DO YOU BELIEVE IN DRAGONS part 3

Do You Believe In Dragons

 

Part 3

The Chinese, Japanese, the Egyptians, the peoples of India and other oriental Far East and Middle East nations are famous for their dragons and dragon tales, their lore, legends and myths but maybe they aren’t really so mythical at all.  These stories, beliefs have to be rooted somewhere.

    

In China, Japan, India, the island nations and much of the Far and Middle East the dragon was considered to be a supreme being with both great spiritual and earthly powers and wisdom.  The dragon would ward off evil, bring good luck and prosperity and use its powers to help humans who were in trouble.  These creatures were honored and revered, worshipped.  They were considered to be god-like and guardians of the Earth.

    

One of the most famous of all these dragons is Yinglong, a beautiful winged dragon with four claws on its feet that was the servant of Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor. It is told that Yinglong, or the yellow dragon had scales made of pure gold and was a most beautiful and kind creature.  The legend tells the story of how Yinglong the dragon helped to stop the Yangtze (Yellow River) from flooding the land and destroying all life by digging long channels or tributaries so the river would not overflow and bring deluge to the land.

    

According to Eastern legends there are four Great Dragons, each ruling over one of the four great seas, north, south, east and west.  These dragons may appear as dragons but they may also appear as humans or in any other form.

 

(AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Read the description of the winged serpent in The Garden of Eden found in the book of Genesis in the Bible and the description of the dragons given by John in Revelation, the last book of the Bible.  This is an interesting comparison.)

 

The dragon, according to these legends, represents divine wisdom and power.  They control the weather and the seasons as well as the fortune or fate of humankind.  According to oriental legend there are 9 supreme dragons; (1) Yinglong, the winged dragon; this dragon roved the skies keeping an eye on good and evil and directing man away from evil that could get man into trouble or harm him. (2) King Dragon, which is really four dragons in one.  Some artists depict this dragon as a four-headed dragon.  This is the dragon that controls the weather, seasons and fate of mankind. (3) Sherlong, this is a male and the spiritual dragon and benefactor to man and presides over the rains and the wind. (4) Dilong, (female) is the underground dragon and the counterpart of Sherlong, benefactor of women and presides over the fields and hills causing the seeds of the earth to bring forth new life. (5) Tianlong, the celestial dragon pulls the chariots of the gods and carries the sun and moon across the sky.  (6) Fucanglong, the dragon that guards the hidden treasures of the Earth and causes volcanoes to erupt.  (7) Panlong, the coiled dragon that inhabits the rivers of the orient and protects and controls these waters and the creatures therein. (8) Huanglong, the dragon called the giver of wisdom who taught the legendary emperor Fu Shi the elements of writing. (9) Li, known as the homeless dragon that lives in and controls the seas along with Chiao who resides in the marshlands and swamps. Li-Chiao is two dragons in one in the same way King Dragon is four dragons in one.  This dragon is often depicted as a two headed dragon and its job is to protect the creatures that live in the seas, marshlands and swamps of the Earth. 

    

Japan, India, the island nations all have similar legends with similar dragons though they give them different names reflecting their own cultural beliefs.  These cultures also have evil and sinister beings that would destroy man and other creatures of the Earth but it is not the way of the dragon.  Were these dragons ever real?   Did they exist?  I think perhaps they really did. 

 

Certainly, at one time there were such awesome creatures.  The Bible and other ancient writings tell about these creatures and we have found fossils to prove such creatures, or similar creatures (those we have named dinosaurs) did exist.  What really happened to them?  It is all speculation but I have my own theory and it all began way back in the very beginning when an evil entity (spirit being) entered into the spirit of a good and beautiful flying serpent in a place called Eden.

    

 

There are some groups of people who claim these legendary creatures to be demonic, evil, pagan gods while others claim they are no more than fanciful tales, fables used to teach lessons in living, no different than Aesop and the fables credited to him.  Perhaps the great dinosaurs of old are the dragons of these legends and they have merely been embellished to make the tale more interesting. I wonder.  Do you every wonder about dragons?

    

As we move west into Europe, the western cultures, these dragons take on a much more sinister roll.  Many of them are defined as evil beings who cause all manner of calamity, pestilence and disease, droughts, famines, chaos.  They are depicted as monsters breathing fire and smoke.  They strike fear into the very soul of man.  Why the difference?  Were they real?  I personally believe they were real enough and that they were demonized by the church at the time to bring ignorant followers of the faith into line.  I also contend that these creatures at times were probably ferocious as they defended their own territorial homes when humans encroached on them. 

