Note 13 — Chapter V · Chinese Dragon Lore

But, it may be asked here, what connection has a mountain stag with the ancient pearl-fishers? As Wang Fu reminds us, the pearl-guarding Chinese dragon has “the horns of a stag”. It was sometimes called, De Groot states,13 “the celestial stag”—the “stag of the sky”. This was not merely a poetic image. The sea-god Ea of ancient Babylonia was in one of his forms “the goat fish”, as some put it. Professor Sayce says, in this connection, “Ea was called ‘the antelope of the deep’, ‘the antelope the creator’, ‘the lusty antelope’. He was sometimes referred to as ‘a gazelle’. Lubin, ‘a stag’, was a reduplicated form of elim, ‘a gazelle’. Both words were equivalent to sarru, ‘king’.”14 Whatever the Ea land animal was—whether goat, gazelle, antelope, or stag—it was associated with a sea-god who, according to Babylonian belief, brought the elements of culture to the ancient Sumerians, who were developing their civilization at the seaport of Eridu, then situated at the head of the Persian Gulf, in which pearls were found. Ea was depicted as half a land animal and half a fish, or as a man wrapped in the skin of a gigantic fish as Egyptian deities were wrapped in the skins of wild beasts. One of Ea’s names was Dagan, which was possibly the Dagon worshipped also by the Philistines and by the inhabitants of Canaan before the Philistines arrived from Kaphtor (the land of Keftiu, i.e. Crete).