "The Magic Crocodile," when the hero meets the
monster for the first time (Terada 1994, 135): "He turned around and
nearly fainted from shock and fright. A huge crocodile was walking
slowly toward hirn. It was so enormous that Towjatuwa could not esti-
mate its length. Nor was its appearance like anything he had seen before.
Between the scales on its back were feathers of the cassowary bird, giv-
ing it a frightful appearance."
In the two-thousand-year old Indian Rig- Veda, the god-hero Indra
slays the "Dragon of the Clouds," Vrtra, by shooting thunderbolts. This
ancient dragon, whose name means "obstruction," was believed to hold
the rain in his stornach. When he was slain, the rains fell. Lightning and
thunderstorms thus are neatly explained for the peoples of ancient India.
The key factor, however, is that V rtra is a giant flying reptile associated
with water-a dragon. Concerning the nagas of India, British anthro-
pologist Grafton Elliot Smith (1919) wrote, "The Nagas are depicted in
three forms: common snakes guarding jewels; human beings with four
snakes in their necks; and winged sea-dragons, the upper part of the body
human, but with a horned, ox-like head, the lower part ofthe body that
of a coiling dragon. Here we find a link between the snake of ancient
166
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India and the four legged Chinese dragon" (136). In Tibet nagas are
shown with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a snake
with horns and wings.
At about the time the Sumerian Empire fell, the ancestors ofthe Hit-
tites migrated out of southern Russia into the Anatolian highlands of
modern-day Turkey. In time, from their capital at Hattusa, they spread
their influence from the Aegean to the Tigris-Euphrates, north to the
Black Sea, and south to the plains ofSyria.
Several Hittite myths have been pieced together from broken clay
tablets found at ruins. One teils of the storm god's battle with the dragon
Illuyanka, a giant serpent with feathered crests, horns, and the ability to
spit fire.The dragon was finaily destroyed when it was lured from its cav-
ern ho me with the prornise of a banquet for its children and itself. At the
party the storm god inebriated the dragon with wine and then killed it.
Heinz Mode (1973) comments, "Thus these few ancient
Mesopotarnian examples already exhibit so me of the basic components
of later dragons. Snake, lion, eagle, and scorpion contribute the shapes,
and some unidentified animal the horns" (37).
At about the same time that the Hittite Empire was crumbling, the
Hebrew peoples were developing their religious concepts and mytholo-
gies.As noted in the introduction, dragon references appear throughout
the Bible. Daniel, according to the biblical Apocrypha, killed a dragon in
Babyion in the temple ofBel, and one of the great dragons of world lit-
erature was the mighty Leviathan. This creature and its archenemy,
Behemoth, were created, the Bible records, on the fifth day of creation,
with Leviathan's purpose being the rule of the world's oceans. The tale
concluded that on the Day of Judgment, Leviathan and Behemoth
would fight and kill each other, and the righteous of the earth would feast
on the Leviathan's flesh.The Book ofJob (41:5-25) described Leviathan
as a multiheaded sea dragon with huge teeth, hundreds of incandescent
eyes, scales, and fiery breath. Its coils could circle the earth, and when it
moved, the oceans boiled.
Georgess McHargue, in The Beasts 01 Never (1988), quotes a Hebrew
commentator who, in A.D. 1035, wrote an expanded version of the Book
ofJob:
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~ AN INSTINCT FOR DRAGONS ......-;...-
Where was thou in the day when I formed the dragon? His food is in
the sea and his dwelling is in the air; his eyes flash fire; ... there pours
forth from hirn flames as though he were a whirling column of dust;
his belly bums and his breath flames forth in hot coals like unto rocks;
it is as though the dash of his teeth were sounds of thunder and the
glance of his eyes were the flashing of lighting; arrnies pass hirn by
while he is lying; nothing terrifies hirn. (17)
The Hebrew root word for dragon is t-n-n, or tanniym, which is gener-
aily translated as "dragon" in the Bible, though sometimes as "whale." It
connotes enormous size and immense length.
In the fifth century B.C., the Greek traveler Herodotus wrote of the
winged serpents ofArabia, noting that they came in a number of colors,
enjoyed the trees that produced frankincense, and migrated into Egypt
each spring, where they engaged in epic batde with the Egyptian ibises.
The Phoenicians' dragon, the agatho5 daimon, was imagined as an
invisible winged serpent with a long heart-shaped tongue. Interestingly,
this dragon was believed to be a benign guardian spirit, perhaps a com-
me nt on the Phoenician's relatively complex level of political organiza-
tion at the time they accepted the existence of the agatho5 daimon.
In the Old Testament, when Moses set out to attack an army of
Ethiopians who had invaded Egypt, he took with him baskets of ibises to
fight the flying snakes that could accompany the invaders (fig. 37). It was
generaily believed that each spring winged serpents would leave Africa
and encounter their enemies, the ibises, in a deep canyon on the Egypt-
ian border where the ibises would destroy most of the winged serpents.
Cicero, a Roman writer, no ted that the exterminating service of the ibis
was necessary because the bite of the winged serpents was known to
cause disease.
Egyptian legends told of snake-necked lions, an image found in
Egypt from earliest times, as weil as flying horned snakes, a motif appear-
ing in later Egyptian culture. In one tale Isis was pursued by a dragon
while trying to protect her son. In addition, the dragon-serpent Seth-heh
fought for Ra during his nighdy passage through the land of darkness.
Dragons also lived in the abyss along the coast ofEthiopia. Reputed
to reach thirty feet in length, they possessed either two or four wings and
168
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FIGURE 37: A MULTIAPPENDAGED FLYING-SERPENT IMAGE FROM
THE SIEN MOUNTAINS OF CHINA. DEPICTED IN THE SHAN-HAI-KING.
were particularly skilled at killing elephants. When hunting in Africa was

