Chapter VI · Bird and Serpent Myths

Culture Complexes in Dragon-lore—Polynesian Dragon Beliefs—Oceanic and African Fish-gods—Reptile Deities where no Reptiles are found—Chinese Dragons and Indian Nagas—Dragon-links between India, Tibet, China, and Japan—Birds and Snakes—Distribution of Egyptian “Winged Disk”—Horus and the “Secretary Bird”—Indian Mungoose supplants “Secretary Bird”—Mungoose form of God of Riches and Death—Bird and Serpent combined in Dragon—Babylonian Dragon was a combination of Eagle, Serpent, and Lion—Tree Forms of the Chinese Dragon, the Polynesian Mo-o, and the Indian Nagas—The Dragon, the Salmon, the Tree, and the “Thunder-bird”.

The intensive study of a country’s beliefs and ideas, as revealed in its myths and legends, is greatly facilitated by the adoption of the comparative method. It may not always be found possible to identify areas in which certain beliefs had origin, but when we detect, as we do in China, myths similar to those found in other lands, and especially highly complex myths, that had origin in one particular country and received additions in another, the imported elements may be sifted out from a local religious system without much difficulty.

The Chinese dragon has distinct and outstanding Chinese characteristics, but it is obviously not entirely a Chinese creation. Attached to the “composite wonder beast” are complex ideas that have a history outside China, as well as those ideas that reflect Chinese natural phenomena and Chinese experiences and habits of life and thought. The fused beliefs, as symbolized by the dragon, have passed through a prolonged process of local development, but those that were imported have not, it is found, been entirely divested of their distinctive characteristics, and remain preserved as flies are in amber.

Interesting and important evidence that throws light on the history of the Chinese dragon is found in Polynesia, India, and Babylonia, and even in Egypt and Europe. The cultural influence of Babylonia, which radiated over a wide area for a score of centuries or longer, is traceable in India, and, as is well known, Buddhist India exercised a strong cultural influence on China. But, as will be shown, Babylonian influence reached the Shensi province of China long before the Aryans entered India. Buddhist ideas regarding the pearl-protecting dragon-god of water and fire were evidently superimposed in China upon earlier Babylonian ideas regarding the water-dragon, which had no particular connection with pearls. At any rate, there is no mention of pearls in the Babylonian myth.

When it is found that many of the ideas connected with the Chinese dragon were prevalent in Polynesia, what conclusion is to be drawn? There is no evidence that Chinese culture was an active force in New Zealand or Hawaii, for instance. It cannot have been from China that the Polynesians derived their dragon, or their beliefs connected with the serpent, a reptile unknown to the islanders at first hand. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese and the Polynesians were influenced at an early period by intruders from other lands. The Polynesian intruders must necessarily have been sea-traders. Of course, the Polynesians may themselves have imported their dragon beliefs from their homeland. That homeland, however, was certainly not China.

In Buddhist art the Naga is shown in three forms: (1) as a human being with a snake on or poised over the head, reminding one of the Egyptian kings or queens who wear the uræus symbol on their foreheads; (2) as half human and half snake (the “mermaid form”); and (3) as ordinary snakes. The first form is found not only in India, but in Tibet, China, and Japan. Human-shaped Nagas are depicted worshipping Buddha, as they stand in water.

In Tibet, the Naga is shown with the upper part of the body in human shape and the lower in snake shape; there are horns on the head and wings spreading out from the shoulders. The same form is found in Japan.

This Tibetan link between the Indian Naga and the Chinese Dragon is important. The bird-god has been blended with the snake-god. In India the bird-gods (Garudas) are enemies of the Nagas (snakes), and Garudas in “eagle shape” are found depicted in low relief, carrying off Nagas in snake shape. This eternal conflict between eagle-like birds and serpents is one of the features of Babylonian mythology.

The story of Zu, the Babylonian Eagle-god, is found on tablets that were stored in the library of the great Assyrian King, Ashur-bani-pal. Zu, it is related, stole from the gods the “tablets of destiny”, and was pursued and caught by Shamash, the sun-god. In one version of the myth Zu, the eagle, is punished by the serpent, which conceals itself in the body of an ox. When the eagle comes to feast on the flesh it is seized by the serpent and slain.

In Polynesia the eternal conflict between bird-god and serpent-god is illustrated in wood-carvings. The Egyptian winged disk, as adopted by the islanders, shows the bird in the centre with a struggling snake in its beak. The Central American peoples had likewise this bird-and-serpent myth. Indeed, it figures prominently in their mythologies. In Mexico the winged disk was placed, as in Egypt, above the entrances to the temples.

In ancient Egyptian myths the bird was the Horus hawk and the serpent was Set. Horus assumed, in his great battle against the snake, crocodile, and other enemies of Ra, the winged disk form—the winged sun, protected by the two snake-goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt.

This strange combination of deities in the “winged disk” symbol was as distinctively an Egyptian cultural and political complex as the Union Jack is distinctively a British complex. As the Union Jack has been carried to many a distant land, so was the Egyptian winged disk, “the flag” of Egyptian culture. In those areas in which the winged disk is found, are found also traces of Egyptian ideas which, of course, were not necessarily introduced by the Egyptians themselves.

In Tibet, as has been stated, the bird and serpent were combined, and the “composite beast” was given a human head with horns. The horned and winged dragon of China is thus, in part, a combination of the original secretary bird and the snake.

The Nagas are guardians of pearls, and the females have many pearl necklaces.

The combination of bird and serpent is found in Persia as well as in Tibet. On an archaic cylinder seal from the ancient Elamite capital of Susa, the dragon is a lion with an eagle’s head and wings; the forelegs are those of the eagle, and the hind legs those of a lion.

Behind dragon worship is a complex of beliefs connected with what is usually called “tree and well worship”. In Gaelic stories, the sacred tree is guarded by the “beast” in the sacred well, and a form of the “beast” (dragon) is the salmon; in the tree is the “thunder bird”. Dragon, tree, and bird are connected with the god of thunder who sends rain.

When Buddhism reached China, imported Naga beliefs were superimposed on earlier Chinese beliefs connected with the dragon-god who controlled the rain-supply, as Osiris in Egypt controlled the Nile, and the Babylonian Ea the Euphrates.

In the next chapter various beliefs connected with the dragon are brought out in representative legends.