Part 1
PERSEUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_ By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_ By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_
_NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes_ By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_ By F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_ By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare_ By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_ By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_ By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_ By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_ By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_PERSEUS, or Of Dragons_ By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_ By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_ By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence_ By Vernon Lee
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
PERSEUS OR OF DRAGONS
BY H. F. SCOTT STOKES, M.A. (Oxon.)
New York E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright 1925 By E. P. Dutton & Company
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_If Jones of Chelsea should bedeck With virgin’s head a horse’s neck, And decorate this monstrous birth With limbs of all the beasts on earth And many-coloured wings, would you Contain your laughter at the private view?_
Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 1–5.
CONTENTS
_Page_
Preface 3
Introduction 13
I. Of Dragons in General 16
II. Of Dragons in Classical Antiquity 23
III. Of Dragons in Early Christendom 29
IV. Of Dragons in Modern Europe 43
V. Of Dragons in Ancient Egypt 57
VI. Of the Birth and Death of the Dragon 63
Epilogue 72
PERSEUS OR OF DRAGONS
OF DRAGONS
PREFACE
I have been asked to explain the purpose of this study. I find a ridiculous difficulty in doing so, for it had none. My interest in dragons was aroused by some incidental paragraphs in Leslie Stephen’s _The Playground of Europe_. I determined to find out all that there was to be known about dragons: with the unfailing assistance of that great institution, the London Library, I made a fairly careful search; and, when I had exhausted my authorities (to whom I am greatly indebted), I set down with some pleasure the facts that had come under my notice. That is all.
In case it should be objected that no sane man could have done anything so elaborately purposeless, I will attempt a more plausible explanation――though the truth is exactly what I have said.
The first four sections give a fair account of the dragon as known to history: in ancient Greece, in early Christendom, and in modern Europe. The last two endeavour to explain how the dragon-story may have originated from the myths and customs of prehistoric Egypt, and how humanly foolish the whole thing is; and they close with the pious hope that the species may in time become extinct.
It will be objected that the dragon is already dead, as has been shown in the course of the study. It is true that the living, breathing, devouring dragon has passed away with Perseus and the gods of old; we have to-day only an occasional saga, such as the “Jabberwock,” a pale reflection of the full-blooded ancient tales, lacking many essential details and almost apologized for by its author; a herald’s act of piety, or the unreal enthusiasm of an æsthete vainly seeking de-sophistication. It is all a faint afterglow of the age of faith. And yet, in England at any rate, the dragon is not dead.
What are the chief characteristics of modern Englishmen――not the ornaments of society, nor artists, nor any other lovely ones, but these poor plain people who earn their daily bread, with or without the sweat of their brows, because they must; who make up nine-tenths of our population; who control our political destinies; and whom the Carlton Club delights to honour?
They are respectability, bigotry, and cant. There can be no doubt about this. The consequence is that the men have no character and the women no charm, and we rule over a quarter of the world with complete satisfaction to ourselves. These three together make up our modern dragon. Respectability is the deadliest, for it is a plausible substitute for better things; but it is a dead end, like innocence.
Most men who have realized the existence of this monster apparently try to meet it by joining the Labour Party. There is nothing immoral about that, but I pin my faith to the less dogmatic method of general education. It is curious, by the way, to note that the devil is historically associated with knowledge and not with ignorance. It would take too long to explain how this bogey came to be hoisted, but it is still very commonly made use of to frighten children, and my true purpose is to plead that it _is_ only a bogey, and that ignorance is the devil’s most effective weapon.
The devil’s advocate might argue much as follows:
1. “You don’t really like the ‘vulgar’――they are not as interesting as your own friends.
2. “It will come to nothing. What _is_ the ultimate value of ‘free discussion’ and ‘reasoning without prejudice’ among people who don’t read and can’t think?
3. “In so far as you do succeed, you will merely make them miserable: as thus:
‘Happiness is the end of life.
‘It consists of (_a_) the admiring contemplation of the truly admirable, and the delighted companionship of the truly delightful. This is the best. (_b_) The second best is to enjoy in imagination what you know to be imaginary. (_c_) The third best is to enjoy mistakenly what is in fact non-existent or ugly.
‘There is no other good.’