poor, they wove themselves into a raft and floated into Arabia to hunt.
The "magie stone" motiE, found in dragons all over the globe, exists
here.The ingredients for such a "stone," which could ensure riches and
long life, were said to co me from the Ethiopian dragon's head.The local
twist on the tale alleged that the materials for making the stone could
only be taken from a living dragon. To that end, a special potion could be
brewed from local herbs that, if one could convince the dragon to drink,
would anesthesize the beast long enough to remove the magie stone
materials from its head.
In New Zealand, the bishop of Wellington told of a dragon that
resided in freshwater lakes, spouted water like a whale, and had a head and
teeth that resembled those of a giant crocodile. The native peoples ofAus-
tralia boast of two types of dragons. The Rainbow Serpent, it is said, lives
in deep pools, from which it emerges from time to time to form the rain-
bow. Through its association with and control of water, it causes storm
and flood if angered. lt pos es a danger to childbearing women, and if they
pollute his pools while menstruating or pregnant, the great serpent's rage
will be experienced by all. In Australia's Northern Territory, it is called
galeru, ungur, wonunger, worombi, wonambi, wollunqua, yurlunggur,julunggul,
langal, and muit. In Queensland, it is known as yero and taipan, and in
southeastern Australia it is mindi and karia.
We are acquainted with the Australian bunyip through myths relat-
ing to the Dream Time, or sacred mythic times, of the interior peoples.
A young boy sought a gift for his lover, and after a long search he found
astrange little animal with a finned tail splashing and playing in a water
hole. About the size of a large dog, the litde creature was covered in shin-
ing scales. Its dragonlike face with glowing eyes resembled that of a bull-
dog, with a wide mouth full of sharp teeth.
The true nature of the gift became apparent when a short time later
the creature's mother appeared to rescue it from its human kidnappers.
"Mother" was a giant lizardlike dragon with flashing scales and many fan-
glike teeth. Its roar sounded like thunder, and so on the people saw the
rivers and lakes rising to flood stage and inundating the land. In further
revenge the bunyip turned those who had taken her baby into a flock of
black swans (Shuker 1995,64-65).
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MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ~
In Hawaii in 1850, the native people living in the vicinity of present-

