Old Calabria

by Norman Douglas

There is an eye, then, in the fountain: an eye which looks or regards. And inasmuch as an eye presupposes a head, and a head without body is hard to conceive, a material existence was presently imputed to that which looked upwards out of the liquid depths. This, I think, is the primordial dragon, the archetype. He is of animistic descent and survives all over the earth; and it is precisely this universality of the dragon-idea which induces me to discard all theories of local origin and to seek for some common cause. Fountains are ubiquitous, and so are dragons. There are fountain dragons in Japan, in the superstitions of Keltic races, in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect, with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara on Malta, and another of the same name near Cape Misenum—all are sources of apposite lore. The water-drac. . . .

So the dragon has grown into a subterranean monster, who peers up from his dark abode wherever he can—out of fountains or caverns whence fountains issue. It stands to reason that he is sleepless; all dragons are “sleepless”; their eyes are eternally open, for the luminous sparkle of living waters never waxes dim. And bold adventurers may well be devoured by dragons when they fall into these watery rents, never to appear again.

Furthermore, since gold and other treasures dear to mankind lie hidden in the stony bowels of the earth and are hard to attain, the jealous dragon has been accredited with their guardianship—hence the plutonic element in his nature. The dragon, whose “ever-open eye” protected the garden of the Hesperides, was the Son of Earth. The earth or cave-dragon. . . . Calabria has some of these dragons’ caves; you can read about them in the Campania. Sotteranea of G. Sanchez.

The Sinno River

In volcanic regions there are fissures in the rocks exhaling pestiferous emanations; these are the spiracula, the breathing-holes, of the dragon within. The dragon legends of Naples and Mondragone are probably of this origin, and so is that of the Roman Campagna (1660) where the dragon-killer died from the effects of this poisonous breath. Sometimes the confined monster issues in a destructive lava-torrent—Bellerophon and the Chimæra. The fire-dragon. ... Or floods of water suddenly stream down from the hills and fountains are released. It is the hungry dragon, rushing from his den in search of prey; the river-dragon. . . . He rages among the mountains with such swiftness and impetuosity that wings must be his portion; yes, he can cleave the heavens in the guise of lightning, or descend upon the fertile fields as a ruinous thunderstorm; the cloud-dragon. . . . Or again, he remains permanently overhead, a flaming meteor in the firmament; this is the draco volans of the schoolmen.

In all his protean manifestations, he represents the envious and devastating principle; the spleenful wrath of untamed (untamable) telluric forces. Everything strong and spiteful has conspired to fashion our conception of the dragon. No wonder mankind, impotent, offers sacrifices to propitiate his rage. These tributary offerings are the dragon’s due—the toll exacted from the weak by the strong in all mundane affairs. They are paid until the dragon-killer appears, that rare mortal who puts an end to his depredations. For the real dragon must be exterminated; he cannot be mollified by kindness; nobody ever heard of a domesticated dragon; compromise is out of the question. Only the victim of Saint George allowed himself to be led like a “meke beest” into the city. But that was the mediæval dragon, of whom anything can be expected.

He ultimately received a concrete form from that innate craving on the part of humanity to give a poetic or pictorial image to its hopes and fears. This derivative (modern) dragon is winged or unwinged, fiery or cold, crested or smooth, of manifold hue, four-footed, two-footed, serpentine or vermiform. Such relative variety of structure is seen in all imaginings that spring up independently in different regions of the globe, and are yet due to a common belief or cause. Why has he assimilated so much of the reptilian physiognomy and framework? Well, seeing that he had to approximate his shape to some type of beast familiar to mankind, what better general model could have been found? The reptile’s glassy eye; its earthward-creeping and cleft-loving habits; its blood that recalls that chill temperature of stones and water; its hostile pose; its ferocious tenacity of life and scaly covering, as of metals? Memories of extinct reptilian monsters may have helped to colour the picture, as well as that hatred of the serpent tribe which has haunted us ever since our own arboreal days.

A prehistoric idea like this, interpretive of such diverse natural phenomena, cannot but absorb into itself all kinds of extraneous material, ridiculous and sublime. Like some avalanche rolling downhill, the dragon gathers momentum on his journey athwart the ages, and is swollen in size both by kindred beliefs that have lain in his path, and by quite incongruous accretions. This is chiefly the poets’ work, though the theologians have added one or two embellishing touches. But in whatever shape he appears, whether his eyes have borrowed a more baleful fire from heathen basilisks, or traits of moral evil are instilled into his pernicious physique by amalgamation with the apocalyptic Beast, he remains the vindictive enemy of man and his ordered ways. Of late—like the Saurian tribe in general—he has somewhat degenerated. So in modern Greece, by that process of stultified anthropomorphism which results from grafting Christianity upon an alien mythopoesis, he dons human attributes, talking and acting as a man (H. F. Tozer). And here, in Calabria, he lingers in children’s fables, as “sdrago,” a mockery of his former self.