Dragons: A History - Ronald Hutton
Summary
TLDRこの講演では、世界中の伝説に共通して現れる怪物たちの存在を探求しています。特に、英語でドラゴンと呼ばれる巨大な爬虫類や蛇のような生き物、または大きな水棲獣について考察しています。欧州と中国では、これらの生き物が芸術や物語で特に顕著ですが、その性格は大きく異なります。欧州のドラゴンは人喰い超掠食者であり、英雄によって倒されることが求められます。一方、中国のドラゴンは人々に友好的で、尊敬されれば有益な存在です。講演者は、これらの伝説がどのようにして形成され、人々の間で共有されてきたのかを考察し、さらに現代の幻想文学や物語におけるドラゴンの役割とイメージの変化についても触れています。
Takeaways
- 🌏 全世界大部分地区都有着类似于英语中称为“龙”的怪物传统,包括巨人、有翼陆地爬行动物、蜥蜴或蛇类,以及巨大的水生蛇类。
- 🔍 可能存在一个真正古老的集体人类记忆,这种记忆在不同文化中以龙的形象出现。
- 📚 讲座强调了学习和知识传播的重要性,鼓励人们分享知识,培养对学习的热爱。
- 🐉 欧洲和远东(特别是中国)在艺术和故事中特别突出这类生物,但欧洲龙和中国龙的性质非常不同。
- 🦇 欧洲龙被描绘为超级掠食者,居住在人类社区附近,捕食人和牲畜,而中国龙则是友好的,如果受到尊重,对人类有益。
- 🔥 欧洲传说中的两种主要龙是火龙(Fire Drake)和冷龙(Cold Drake or Worm),它们在民间传说和中世纪文学中占有重要地位。
- 🏰 英格兰拥有世界上最多的龙传说,这些传说通常与英雄屠龙的故事联系在一起,屠龙被视为一种英雄行为。
- 🤴 典型的英国屠龙者包括圣人和贵族骑士,但也有工匠,显示了英雄可能来自社会各阶层。
- 🗡️ 屠龙的方法多种多样,包括让龙吞下自己然后从内部刺穿它,或者使用尖刺装备让龙自己受伤。
- 📉 讲座指出,龙在现代记忆中的形象发生了变化,从恐怖的怪物转变为智慧和敏感的生物,甚至在某些故事中成为人类的盟友。
- 🌟 讲座最后探讨了龙的起源,包括人类对顶级掠食者的普遍需求、对巨大化石的发现以及不同地区传统形成的过程。
Q & A
世界中の多くの地域で、人々はどのような怪物伝統を持っていますか?
-世界中の多くの地域で、人々は巨人、翼のある陸生の爬虫類、巨大な水蛇など、英語でドラゴンと呼ばれる怪物の伝統を持っています。
欧州と中国のドラゴンの違いは何ですか?
-欧州のドラゴンは超掠食者で、人々の近くに住み、人や家畜を食べます。一方、中国のドラゴンは人々に友好的で、尊敬されれば有益です。彼らは火を吐かず、すべての種類の水に住むとされています。
英国で最も多くドラゴン伝説がある理由は何ですか?
-英国は聖ゲオルギウスがイギリスの国民的守护神として採用された後、その伝説が全国に広まって、ドラゴン退治の民間モチーフの絶大な人気を得るためです。
ドラゴンを倒す方法にはどのようなものがありますか?
-ドラゴンを倒す方法には、ドラゴンの内部から刺す、口を通して突き刺す、毒を用いる、またはトゲのある鎧やトゲがはんだされたバレルに隠れて刺すなどがあります。
現代のフィクションでドラゴンはなぜ財宝を守るようになったのですか?
-現代のフィクションでドラゴンが財宝を守るようになったのは、主にゲルマンの中世物語やベオウルフやボルソンガ・サーガなどの物語に由来するためです。
ドラゴン伝説が持続する理由は何ですか?
-ドラゴン伝説が持続するのは、人類が古代の巨大な骨や神秘的な海の生き物を発見し、それらが既存の怪物に対する信仰を強化したためです。
中国古代文学における「騎士」と「工芸人」の間のドラゴン退治の違いは何ですか?
-中国古代文学では、ドラゴン退治は騎士だけでなく、靴職人や裁縫のような工芸人によって行われることもあり、これらの工芸人も勇敢で独立した特性を持っています。
欧州のドラゴンと中国のドラゴンの性質の違いは文化的な背景にどのように反映されていますか?
-欧州のドラゴンは悪を象徴し、英雄によって倒されるべき存在として描かれています。一方、中国のドラゴンは自然と調和し、人々に友好的であることが文化的な背景によって反映されています。
現代の幻想文学におけるドラゴンのイメージはどのように変化しましたか?
-現代の幻想文学では、ドラゴンは主に人類の盟友であり、知能と感性に富んだ生き物として描かれるようになりました。
ドラゴン伝説が持続する中で、科学技術の進歩はどのような影響を与えていますか?
