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.
There is an eye, then, in the fountain: an eye which looks or regards.
And inasmuch as an eye presupposes a head, and a head without body is
hard to conceive, a material existence was presently imputed to that
which looked upwards out of the liquid depths. This, I think, is the
primordial dragon, the archetype. He is of animistic descent and
survives all over the earth; and it is precisely this universality of
the dragon-idea which induces me to discard all theories of local origin
and to seek for some common cause. Fountains are ubiquitous, and so are
dragons. There are fountain dragons in Japan, in the superstitions of
Keltic races, in the Mediterranean basin. The dragon of Wantley lived in
a well; the Lambton Worm began life in fresh water, and only took to
dry land later on. I have elsewhere spoken of the Manfredonia legend of
Saint Lorenzo and the dragon, an indigenous fable connected, I suspect,
with the fountain near the harbour of that town, and quite independent
of the newly-imported legend of Saint Michael. Various springs in Greece
and Italy are called Dragoneria; there is a cave-fountain Dragonara on
Malta, and another of the same name near Cape Misenum - all are sources
of apposite lore. The water-drac. . . .
So the dragon has grown into a subterranean monster, who peers up from
his dark abode wherever he can - out of fountains or caverns whence
fountains issue. It stands to reason that he is sleepless; all dragons
are "sleepless "; their eyes are eternally open, for the luminous
sparkle of living waters never waxes dim. And bold adventurers may well
be devoured by dragons when they fall into these watery rents, never to
appear again.
Furthermore, since gold and other treasures dear to mankind lie hidden
in the stony bowels of the earth and are hard to attain, the jealous
dragon has been accredited with their guardianship - hence the plutonic
element in his nature. The dragon, whose "ever-open eye" protected the
garden of the Hesperides, was the Son of Earth. The earth or
cave-dragon. . . . Calabria has some of these dragons' caves; you can
read about them in the Campania. Sotteranea of G. Sanchez.
In volcanic regions there are fissures in the rocks exhaling pestiferous
emanations; these are the spiracula, the breathing-holes, of the
dragon within. The dragon legends of Naples and Mondragone are probably
of this origin, and so is that of the Roman Campagna (1660) where the
dragon-killer died from the effects of this poisonous breath:
