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.”