-科学技術の進歩は、古代の骨や化石の発見を通じてドラゴン伝説の起源を解明し、人類が自然界と接する視点を変化させる影響を与えています。
Outlines
🐉 世界各地的龙传说
本文探讨了全球不同文化中关于类似龙的怪物传说的普遍性。提到了英语中称为'龙'的生物,包括巨人、有翼的陆地爬行动物、巨蛇等,暗示可能存在一个古老的共同人类记忆。作者通过Gresham College讲座分享了这一知识,并鼓励听众分享讲座链接,以促进学习的热情。讲座还讨论了非洲祖先可能遭遇的自然危险,如大型有毒蛇类、猛禽和鳄鱼,这些可能构成了怪物传说的基础。特别指出欧洲和远东(尤其是中国)在艺术和故事中突出了这类生物,但中国的龙与欧洲的有很大不同,它们通常对人类友好。
🔥 欧洲龙与中国文化中的龙
本段深入讨论了欧洲和中国文化中龙的形象和角色差异。欧洲的龙通常被描绘为超级掠食者,居住在人类社区附近,捕食人和牲畜,而英雄的任务则是杀死它们。文中提到了两种主要的欧洲龙:火龙和冷龙,以及在《哈利·波特》中出现的巨蛇形态的巴西利斯克。相比之下,中国的龙通常被描绘为友好的生物,它们不喷火,居住在各种水域中,与自然界的磁场能量和谐共存。此外,还探讨了为什么欧洲人如此相信龙的存在,以及为什么欧洲的龙如此恶劣,而中国的龙则相对温和。
🇬🇧 英国的龙传说与圣乔治
这一段专注于英国的龙传说,特别是圣乔治屠龙的故事。圣乔治可能是一个真实的罗马士兵,在戴克里先皇帝时期殉道,但他与龙的故事直到中世纪才被联系起来。英国有着世界上最多关于龙的传说,这些传说通常与当地的圣人或英雄有关,如圣乔治。英国的龙传说在1350年到1550年间特别盛行,这与圣乔治作为英格兰的守护圣人的地位有关。这些传说不仅体现了人类对怪物的古老叙事形式,也展现了英雄对抗强大邪恶的传统主题。
🏰 中世纪欧洲的龙与现代虚构作品中的变化
本段讨论了中世纪欧洲关于龙的传说以及它们在现代虚构作品中的变化。指出在许多现代故事中,龙不再仅仅是守护宝藏的生物,而是成为了具有智慧和敏感性的生物,甚至可以成为人类的盟友。这种变化反映了西方世界对自然和动物的态度变得更加友好和尊重。此外,还提到了在中世纪欧洲,龙作为alpha predator(顶级掠食者)的象征意义,以及它们在人类文化和精神体系中的地位。
🌐 龙的起源与自然现象的联系
这一段探讨了龙的起源可能与自然现象的联系,包括流星、彗星和大型的爬行动物。提出了一些理论,比如将龙与实际动物(如鳄鱼)联系起来,或者将它们视为对自然力量的一种象征。还讨论了在不同文化中,人们对龙的不同解释,包括将它们视为对人类掠食者的象征,或者是对古代巨大生物的想象。此外,还提到了在某些情况下,龙的传说可能与古代的化石发现有关。
🦕 化石与龙传说的联系
本段深入探讨了化石发现与龙传说之间的联系。提出在史前时期,人类可能已经注意到从岩石中风化的巨型动物骨头,这些骨头可能激发了对龙等巨型生物的想象。讨论了在欧洲和中国发现的化石,以及它们如何被解释为传说中的龙。特别提到了Adrian Mayer的工作,她指出古代文献中充满了关于在化石床上发现的巨型骨头的记载,这些骨头可能是龙传说的来源。
🏴 威尔士的龙与民族认同
这一段讨论了龙在威尔士文化和民族认同中的重要性。虽然威尔士的本地龙传说数量不多,但龙成为了威尔士的象征,这主要源于《不列颠历史》中的一个故事,其中提到了两个龙——红龙代表威尔士,白龙代表英格兰。此外,还提到了亨利·都铎如何将红龙作为威尔士的象征,以及这一象征如何随着时间的推移而深入人心。
🌈 全球各地的龙与神话生物
本段讨论了全球范围内不同文化中关于龙和其他神话生物的传说。指出大多数人类社会都有关于恶劣野兽的神话,因为这些社会在现实中也经历了恶劣的野兽。同时,也提到了人们对动物的复杂和矛盾的态度,既有敌意也有友谊。此外,还探讨了不同文化中对自然的不同看法,以及这些看法如何影响对龙和其他神话生物的描述。
🎨 文化对龙形象的塑造
这一段探讨了文化如何塑造我们对龙的看法。指出在短短几十年内,龙在流行文化中的形象发生了巨大变化,从必须被杀死的怪物变成了可以被爱、喂养、驯养和骑乘的生物。这种变化反映了文化如何不断地重新解释和适应传统符号以满足现代的需求。
🤔 龙的传说与自然力量
本段提出了一个观点,即龙可能被视为野性的自然力量,在不同文化中人们对这种力量的态度和应对方式各不相同。提到了中国的风水学,以及它如何影响建筑设计,以适应自然力量,而不是与之对抗。同时,也提到了在中世纪欧洲,人们可能将自然视为需要克服的威胁。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡伝説の怪物
💡龍
💡火の竜(Fire Drake)
💡ワーム(worm)/コールドレイク(cold Drake)
💡バサリス(Basilisk)
💡竜の退治
💡聖ジョージ(Saint George)
💡化石
💡アルファプレデター(Alpha Predator)
💡文化的創作物
Highlights
世界各地的许多文化中都有类似于英语中称为“龙”的怪物传统。
Gresham College讲座提供了来自世界领先学术专家的知识和见解。
非洲祖先必须应对大型有毒蛇、大型猛禽和鳄鱼等自然危险。
欧洲和远东,特别是中国,特别突出了这类生物在艺术和故事中的地位,但龙的性质在两地截然不同。
欧洲龙是超级掠食者,而中国龙则是友好并有益于人类的生物。
欧洲民间传说中的两种主要类型的龙:火龙和冷龙。
英格兰拥有世界上最多关于龙的传说。
英国的龙故事中,英雄屠龙是困难的,通常需要特殊的技巧或策略。
屠龙故事在1350年至1550年间在英国特别流行,这与圣乔治作为英国守护圣人的地位有关。
在欧洲,龙几乎从不守护宝藏,这与现代小说中的描述不同。
古代希腊英雄杀死巨蛇,这些在英语翻译中被称为龙。
北欧版本的龙——林德虫,是一种巨大的蛇,最终会进入水中成为海怪或湖怪。
关于龙的现代记忆,经典的屠龙者是一位高贵的骑士。
龙的起源可能与《圣经》中的利维坦有关,它被描述为一种巨大的、有鳞的、喷火的海怪。
现代幻想文学和电影剧本中,龙通常被视为人类的朋友,具有智慧和敏感性。
人类对龙的信仰可能源于对史前怪物化石的发现以及对神秘海洋生物的目击。
龙的神话可能经历了三个阶段:人类对顶级掠食者的普遍需求、化石的发现以及地区传统形成。
在中国文化中,龙与风水艺术中的自然磁能和谐共存,被视为地球能量的体现。
讲座结束时,教授Rob分享了他最喜欢的龙——来自他居住和热爱的西乡村的Chill Compton的龙。
Transcripts
I will start with the proposition that across most of the world, most peoples
have traditions of monsters similar to those who are called dragons in English. In other words,
giants, winged land, reptiles of lizard or snake kind, or giant water serpents. It may
be that there is a genuinely ancient collective human memory at work here.
