The Evolution of the Dragon Part 15

Breasted attempts to interpret the statements concerning the storm and rain-clouds as references to the enemies of the sun, who steal the sky-G.o.d's eye, i.e., obscure the sun or moon.[175] The incident of Horus's loss of an eye, which looms so large in Egyptian legends, is possibly more closely related to the earliest attempts at explaining eclipses of the sun and moon, the "eyes" of the sky. The obscuring of the sun and moon by clouds is a matter of little significance to the Egyptian: but the modern Egyptian _fellah_, and no doubt his predecessors also, regard eclipses with much concern. Such events excite great alarm, for the peasants consider them as actual combats between the powers of good and evil.

In other countries where rain is a blessing and not, as in Egypt, merely an unwelcome inconvenience, the clouds play a much more prominent part in the popular beliefs. In the Rig-Veda the power that holds up the clouds is evil: as an elaboration of the ancient Egyptian conception of the sky as a Divine Cow, the Great Mother, the Aryan Indians regarded the clouds as a herd of cattle which the Vedic warrior-G.o.d Indra (who in this respect is the h.o.m.ologue of the Egyptian warrior Horus) stole from the powers of evil and bestowed upon mankind. In other words, like Horus, he broke up the clouds and brought rain.

The ant.i.thesis between the two aspects of the character of these ancient deities is most p.r.o.nounced in the case of the other member of this most primitive Trinity, the Great Mother. She was the great beneficent giver of life, but also the controller of life, which implies that she was the death-dealer. But this evil aspect of her character developed only under the stress of a peculiar dilemma in which she was placed. On a famous occasion in the very remote past the great Giver of Life was summoned to rejuvenate the ageing king. The only elixir of life that was known to the pharmacopia of the times was human blood: but to obtain this life-blood the Giver of Life was compelled to slaughter mankind. She thus became the destroyer of mankind in her lioness _avatar_ as Sekhet.

The earliest known pictorial representation of the dragon (Fig. 1) consists of the forepart of the sun-G.o.d's falcon or eagle united with the hindpart of the mother-G.o.ddess's lioness. The student of modern heraldry would not regard this as a dragon at all, but merely a gryphon or griffin. A recent writer on heraldry has complained that, "in spite of frequent corrections, this creature is persistently confused in the popular mind with the _dragon_, which is even more purely imaginary."[176] But the investigator of the early history of these wonder-beasts is compelled, even at the risk of incurring the herald's censure, to regard the gryphon as one of the earliest known tentative efforts at dragon-making. But though the fish, the falcon or eagle, and the composite eagle-lion monster are early known pictorial representations of the dragon, good or bad, the serpent is probably more ancient still (Fig. 2).

The earliest form a.s.sumed by the power of evil was the serpent: but it is important to remember that, as each of the primary deities can be a power of either good or evil, any of the animals representing them can symbolize either aspect. Though Hathor in her cow manifestation is usually benevolent and as a lioness a power of destruction, the cow may become a demon in certain cases and the lioness a kindly creature. The falcon of Horus (or its representatives, eagle, hawk, woodp.e.c.k.e.r, dove, redbreast, etc) may be either good or bad: so also the gazelle (antelope or deer), the crocodile, the fish, or any of the menagerie of creatures that enter into the composition of good or bad demons.

"The Nagas are semi-divine serpents which very often a.s.sume human shapes and whose kings live with their retinues in the utmost luxury in their magnificent abodes at the bottom of the sea or in rivers or lakes. When leaving the Naga world they are in constant danger of being grasped and killed by the gigantic semi-divine birds, the Garudas, which also change themselves into men" (de Visser, p. 7).

"The Nagas are depicted in three forms: common snakes, guarding jewels; human beings with four snakes in their necks; and winged sea-dragons, the upper part of the body human, but with a horned, ox-like head, the lower part of the body that of a coiling-dragon. Here we find a link between the snake of ancient India and the four-legged Chinese dragon"

(p. 6), hidden in the clouds, which the dragon himself emitted, like a modern battles.h.i.+p, for the purpose of rendering himself invisible. In other words, the rain clouds were the dragon's breath. The fertilizing rain was thus in fact the vital essence of the dragon, being both water and the breath of life.

