The Evolution of the Dragon Part 19

But the close connexion of the Great Mother with the dragon and the thunder-weapon prepared the way for the special a.s.sociation of the spiral with thunder, which was confirmed when the ram with its spiral horn became the G.o.d of Thunder.

[230: _Op. cit._, vol. i., pp. 212-27.]

The Pig.

The relationship of the pig to the dragon is on the whole a.n.a.logous to that of the cow and the stag, for it can play either a beneficent or a malevolent part. But the nature of the special circ.u.mstances which gave the pig a peculiar notoriety as an unclean animal are so intimately a.s.sociated with the "Birth of Aphrodite" that I shall defer the discussion of them for my lecture on the history of the G.o.ddess.

Certain Incidents in the Dragon Myth.

Throughout the greater part of the area which tradition has peopled with dragons, iron is regarded as peculiarly lethal to the monsters. This seems to be due to the part played by the "smiths" who forged iron weapons with which Horus overcame Set and his followers,[231] or in the earlier versions of the legend the metal weapons by means of which the people of Upper Egypt secured their historic victory over the Lower Egyptians. But the a.s.sociation of meteoric iron with the thunderbolt, the traditional weapon for destroying dragons, gave added force to the ancient legend and made it peculiarly apt as an incident in the story.

But though the dragon is afraid of iron, he likes precious gems and _k'ung-ts'ing_ ("The Stone of Darkness") and is fond of roasted swallows.

The partiality of dragons for swallows was due to the transmission of a very ancient story of the Great Mother, who in the form of Isis was identified with the swallow. In China, so ravenous is the monster for this delicacy, that anyone who has eaten of swallows should avoid crossing the water, lest the dragon whose home is in the deep should devour the traveller to secure the dainty morsel of swallow. But those who pray for rain use swallows to attract the beneficent deity. Even in England swallows flying low are believed to be omens of coming rain--a tale which is about as reliable as the Chinese variant of the same ancient legend.

"The beautiful gems remind us of the Indian dragons; the pearls of the sea were, of course, in India as well as China and j.a.pan, considered to be in the special possession of the dragon-shaped sea-G.o.ds" (de Visser, p. 69). The cultural drift from West to East along the southern coast of India was effected mainly by sailors who were searching for pearls.

Sharks const.i.tuted the special dangers the divers had to incur in exploiting pearl-beds to obtain the precious "giver of life". But at the time these great enterprises were first undertaken in the Indian Ocean the people dwelling in the neighbourhood of the chief pearl-beds regarded the sea as the great source of all life-giving virtues and the G.o.d who exercised these powers was incarnated in a fish. The sharks therefore had to be brought into harmony with this scheme, and they were rationalized as the guardians of the storehouse of life-giving pearls at the bottom of the sea.

I do not propose to discuss at present the diffusion to the East of the beliefs concerning the shark and the modifications which they underwent in the course of these migrations in Melanesia and elsewhere; but in my lecture upon "the Birth of Aphrodite" I shall have occasion to refer to its spread to the West and explain how the shark's role was transferred to the dog-fish in the Mediterranean. The dog-fish then a.s.sumed a terrestrial form and became simply the dog who plays such a strange part in the magical ceremony of digging up the mandrake.

At present we are concerned merely with the shark as the guardian of the stores of pearls at the bottom of the sea. He became identified with the Naga and the dragon, and the store of pearls became a vast treasure-house which it became one of the chief functions of the dragon to guard. This episode in the wonder-beast's varied career has a place in most of the legends ranging from Western Europe to Farthest Asia.

Sometimes the dragon carries a pearl under his tongue or in his chin as a reserve of life-giving substance.

Mr. Donald Mackenzie has called attention[232] to the remarkable influence upon the development of the Dragon Myth of the familiar Egyptian representation of the child Horus with a finger touching his lips. On some pretence or other, many of the European dragon-slaying heroes, such as Sigurd and the Highland Finn, place their fingers in their mouths. This action is usually rationalized by the statement that the hero burnt his fingers while cooking the slain monster.

[231: Budge, "G.o.ds of the Egyptians," vol. i., p. 476.]

[232: "Egyptian Myth and Legend," pp. 340 _et seq._]

The Ethical Aspect.

So far in this discussion I have been dealing mainly with the problems of the dragon's evolution, the attainment of his or her distinctive anatomical features and physiological attributes. But during this process of development a moral and ethical aspect of the dragon's character was also emerging.