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Our ancestors in Africa long ago would've had to deal with big poisonous snakes,
big constricting snakes, large birds of prey and crocodiles. Moreover, venomous or crushing snakes
are the only dangerous animal that every single inhabited continent has in common. So monsters of
the sort I've just described are a compound of all those primordial natural hazards. However,
two areas in the world have made such creatures, especially prominent in art and story, and their
Europe and the far East is especially China, but the nature of the dragon is very different. In
each European dragons are super predators who take up residents near a human community and eat the
people and their livestock. Their functional role is then to get killed by heroes. Chinese dragons
look like elongated versions of European dragons with lizard bodies, four legs, clawed feet and
wings and fangs, but otherwise they have nothing in common with them. Chinese dragons are friendly
and beneficial to humans if treated with respect. They don't breathe fire and they inhabit water of
all kinds. They exist in harmony with the natural magnetic energies of the earth as reflected in the
Chinese art of Feng shui or Feng. I therefore have two questions to answer in this talk. Why
did Europeans believe in dragons so much and why are European dragons so nasty and Chinese dragons
so nice to go to Europe first, there are two main kinds of European dragon in popular folk law and
medieval literature. One is the fire Drake, a reptile with wings, a horn or crested head,
a spine tail and fiery breath. The fire Drake is the classic dragon of medieval heraldry Chronicles
and romances, but also of JR R Tolkien, CS Lewis and JK Rowling. The other traditional European
dragon is the worm or cold Drake A. That is a huge snake which spits venom or breeds poisonous
gas and can sometimes crush with its coils. There are however many other kinds of dragon that appear
in European folklore, literature and heraldry. The one that I'll mention here is the basals or
cock. There's a thoroughly glorious but misleading description of one in Harry Potter and the chamber
of secrets where it takes the form of a gigantic serpent. The classic medieval basals was a winged
snake or a scaly cocker only a few feet long. It was formed from an egg hatched by a toad. What JK
Row got absolutely right was its most famous characteristic that it kills with its stare.
England has the largest number of dragon legends for a country its size anywhere in the world, 68
in all Somerset, my local county has most followed by Yorkshire. The chief narrative function of
English dragons is to get killed, and the whole point of the typical dragon story is that slaying
one is difficult. There are no specialists and no kit Dragon slaying. Dracony is a one off ad hoc
business with no prose. English dragon slayers include five saints ranging from the local to
the truly international, such as Saint George. George was probably a real Roman soldier who
got martyred during the great persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian, but
he's not actually mentioned by anybody until the sixth century. A couple of hundred years later,
he's first mixed up with a dragon. However, 600 years later in the time of the Crusades, this is
almost certainly because Jaffa in Palestine, which became part of the crusader kingdom, was both one
of George's cult centers and the setting for the ancient legend of Perseus and Andromeda. Perseus
rescued Andromeda from a sea monster and his legend got built into George's with the sea beast
turned into the more familiar European monster by the Middle Ages. The dragon and the crusaders then
brought the story home to Europe. In modern memory, the classic dragon slayer is a noble
knight and there are 24 of those in England. There are, however, also 26 stories in which the slayer
is a young artisan, like a tailor or a cobbler. Now those trades rely on skill and independence,
so the majority of English dragon slayers are working class lads made good. Both traits are
needed for the job because a dragon always has a hide too tough to be pierced by conventional
weapons. One solution is to get the dragon to swallow you and then pierce it from the inside.
This is clearly risky , but it's still a trick. Obvious enough to be found worldwide as a
way for really hard heroes to kill huge monsters. The ancient Gods Indra in India and Marduk in
Babylon both used it. Another node is to stab the dragon through the mouth. As it's opens its jaws
to swallow you Also tricky. A third, which is the cowardly way, is to poison the beast. The least
obvious is to put on spiked armor or get into a barrel studded with spikes. The dragon then,
if it's stupid enough, charges you and impales itself on the spikes if they're long enough. This
idea actually came from watching hedgehogs deal with vipers by rolling into a spiked ball against
which the striking serpent got injured or killed. Whatever the method employed, dragon slaying
served two different purposes. One is a monster killing, which is one of the oldest and most
timeless forms of human narrative. The other is a heroic how done it in which the good characters
are pitted against much more powerful and evil. Foes good is expected to win, but until the end,
it seems impossible to see how it can just think. James Bond, star Wars or the Lord of the Rings.
