What were Medieval Dragons for?
The last post on medieval dragons was all about what exactly a dragon was and how it has been understood today. I basically reviewed dragons as they exist in contemporary fiction through a stricter medieval lens, when they possessed very different and more sensitive meanings, then used that to critique modern dragonisms.
Dragons! Dragons! Dragons!
Dragons: especially why they're not wyverns and why that distinction is ridiculous if you are trying to capture 'historical realism' for your fiction. Were dragons taxonomised? Why do we continue to try to construct typologies? All this and more!
The argument in that post is more that it’s reductive and constrictive to be overly ‘technical’ when employing dragons in fiction. It’s a bit like the way I beat my magic drum: “hard magic systems” will not capture the mystique inherent to a world which actually was thought to possess medieval magic.
The argument in this post is much more important—why calling nonfictional things “dragon” may be very problematic. I am not interested in the palaeobiology and psychological reasons for dragonlike things here—I am interested in culture.
The basic question to get at what I mean is: what did “dragon” mean to medieval people?—in a symbolic way, rather than the literal way that is discussed in the previous post.
Using Dragons
A good way to interpret symbolism is to think about genre. What medieval genres used dragons? Well, let’s break them down into three groups:
Religious (namely saints’ lives and Biblical sources)
Fictitious (from folktales to romances)
Natural philosophy (sources adjacently religious—bestiaries, scholarly tracts)
The usual caveats apply—these all overlap and influence one another, especially beneath the religious sources, which are broadly the most important to most medieval people and to advancing this case. We will also touch on bestiaries and the (courtly) romance genres.
From these sources we will find dragons symbolise adversity at its highest level—often an evil challenge to be overcome, and at times specifically the devil/demons.
Thinking like a medieval person then, ascribing something the catchall term ‘dragon’, the symbolism is (generally) negative. When ‘dragon’ was applied in history, such as when the Spanish invaded the Americas, the intended meaning was specific, and we see how it remains relevant today, even if it is subtle. By making other comparisons we can see how this was intentional—such as a Chinese dragon silk on a Swiss priest’s garb.
Saints and Dragons
There are two basic ways dragons are slain by saints:
Through prayer
Through battle
In both, the dragon is a form taken by a demon or the Devil/Satan himself. This works in the Biblical sense on many levels, where dragon, serpent, and Leviathan (Jonah’s whale) are essentially conflated, as Thomas Honegger explains in Introducing the Medieval Dragon.
The obvious military victories are Saint George—which has been read as dispelling paganism (which in medieval Christian theology facilitated demonic presence through idolatry) and as conquering demons; and Saint Michael the Archangel—who literally fought Satan in dragon form.
The victories through prayer are more allegorical, not unlike the elephant I have covered previously. Saints Martha (with the tarasque) and Margaret both do this.
The essential difference is that one must overcome the demonic temptation and power through faith, when—at the extreme end—God will intervene through miracle and dispel the demonic dragon. From The Golden Legend:1
‘…Margaret was taken down and put back in jail, where a marvelous light shone around her. There she prayed the Lord to let her see the enemy who was fighting her, and a hideous dragon appeared, but when the beast came at her to devour her, she made the sign of the cross and it vanished. Or, as we read elsewhere, the dragon opened its maw over her head, put out its tongue under her feet, and swallowed her in one gulp. But when it was trying to digest her. she shielded herself with the sign of the cross, and by the power of the cross the dragon burst open and the virgin emerged unscathed…
‘…Again the devil, still trying to deceive Margaret, changed himself to look like a man. She saw him and resorted to prayer, and when she rose, the devil approached, took her hand, and said: "Let all you've done be enough for you, and just let me be!" But she grabbed him by the head, pushed him to the ground, planted her right foot on his head, and said: "Lie still at last, proud demon, under the foot of a woman!" The demon cried out: "O blessed Margaret, I'm beaten! If I'd been beaten by a young man I wouldn't mind, but by a tender girl…! And I feel even worse because your father and mother were friends of mine!"
Shifting into dragon forms and hybrids are to come soon…
The Dragon and Heroes
The hero and the dragon basically emulates the saintly stories, especially warrior saints like Michael and George (and perhaps originally the warrior-saint stories emulated hero narratives). I won’t delve into the detail here, rather reserving it for future posts. The basic setup is that the dragon is the ultimate natural and supernatural challenge the hero must overcome. This is frequent in Arthurian stories.
In Sir Eglamour, the third and most difficult challenge is the dragon (after a boar and two giants!); much like Beowulf, the dragon is the monumental task to conclude the tale which ultimately tests the chivalry and heroism.