Now that we have realized the fact of the dragon's h.o.m.ology with the moon-G.o.d it is important to remember that one of the primary functions of this deity, which later became specialized in the Egyptian G.o.d Thoth, was the measuring of time and the keeping of records. The moon, in fact, was the controller of accuracy, of truth, and order, and therefore the enemy of falsehood and chaos. The identification of the moon with Osiris, who from a dead king eventually developed into a king of the dead, conferred upon the great Father of Waters the power to exact from men respect for truth and order. For even if at first these ideas were only vaguely adumbrated and not expressed in set phrases, it must have been an incentive to good discipline when men remembered that the record-keeper and the guardian of law and order was also the deity upon whose tender mercies they would have to rely in the life after death. Set, the enemy of Osiris, who is the real prototype of the evil dragon, was the ant.i.thesis of the G.o.d of justice: he was the father of falsehood and the symbol of chaos. He was the prototype of Satan, as Osiris was the first definite representative of the Deity of which any record has been preserved.

The history of the evil dragon is not merely the evolution of the devil, but it also affords the explanation of his traditional peculiarities, his bird-like features, his horns, his red colour, his wings and cloven hoofs, and his tail. They are all of them the dragon's distinctive features; and from time to time in the history of past ages we catch glimpses of the reality of these identifications. In one of the earliest woodcuts (Fig. 17) found in a printed book Satan is depicted as a monk with the bird's feet of the dragon. A most interesting intermediate phase is seen in a Chinese water-colour in the John Rylands Library, in which the thunder-dragon is represented in a form almost exactly reproducing that of the devil of European tradition (Fig. 16).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 16.--The G.o.d Of Thunder.

(From a Chinese drawing (? 17th Century) in the John Rylands Library)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 17.--From Joannes de Turrecremata's "Meditationes seu Contemplationes". _Romae: Ulrich Hau_. 1467]

Early in the Christian era, when ancient beliefs in Egypt became disguised under a thin veneer of Christianity, the story of the conflict between Horus and Set was converted into a conflict between Christ and Satan. M. Clermont-Ganneau has described an interesting bas-relief in the Louvre in which a hawk-headed St. George, clad in Roman military uniform and mounted on a horse, is slaying a dragon which is represented by Set's crocodile.[233] But the Biblical references to Satan leave no doubt as to his ident.i.ty with the dragon, who is specifically mentioned in the Book of Revelations as "the old serpent which is the Devil and Satan" (xx. 2).

The devil Set was symbolic of disorder and darkness, while the G.o.d Osiris was the maintainer of order and the giver of light. Although the moon-G.o.d, in the form of Osiris, Thoth and other deities, thus came to acquire the moral attributes of a just judge, who regulated the movements of the celestial bodies, controlled the waters upon the earth, and was responsible for the maintenance of order in the Universe, the ethical aspect of his functions was in large measure disguised by the material importance of his duties. In Babylonia similar views were held with respect to the beneficent water-G.o.d Ea, who was the giver of civilization, order and justice, and Sin, the moon-G.o.d, who "had attained a high position in the Babylonian pantheon," as "the guide of the stars and the planets, the overseer of the world at night". "From that conception a G.o.d of high moral character soon developed." "He is an extremely beneficent deity, he is a king, he is the ruler of men, he produces order and stability, like Shamash and like the Indian Varu?a and Mitra, but besides that, he is also a judge, he loosens the bonds of the imprisoned, like Varu?a. His light, like that of Varu?a, is the symbol of righteousness.... Like the Indian Varu?a and the Iranian Mazdah, he is a G.o.d of wisdom."

When these Egyptian and Babylonian ideas were borrowed by the Aryans, and the Iranian Mazdah and the Indian Varu?a a.s.sumed the role of the beneficent deity of the former more ancient civilizations, the material aspect of the functions of the moon-G.o.d became less obtrusive; and there gradually emerged the conception, to which Zarathushtra first gave concrete expression, of the beneficent G.o.d Ahura Mazdah as "an omniscient protector of morality and creator of marvellous power and knowledge". "He is the most-knowing one, and the most-seeing one. No one can deceive him. He watches with radiant eyes everything that is done in open or in secret." "Although he has a strong personality he has no anthropomorphic features." He has shed the material aspects which loomed so large in his Egyptian, Babylonian and earlier Aryan prototypes, and a more ethereal conception of a G.o.d of the highest ethical qualities has emerged.

