Dragons And Destiny
It all started as I was idly checking to see what was showing on the TV and, within seconds of each other, two programmes featuring dragons popped onto the screen. One was the movie Dragonheart, an all-time favourite of mine that was on a local channel. I was tempted - if only to hear Sean Connery bring Draco to life! On the other hand, a documentary based on Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden was on the Discovery channel at roughly the same time. Since I own a copy of Dragonheart, I decided to watch the documentary. I briefly thought about the co-incidence of two programmes airing at the same time both focusing on dragons but then got lost in Carl Sagan's characteristic tonselly voice giving his "take" on the dominant Western creation myth and the theory of evolution weaving back and forth between antiquity and the post-modern world of science. But what stayed with me long after the programme were images of dragons. In a sense they were always with me, curled up in the hidden recesses of my unconscious mind making an appearance now and then in the form of unacknowledged fears or momentary anxieties that I quickly dismissed and moved on. Don't get me wrong, I loved dragons as a kid but then who didn't?
A day after I watched The Dragons of Eden, I was in a charity shop browsing through the used books shelves when an out-of-print novel I had been looking for found me instead. It was perched precariously on the edge of the shelf just above my eye level. The book was Tea With The Black Dragon by R. A. McAvoy, a delightful story by a much admired writer and story-teller. I snapped up the book and decided to start reading it over lunch at a local restaurant that specialized in light fare on the lunchtime menu. The synchronicity of this third occurrence of a Dragon in the space of a day fleetingly passed through my mind as I made my way to the restaurant.
Dragons, Dragons Everywhere
I was about to order a quiche when the waiter wheeled chalkboard in to the shop. The board immediately caught my eye. It sported a very brightly coloured chalk drawing of...guess what? Oh, yes, a Dragon! Whoa, we were way past simple co-incidence by now. I stared in amazement at the fanciful beast. He was meant to draw attention to the daily special: Dragon's Breath Curry. I kid you not! Tempting as it was for a minute, Curry is not exactly my idea of a light lunch so I gave that a miss but wrote a note on the amusing synchro in back of the book I had just bought.
By the time I arrived home a few hours later, the Dragon's Breath Curry was a receding memory - until later that evening when I picked up my mail. As I was lifting it out of the mailbox, a flyer fell out so I stooped to retrieve it. It was an invitation to a class in something I have always wanted to learn: Oriental Silk Thread Embroidery. And the item to be embroidered was - wait for it - Yep, a Dragon! By now I was getting a bit spooked. Why were dragons - of all things - suddenly springing up all around me as though insisting I pay attention? This was the fifth one in the space of 24 hours! I knew better than to ignore such multiple incidents of the same iconic symbol popping up within a short span of time so I raised my antenna to a higher than usual level of alertness and realised I would have to investigate this strange Synchronicity to discover what it meant.
Hating Dragons, Loving Dragons
Not everyone likes Dragons, of course. The Dragons of European/Anglo origin are generally highly unpleasant characters! They are a relatively recent cultural artifact as Europe was at one time a "New World" but they were preceded by various gods and goddesses like those of ancient Greece. Most of us know the story of Zeus, a blood-thirsty, vengeful megalomaniac of a god who exhibited all the worst of human character flaws. Gods of this ilk demanded constant admiration, worship and appeasement to keep his violent proclivities in check. The gods of Western imagination were dangerously fickle and more likely to visit catastrophe on humans than to provide wisdom or protection.
The Chinese, on the other hand, found an alternative to these capricious gods. In the Chinese context dragons go back to at least 4000 BCE. There is no definitive history of the idea of the dragon but cultures all over the world had different versions of creatures that are clearly all representations of the Dragon. They reasoned that it would take a creature with a huge body, large eyes that could see even in the dark, the ability to fly, scaly skin like fish so it would be impervious to water, horns on its head to break through barriers, paws like a lion for strength, could breathe fire if it had to, and had the talons of an eagle to fight with. But these imposing beasts were not hostile to humans. In fact, if we humans honoured them the dragons would help and protect us in all domains of our existence. In Chinese culture specific Dragons dwelt in the realms of earth, air, fire, and water. By honouring the power and influence of the Dragons in each realm, humans could be guided by Dragon Energy to a life of balance and prosperity. What's not to like about that? The Oriental Dragon is a being of dignity, nobility and, most of all, beneficence. Oriental Dragons are human-friendly, even protective of us - which I for one find a rather comforting notion. Couldn't we all use a fire-breathing defender from time to time ?
Making Dragons Into Enemies
In Western culture, psychologists maintain that Dragons are vestigial memories of frightening human encounters with Monitor Lizards or other species of large reptiles deep in our evolutionary past. In the view of evolutionary psychology, these real-life experiences with individual beasts became generalised through myth and legend into personifications of human fears. Whereas the Chinese and other Oriental peoples be-friended their dragons, Westerners turned them into enemies to be hunted and slain. Aggression, violence and ruthlessness thus came to be regarded as essential to human survival and the idea of co-operation with natural elements was limited to the healing arts and, later, to agriculture.
To this day the Western imagination conjures ever more vile and enormous scale-covered monsters requiring ever bigger and more destructive weapons for humans to kill them. In other words, our fears of Nature and each other have increased with our capacity to inflict destruction on the world around us. But there is an alternative and benign Dragons represent it: respect for and skillful use of the natural energies around us, letting go of the need to control in favour of adaptation and acceptance. There is no final control of nature in any case; it is always far more powerful than we are so why not work with it rather against it. No one gets off this planet alive and we're a long way from "colonising" space which itself may depend on changing our attitudes from conquering nature back to exploring it for its own sake and not for more natural resources to exploit. Rather than taking our battles into space, shouldn't we learn what our own planet has to teach us first. Where better to start than with the benign protection of Earth, Air, Water and Fire Dragons?
© Delia O' Riordan 2014