I elected to cut a discussion on the Mordiford Dragon and folktales for another day.
Here be Dragons: on the Map
I’ll take this more quickly, as it is a side point. But the whole “here be dragons” idea has some merit from the perspective that, to demonstrate the exotic, wondrous, dangerous, chaotic, and demonic, medieval Europeans often put dragons (and other marvels) on the periphery.
For example, in this single 1460 manuscript, take a look at “Ethiopia” (not necessarily the same as the modern-day country):
And this one, “Arabia”, where people get gemstones from dragon bellies:
Or how about “Africa”, where children are fed to dragons:
Then there’s Egypt, where people worship beasts and dragons run ragged:
The dragon was a symbol to indicate a place was chaotic and diabolical (on its own) and with other symbols, indicated a marvellous exoticism. This followed the Greco-Roman us and them geography that medieval Europe generally employed.
Dragon as a Symbol as a Label
If the dragon is at best a horrific challenge that must be wiped out, may well be an allegory for paganism/non-Christianity, and is at worst the Devil—then what does it mean to call entities from other cultures “dragons”?
Noting it isn’t right to say dragons = demons = dragons = demons—they are clearly distinctive. Dragons were corporeal animals. They had a mortal, vegetative soul. Demons were like angels, with rational, immortal souls.
Nevertheless, dragons’ allegorical and symbolic nature was demonic. Making that difference is key in, say, Beowulf, where the anonymous poet is careful with his language so the audience is left thinking the fight with the dragon was a historical event, and not purely allegory—and yet the allegory is happening simultaneously.
Well, this played out most obviously in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. These days, people call the ‘feathered serpent’ a dragon—according to the “family tree” we looked at before, it would probably be an amphiptere.
Mexican cultures, at least since the Teotihuacano culture (c.100BCE-550CE)—and possibly as early as the Olmecs (1200-400BCE)—had used the feathered serpent image for religious purposes. The primary manifestation is the deity called Quetzalcoatl.
The Spanish had all the righteous zeal and justification for slaughter they would need if they could say their enemies, the native peoples, not only performed ‘human sacrifice’ but also worshipped a dragon (the devil).2
Take this account by Bernal Diaz (1492-1584) a conquistador whose account he self-proclaims is righteous. With little subtlety, Diaz at one point likens Hernán Cortés to Saint George:3
‘…Cortés then ordered an arm-chair to be brought, beautifully painted and adorned with inlaid work, some pieces of precious stones, wrapt in cotton cloth, perfumed with musk, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scarlet cap, with a medal, on which was represented the holy Saint George on horseback, with lance in hand, killing the dragon.’
Among describing the religious and civic spaces they have conquered, this explicitly links native religion to dragons and dragons to demons:4
‘…I cannot, however, pass by in silence a kind of small tower standing in its immediate vicinity, likewise containing idols. I should term it a temple of hell; for at one of its doors stood an open-mouthed dragon armed with huge teeth, resembling a dragon of the infernal regions, the devourer of souls. There also stood near this same door other figures resembling devils and serpents, and not far from this an altar encrusted with blood grown black, and some that had recently been spilt. In a building adjoining this we perceived a quantity of dishes and basins, of various shapes. These were filled with water and served to cook the flesh in of the unfortunate beings who had been sacrificed; which flesh was eaten by the papas. Near to the altar were lying several daggers, and wooden blocks similar to those used by our butchers for hacking meat on. At a pretty good distance from this house of horrors were piles of wood, and a large reservoir of water, which was filled and emptied at stated times, and received its supply through pipes underground from the aqueduct of Chapultepec. I could find no better name for this dwelling than the house of satan!’
So I pose the question—would the Spanish genuinely think the feathered serpents and Mexica deities were dragons, or not? Either way—the answer appears to be the same: the idols were demonic because the people were misled by demons, and dragon was essentially synonymous. If they were draconic/demonic, they were to be slain.
So, should we still group the feathered serpent as a dragon?
Why Demon and Dragon-Labelling is Intentional
I have discussed the Chinese dragon in Europe before. Have a refresher on the full story:
The Chinese 'Dragon' of Switzerland
A priest’s garment from Switzerland c.1400 has a Chinese dragon on it.
Hold on!
—you say—
if dragons are like demons, well, why would a Christian priest wear one?!—doesn’t that undermine your idea about Diaz painting the natives as demon-worshipping savages?!