"We find the Naga king not only in the possession of numberless jewels and beautiful girls, but also of mighty charms, bestowing supernatural vision and hearing. The palaces of the Naga kings are always described as extremely splendid, abounding with gold and silver and precious stones, and the Naga women, when appearing in human shape, were beautiful beyond description" (p. 9).

De Visser records the story of an evil Naga protecting a big tree that grew in a pond, who failed to emit clouds and thunder when the tree was cut down, because he was neither despised nor wounded: for his body became the support of the stupa and the tree became a beam of the stupa (p. 16). This aspect of the Naga as a tree-demon is rare in India, but common in China and j.a.pan. It seems to be identical with the Mediterranean conception of the pillar of wood or stone, which is both a representative of the Great Mother and the chief support of a temple.[177]

In the magnificent city that king Yaca?ketu saw, when he dived into the sea, "wis.h.i.+ng trees that granted every desire" were among the objects that met his vision. There were also palaces of precious stones and gardens and tanks, and, of course, beautiful maidens (de Visser, p.

20).

In the Far Eastern stories it is interesting to note the antagonism of the dragon to the tiger, when we recall that the lioness-form of Hathor was the prototype of the earliest malevolent dragon.

There are five sorts of dragons: serpent-dragons; lizard-dragons; fish-dragons; elephant-dragons; and toad-dragons (de Visser, p. 23).

"According to de Groot, the blue colour is chosen in China because this is the colour of the East, from where the rain must come; this quarter is represented by the Azure Dragon, the highest in rank among all the dragons. We have seen, however, that the original sutra already prescribed to use the blue colour and to face the East.... Indra, the rain-G.o.d, is the patron of the East, and Indra-colour is _nila_, dark blue or rather blue-black, the regular epithet of the rain clouds. If the priest had not to face the East but the West, this would agree with the fact that the Nagas were said to live in the western quarter and that in India the West corresponds with the blue colour. Facing the East, however, seems to point to an old rain ceremony in which Indra was invoked to raise the blue-black clouds" (de Visser, pp. 30 and 31).

[175: Breasted, _op. cit._, p. 11.]

[176: G. W. Eve, "Decorative Heraldry," 1897, p. 35.]

[177: Arthur J. Evans, "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult," pp. 88 _et seq._]

The Dragon Myth.

The most important and fundamental legend in the whole history of mythology is the story of the "Destruction of Mankind". "It was discovered, translated, and commented upon by Naville ("La Destruction des hommes par les Dieux," in the _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, vol. iv., pp. 1-19, reproducing Hay's copies made at the beginning of [the nineteenth] century; and "L'Inscription de la Destruction des hommes dans le tombeau de Ramses III," in the _Transactions_, vol. viii., pp. 412-20); afterwards published anew by Herr von Bergmann (_Hieroglyphische Inscriften_, pls. lxxv.-lx.x.xii., and pp. 55, 56); completely translated by Brugsch (_Die neue Weltordnung nach Vernichtung des sundigen Menschengeschlechts nach einer Altagyptischen Ueberlieferung_, 1881); and partly translated by Lauth (_Aus aegyptens Vorzeit_, pp. 70-81) and by Lefebure ("Une chapitre de la chronique solaire," in the _Zeitschrift fur aegyptische Sprache_, 1883, pp 32, 33)".[178]

Important commentaries upon this story have been published also by Brugsch and Gauthier.[179]

As the really important features of the story consist of the incoherent and contradictory details, and it would take up too much s.p.a.ce to reproduce the whole legend here, I must refer the reader to Maspero's account of it (_op. cit._), or to the versions given by Erman in his "Life in Ancient Egypt" (p. 267, from which I quote) or Budge in "The G.o.ds of the Egyptians," vol. i., p. 388.

Although the story as we know it was not written down until the time of Seti I (_circa_ 1300 B.C.), it is very old and had been circulating as a popular legend for more than twenty centuries before that time. The narrative itself tells its own story because it is composed of many contradictory interpretations of the same incidents flung together in a highly confused and incoherent form.