“All this is A B C, and no longer worth arguing about. Then imagine a man well content with a mistaken religion, a dreary home, and an unlovely wife (and this describes nearly all mankind). What happens when you educate him? It is difficult for him to change his wife, very difficult to change his religion, and impossibly difficult to change his home――and the man is uprooted and miserable for life.”
The answer is: This is all substantially true (which is the definition of caricature). Comfortable folk too commonly ignore the prosaic foundations of imperishable things. Many of the more delightful virtues are impossible vices to men struggling for the bare necessities of life (as you may see any day if you try to practise ordinary courtesy in mounting a ’bus), and it is complacent cant to propose such virtues to them. And men so struggling are not altogether delightful. The point about them is, by what right or merit of yours do you live so much more easily, with so many more opportunities of the good life; and do you use your opportunities? And can you be of any use to others less fortunate than yourself? For the rest:
(1) The argument defends too much. It defends every _status quo_ against all change. But change, though not necessarily progress, is evidently necessary to progress; and, even if progress be despaired of, change is in itself nearly always healthy. It prevents men from going to sleep.
(2) When all the world is delightful, all men will be able to enjoy delightful companionship. Meanwhile, the pioneers must suffer, and hope for better things for their children.
If it be argued that education does not make men delightful, in fact very much the contrary, I answer that that depends upon the education, and that, if genuine education doesn’t, nothing will; which is absurd.
(3) When all the world loves lovely things, then lovely things will be easily come by, and ugly things will not be tolerated. This is not a generous illusion but a simple economic truth. Suppose I manufacture purple handkerchiefs adorned with green dragons: I do it because there is a demand, and if you want one perfectly plain (and if nobody else does) you will have to pay twice as much for it because it is a “special”; but if all the world wanted them plain, they would be a stock line and you could have them for half the money. Meanwhile, the pioneers must pay double or go without.
(4) When all the world has passed through the stage of intelligent scepticism and examined its foundations, it will worship the unknown god without fear and without reproach――a very right and proper thing to do. Meanwhile, the pioneers must be damned dissenters.
That is the gist of this study: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation....” Good (_b_) is in itself better than (_c_); and it is a half-way house to (_a_), which (_c_) is not.
All the textbooks tell us about the nature and origin of belief. I have but shown a few examples of what incredible things men believed almost down to our own day, and still believe. One of the chief functions of History is to show what wrongs good men have tolerated, and what absurdities wise men have believed, as a warning to their later sons to look warily about them for the like. In that sense this study may claim to be true history.
That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred’s soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit.
We may miss an unit and die; but at least we shall have striven to be worthy of a grammarian’s funeral.
OF DRAGONS
(An Introduction to the Study of Man)
I must first ask your pardon for troubling you with this digression, but the facts and the theories are so many and curious and the whole subject is of such vital importance, that I dared not trust to my memory alone. It must be admitted that most of the facts recorded are obviously untrue and that most of the theories are unsupported by evidence and highly improbable; though the facts are guaranteed by the highest authorities of the most ancient religions and the theories upheld by the most eminent modern scientists. Whence it is evident that I, like Sir John Mandeville, “have taken pains to ascertain the exact truth”; and yet I think that from this jumble of superstitions and fables and conjectures and absurdities there does emerge something that may repay you for the weariness of an hour, and throw some light upon the hopes and fears with which the unconquerable spirit of man has progressed through the ages to the crowning triumphs of this twentieth century. Indeed, as Sir Thomas Browne finely says in his Preface: “A work of this nature is not to be performed upon one legg: and should smell of oyl, if duly and deservedly handled.” And, on second thoughts, I fully and unreservedly withdraw my apology.
I shall begin with some attempt to define our subject, and then take you through the dragons of classical antiquity and early Christendom down to the twilight uncertainty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the blank incredulity of our modern age. I shall then go back to the earliest legends of all――the Egyptian, and close with an attempt to harmonize the whole, and with a critical estimate of the place of the dragon in human thought and experience.
I
OF DRAGONS IN GENERAL
In Glastonbury, where St. Dunstan took the devil by the nose and where the Pilgrim’s Inn is dedicated to St. George and the Dragon, the dragon will always be an object of peculiar interest, not to say veneration. (So true is this that on the 16th October, 1906, the Somerset County Council, on the advice of its Chairman, adopted as its sole device “Gules, a dragon rampant, or,” though the recognition of its increasing importance has since led it to add――15th October, 1912――the mace of office, “at a cost not exceeding £20.”)