To that, I ask you to reflect on two points:
Would medieval people know the Chinese ‘dragon’ to actually be a dragon—as they understood it? [i.e., think about whether Chinese dragons really are dragons];
if yes, then:—
A priest wearing it is (likely to be) inherently okay; this Chinese ‘dragon’—if they believed it was a dragon—was not a demonic dragon but mere decoration.
Which, I posit, means your answer to (1) was incorrect—the Chinese ‘dragon’ was not a dragon at all to medieval people. And why would it be? Calling something a dragon had a very specific meaning, as Diaz labours at great lengths to tell us.
By comparison, then, it seems intuitive that the priest and/or Alpine Swiss culture (which was very rich with mythical beasts, including dragons!) did not equate the Chinese 龙 (lōng) with the European (demonic) dragon.
So why do modern fiction writers (and indeed scholars!) prefer to group things under the dragon banner when the historical people did not do so? I think it’s because we think we are being clever and scholarly but really we’re thinking ahistorically and making the classic mistake in believing fiction is inert and unimportant. I also think people take hypotheses from palaeobiology and speculative anthropology and psychology too far in drawing cultural and historical conclusions.
Paul Jordan-Smith puts it very nicely:5
‘David Jones, who teaches anthropology at the University of Central Florida, should have known better than to tangle with dragons, bereft as he seems to be of a much-needed arsenal of data, clarity, and logic. He tries to show, in a rambling and disjointed display of half-understood concepts from various sciences, how the dragon (a) is a pancultural image of danger; (b) is a composite of images of the serpents, predatory cats, and raptors that presumably terrorized our primate ancestors; and (c) is hardwired into the human limbic system (the so-called "reptilian brain").
The claim that a cultural manifestation is ubiquitous is quaint, given how antiquated the notion of "cultural universals" is by today's standards…That an image is ubiquitous is indefensible; in the case of dragons, it's also demonstrably untrue, a fact that Jones tries to hide behind verbal shrubbery. Certainly images may be compounded of diverse elements, and one could comfortably entertain the idea that common dangers (and other human interests) might become codified in a single representative symbol such as the dragon. That this could occur among peoples who never experienced one or more of the dangers, or for whom the dragon is benign, is problematic. Jones rises to the challenge with the hard-wiring hypothesis. Never mind that this cannot be clinically demonstrated: it must be so, according to Jones, because dragons are found “everywhere,” and dissemination by the usual channels of cultural sharing is out of the question, for reasons that remain obscure…’
Who says academics can’t get sassy?
I like finding similarities across human cultures. I also like comparative studies and interdisciplinary scholarship—indeed, my next post will be just on where the western and eastern “dragon”-like things crossover in central Eurasia in wonderful ways, which will definitely nuance what I’ve written today and could even critique.
So, I won’t go that far as to say “dragon-naming” is a fruitless exercise, but I will say it is one we should be careful about. There’s more to the label than scaly fire-monster, and it ain’t just wyvern v dragon v amphiptere v worm v others.
For future dragon posts, I will be covering folklore, cross-Eurasian (Persian) dragons, dragon-morphing, hybrids, and more. Please consider supporting my work!
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Question:
Does dragon = demon? Do either of those things mean anything these days?
Drop your thoughts below—I’d love to hear them, and any ideas for future posts you’d like to see.
2012 translation by William Granger Ryan.
I have put ‘human sacrifice’ in quotes because my Mesoamerica teacher, Professor Elizabeth Graham, did not believe such a thing happened (the way the Spaniards stated it). She is extremely eminent in the field and in the scholarship and not a quack! Here’s her basic position, which I do find fairly persuasive.
Chapter XXXVIII from the John Ingram Lockhart translation.
Chapter XCII.
From a 2002 article, reviewing An Instinct for Dragons by David E Jones who tries all the interdisciplinary tricks to argue that “dragon” is somehow biologically hardwired into humanity, hence what he purports to be cultural similarities and a universal “origin” for the dragon.
An historical question about the 'here be dragons': as far as i know this 'warning' was 'hic sunt leones' to point out that in that area there were unknown lands. When and where the 'here be dragons' has been used? (I am extremely curious as I used this saying in the maps of my fantasy rpg and I was sure these didn't exist in teal maps!) Thanks
I have a question that you may be able to answer. I've wondered about the origins of dragons, and even entertained the idea of them being hard-wired into us, a sort of genetic memory and fear of the dinosaurs that's remained through evolution. I suppose people must have been finding dinosaur fossils through the ages, do you know if such bones were ever attributed to dragons?