The other legends to which I shall have constantly to refer are "The Saga of the Winged Disk," "The Feud between Horus and Set," "The Stealing of Re's Name by Isis," and a series of later variants and confusions of these stories.[180]

The Egyptian legends cannot be fully appreciated unless they are in conjunction with those of Babylonia and a.s.syria,[181] the mythology of Greece,[182] Persia,[183] India,[184] China,[185] Indonesia,[186] and America.[187]

For it will be found that essentially the same stream of legends was flowing in all these countries, and that the scribes and painters have caught and preserved certain definite phases of this verbal currency.

The legends which have thus been preserved are not to be regarded as having been directly derived the one from the other but as collateral phases of a variety of waves of story spreading out from one centre.

Thus the comparison of the whole range of h.o.m.ologous legends is peculiarly instructive and useful; because the gaps in the Egyptian series, for example, can be filled in by necessary phases which are missing in Egypt itself, but are preserved in Babylonia or Greece, Persia or India, China or Britain, or even Oceania and America.

The incidents in the Destruction of Mankind may be briefly summarized:

As Re grows old "the men who were begotten of his eye"[188] show signs of rebellion. Re calls a council of the G.o.ds and they advise him to "shoot forth his Eye[189] that it may slay the evil conspirators.... Let the G.o.ddess Hathor descend [from heaven] and slay the men on the mountains [to which they had fled in fear]." As the G.o.ddess complied she remarked: "it will be good for me when I subject mankind," and Re replied, "I shall subject them and slay them". Hence the G.o.ddess received the additional name of _Sekhmet_ from the word "to subject".

The destructive Sekhmet[190] _avatar_ of Hathor is represented as a fierce lion-headed G.o.ddess of war wading in blood. For the G.o.ddess set to work slaughtering mankind and the land was flooded with blood[191].

Re became alarmed and determined to save at least some remnant of mankind. For this purpose he sent messengers to Elephantine to obtain a substance called _d'd'_ in the Egyptian text, which he gave to the G.o.d Sektet of Heliopolis to grind up in a mortar. When the slaves had crushed barley to make beer the powdered _d'd'_ was mixed with it so as to make it red like human blood. Enough of this blood-coloured beer was made to fill 7000 jars. At nighttime this was poured out upon the fields, so that when the G.o.ddess came to resume her task of destruction in the morning she found the fields inundated and her face was mirrored in the fluid. She drank of the fluid and became intoxicated so that she no longer recognized mankind.[192]

Thus Re saved a remnant of mankind from the bloodthirsty, terrible Hathor. But the G.o.d was weary of life on earth and withdrew to heaven upon the back of the Divine Cow.

There can be no doubt as to the meaning of this legend, highly confused as it is. The king who was responsible for introducing irrigation came to be himself identified with the life-giving power of water. He was the river: his own vitality was the source of all fertility and prosperity.

Hence when he showed signs that his vital powers were failing it became a logical necessity that he should be killed to safeguard the welfare of his country and people.[193]

The time came when a king, rich in power and the enjoyment of life, refused to comply with this custom. When he realized that his virility was failing he consulted the Great Mother, as the source and giver of life, to obtain an elixir which would rejuvenate him and obviate the necessity of being killed. The only medicine in the pharmacopia of those times that was believed to be useful in minimizing danger to life was human blood. Wounds that gave rise to severe haemorrhage were known to produce unconsciousness and death. If the escape of the blood of life could produce these results it was not altogether illogical to a.s.sume that the exhibition of human blood could also add to the vitality of living men and so "turn back the years from their old age," as the Pyramid Texts express it.

Thus the Great Mother, the giver of life to all mankind, was faced with the dilemma that, to provide the king with the elixir to restore his youth, she had to slay mankind, to take the life she herself had given to her own children. Thus she acquired an evil reputation which was to stick to her throughout her career. She was not only the beneficent creator of all things and the bestower of all blessings: but she was also a demon of destruction who did not hesitate to slaughter even her own children.

In course of time the practice of human sacrifice was abandoned and subst.i.tutes were adopted in place of the blood of mankind. Either the blood of cattle,[194] who by means of appropriate ceremonies could be transformed into human beings (for the Great Mother herself was the Divine Cow and her offspring cattle), was employed in its stead; or red ochre was used to colour a liquid which was used ritually to replace the blood of sacrifice. When this phase of culture was reached the G.o.ddess provided for the king an elixir of life consisting of beer stained red by means of red ochre, so as to simulate human blood.