day Pearl Harbor informed the missionaries that the drastic fall in oys-
ter production was due to a mo-o, a saurian sea monster who had moved
the local oyster bed to another location.
The mo-o, also mo-ko, are a classification ofthe 'aumakua, the ances-
tral gods.Varieties of mo-o abound, but most have some association with
water, rain, and storms. Hawaiian images of mo-o detail a large, often
black, heavy-bodied reptile with four legs, scales, fanglike teeth, and a
length of about thirty feet. Emphasizing that the Polynesian dragon
does not seem to be derivable from images in nature, Reverend Bloxam,
the English naval chaplain on board the Blonde in the early 1800s, dis-
cussed the difficulty in understanding the Hawaiians' description of the
mo-o, since they "had nothing of the shape of serpents or large reptiles in
their islands" (cited in Mackenzie 1994,69).
In the eastern regions of modern-day Ecuador and Peru live the hor-
ticultural Shuara. A people famous for their incessant raiding and head-
taking (and shrinking!), they are particularly interested in rituals that
guide boys to manhood and full warrior status.When a Shuara boy
reaches the age of puberty, his relatives honor hirn with a feast to initi-
ate his incorporation into adult male Shuara society. Foilowing the feast,
he is given a hallucinogenic drink called maikoa, which is made from the
bush Datura arborea. Isolated, usually in the vicinity of a waterfail, an area
sacred among the Shuara, the boy experiences frightful visions of vari-
ous spirits that to become a man he is directed to overcome. Rafael
Karsten (1990) writes, "The most important of these spirits are the so-
called arumtama ("the old ones") which are in their nature the souls of the
ancestors. These appear in ail sorts of terrible shapes, as tigers (Jaguars),
eagles,giant snakes [emphasis added], and other wild animals, or reveal their
presence in stupendous phenomena of nature, in the lightning, in the
rainbow, in meteors, etc." (304-5).
Far to the north of the Shuara, the Aztec employed not only the
winged serpent-dragon but also the double-headed serpent motif and
conventional saurian dragon images. Around 500 B.C.-A.D. 900 among
the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, Kulkulkan, the plumed serpent, was
an important deity. The Maya incorporated feline features into the
Kulkulcan plumed serpent image, as weil as into images of Chac, the
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---- AN INSTlNCT FOR DRAGONS ~
Mayan rain god. Chac is shown with a serpent's body in the Dresden
Maya Codex and sometimes with wings, horns, and crests in other
Mayan media.The double-headed serpent motif also appears among the
Maya on Stela N at Copan, Honduras, as weIl as on the east side ofAltar
o at Copan.
Specialists in Olmec culture, the most ancient high culture of
Mesoamerica, believe that the plumed serpent cult of the later Toltecs,
Mayans, and Aztecs evolved from an earlier Olmec jaguar cult. Various
forms of Olmec art carry creatures with the combined elements of the
raptor, serpent, and jaguar-the dragon complex (Fig. 38, 39). The phrase
"jaguar serpent" comes from the ancient "Song to Tlaloc" from Teoti-
huacan. The "jaguar serpent" was later incorporated with the image of the
owl among the Toltec, thus completing the typical dragon complex
Image.
Non-state-Ievel societies in classic Mesoamerica demonstrated an
awareness of dragons. The hunting and gathering Huicholes of northern
Mexico considered plumed serpents to be the cause of rain and storms.
And at the time ofSpanish contact on the coast ofYucatan, village fish-
ermen spoke ofItzamna, the serpent god of the East, and ofItzam-kab-
ain, a whale-like creature with alligator feet, teeth, and claws.
On the lower Missouri River, not far from the Mississippi River cliff
where the Piasa dragon (no ted in the introduction) can be seen to this
day, a Cheyenne tale is set that explains why traditional Cheyenne always
made an offering of food or tobacco when crossing a deep body of water.
In ancient times two men were hunting along the river when they
came upon several very large eggs. One man ate some of the eggs,
while his partner refrained. Slowly, in the days following, the man who
had consumed the eggs transformed into a giant feathered serpent. In
time, bidding his friend good-bye, he disappeared into the Missauri
River, a tongue af flame rising from the swirl where he submerged (Mar-
riatte and Rachlin 1974, 71-72).The Cheyenne also tald ofthe minio,
the horned, hairy water spirits who sametimes caught careless individ-
uals as they walked near their ab ades in deep pools-and dragged them
to a watery death.
On the Northwest coast of the Uni ted States, the Haida and the
K wakiutl Indians feared the Sisiutl, sometimes depicted as a double-
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FICURE38:lMAGE OF AN OLMEC DRAGON SWALLOWING A MAN. NOTE
THE LARGE TEETH, WINGS, SERPENT BODY, AND ACCOMPANYING
IMAGES THAT ARE VERY REMINISCENT OF THE CLOUD AND WAVE
EMBLEMS FROM CHINESE DRAWINGS OF DRAGONS.
FIGURE 39:A HIGHLY STYLIZED OLMEC DRAGON IMAGE.
~ MORE TALES OF THE GREAT WORM ------'-
headed serpent and sometimes with four clawed feet and a snakelike tail,
and of a size big enough to swallow a man.Among the Kwakiud, the Sisi-
ud was honored in the winter ceremonies where it was presented as a
monster that could bring death simply by its touch, assume the shape of
a fish at will, and grant powers to those it favored.
A painted screen from the Nootka ofVancouver Island depicts the
dragon complex in a grouping of a raptor (Thunderbird), serpent (Light-
ning Serpent), and carnivore (Wolf). From the Tlingit Indians of Alaska,
a carved image of a dragon-headed boat carries seven spirits to the
spirit world.
In the era of the Southern Ceremonial Complex (circa 1450-1650)
among groups ancestral to the historie Cherokee (as well as the Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez), many images of men with anders,
wings, talons, snakelike tails, and breechcloths with a spotted pattern, per-
haps representing the scales of serpents, were etched on shell, bone, wood,
and ceramies. The classic uktena and the Water Cougar are also found in
the art motifs of the Southern Ceremonial Complex.
In conclusion, it is interesting to note that what I refer to as the
dragon complex is the tide of famed art historian Miguel Covarrubias's
1967 work on the Indian art ofAlaska, Canada, and the United States: The
Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent.
175
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183
~
..ili.
IN 0 EX
ip
Agoraphobia, 65-66, 92,109 Cannon, Walter B., 41