For Milton writes in one of his most harmonious numbers:
The old Dragon under ground In straiter limits bound Not half so far casts his usurpéd sway. And wroth to see his kingdom fail Swings the scaly horrour of his folded tail.
and St. John (_Revelation_, xx, 2) speaks of “the Dragon, the old Serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,” while the Serpent that tempted Eve in Paradise has been familiar to us all since our earliest childhood; though commentators differ as to whether it appeared with a virgin’s head (as some say) and how it was enabled to speak, and in Eve’s own language; and why the event excited no surprise in her. (Milton tells us――_Paradise Lost_, ix, 550, and what follows――that it did, and that “not unamazed” she took up the matter with the Serpent, which explained that it had been elevated above all the “other beasts that graze” by tasting of the tree of knowledge. This answer at once satisfied Eve and lured her on to her fall. The whole account is circumstantial but undocumented.) Some say that Eve was inexperienced with animals, not having been present when Adam named them; Eugubinus suggests that the Serpent was a basilisk, at that time harmless; and the Emperor Julian said roundly that the whole story was a fable. However that may be, the dragon has been identified with nearly all the gods and devils of nearly all the religions of nearly all mankind――primitive man does not distinguish between the two, both being primarily non-moral beings of enormous and terrifying power――and Christian evidence is undivided in associating the dragon with the powers of darkness. And what could be more natural than that a dragon should take up its abode in or near Glastonbury, this region of hills and swamps? For it is universally admitted that dragons are to be found on the tops of mountains or in the depths of marshes, and it is a generally accepted test of evidence that what has been believed by all men everywhere in every age is true――absurd, perhaps, but not more absurd than the modern opinion that what one man has once believed is true.
We need not pause long over those other meanings of “Dragon” which so confused our forefathers and so delight our contemporary compilers of dictionaries: we do not propose to study that Dragon (Draco) who gave stringent laws to the ancient Athenians, nor the variety of carrier-pigeon known to natural history under that name, nor the star called Dragon, nor quicksilver, nor (directly) the sea-serpent, nor the flying lizard; nor have we any concern with the dragoons, who take their name either from the dragon wrought upon their guns or from the fact that they were originally mounted infantry, and so a kind of fabulous monster or “popular mystery.” Our subject is the common (or garden) dragon, one of the major vertebrates, blood-red or chameleon-hued, with huge snake-coils, web-feet, bat-wings, and the head of a lion or an eagle, capable of snuffing up the wind (_Jeremiah_, xiv, 6) and holding companionship with owls (_Job_, xxx, 29) though some say that the bird intended is the ostrich. It dwelt of old in mountain-caves, and lakes and marshes, and other inaccessible places (the fiercer sort favoured the mountains), and survives to-day only in heraldry, for instance, in the arms of the City of London, and of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. More peculiar and detailed descriptions of the animal will follow later, but it is well to note here its special partiality for water and for swallows (whence swallows flying low are to this day popularly supposed to herald rain), and its habit of guarding treasures――gold, pearls, and precious stones――and of emitting thunder and lightning. Eating its heart confers peculiar qualities, notably fertility and the gift of tongues, and the draconite or precious stone which lies embedded in its forehead has incredible properties in the way of medicine and magic, but only if you catch the animal alive and remove the stone without otherwise injuring it. (The recorded instances of this feat are remarkably rare, most authentic draconites having fortunately fallen from the head of the beast while in flight, very much as a meteorite might fall to-day.)
Without further theorizing or inquiry, we will pass on to the old Greek legend of Perseus, pausing only for the pleasant task of exploding one particularly absurd opinion about the origin of the dragon. Sceptics have suggested that it is nothing but primitive man’s hazy and terrified tradition of the antediluvian monsters which walked the early earth and which adorn the first pages of Mr. Wells’ _Outline of History_; but science now tells us that something like seven million years elapsed between the passing of the last of these and the first appearance of the first of our fairly human forebears.
II
OF DRAGONS IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
There were numerous dragons in old Greece, “gorgons and hydras and chimæras dire,” and all the best heroes had at least one apiece to their credit; but they were a confusing and unfriendly lot, and we will confine ourselves to the central legend of Perseus.
