"When the dragon has eaten much fruit, he seeks the juice of the
bitter lettuce; he has been seen to do this."
Are we tracking the dragon to his lair? Is this the aboriginal beast?
Not at all, I should say. On the contrary, this is a mere side-issue, to
follow which would lead us astray. The reptile-dragon was invented when
men had begun to forget what the arch-dragon was; it is the product of a
later stage - the materializing stage; that stage when humanity sought to
explain, in naturalistic fashion, the obscure traditions of the past. We
must delve still deeper. . . .
My own dragon theory is far-fetched - perhaps necessarily so, dragons
being somewhat remote animals. The dragon, I hold, is the
personification of the life within the earth - of that life which, being
unknown and uncontrollable, is eo ipso hostile to man. Let me explain
how this point is reached.
The animal which looks or regards. . . . Why - why an animal? Why not
drakon = that which looks?
Now, what looks?
The eye.
This is the key to the understanding of the problem, the key to the
subterranean dragon-world.
The conceit of fountains or sources of water being things that see
(drakon) - that is, eyes - or bearing some resemblance to eyes, is common
to many races. In Italy, for example, two springs in the inland sea near
Taranto are called "Occhi" - eyes; Arabs speak of a watery fountain as an
eye; the notion exists in England top - in the "Blentarn" of Cumberland,
the blind tarn (tarn = a trickling of tears), which is "blind" because
dry and waterless, and therefore lacking the bright lustre of the open eye.