Ah Puch,130 Capek,Abe, 155-160
Alycone,15 Carboniferous, 28
Amphipteres, 141 Celts, 126
Andromeda, Princess, 15 Cetus,15
Anthropology, 25 Chalmers, David].. 58, 60
Arapesh,15 Charbonneau-Lassay, Louis, 137
Ardipithecus ramidus, 29 Cherokee, I, 19
Australopithecus, 29, 31, 61, 116 Cheyenne, 172
Aymara, 132 chiefdom, 98
Aztec, 171 chimera,137
Christensen, Erwin 0., 82
Bailey, Theodore N., 36 Chuckchi, 164
Bands, 96-97 chunk,116
Barash, David P, 51, 52 Count, Earl, 59, 60, 62
Basilisk, 146 Covarrubias, MigueI, 175
Bastien,]ospeh,132 Cretaceous, 28
Beowulf, 101, 140 Crick, Francis & ]ames Watson, 48
Barker, WH. & C. SincIair, 15 culture,48
Berger, I.R. & R. J. Clarke, 31, 35
Biogram, 59 Dart, Raymond, 29, 31
Bitis gabonica, 34 defense,37
Blest,A.D.,64 Djed Pillar, 125
Boa constrictor, 34 DNA,48-49
Boaz, N.& R.Almquist, 37 Doonongaes, 17
Bogoras, Waldemar, 164 dragon:
Boiga blanding, 34 words for, 1
Bunyip, 15, 170 towns attacked by, 3
185
~
~ INDEX ~
griffin-dragon,7 gargouille, 101, 145