It is clear there's a particular boom period in the creation of English dragon legends. This was
between 1350 and 1550 when they had got attached to a range of families and communities got carved
in churches and appeared in games and processions. The reason for this is simply that the period
followed the adoption of George as the English national patron saint. His legend then got spread
across the country and started the huge popularity of dragon slaying as an English folk motif. But
the basic point of the dragon remains that dragons are there to eat people and their livestock and
then come to a sticky end. In Europe, what they almost never do is guard treasure as they do in a
lot of modern fiction. This is simply because they do guard treasure in a narrow range of Germanic
medieval tales and the most famous a Beowulf and the Volson ga saga where Beowulf and Siegfried
become the dragon killers and two Oxford Dawns who had to teach Beowulf and the Volson ga saga every
week where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, and that's why treasure guarding dragons are so big in modern
fiction. But behind all these traditions lay much older precursors. The ancient Greek heroes
killed giant snakes, which English translators of the stories called dragons. The Greeks, however
called them pythons, a term employed in the modern world for a class of real snakes. Of course, the
Romans use the term Draco for a mythical kind of winged snake, and this is the root of the English
word dragon. These beasts do things like pulling the chariot of the sorceress Madea. There's also
a distinctively Norse version of the dragon, the lindworm. This is a giant snake like the English
and Germanic worm, but after it grows to a certain size it takes to water there it becomes the sea
serpent or lake monster. The greatest in Norse legend was the mid guard serpent, which encircled
the whole earth. Unlike dragons in general, Norse Lind worms continued to be cited right up to the
present. In 1894. Two of them were reported in a newspaper as blocking the entrance to
the harbor of the north fishing village of Ervin. The nearest one was dark yellow and 180 feet long,
a whaling ship set out from the nearest big port, very bravely to fight the snakes,
but both sensibly vanished as it approached. Now all this sounds amazingly real, but if it is,
then Norse Lind worms are scrupulously nationalist. Once you cross into Finland,
they're absent. Even though Finland has lots of lakes and an enormous seacoast finished dragons
live on hills and only eat fat people and hate eggs . So children, if you eat up your
eggs and stay slim, you are safe. In other words, a creature that on one side of the border can
block a modern fishing port on the other is equivalent to AA mill's bears who only eats
children who tread on the lines between paving stones, . So what were dragons, I'm going
to start with some fun answers, really attractive answers, but also I think are wrong answers. And
the first issue to settle when dealing with these is whether dragons actually existed as
portrayed zoologists were long confident that fire Drakes were physically impossible, but in 1979,
a cryptozoologist called Peter Dickinson showed that they were not. He suggested that they
produced hydrogen gas from hydrochloric acid in their stomachs, which was burned off through their
mouths. This enabled them to descend in flight like balloons burning off gas, and of course,
the acid completely consumed their bodies after death, which is why we never find their
remains . The theory is wonderful. It is also however incapable of proof, and it's hard
to see how stomach acid could consume an entire huge body. Moreover, no dragon legend describes
a fire Drake imploding after death. Instead, were often told how parts of the body were preserved
as trophies. Another theory was popularized by John Michel in 1969, which imposed the Chinese
view of dragons on the entire world. It picked up on the Chinese idea that dragons moved along
currents of natural energy that crossed the earth. John gave these currents the English name of Lays,
lay lines and declared that the Chinese belief had been held across the whole planet. He
declared that also the European hostility towards dragons have been imposed by repressive medieval
Christianity. This turned benevolent earth energies into satanic monsters. His book was
the main force in catalyzing the whole late 20th century enthusiasm for mapping and dowsing lay
lines. I acknowledge readily that this has given great pleasure and re enchanted the landscape for
many people in dragon law. However, John got things the wrong way round. It's the Chinese
belief in benevolent dragon light creatures, which is anomalous in a world context. Most
peoples have treated giants, reptilian beasts as monsters, and the European antipathy towards them
goes as indicated way back before Christianity. There's also a psychological explanation for
dragon stories that they are simply metaphors for predatory human beings. They're certainly
used as such. In history, the Romans had dragon standards like wind socks on poles,
which made a roaring sound as cavalry charged. This is incidentally the only historical detail
which Jerry Bruckheimer filmed about King Arthur got right, but we were treated to Keira Knightly
in a leather bikini to console those looking for historical accuracy. the Vikings famously
had dragon figureheads on the ships. Both groups ravaged lands and demanded tribute. The trouble
here is that Romans and Vikings used the dragon for as a symbol for ferocity because the concept
of it already existed. It's also not obvious that dragons function well as a metaphor for armed
bands of humans. They seem to be much more like animal predators. So we now come to explanations,
which I think to be credible, but marginal. One is that dragons are the result of freak meteorology.
Medieval chronicles are bound in references to fiery dragons seen high in the air and meteors and
comets could account for all of these. Medieval and early modern night skies were very bright
as there was though little human lighting. Some dragons could also have been misidentified real
animals. The closest real beast to dragons are crocodiles, which can grow up to 30 feet in length
and way three tons. They're also highly predatory. Even today, they kill an average 5,000 people a
year more than any other species except humans. A so-called dragon exhibited Durham in 1569 was
a crocodile and escaped crocodilians would explain some local medieval dragon legends. The dragon of
St. Leonard's Forest described in a pamphlet of 1614. The foresters in Sussex was a giant
snake which reared up and approached, killed people and dogs with its bite ate rabbits and
vanished when winter came. Now, this would fit an escaped king cobra or mamba in all those details,
including not being able to survive. Frost accidents of natural history can also plausibly
explain bits of dragon law. Hems are sometimes born with insufficient estrogen and develop the
physical characteristics of Cox. Sometimes the hormonal balance is rectified and they lay eggs
in pre-Modern societies also hens often suffered from roundworms, which could get from the animal
into its eggs. When such an egg was cracked, the riving worm was revealed. A newborn basal lisc,
which you may remember, was supposed to be hatched from an egg laid by a cock. All these factors,
in my opinion, do indeed credibly explain certain dragon legends or classes of reference to dragons.