But such a mixture was doubly potent, for the barley from which the beer was made and the drink itself was supposed to be imbued with the life-giving powers of Osiris, and the blood-colour reinforced its therapeutic usefulness. The legend now begins to become involved and confused. For the G.o.ddess is making the rejuvenator for the king, who in the meantime has died and become deified as Osiris; and the beer, which is the vehicle of the life-giving powers of Osiris, is now being used to rejuvenate his son and successor, the living king Horus, who in the version that has come down to us is replaced by the sun-G.o.d Re.

It is Re who is king and is growing old: he asks Hathor, the Great Mother, to provide him with the elixir of life. But comparison with some of the legends of other countries suggests that Re has usurped the place previously occupied by Horus and originally by Osiris, who as the real personification of the life-giving power of water is obviously the appropriate person to be slain when his virility begins to fail. Dr.

C. G. Seligman's account of the d.i.n.ka rain-maker Lerpiu, which I have already quoted (p. 113) from Sir James Frazer's "Dying G.o.d," suggests that the slain king or G.o.d was originally Osiris.

The introduction of Re into the story marks the beginning of the belief in the sky-world or heaven. Hathor was originally nothing more than an amulet to enhance fertility and vitality. Then she was personified as a woman and identified with a cow. But when the view developed that the moon controlled the powers of life-giving in women and exercised a direct influence upon their life-blood, the Great Mother was identified with the moon. But how was such a conception to be brought into harmony with the view that she was also a cow? The human mind displays an irresistible tendency to unify its experience and to bridge the gaps that necessarily exist in its broken series of sc.r.a.ps of knowledge and ideas. No break is too great to be bridged by this instinctive impulse to rationalize the products of diverse experience. Hence, early man, having identified the Great Mother both with a cow and the moon, had no compunction in making "the cow jump over the moon" to become the sky.

The moon then became the "Eye" of the sky and the sun necessarily became its other "Eye". But, as the sun was clearly the more important "Eye,"

seeing that it determined the day and gave warmth and light for man's daily work, it was the more important deity. Therefore Re, at first the Brother-Eye of Hathor, and afterwards her husband, became the supreme sky-deity, and Hathor merely one of his Eyes.

When this stage of theological evolution was reached, the story of the "Destruction of Mankind" was re-edited, and Hathor was called the "Eye of Re". In the earlier versions she was called into consultation solely as the giver of life and, to obtain the life-blood, she cut men's throats with a knife.

But as the Eye of Re she was identified with the fire-spitting uraeus-serpent which the king or G.o.d wore on his forehead. She was both the moon and the fiery bolt which shot down from the sky to slay the enemies of Re. For the men who were originally slaughtered to provide the blood for an elixir now became the enemies of Re. The reason for this was that, human sacrifice having been abandoned and subst.i.tutes provided to replace the human blood, the story-teller was at a loss to know why the G.o.ddess killed mankind. A reason had to be found--and the rationalization adopted was that men had rebelled against the G.o.ds and had to be killed. This interpretation was probably the result of a confusion with the old legend of the fight between Horus and Set, the rulers of the two kingdoms of Egypt. The possibility also suggests itself that a pun made by some priestly jester may have been the real factor that led to this mingling of two originally separate stories. In the "Destruction of Mankind" the story runs, according to Budge,[195]

that Re, referring to his enemies, said: _ma-ten set uar er set_, "Behold ye them (_set_) fleeing into the mountain (_set_)". The enemies were thus identified with the mountain or stone and with Set, the enemy of the G.o.ds.[196]

In Egyptian hieroglyphics the symbol for stone is used as the determinative for Set. When the "Eye of Re" destroyed mankind and the rebels were thus identified with the followers of Set, they were regarded as creatures of "stone". In other words the Medusa-eye petrified the enemies. From this feeble pun on the part of some ancient Egyptian scribe has arisen the world-wide stories of the influence of the "Evil Eye" and the petrification of the enemies of the G.o.ds.[197] As the name for Isis in Egyptian is "_Set_" it is possible that the confusion of the Power of Evil with the Great Mother may also have been facilitated by an extension of the same pun.