 

Corner a Grizzly or a Mountain Lion and find out what happens, leave them alone and do nothing to aggravate them and they probably won’t bother you either.  I think the same went for the dragons (dinosaurs) of old.  If they did happen to kill and eat a human, well, it’s called the food chain.  Humans, like other animals were just another meal to these creatures like deer, bear, cattle, rabbits and squirrels.  We humans do the same thing.  Most of us eat another animal every day and think nothing of it other than “yummy, this is delicious,” and humans like other animals defend their territorial home.  When you look at dragons from this perspective, well, dragons don’t seem quite so frightening at all. 

    

Once you come to the Americas you find a combination of the two different types of dragons of legend and lore.  There are warring dragons and dragons that bring peace and harmony depicting the battle between good and evil.  You’ll find stories of these great creatures in Native American Legend and Lore. These dragons are very similar to those of the middle east and far east legends.

    

 

What is the basis for all these varying beliefs, this legend and lore?  Is there any basis of truth in any of these tales?  I decided to ask Cosmos.  He’s been around for a very long time.  Maybe he knows.  Cosmos shared some pretty interesting stuff about dragons and told me about several cousins of his still living in our lakes and seas and larger rivers, like Cosmos and Quinnie; Memphre and Champ, all here in Vermont where I live. One of the dragon like creatures Cosmos told me about is a great sea-serpent that lives off the shores of British Columbia in Canada and Alaska south to Washington State, Oregon and California and there have been many sightings, over 300 confirmed sightings in the last 200 years and the legend of Caddy has been around for as long as there have been people living in this region, perhaps several thousand years ago.   Caddy, apparently, is very, very real (not like my imaginary Cosmos) however, exactly what species of animal Caddy is has yet to be confirmed.  No one has ever caught Caddy or any of his kin.  He appears to be a gigantic serpent of some sort or something like an eel, a very, very huge eel or perhaps a gigantic pencil fish.  Caddy has a sort of horse shaped head, fins and a long tail with a fan-like tip like that of a whale.  It feeds on fish, seaweed and other aquatic plants.  Descriptions we have describe Caddy as being anywhere from ten to twelve to eighteen feet long, gray-brown to almost black in color and having round eyes and gills.  Caddy and/or his kin have been seen several times following the fishing boats off the northwest coast.  So I’ll give Caddy a thumbs up for being more fact than fiction.  There is definitely something out there following fishing boats from Alaska to as far south as San Francisco California.  Exactly what Caddy is, honestly, I don’t know other than believing that Caddy is very, very real. 

 

From earliest times you can find reports and stories about dragons.  The early seafarers often came home with tales of giant sea serpents, dragons of the seas, horrid beast and monsters of the deep that could swallow ships whole; they reported seeing merpeople (mermaids and mermen) and sirens, the giant octopus, great serpents hundreds of feet long and turtles so large their backs appeared to be islands and the more often these stories were told the bigger they grew. 

    

Real or imagined, I wasn’t there.  I can’t be sure.  What I do know is that there are some very strange creatures still on this Earth today, creatures we don’t really know a whole lot if anything about, creatures that are just now, in the 21^st, century being discovered.  Maybe we will be able to prove dragons after all.  Could giant sea serpents really have existed and perhaps somehow became land locked and now reside in some of our lakes and rivers?  I suppose that could have happened.  It is a reasonable supposition. 

    

The earliest documentation I know of about dragons comes from the Sumerians, Sumerian mythology.  Samaria is in the Middle East, the cradle of civilization.  To the people of that time these creatures were not imaginary, they were not myth.  There is documentation of such creatures existing one upon a time but do they still exist? 

    

Many such creatures were worshipped and honored as gods by the Sumerians, gods of both good and evil.  You’ll find more such tales among the histories and philosophies of other nations as well; the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, the Vikings of the north, the Celts and other civilizations all around the world.

    

Dragons are mentioned in several places throughout the Bible.  One of the most famous stories is found Genesis, the story of the winged serpent and Eve, that serpent thought by some to be a form of dragon and another famous story in the book of Daniel; Bel and the Dragon is one of the additions to Daniel found at the end of that book in the Greek translations of the Hebrew Old Testament.