There is, however, an obvious problem with them as a general source of explanation,
even when they're all rolled together. That is all the comets, meteors, crocodilians, cobras,
and worm infested eggs presuppose an existing idea. When you look up into a medieval sky and
see a meteor, you don't think it's a flying fire, breathing reptile unless you already
believe in such beasts. To get to the real roots of the belief in dragons, we're going to have to
dig deeper, but first I need to do two bits of tidying up. The first is to suggest an origin for
the most distinctive and classic form of European dragon, the fire Drake. No other culture and time
has produced a predatory big reptilian monster that breathes fire. I'd suggest it comes from
just one source, and that happens to be the book that medieval and early modern Europeans read,
respected and believed more than any other. The Bible. The relevant passage isn't the Book of
Job chapter 41, and it's spoken by God himself. This is actually very rare. Jehovah almost never
speaks in the first person in the Bible, and it begins Leviathan and it then goes on to say,
have you draw? Can you draw out to Leviathan with a hook or his tongue with a cord? And it then goes
on for a number of verses to portray a gigantic monster with terrible, sharp teeth scales so
close together that no weapon can possibly pierce them and out of his mouth go burning lamps and
sparks of fire, leap out out of his nostrils, go with smoke as out of a seething pot or cauldron.
And it then goes on to say about, uh, his heart being like a stone, about how swords and spears
are useless against him and how he makes the deep boil like a pot, the deep being the sea. He makes
the sea like a pot of ointment. He makes a path to shine after him. He is a king over the kingdom of
pride. By the 17th century when Christians were starting to understand the natural world better,
it became generally concluded that the leviathan as a sperm whale, this is probably correct if a
plume of water from its blowhole was mistaken for smoke and that therefore it was concluded that an
animal blowing smoke out of its head must have a fire in its mouth to medieval readers. Therefore,
what you have here is a huge scaly fire breathing monster with terrible teeth apparently found in
both land and sea with a hide impervious to conventional weapons apart from the wings,
which could be added to account for the way in which it spans environments. This is a blueprint.
Fire drag leviathans are mentioned briefly elsewhere in the Old Testament, such as an Isaiah,
and always with the reputation of being the most terrifying of animals, more powerful and
deadly than lions. To those who regarded the Bible as the literal word of God, which is
most Christians till the 19th century, something that he speaks in the first person is going to
carry particular weight. No wonder the fire Drake became the classic monster of the Christian world
from the Anglo-Saxon Times onwards. This isn't a theory of mine, it's uh, shared widely among
crypto zoologists and I'm simply endorsing it. There's a final loose end to be tied that dragons
are now once again really big business in fantasy literature and screenplays. There have been dozens
of fantasy novels with Dragon or Dragons in the title published since 1970. What is striking about
them is that most regard dragons as a good thing as essentially intelligent and sensitive beasts
that can be allies of humans. I am your dragon Aragon, in particular. The 1970s threw up a new
sort of hero or heroine, the dragon rider who treats the beasts both as steeds and companions.
These were the work of Anne McCaffery, an Irish woman who moved to America and who really loved
horses. And so her flying dragons are actually horses that breathe fire and look like dragons and
have horse like characteristics. What has happened is that the physical form of the classic European
dragon, the fire Drake, has been combined with the spiritual form of the classic Chinese dragon
in a western world that is kinder and greener and doesn't have to worry any longer about predators.
This combination has taken place logically enough in the nation, which is both the current leader of
the globe and lies midway between Europe and China America. Now it's time to discuss the
most fundamental aspects of the concept of the dragon. European dragons occupy a very specific
animal relationship with humanity. They're what the American eco journalists David Kwaman has
named the Alpha Predator. Great and terrible flesh eating beasts were part of the ecological
matrix within which our species evolved. They were part of the psychological context within
which we formed our identity. They were part of the spiritual systems that we developed for
coping with the cosmos. Their ferocity and hunger and complete violation of our sense of self and
of self-worth were grim realities that could be alluded but not forgotten to nearly all early
humanity and to traditional peoples right up until almost the present. They were a familiar kind of
capricious misfortune. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness must have been the awareness
of being prey, even in the most modernized and well-protected modern societies. Zoological,
mellow drama Aja described by detractors as predator porn, whether it be Jaws alien,
deep Blue Sea, lake Placid, or Jurassic Park is a well-established form of entertainment. An alpha
predator, however, is not just any animal that eats humans. It's a solitary hunter,
which makes a one-to-one relationship with its prey. Predators that hunt in packs like cowards,
however dangerous to humans such as hyenas, wild dogs and wolves do not qualify. On the other hand,
a lone big rogue wolf does in a region which has no more frightening wildlife. Elephants kill more
people every year than any other mammal, but they don't count because they don't eat their victims.
They have never been made. The mythological alpha predator. The very real human fear of
predators means that a good Lord or chief in a traditional human society is at least in theory,
in the position of a shepherd to his flock. He is there to guard its members against both human
and animal foes. And the greater the hero, the more spectacular is the predator against which
he has matched the oldest surviving piece of literature, the epic of Gilgamesh has a battle
between a king and a monster. At the center of the story, the greatest heroes of their
respective peoples Hercules, alias, Hercules, and Beowulf were serious killers of pre serial
killers of predators. It also matters that human societies tend to have room for only one alpha
predator in their imaginative space. Across most of the old world, the predator of human symbolic
choice is the lion. It features as such in both Greek myth, hence Heracles and the Bible, hence
Samson. And one of the chief duties of an ancient near Eastern king was to kill lions personally as
a sign of royal prowess, and so an ability to defend his people. Lions always stood in for
foreign foes when none of the latter are currently available in ancient India and Persia and tribal
Africa. To be a ruler, likewise meant being a lion killer. Other predators took over only where lions
didn't exist. For example, in India, outside Lion country where the tiger stood in across
most of the rest of East Asia and eastern Siberia where there were tigers. And in West Africa where
the next cat down the pecking or biting order was the leopard, you can go on down the scale it lands
with no big cats. The bear is the alpha predator and where there are no big land animals at all,
the crocodile or the shark takes over In medieval Europe, however, the alpha predator was missing.