It is important to recognize that the legend of Hathor descending from the moon or the sky in the form of destroying fire had nothing whatever to do, in the first instance, with the phenomena of lightning and meteorites. It was the result of verbal quibbling after the destructive G.o.ddess came to be identified with the moon, the sky and the "Eye of Re". But once the evolution of the story on these lines prepared the way, it was inevitable that in later times the powers of destruction exerted by the fire from the sky should have been identified with the lightning and meteorites.

When the destructive force of the heavens was attributed to the "Eye of Re" and the G.o.d's enemies were identified with the followers of Set, it was natural that the traditional enemy of Set who was also the more potent other "Eye of Re" should a.s.sume his mother's role of punis.h.i.+ng rebellious mankind. That Horus did in fact take the place at first occupied by Hathor in the story is revealed by the series of trivial episodes from the "Destruction of Mankind" that reappear in the "Saga of the Winged Disk". The king of Lower Egypt (Horus) was identified with a falcon, as Hathor was with the vulture (Mut): like her, he entered the sun-G.o.d's boat[198] and sailed up the river with him: he then mounted up to heaven as a winged disk, i.e. the sun of Re equipped with his own falcon's wings. The destructive force displayed by Hathor as the Eye of Re was symbolized by her identification with Tefnut, the fire-spitting uraeus-snake. When Horus a.s.sumed the form of the winged disk he added to his insignia two fire-spitting serpents to destroy Re's enemies. The winged disk was at once the instrument of destruction and the G.o.d himself. It swooped (or flew) down from heaven like a bolt of destroying fire and killed the enemies of Re. By a confusion with Horus's other fight against the followers of Set, the enemies of Re become identified with Set's army and they are transformed into crocodiles, hippopotami and all the other kinds of creatures whose shapes the enemies of Osiris a.s.sume.

In the course of the development of these legends a mult.i.tude of other factors played a part and gave rise to transformations of the meaning of the incidents.

The G.o.ddess originally slaughtered mankind, or perhaps it would be truer to say, made _a_ human sacrifice, to obtain blood to rejuvenate the king. But, as we have seen already, when the sacrifice was no longer a necessary part of the programme, the incident of the slaughter was not dropped out of the story, but a new explanation of it was framed.

Instead of simply making a human sacrifice, mankind as a whole was destroyed for rebelling against the G.o.ds, the act of rebellion being murmuring about the king's old age and loss of virility. The elixir soon became something more than a rejuvenator: it was transformed into the food of the G.o.ds, the ambrosia that gave them their immortality, and distinguished them from mere mortals. Now when the development of the story led to the replacement of the single victim by the whole of mankind, the blood produced by the wholesale slaughter was so abundant that the fields were flooded by the life-giving elixir. By the sacrifice of men the soil was renewed and refertilized. When the blood-coloured beer was subst.i.tuted for the actual blood the conception was brought into still closer harmony with Egyptian ideas, because the beer was animated with the life-giving powers of Osiris. But Osiris was the Nile.

The blood-coloured fertilizing fluid was then identified with the annual inundation of the red-coloured waters of the Nile. Now the Nile waters were supposed to come from the First Cataract at Elephantine. Hence by a familiar psychological process the previous phase of the legend was recast, and by confusion the red ochre (which was used to colour the beer red) was said to have come from Elephantine.[199]

Thus we have arrived at the stage where, by a distortion of a series of phases, the new incident emerges that by means of a human sacrifice the Nile flood can be produced. By a further confusion the G.o.ddess, who originally did the slaughter, becomes the victim. Hence the story a.s.sumed the form that by means of the sacrifice of a beautiful and attractive maiden the annual inundation can be produced. As the most potent symbol of life-giving it is essential that the victim should be s.e.xually attractive, i.e. that she should be a virgin and the most beautiful and desirable in the land. When the practice of human sacrifice was abandoned a figure or an animal was subst.i.tuted for the maiden in ritual practice, and in legends the hero rescued the maiden, as Andromeda was saved from the dragon.[200] The dragon is the personification of the monsters that dwell in the waters as well as the destructive forces of the flood itself. But the monsters were no other than the followers of Set; they were the victims of the slaughter who became identified with the G.o.d's other traditional enemies, the followers of Set. Thus the monster from whom Andromeda is rescued is merely another representative of herself!

But the destructive forces of the flood now enter into the programme.