The whole of this process of transformation has been described with deep insight and lucid exposition by Professor c.u.mont, from whose important and convincing memoir I have quoted so freely in the foregoing paragraphs.[234]

The creation of a beneficent Deity of such moral grandeur inevitably emphasized the baseness and the malevolence of the "Power of Evil". No longer are the G.o.ds merely glorified human beings who can work good or evil as they will; but there is now an all-powerful G.o.d controlling the morals of the universe, and in opposition to Him "the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan".

[233: "Horus et St. George d'apres un bas-relief inedit du Louvre,"

_Revue Archeologique_, Nouvelle Serie, t. x.x.xii., 1876, p. 196, pl.

xviii. It is right to explain that M. Clermont-Ganneau's interpretation of this relief has not been accepted by all scholars.]

[234: Albert J. Carnoy, "The Moral Deities of Iran and India and their Origins," _The American Journal of Theology_, vol. xxi., No. 1, Jan.

1917, p. 58.]

Chapter III.

THE BIRTH OF APHRODITE.[235]

It may seem ungallant to discuss the birth of Aphrodite as part of the story of the evolution of the dragon. But the other chapters of this book, in which frequent references have been made to the early history of the Great Mother, have revealed how vital a part she played in the development of the dragon. The earliest real dragon was Tiamat, one of the forms a.s.sumed by the Great Mother; and an even earlier prototype was the lioness (Sekhet) manifestation of Hathor.

Thus it becomes necessary to enquire more fully (than has been done in the other chapters) into the circ.u.mstances of the Great Mother's birth and development, and to investigate certain aspects of her ontogeny to which only scant attention has been paid in the preceding pages.

Several reasons have led me to select Aphrodite from the vast legion of Great Mothers for special consideration. In spite of her high specialization in certain directions the Greek G.o.ddess of love retains in greater measure than any of her sisters some of the most primitive a.s.sociations of her original parent. Like vestigial structures in biology, these traits afford invaluable evidence, not only of Aphrodite's own ancestry and early history, but also of that of the whole family of G.o.ddesses of which she is only a specialized type. For Aphrodite's connexion with sh.e.l.ls is a survival of the circ.u.mstances which called into existence the first Great Mother and made her not only the Creator of mankind and the universe, but also the parent of all deities, as she was historically the first to be created by human inventiveness. In this lecture I propose to deal with the more general aspects of the evolution of all these daughters of the Great Mother: but I have used Aphrodite's name in the t.i.tle because her sh.e.l.l-a.s.sociations can be demonstrated more clearly and definitely than those of any of her sisters.

In the past a vast array of learning has been brought to bear upon the problems of Aphrodite's origin; but this effort has, for the most part, been characterized by a narrowness of vision and a lack of adequate appreciation of the more vital factors in her embryological history. In the search for the deep human motives that found specific expression in the great G.o.ddess of love, too little attention has been paid to primitive man's psychology, and his persistent striving for an elixir of life to avert the risk of death, to renew youth and secure a continuance of existence after death. On the other hand, the possibility of obtaining any real explanation has been dashed aside by most scholars, who have been content simply to juggle with certain stereotyped catchphrases and baseless a.s.sumptions, simply because the traditions of cla.s.sical scholarship have made these devices the p.a.w.ns in a rather aimless game.

It is unnecessary to cite specific ill.u.s.trations in support of this statement. Reference to any of the standard works on cla.s.sical archaeology, such as Roscher's "Lexikon," will testify to the truth of my accusation. In her "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion" Miss Jane Harrison devotes a chapter (VI) to "The Making of a G.o.ddess," and discusses "The Birth of Aphrodite". But she strictly observes the traditions of the cla.s.sical method; and a.s.sumes that the meaning of the myth of Aphrodite's birth from the sea--the germs of which are at least fifty centuries old--can be decided by the omission of any representation of the sea in the decoration of a pot made in the fifth century B.C.!

But apart from this general criticism, the lack of resourcefulness and open mindedness, certain more specific factors have deflected cla.s.sical scholars from the true path. In the search for the ancestry of Aphrodite, they have concentrated their attention too exclusively upon the Mediterranean area and Western Asia, and so ignored the most ancient of the historic Great Mothers, the African Hathor, with whom (as Sir Arthur Evans[236] clearly demonstrated more than fifteen years ago) the Cypriote G.o.ddess has much closer affinities than with any of her Asiatic sisters. Yet no scholar, either on the Greek or Egyptian side, has seriously attempted to follow up this clue and really investigate the nature of the connexions between Aphrodite and Hathor, and the history of the development of their respective specializations of functions.[237]

But some explanation must be given for my temerity in venturing to invade the intensively cultivated domains of Aphrodite "with a mind undebauched by cla.s.sical learning". I have already explained how the study of Libations and Dragons brought me face to face with the problems of the Great Mother's attributes. At that stage of the enquiry two circ.u.mstances directed my attention specifically to Aphrodite. Mr.