Lions disappeared from almost all of Europe at the end of the ice age. The European brown bear
is much less dangerous than other species, and very rarely do European wolves produce the giant
lone serial killer of humans that is needed to qualify as a mythological. Alpha predator lions
stayed pretty close. They survived in Turkey until the 1870s and an Algerian Morocco till the 1920s,
but they were never even by the new stone age, an actual menace to most Europeans. Instead,
the lion's reputation as the nce of great kings and the lordly appearance and flamboyant behavior
of the male lion made it the royal beast par excellence to Europeans. In the medieval besties,
it stood for courage and regality. It became the most common symbol of West European rulers,
especially in Britain, Spain and Germany. The British lions still roars for us today.
Europeans therefore had an imaginative need for an alpha predator that was even more
powerful and terrifying than the lion, and which could be treated as an emblem of evil
as well as a ferocity. The dragon filled that conceptual gap. This does, however,
invite the question of why medieval Europeans would've thought that the dragon was more native
to their lambs than the lion, so it could be appropriated for the job and why they thought
it was so real. There is absolutely no evidence for dragon like creatures actually surviving on
land in Europe during historic times. Things get a lot trickier and more interesting, however, as
soon as we hit deep water, whereas nobody nowadays claims to see fire, Drakes worms or Basalis lake
and sea monsters are regularly reported across the world, including Britain. Hence Lochness
zoological. There's still a lot of mileage and a lindworm or a sea serpent. We do have some good
candidates for these among real creatures. One is the ribbon fish, which is the fish on the screen,
which is a rare species of eel that often grows to more than 20 feet and has red spines running down
its back, which rise to a crest on its head. In addition, the natural decomposition of carcasses
can turn even well-known marine species studied at close quarters into fabulous beasts. In 1977,
the Japanese National Museum of Natural Science identified photographs of a huge corpse trawled
up by fishermen off New Zealand as showing a prehistoric CIA saw only when tissues saved from
the body and its merciful tissues were saved, were examined. Did it turn out to be a badly rotted
blue shark whom decomposition had turned into the shape of aple? Saw many reports of sea serpents
are now attributed by marine biologists to sightings of the giant squid, the long tentacles
of which can easily be taken for the body of a huge serpent. Giant squids can grow to more than
a hundred feet in length, over half of which are the tentacles. And mistaking a giant squid for a
sea serpent is even easier if the squid concerned is dead and dismembered and the tentacles appear
to form one continuous creature on the surface of the sea. Having said that, however, we still face
two puzzles. One is that there are simply no known animals that correspond to some of the detailed
descriptions of sea and lake monsters provided by observers over the centuries. There's still
a mystery here. Remember that 180 foot yellow serpent just off the harbor of air vCAN and its
mate. The other is that we're still no nearer finding real animals which correspond to the
European land dragons so prominent in tradition, I'd suggest they were indeed prehistoric monsters,
but safely dead, not living fossils, just fossils. Since Homosapiens first acquired
its capacity for reasoning, humans will have noted that huge bones weather out of the rocks offered
of creatures with teeth like steak knives in powerful jaws plus grasping claws and horns.
It's would have been obvious to the observers that such beasts no longer lived in the lands,
concerned to humans before the sciences of geology and paleontology and the concept of evolution had
appeared. The obvious explanation was they'd been exterminated, given their size and ferocity. It
had to have been heroes who did it at times. In the case of dragons, we can be much more specific
Every time that a relic of a historic dragon has actually been preserved, it turns out to be a long
extinct animal. One of the most famous European dragons was that of klar and foot in Austria,
slain by a duke of Austria. Its skull was displayed in the town hall until the 19th
century when it was identified as that of a woolly rhinoceros. Another Austrian, the paleontologist
EO arbel studied dragon legends in 1914. He realized that the cave systems traditionally
identifies the layers of the beasts, often contain the bones of cave bears, massive ice age predators
with sharp teeth. The head of the dragon of kil Somerset was preserved and as that of one of the
Jurassic marine reptiles called IAOs. The reason why Somerset is richer in dragon legends than
any other county may simply be that its limestone rocks preserve fossil remains is especially those
of IAOs police souls and ply saws with great clarity. And ply saws, just for the record,
are the biggest carnivorous animals that the planet has ever produced, truly terrifying beasts,
and they look at in their skeletons. We can be a lot more sure of this now because of the work of
Adrian Maya, a classicist who also understands paleontology, a rare combination. She points out
that ancient literature is full of references to giant bones where skeletons are found in fossil
beds superimposed on each other. It would be easy to see how these could reasonably give
rise to tales of hybrid beefs, such as cental and the chime era. She has also pointed to two
specific sources of dragon legends. One is that of the griffin, the half lion, half eagle beast of
European legend. The ancient Greeks invented the idea of griffins and they placed their homeland
in central Asia. Now that region is full of fossils of beaked dinosaurs, which look very
much like the griffins of myth. The other is much more particular to dragons and consists of one of
the most influential sources of dragon law, the biography of the philosopher Apollonius of Tiana,
written by Philosophists in the imperial Roman period. It included a description of a journey
that Apollonius had made to northern India, in which he described huge scaly serpentine monsters
in two main species, one smooth headed and the other larger and crested this account, the result
of one Greek taking the hippie trail across Persia to India in the first centuries of the common
era became the basis of a considerable amount of medieval and early modern dragon law. His account
repeated wholesale and works on dragons right up to the 17th century. Adrian and Mayer pointed out
that apollonius route into India along the old Persian royal road would've taken him
under the SWA hills, which are full of bones of huge extinct crocodiles and mammals. One
vivid detail in Apollonius story has a direct parallel in the swale. This is the information
that one kind of Indian dragon had a jewel in the center of its skull. Again, a motif that
passed into European dragon law. As it happens, the rocks of the swale form crystals and these
often grow inside the larger fossil skulls in the hills. Adrian Mayer picked up and other certain
or probable connections between ancient myths and fossil remains. She noted that the Greek historian
Herodotus had said that great flying serpents lived in the Egyptian desert. This may have been
inspired by the sight of the bones of the enormous sail backed predatory dinosaur spinosaurus,
which is the super nasty of Steven Spielberg's film, Jurassic Park. Three more certain is
the alleged discovery of the skeleton of the monster slain by Perseus to rescue Andromeda,
which was dug up in imperial Roman times at the traditional setting of the tale at dropper, the
modern Jaffa in Palestine. It was brought to Rome and had a 40 foot backbone. Clearly this was some
kind of prehistoric beast. It's notable that China and Europe lands of dragon law par excellence,
a both exceptionally rich in fossil bearing rocks that produce big ferocious looking extinct beasts.