“An oracle warned Acrisius, King of Argos, that he would surely die by the hand of his daughter Danæ’s son. To prevent this, he locked the fair maiden in a tower of brass, which he built for the purpose. But Zeus, king of Heaven, visited her in the disguise of a golden shower of rain, and, much to Acrisius’ annoyance, she bore a son, Perseus. Acrisius then shut them up in a chest and cast them into the sea; but, far from being drowned or inconvenienced by the motion, the babe slumbered as in a rocking cradle, and in due course the chest was drawn safely ashore on Seriphos by Dictys, brother to Polydektes, king of that island, who took the pair under his protection. Time passed, and Polydektes sought to marry the unwilling Danæ, and, to get rid of Perseus, now a strapping lad, sent him off to kill Medusa and bring home her head. Medusa was a kind of dragon called a Gorgon, who, though mortal herself, had two immortal sisters. Their parentage, though obscure, was extremely distinguished, whence their troubles; for as half-castes they had no lot or portion with gods or men, which to three lively young women (as they then were) was insufferably dull. Their speaking countenances betrayed the depth of their more than human suffering, so much so that in course of time they became so terrible to look upon that any man who should see them would be turned to stone at sight. In this awkward predicament Perseus was fortunate in possessing friends in high places. The goddess Athene gave him a mirror, to strike the creature after the manner of a man shaving, without directly looking on her――an awkward and unconvincing manœuvre. The god Hades gave him a helmet of invisibility, apparently of a higher class than the device adopted by Old Peter in the Bab Ballad. (He, you will remember, duly became invisible, but his clothes did not; whence divers inconveniences.) Or perhaps the hero travelled in primitive simplicity (but that wouldn’t account for his weapons). The god Hermes gave him his own winged shoes, and the god Hephæstus a mortal blade. Armed with these contrivances, and luckily finding the Gorgons asleep, Perseus completed his task and started for home with the head in a travelling-bag with which he had prudently provided himself (for the head was still fatal to view). On his way he turned Atlas to stone (and you can see the Atlas mountains to this day), either out of pity for his sufferings――he had to hold up all heaven on his head, and heaven was, as in early Christendom, completely solid――or, as some say, in revenge for some trivial rudeness. If so, it is a regrettable blot on his otherwise unsullied escutcheon; for even Medusa had longed to die. Flying on, he next beheld Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus king of Ethiopia, bound to a rock and waiting to be devoured by a dragon. This dismal scene had been staged by Zeus to appease the Old Man of the Sea, because the king’s wife had boasted that she (or, some say, her daughter) was more beautiful than the nymphs of the sea. Perseus rapidly appreciated the situation, pressed the terrified damsel to marry him (about which in her distress she made no difficulty, though already betrothed to her uncle Phineus, who was safely under cover at home), killed the instrument of divine vengeance when it lumbered up clumsily from the sea, so that the waves ran red with its blood――and duly married Andromeda. The skulking uncle made a regrettable scene at the ceremony, and the bloody fight was terminated only by Perseus producing the fatal head of Medusa, which turned his enemies to stone. Returning home with his bride, he restored his grandfather, who had been dethroned by a wicked brother, and reached Seriphos in time to save his mother from Polydektes, whom he replaced by the faithful Dictys. Shortly afterwards he was throwing the hammer at some sports organized by a neighbouring monarch, when his aged grandfather unluckily got in the way and received a fatal blow on the head; and the old oracle was fulfilled. Perseus inherited his kingdom, and begot a numerous progeny; but this idyllic scene was overshadowed by the gloom of the accident, and he found no peace until he exchanged thrones with the king of Tiryns, where he lived to a ripe old age, and died, universally lamented, in the bosom of his family.”
Such is the old Greek legend: two dragons, a supernatural birth, supernatural weapons, faithful and wicked brothers, a rescued maiden, and the inexorable doom of Fate. We shall come back to this in our conclusion.
III
OF DRAGONS IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM
There were numerous dragons in early Christendom, “gorgons and hydras and chimæras dire,” and all the best saints had at least one apiece to their credit; but they were a confusing and unfriendly lot, and we will confine ourselves to the central legend of St. George.
“St. George is one of that numerous class of Saints about whom nothing authentic is known”: but, piecing together the _Golden Legend_ and the Portuguese and Balkan variants, we arrive at the following: