Part 3

This is the bald and essential outline of their faith. The details are extremely confusing, partly because of variants, but principally because the savage-mind _is_ so confused. “Anne’s Mother’s daughter, Mother’s Anne’s daughter,” reasons my baby; and the small boys who deliver messages round the factory find a similar difficulty in distinguishing between the Buying Department and the Sales Department. In exactly the same way the gods of old Egypt became inextricably mixed. The tale told of one is easily applied to another, and God the doer easily becomes God the done-by; while the symbol of the god will equally well pass for (say) the enemy of the god, or the weapon with which he fought. Like the old lady in the story, they “do not distinguish.” (Compare how our Arthur and the Saxon Cedric, whom he fought at Langport, were both identified with the dragon.)

After this warning, the chief events of the Egyptian Old Testament may not seem so absurd. They centre round “The Destruction of Mankind,” the original of all our myths.

The story is that Isis became angry with mankind because of their infidelity, and determined to slay them all. She set about it with a will and the earth ran red with their blood; but when she was near the end of her task, the other gods took pity on those who were left, and determined to thwart her. This they did by giving her some doctored beer, whereupon she became “genially inoffensive”――and so the remnant escaped; and to this day their descendants generally regard beer with an almost superstitious veneration. The Flood is an obvious and world-wide variation of this theme.

The next stage is that Isis the slayer becomes Isis the slain, whose sacrifice will atone for the sins of mankind. The grandmother goddess then becomes a mere mortal, “a beautiful and attractive maiden”――say a virgin: the virgin is then abandoned to her fate, and rescued by the conquering hero, and we are hot on the trail of Perseus and St. George.

But, you will say, what has all this to do with dragons? It must be admitted that in Egypt, “the great breeding-place of monsters,” no dragons survive in full-blown splendour; but these legends are the germ of all, and from them springs the essential dragon-conflict, the vendetta of Horus against the powers of darkness. The dragon has also been identified with Osiris the good controller of water, with Set the evil who killed him, with Isis in so far as she is confused with Osiris, and with Horus as the successor of Osiris, but we shall only become confused if we try to follow all its transformations.

We have come now to the end of all our tales, and I shall try in the last part of this section to link up all the parts; to show you how remarkably little essential change there has been in man’s thinking for fifty centuries, and how the commonplace incidents of originally prosaic stories became distorted and elaborated with corroborative detail, quite regardless of the original and often forgotten meaning.

_Reference_: Elliot Smith, _The Evolution of the Dragon_ (London, 1920).

VI

OF THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE DRAGON

The chief satisfaction which learned men appear to derive from these tales is quarrelling about their common or separate origin. The Separatists say that their resemblances merely show how very much alike men are, the world over; the Communists that they are so very intricate and so far from obvious that they must have sprung from a common stock (_cf._ Mr. W. J. Perry’s and Professor Elliot Smith’s theories as to the common――Egyptian――origin of militarism, mining, and many other branches of megalithic and modern culture). Personally I am a Communist; for it is a perfectly good principle, common to science and theology, that miracles are not to be multiplied, beyond necessity. The question is, in any case, of no fundamental importance to us, but it will simplify what follows if I make my standpoint plain.

When our first fathers found themselves at large in this already ancient world, the first fact they noticed was that they were alive. Like all their descendants after them, they wisely worshipped facts, and they made a religion of fertility; like us too, and like all those who will follow us, they knew nothing certain of the two infinities from which we come and to which we go, before birth and after death. The next fact they noticed was that other men died, though their minds shrank in horror from the fact that they too must die, and could not entertain it. They hankered after immortality, for their dear ones and (later) for themselves, as we hanker after it, and as our children will; for in course of time it became a commonplace of all the world that all men must die, and this doom of the “sad-eyed race of mortal men” is the theme of pathos throughout antiquity. Their souls rebelled against the bitterness of death, and the search for the elixir of life (to renew man’s youth and to give him immortality) has been “the inspiration of most of the world’s great literature in every age and clime, and not only of our literature but of all our civilization.”

They worshipped life, and feared and hated death. And so they worshipped women, and the womb from which they all sprang. For good luck they carried amulets, shells especially; and from being amulets these shells came to be worshipped as the actual source of life, were personified and made symbols again of the Great Mother, the giver of life. (So Aphrodite, the goddess of love, came floating in a shell on the foam of the sea to gladden the hearts of men). They noticed, too, that water was the first necessity of men and beasts and plants, and that dead men and things stiffened and withered as though the water was gone out of them; and so they worshipped water as the principle of life, and the water-god was the second-born. Then, turning their vision further a-field, they took note of the regular motions of the moon, her monthly course, and her strange connection with the tides of the sea; and so the Great Mother became identified with the Moon. And then as they pondered they felt the greater glory of the Sun, and set him up above his mother the Moon; but the moon long remained the personification of order and light and goodness, set over against chaos and darkness and evil――though in time it was the sun, or his successor-sun, who came to be regarded as the prince of light.

