It is reported of Mr. Winston Churchill that, being challenged one day by a Frenchman as to the remarkable uniform he was wearing, he replied in the same language that he was an Elder Brother of the Trinity. “Ah!” said the Frenchman, “that is indeed a unique distinction.”
It is not so unique as might be supposed. If we could betake ourselves to the Egypt of 5,000 years ago, we should find them worshipping a Trinity of their own: Isis the all-Mother; Osiris the Son, and Horus. Isis, the forerunner of all the gods of all mankind was the goddess of fertility—goddess, not god, for what could be more evident than the female fact of birth, whereas male assistance went long unrecognized. The savage mother, finding herself with child, would attribute her condition not to a “commonplace event which took place perhaps many months before,” but to a recent thunderstorm or other striking phenomenon to which all could bear witness.
So Isis ruled alone for a while, and then in her own inimitable fashion gave birth to the water-god Osiris; and between them in due course they produced the warrior Horus, who in the fullness of time became the avenger of Osiris, when the powers of darkness slew him.
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).