 

It appears it was probably added to the Old Testament part of the Bible somewhere around the beginning of the second century BC. It includes the story of Daniel and the statue of Bel, (also called Baal) a Babylonian god; so we have the stories of Daniel and the Dragon, and then goes to Daniel and the Lion’s Den which is a story familiar to many of us about a Hebrew boy who was thrown into the lions den to be devoured when he refused to worship the false gods of his captors.  The story of Bel and the Dragon is set in Babylon.  It appears to be a mixture of folklore and satire that was taught by the Hebrews or Jewish religious society to teach against idolatry but I believe it really happened just like Daniel recorded it in his writing that were later included in the Catholic Bible and some other Bible translations.  We can be reasonably certain it is so because these events are also included in Babylonian written history. 

    

The people of Babylon worshipped many gods and built elaborate idols to these gods.  At the time these scripts were written and taught the Jews were being held captive by the Babylonians.  It tells the story of food being offered to the god, Bel.  Bel is the keeper of the dragon. Bel of course does not accept and eat this food since Bel is a dead god, does not exist.  It is eaten instead by the temple priests who are put to death by King Cyrus the Great for their deception after they are exposed by Daniel. 

    

The dragon in this story is a living god but not the true God.  It is a creature that the Babylonians think of as mystical and magical.  They are in awe of this being and worship it.  So now we go to Daniel and the Dragon, a dragon that is apparently a real creature and worshipped by the Babylonians.  Daniel prepares food for the dragon and it eats it and the dragon dies.  The Babylonians become so angered that one of their gods has been killed they convince the king to throw Daniel into the lions den and we go to Daniel and the Lions Den.  An entire week passes and the king discovers that Daniel is still alive and well.  The lions have not eaten him or harmed him in any way. 

 

The king is over joyed to find Daniel still alive because he really likes Daniel and considers him to be very wise and a good person.  Daniel is released from the lion’s den and the king orders Daniel’s enemies cast into the den where they are quickly devoured by the hungry lions.  This is just one of many stories about dragons and their relationship to and with people, for good or evil. 

    

The story of Bel and of Daniel and the Dragon are not only documented in the Bible but are documented in Babylonian history and apparently this creature, this dragon was very real.  Now this dragon (the dragon of Daniel’s day) existed thousands of years after the great flood, the great deluge that covered the whole Earth and destroyed all living things except those God chose to save.  It also happened well after the time scientist suggest that a great comet struck the Earth and greatly altered the environment causing the dinosaurs (dragons) to die off.  I guess it all depends on what you want to believe.  I believe Daniel was dealing with a real, live dragon (dinosaur of some kind) that was being worshipped by the Babylonian community, perhaps held in captivity for such purpose. 

    

These events all took place about 600 BC, give or take three to five years and we know, not just from the recordings of these events in the Bible but from other documented history that it is so.  We know when Nebuchadnezzar died when Cyrus the Great captured and became ruler of Babylon.  If we believe other parts of ancient history for this region then we have no reason not to believe this; that the Babylonians had a dragon held captive and worshipped it as a god and that Daniel slew the dragon. 

    

The whole point of this story was to teach that there is only one God and that God only is the God we should worship, however, the point being here is that there was a dragon a real live dragon so dragons were walking the Earth at the time the Jews were held captive by the Babylonian Empire around 600 BC, which is documented world history and it was long after the flood and long after the supposed comet.  This being, then dragons roamed the earth no more than 2650 or so years ago which really isn’t that long ago in the whole scheme of things.

    

In the western hemisphere you will find these same or similar creatures and tales about them among the Mayans, the Aztecs, and our Native Hawaiians and in continental North America among the Iroquois Nation and the Algonquian peoples.  They all had their dragons, magical, mystical beast, animal gods and they all have legends about serpent or lizard-like creatures that lived in the lakes, rivers and the sea and roamed the Earth among them, for good and for evil.  These creatures sound like dragons (dinosaurs) to me. 

    

Many of these peoples had gods that were described as flying serpents and we have fossils and skeletons of dinosaurs that we know could fly.  You can see these in much of their artwork.  These dragon gods existed at least in the minds of these peoples of the western hemisphere long after time first began and the Garden of Eden was no more, or man was at least ban from it.  It was a winged serpent that Satan spoke through to tempt