Chinese fossils have been called dragons bones since records begin, but China didn't make the
dragon the alpha predator of its myths because it had enormous striped alpha predators on its
premises already, the tigers that ate the Chinese in large numbers until the 1930s. And so the tiger
hunter became the classic hero of China's. China's mythology and legend, and these harmless, enormous
bony beasts weathering outta the rock became associated with the energies of the earth from
which they came and regarded as benevolent. It is time to conclude. I would suggest three stages of
creation of dragon myth. The first is the general human need for stories about alpha predators and
the ancestral fear of great reptilian beasts, crocodiles and snakes from our emost human past
in the Africa from which our species came. The second is the discovery of giant fossils and the
sighting of mysterious sea beasts supplying the apparent objective evidence that these things
had been and still were around. And the third is that regional traditions then form Europe gets
dragons as alpha predators because it lacks them in reality. And then the Christian fire Drake,
out of the Book of Job China got benevolent dragons moving along energy lines. So I think
I've answered my last two questions, and I think that if you want to go dragon hunting or communing
with dragons, all you need to do is go fossil hunting, but just stay out of the water. ,
Do you have a favorite dragon ?
Yes, it's, uh, I, I am a great west country patriot. I spent so many years living and
working there and loving the land, and I like a humdrum local Somerset dragon , uh,
the dragon of chill compton. And, uh, it was a dozy dragon and the hero who went
to kill it didn't actually realize it was a dragon until he'd been sitting on it for
about half an hour thinking it was a log. Uh, and eventually and some versions of the story,
they felt they had to come to terms and they did. So there's a happy ending possible to the storm
. Excellent. The gentleman just, just say,
if you wait for the microphone to get to you, then the people online can hear as well.
Fine. Uh, thank you for that. That was amazing. Um, I noticed at the beginning you were talking
about English dragons. Yeah. And I noticed that whales and Scotland were absent in that.
And yet whales is very well known for a dragon. Yeah. Is there any more to do with whales? Happy
To answer Scotland that there are Scottish dragons, but many fewer than in England because
the lack of a catalyzing national saint, uh, Wales, uh, is a different matter. Wales actually
has fewer local dragon legends by far than England, although there are some cute examples,
my favorites, the Ber, which is a small dragon England Morgan that eats chickens and is in
traditional folk law. Uh, the reason why dragons became central to Welsh identity and heraldry is
because of one story, which is in the British history, published in 8 29, uh, in which the
boy who's called Ambrosius, who is later going to become Merlin, explains the subsidence of a tower
built by a tyrant because there are two dragons, white and red fighting underneath. And the red
one stands for whales, and the white ones stands for the English. And so naturally the red one's
gonna win eventually, but they keep fighting for the time being, and the Welsh likes that,
and we all do. But the lion was the symbol used by Welsh medieval princes on their coats of arms,
their banners, their heraldry. Until that splendid Welshman, Henry Tudor killed Richard
II at the Battle of Bosworth with a largely Welsh and French army, and conquered England,
thereby fulfilling the Welsh prophecy that a, a Welsh prince would do this. It actually happened
the moment they'd been waiting for, since 8 29, but there's now a heraldic problem because Henry's
beast should be the lion, but it's already the royal beast of England. So what are the Welsh
gonna get? And so overnight the Tudors decided the dragon should be the symbol of Wales because
of the story and the British history. Um, the Red Dragon has been the symbol of Wales ever since.
I'm, I'm a member of the, the Learned Society of Wales. I have a patriarchic investment in that
,
The
Gentleman at the back. Um, thank you. It was very interesting. Um, out of curiosity,
like when we have a broader viewpoint as to beasts in general Yes. Uh, in, uh,
let's say just specifically in this context, let's say European versus Chinese. Uh,
do we know the distribution of say, the nasty beasts versus nice beasts? And do they overlap?
Are they similar? Are they very different across European and, uh, Chinese landscape?
Most human societies have nasty beasts in mythology, and that's because most human societies
have had nasty beasts in reality. So it's a trans position, very easy to make, but they're also good
beasts in the mythology of most nations. Uh, the affection given to the raven by the northwestern
Pacific peoples, or the coyote by the peoples, the American southwest, the reverence for the bear all
the way across the circumpolar region from, uh, the saami lands, the lap lands right through to
the northern most island of Japan is, uh, again, an example of this. So there's a tendency among
humans to regard animals as in a constant relationship with us, which they were and are,
and to pick out friends and foes among them. They then get frozen in mythology for all time.
I'm just curious if any other country pursues its myths in the way that we pursue lochness, and are
people going around actual with scientific, uh, processes trying to discover a myth?
Yeah, there are lake monsters all over the globe. Uh, notable examples in the
North American continent, and there's a favorite lake monster in the Congo,
uh, which was Zaire. Now the Democratic republic, uh, sometimes it's possible
to identify sources for these. Uh, in the case of the Congolese Lake monster,
which got a lot of, uh, attention from scholars in the eighties and nineties,
it was realized that it's actually the now almost extinct northern white rhinoceros, which had lived
in the land and become extinct. And in mythology, it had got it transferred to water to explain why
you no longer saw it. So it must have come out of the lake and go back in at a particular lake. Uh,
and there at least we can pin down the origins of a, a lake monster legend, but they're found
all over the globe, including Polynesia like New Zealand and every inhabited continent high.
