What is a dragon? An animal, one might say, which looks or regards
(Greek drakon); so called, presumably, from its terrible eyes. Homer
has passages which bear out this interpretation:
[Greek: Smerdaleon de dedorken], etc.
Now the Greeks were certainly sensitive to the expression of animal
eyes - witness "cow-eyed" Hera, or the opprobrious epithet "dog-eyed";
altogether, the more we study what is left of their zoological
researches, the more we realize what close observers they were in
natural history. Aristotle, for instance, points out sexual differences
in the feet of the crawfish which were overlooked up to a short time
ago. And Hesiod also insists upon the dragon's eyes. Yet it is
significant that ophis, the snake, is derived, like drakon, from a
root meaning nothing more than to perceive or regard. There is no
connotation of ferocity in either of the words. Gesner long ago suspected
that the dragon was so called simply from its keen or rapid perception.
One likes to search for some existing animal prototype of a fabled
creature like this, seeing that to invent such things out of sheer
nothing is a feat beyond human ingenuity - or, at least, beyond what the
history of others of their kind leads us to expect. It may well be that
the Homeric writer was acquainted with the Uromastix lizard that occurs
in Asia Minor, and whoever has watched this beast, as I have done,
cannot fail to have been impressed by its contemplative gestures, as if
it were gazing intently (drakon) at something. It is, moreover, a
"dweller in rocky places," and more than this, a vegetarian - an "eater
of poisonous herbs" as Homer somewhere calls his dragon. So Aristotle
says: "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.