Chinese, 7,149-161 Gelder, M.C. & 1. M. Marks, 63
face of, 74---76 genes, 48
scaly body, 76-78 Goldstein,J.A. & D. L. Chambless, 65
large size, 78-79 Gould, Steven S., 77
spots and circles, 79 Graziosi, Paolo, 84
roaring of, 80 Great Los Angeles Air Raid, 106
feet of, 80-81 griffin, 146
hydra effect, 82-84 Griffin, Donald R., 58
horns of,87 grypeseye, 146
crowns of, 87 guivre, 144
beards of, 89
deadly breath of, 90 Haida, 19, 172
association with water, 90-91 Hai-riyo, 162
wel1s of,91 Haslerud, G.M., 64
eyes of,91 Haviland, William, 25
young women and, 91-93 Hayes, L. Newton, 154
treasures,jewels of,93-94 Hebb, Donald, 44
dragon dancers, 117 hippocampus, 103
Drevar, George, 147 Hittite, 167
Duchamp, Marcel, 82 Hoffinan, Walter James, 19
Duke University, 42, 74 Homo habilis, 32
Hutton,James,47
eagles, 33 Hydra,6
Echidna, 137
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus, 109 Inkhomi,15
Eliot, Alexander, 128 Inuit, 19
Eocene,28
EPAM,58 Jersild,A.T. & E B. Holmes, 65,109
Epstein, Perle, 6 Jormungander (also: Midgard
Eunectes murinus, 34 Serpent), 6,79,139
Evans,Jonahtan,6 Jolly, Alison, 33
Evolution, 47
kami,126
Fafnir, 140-141 Karsten, Rafael, 171
Falconiform, 35 Ki-ai,80
Farley, John, 105 Kikituk,19
flapping and fluttering ofbirds, 44 Kitchener,Andrew 32,36
Franklin, S., 58-60 Knipe, Rita, 15
Frazer, James, 127 Kojiki,7
Freud, Sigmund, 68-69 Komodo dragon,3
186
~
~
INDEX ----
Konner, Melvin, 44 der,l)

Koshi, Dragon of, 78,164 Miller, George A., 56-62
Krak,146 minio,l72
Kulkulkan, 17, 171 Miocene, 29, 61
Mode, Heinz, 9, 95-96,167
Ladon, 137 mokele-mbembe,15
Laidly Worm, 143 Moko (also Mo'o), 15
Lang, PJ. & A. Lazowik, 57 Monkeys
lemurs, 28,33,38 capuchin, 27
Leongalli,9 Goeldis monkey, 27, 43, 53
leopards, 31 pygamy marmoset, 27
Leviathan, 167 Old World monkeys, 27
Loch Ness monster, 6 vervet,27
Locke,John,55 Morris, R. & D. Morris, 44
Lorenz, Konrad, 52 mutation, 50
Lyell, Charles, 47
Naga,9, 122, 166, 167
Macedonia,Joseph M., 42 natural selection, 47, 50-54
Mackal, Roy, 136 Navajo,123
Mackenzie,Donald, 121, 162, 164, Neofelis nebulosa, 32
166,171 Nesse, Randolph M., 41
MacLean, Paul, 71 Neurognostic structuring, 59
Madagascar, 33, 34, 41 Nidhogg, 140
Mad Gasser, 106 Nigg,Joseph,138
Magdalenian, 84 Nihon-gi, 162
Makara, 9,19 Ninurta,8
Marks, Isaac M., 44,52,63-65,67, Olduvai Gorge, 36
68,71,93 Oligocene,28
Marquette, Father Joseph, 17 Or-Danom Dayak (Boreno), 123
Marriotte,Alice & Carol Rachlin, 172 Oroboros,6
Mashenomak, 144
mass hysteria, 105 Panthera, 35
Mavissakalian, Matig, 63 Parker, Sue & Kathleen Gibson, 77
Maya, 111, 171-172 Peluda,144
mazeway, 103-104 phobia (animal), 62-63, 65-71, 92-93
McHargue, Georgees, I, 147 Piamupits, 114
MedaIia, Nehum & Otto Larson, 106 Piasa,17
Melusine, 145 Plains Indians (, Comanche, Kiowa,
Melville,Joy, 44, 93 Arapaho, Sarsi, Crow, Blackfoot,
Mendel, Gregor, 48 Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche,
Midgard Serpent, 6 (see: Jorgaman- etc.),114
187
W
~ INDEX ~
Pottos, 33 Tanniym,168
Primates, 34 Tarasque, 145
Proeonsul, 29 Tarsiers, 27, 33
Pueblo Indians (Hopi, Zuni, Keres, tatsu, 161
ete.), 17 Tatzelwurm, 146
Pululukon, 17,90,112 Taung,29
Python,33 Terada,Alice M., 166
template, 58
Quetzalcoatl, 17 terminal additions, 77
Tiamat,9
Ragnarok, 139 Tinbergen, N., 64
Rainbow Serpent, 15, 170 tribes,97
Raehman, S., 63,67 tripartite cosmos, 128-134
Ratatoskr, 122 Turi,Johan,93
Rig-Veda,166 Typhon, 6, 136
Russel, P.A., 64
Uktena, 1,90,111,117,175
Seattle windshield pitting epidemie,
106 Varanus komodoensis (see: Komodo
Seti,9 dragon),114
Seljordsvatnet, Lake, 6 Vrtra,166
Seneea,17 visual eliff experiment, 67
shime-nawa, 126
Shuara, 171 Wakantanka, 123
Shuker, Karl, 147 Wales, dragons of, 141
Simon, Herbert A., 58 Wallace,A.F.C., 103, 105, 109
Sirrush, 9 Water Cougar, 175
Sisiutl, 19, 172 Wayang (Java), 123, 166
Sivapitheeus, 29,38 Webster,John W, 149
Sluckin,W, 44, 65, 70 Wilson, Edward 0.,92
Smith, S.M., 53 World Tree, 121
Smith, G.E., 1, 15, 166 Worms (wyrms, wurms),143
Spencer, Herbert, 47 wyverns,143
St. George, 73
Struhsaker, T. T., 4, 91 Yanomamo, 132
Sullivan, Lawrence, 19 Y ggdrasil, 122
Susa, 7
188
~