Are there any differences in the personalities
of different colored dragons, like red versus green versus
Black?
Not, not really. Uh, dragons are lots of different colors. That's a point on which
the imagination of the individual storyteller is given free reign.
There's nothing canonical about dragons colors, and there are no moral qualities,
no local loyalties attached to them except for the famous case of Wales, because of that one tail.
Thank you so much for this lecture. Um, if I may, two very quick questions. One,
uh, I noticed when you were talking about Bazel Lisk that the look that kills not very typical.
And the only one other one that comes to my mind is Medusa. Yes. Where does the look that kills
come from? It's obvious for the jaws and the teeth and the claws, but where does the look that kills
Come from? Uh, the answer is we haven't The faintest idea, somebody fought it up. I mean,
there, there's, there's actually much crazier stuff about the basal than I had time to describe
in the lecture. For example, not only were medieval people convinced that it existed and came
outta this egg laid by a cock hatch by a toad, but that the only animal, which it really feared
was the weasel, which is why there's a weasel in the picture that I flashed up there with a,
a basalis looking distinctly wary. And nobody knows why weasels should be picked, but it became
canonical. Everybody knew that if you kept a weasel around, you'd be safe from a basalis.
So, but there, there is, uh, a, an absolutely glorious, uh, cultural fertility in all this,
which sometimes borders on the absolutely crazy and, and therefore all the more wonderful.
So if you will allow me that second question. Yeah. I think it kind of
ties nicely into what you just said. Do you notice any differences in dragon myths across
the European tribes tribe? Tribal lines? No, absolutely. Versus Germanic versus,
No. Uh, it's amazingly standard. Uh, every European people by the beginning of history had
picked up on the idea of dragon light creatures and embedded them in their mythology. And, uh,
we, we were kind of baffled as to why this should be, which is why I,
this is actually one of my ideas, I can take credit for it. Good or bad, is, uh,
the idea of the absence of alpha predator in historic Europe and late prehistory.
You really have to go back as far as, uh, the paleolithic the ice age before you live
in a world which has credible alpha predators of the kind farm pretty well everywhere else.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Um, let, let's take a couple from Slido,
which I've been silently neglecting. Um, a couple of people have asked, uh, similar
questions about how did the city of London end up with dragons as its crest
That I don't actually know. Uh, I've never found a book that could tell me, although I'm certain
there must be one. Uh, certainly the incredible popularity of dragon legends in the late middle
Ages, we're talking 1350 to 1500 produces dragons across the landscape. They appear everywhere,
and that's when they appear as, um, a symbol of London. So perhaps the corny explanation,
which may actually be right, is at a time when the country was going Dragon Mad London had
to have one too or perhaps one in every post, uh, leading in. And of course,
the, the locals here were just outside Gresham, just opposite the city of York. Pub
Everywhere needs a dragon. Um, a couple of people have asked questions
about how sort of popular imagination kicks from a dragon. So the combination of whether
it's artists, creative people, or just people in the pub exaggerating what's,
what's the role of, um, of, of culture in creating what we've ended up with
The role of culture and creating everything else. We end up with , uh, which is
that we have this stock of primeval loves and fears that focus on certain symbolic shapes
and forms and traditions. And then this gets reworked millennium after millennium
and century after century, and adapted to modern needs, uh, which is why in Hollywood, uh, within,
uh, within about 10 years, dragons turned from being things that even in Walt Disney had to be
killed to being things, uh, whom you love feed domesticate and ride around the sky. ,
Thank you so much for another brilliant, and, and very, yeah, interested lecture.
What just came to my mind, the dragon maybe seen as the Wild Nature force, and in China,
they have Feng Shu of fng shui. So they learn to live with the nature force as they build their
buildings. So the nature spirits aren't disturbed, so they, they build buildings so the dragon can,
can go from the mountains to the, to the lake and and drink also. And maybe Europeans,
especially in the Middle Ages, have seen nature as a forces that have to be overcome
because they are threatening. Just, just my idea, I just don't know. So question,
I, I don't think that the Chinese traditional relationship with nature was that different from
the European. Uh, because the same Chinese who are, uh, celebrating dragons as wonderful forces,
the earth are exterminating tigers as fast as they can, uh, and usually not very successfully
until the 19th, 20th century as mortal predator enemies. And in the same way in Europe, uh,
you can have the ancient Greeks and Romans having dracos and pythons as symbols of, uh, the terror
of nature. And, uh, hees bumping off the maayan lion and other natural monsters. But venerating
rocks, trees, and water as the home of nymphs and of, uh, rather beautiful spirits. So the
human relationship with nature is very complex and deeply ambivalent right across the grove,
but the world, the, well, the, uh, the globe. But the, the fun thing here is it manifests in
such different ways that it provides something really creative, fascinating, and it's wonderful
seeing the different way the kaleidoscope re patterns itself in culture after culture.
Um, I'm afraid I have to break the news, uh, that, that we're out of time. Um, uh,
the, uh, uh, ladies and gentlemen, we have had a absolute tour divorce, as said, uh, earlier,
we, we have been informed, we've been entertained, and we have had a series of important life lessons
about how to kill a dragon and the importance of retaining a weasel at all times. , uh,
would you please join me in thanking the Gresham College Professor of Divinity, professor Rob.
تصفح المزيد من مقاطع الفيديو ذات الصلة
01 The Science h264
Mary Evelyn Tucker 0102 - Integrating Scientific Knowledge Within A Larger Whole Through Story
Jean Pierre Makosso 0201 - A Bridge To The Stories
Mary Evelyn Tucker 0101 - To See The Universe Not Just As A Place, But As A Story
【斎藤一人】自分の人生を輝かせるには?あらゆるモノには神の意志が宿っている
THE BIG IDEA (3): The Journey
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