They hated death, and in the presence of it protested their belief that somehow, somewhere, the dead continued to live, needing all the gifts his family could bring――a primitive doctrine of immortality. And then, in the presence of corruption, they made plans to preserve the body: they burnt incense to restore the odour of life; they poured libations to replace the vital juices. They tried to infuse blood, the life-giver (for “blood,” as we say still, “is thicker than water”) or to find some painted substitute. They hung the tomb with magic shells, that the dead might be born again. And when, after all, the body still decayed, they made statues instead for the soul to inhabit, and tried their charms on them; and from the idea that statues can come to life grows the contrary idea that men can be turned to stone. The crowning triumph of their statuary was the eye, making the statue (as we say) “a living image”; and from the idea that the open eye means life, came the belief in the power of the eye for good or evil. To this day the neglect of the poorest grave is regarded as a more than callous crime, and there are not wanting those amongst us who shudder at the desecration of the age-old tombs of Egyptian kings.

Thus it was in the beginning. And when in process of time a wise king discovered the arts of irrigation (it may be that this discovery made him king; or perhaps kingship originated with the discovery of the calendar, which conferred the gift of prophecy: “king” here is in any case premature), and spread fertility throughout the land, they worshipped him too and made him a living god, and cherished him as the soul (as it were) of their land’s fertility. And when he grew old, and his powers began to wane, terror fell on them lest their fortunes should fail with him and they be all dead men. So they transferred their worship for the king to his office, killed him, and made his son divine. And when he too began to age, they killed him in turn, and his sons after him, so that they always had a young and vigorous king-god. Until in time an ageing king refused to submit, and this was the origin of the story of the wrath of the gods and the destruction of mankind. Time passed, and the monarch was replaced by a maiden among his subjects, and we are at the stage of ordinary human sacrifice, “human blood being thought of as the only elixir.” But in time that, too, was ended, by a kind of religious reformation, through the belief that any other blood would do as well; and this was the origin of the story of the rescued maiden and her deliverer.

They worshipped water, and they worshipped shells, and so the pearl within the oyster-shell; and diving for pearls, their natural enemy was the shark, the guardian of the treasure and the only true and original dragon. But in the course of ages all this was naturally forgotten, and the dragon came to be adorned with all the terrors of all the monsters of travellers’ tales, from the python to the octopus and the lion that lives in the waste. Any terrible or impressive fact of life or nature――the existence of evil, or of hoary mountains――gave rise to a fresh dragon-tale; and the fact was then brought in as evidence of the truth of the tale, very much as a politician to-day will convince men of his general veracity and wisdom by stating some obvious truth; and in the absence of facts, the vague terrors of untutored minds became embodied in similar monsters; and so in a sense they are still, though nowadays we call the result a “complex.”

EPILOGUE

I would not wish man rid of the dragon as death; partly, no doubt, because I know it to be impossible (“This business of death is a plain case and admits no controversy”); partly because death is such a satisfactory thing: it is always something to look forward to. Death is perhaps the oldest of the dragons, long since domesticated and become the friend of man through familiarity.

But there remains that dragon of which we spoke in the beginning, compounded of respectability and bigotry and cant; or rather these things are the evidence that the dragon still exists, for they are all the effects of terror: terror of truth and knowledge and hard fact, the old terror of man “a stranger and afraid, in a world he never made.” This monster dwells not in the desert places of the earth, but in the hearth and home of every man. Its appetite is enormous and its destructive powers are equalled only by its fertility. Like all the other dragons, it is begotten by dogma out of ignorance.

It would be a mistake to suppose (as some have done) that religion is altogether a bad thing because it has fostered many errors, or altogether a fraud because it is profitable to priests. Every science under the sun has fostered innumerable errors, and every doctor on earth practises pious frauds daily, seldom solely for his private ends. Mankind as a whole has had a hand in these imaginings for half-a-hundred centuries; our certain knowledge of our surroundings is to this day infinitesimal; and “it is part of our human make-up to bridge the gaps in our experience with rumours, with conjectures, and with soothing traditions.”

Not many months ago there came to these shores a Chinese game, Mah Jongg, so perfected in the course of centuries that not even a Chinaman can cheat at it. Is it too much to hope that, with the general increase of knowledge and the general recognition of the limits to which our knowledge can attain, this old world may yet produce some saint or hero who will finally rescue Andromeda from the dragon?

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Printer’s, punctuation, and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.