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Pub1ished 2016 by Rout1edge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2000 Tay10r & Francis.

ISBN: 9780415927215 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cata10ging-in-Publication Data

Jones, David E., 1942-

GR830.D7 Ij65 2000

C H AP T E R 1 • The Monkey Hunters 25

C H AP T ER 2 • Running from Certain Shadows 39

CHAPTER 3 • Red Tooth, Red Claw 47

CHAPTER 4 • HowTime Makes a Dragon 55

C H AP T E R 5 • Why Dragons Breathe Fire 73

CHAPTER 6 • Time ofthe Dragon Slayers 95

C H AP T E R 7 • Fate of the Dragons 113

ApPENDIX A • Tree ofLife and theThree Sacred Realms 121

A P P END I X B • More Tales of the Great Worm 135

From the shadows of an oak grove on a distant ridge, it watched the

hoarding dragon Smaug looks down from my Hobbit calendar. Some-

Dragons also populated the Seandinavian eountries.Vikings raided

nesia, but the mythological resemblance is elear.We can best understand

MYTHIC ANIMAL DEVOURING NATIVE

HOFFMAN, IN THE LATE 18005, TOOK THESE ETCHINGS

he world-dragon was formed by the nature of our own shad-

~ T owy progenitors' encounters with the creatures who hunted

presence of the dragon through the entertainment industry, religion, arts,

keylike, generally outeompeting more "primitive" primates. Then, some

I have paused to consider the circumstances surrounding the find of

and-in the case of the baboon-their ferocious group response to

of prey appeared. The oldest SO far discovered, Lithornis, dates to 60 mil-

The effects of the primordial predator linger in the modern social

evolution. Evolution is driven by natural selection, and natural seleetion

he dramatic responses of the vervet monkey to the three basic

~ T predator calls indicate not only the complexity of the monkey's

areas, running, climbing, hiding, and mobbing) should be fairly uniform

Regarding another troop of lemurs in her Madagascar field study,

and 90-degree ares, alternating direction, as if preparing to meet an

Fear, anxiety, and defensive reaetions appearing in eneounters with

he near-universal similarities in primate responses to the three

~ T basic predators of their order require an answer to the question,

individuals advances through the generations. Others, not favorably

To understand evolution, one must move beyond the level of the

dark-patterned peppered moths predominated, and the light-colored

pended a goose cutout from a revolving arm over a pen of newly

he composite predator beast, the dragon, originates from three

The result is the formation ofhierarchies of remembered units, com-

Pfeiffer brings the discussion into a decidedly anthropological dimension

Borrowing language from communication theory, Mil1er also writes

biologically inherited. To explain his position, he offers this brief discus-

ing," Griffin's use of"template," Chalmers's "patterns of neural activity;'

We might argue that in the course of evolution those organisms were

or brain-file label, is "dragon."The "original input events" are the hard-

(1981) notes as examples "fears and avoidances of dogs or cats, birds or

alone and the "fear of fear" is also understandable in the context of

The format of the "visual cliff" experiment is set up as folIows. A

Sigmund Freud, likewise, was unsure of what childhood animal

Sometimes an event that triggered an animal phobia will be discov-

lution, when it burst forth as a composite beast believed by those who

However, rnany details of the story of the world-dragon rernain to