Wilfrid Jackson was collecting the data relating to the cultural uses of sh.e.l.ls, which he has since incorporated in a book.[238] As the results of his search acc.u.mulated, the fact soon emerged that the original Great Mother was nothing more than a cowry-sh.e.l.l used as a life-giving amulet; and that Aphrodite's sh.e.l.l-a.s.sociations were a survival of the earliest phase in the Great Mother's history. At this psychological moment Dr. Rendel Harris[239] claimed that Aphrodite was a personification of the mandrake. But the magical attributes of the mandrake, which he claimed to have been responsible for converting the amulet into a G.o.ddess, were identical with those which Jackson's investigations had previously led me to regard as the reasons for deriving Aphrodite from the cowry. The mandrake was clearly a surrogate of the sh.e.l.l or vice versa.[240] The problem to be solved was to decide which amulet was responsible for suggesting the process of life-giving.

The G.o.ddess Aphrodite was closely related to Cyprus; the mandrake was a magical plant there; and the cowry is so intimately a.s.sociated with the island as to be called _Cypraea_. So far as is known, however, the sh.e.l.l-amulet is vastly more ancient than the magical reputation of the plant. Moreover, we know why the cowry was regarded as feminine and accredited with life-giving attributes. There are no such reasons for a.s.signing life-giving powers or the female s.e.x to the mandrake. The claim that its magical properties are due to the fancied resemblance of its root to a human being is wholly untenable.[241] The roots of many plants are at least as manlike; and, even if this character was the exclusive property of the mandrake, how does it help to explain the remarkable repetory of quite arbitrary and fantastic properties and the female s.e.x a.s.signed to the plant? Sir James Frazer's claim[242] that "such beliefs and practices ill.u.s.trate the primitive tendency to personify nature" is a gratuitous and quite irrelevant a.s.sumption, which offers no explanation whatsoever of the specific and arbitrary nature of the form a.s.sumed by the personification. But when we investigate the historical development of the peculiar attributes of the cowry-sh.e.l.l, and appreciate why and how they were acquired, any doubt as to the source from which the mandrake obtained its "magic" is removed; and with it the fallacy of Sir James Frazer's wholly unwarranted claims is also exposed.

If we ignore Sir James Frazer's nave speculations we can make use of the compilations of evidence which he makes with such remarkable a.s.siduity. But it is more profitable to turn to the study of the remarkable lectures which Dr. Rendel Harris has been delivering in this room[243] during the last few years. Our genial friend has been cultivating his garden on the slopes of Olympus,[244] and has been plucking the rich fruits of his ripe scholarship and nimble wit. At the same time, with rougher implements and cruder methods, I have been burrowing in the depths of the earth, trying to recover information concerning the habits and thoughts of mankind many centuries before Dionysus and Apollo, and Artemis and Aphrodite, were dreamt of.

In the course of these subterranean gropings no one was more surprised than I was to discover that I was getting entangled in the roots of the same plants whose golden fruit Dr. Rendel Harris was gathering from his Olympian heights. But the contrast in our respective points of view was perhaps responsible for the different appearance the growths a.s.sumed.

To drop the metaphor, while he was searching for the origins of the deities a few centuries before the Christian era began, I was finding their more or less larval forms flourishing more than twenty centuries before the commencement of his story. For the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of his narrative were only the thinly disguised representatives of much more ancient deities decked out in the sumptuous habiliments of Greek culture.

In his lecture on Aphrodite, Dr. Rendel Harris claimed that the G.o.ddess was a personification of the mandrake; and I think he made out a good prima facie case in support of his thesis. But other scholars have set forth equally valid reasons for a.s.sociating Aphrodite with the argonaut, the octopus, the purpura, and a variety of other sh.e.l.ls, both univalves and bivalves.[245]

The G.o.ddess has also been regarded as a personification of water, the ocean, or its foam.[246] Then again she is closely linked with pigs, cows, lions, deer, goats, rams, dolphins, and a host of other creatures, not forgetting the dove, the swallow, the partridge, the sparling, the goose, and the swan.[247]