Henry Folliott Scott Stokes

“ This monster dwells not in the desert places of the earth, but in the hearth and home of every man. Its appetite is enormous and its destructive powers are equalled only by its fertility. Like all the other dragons, it is begotten by dogma out of ignorance.
It would be a mistake to suppose (as some have done) that religion is altogether a bad thing because it has fostered many errors, or altogether a fraud because it is profitable to priests. Every science under the sun has fostered innumerable errors, and every doctor on earth practises pious frauds daily, seldom solely for his private ends. ”

“ If it be argued that education does not make men delightful, in fact very much the contrary, I answer that that depends upon the education, and that, if genuine education doesn’t, nothing will; which is absurd. ”

“ It must be admitted that in Egypt, “the great breeding-place of monsters,” no dragons survive in full-blown splendour; but these legends are the germ of all, and from them springs the essential dragon-conflict, the vendetta of Horus against the powers of darkness. The dragon has also been identified with Osiris the good controller of water, with Set the evil who killed him, with Isis in so far as she is confused with Osiris, and with Horus as the successor of Osiris, but we shall only become confused if we try to follow all its transformations. ”

“ Most men who have realized the existence of this monster apparently try to meet it by joining the Labour Party. There is nothing immoral about that, but I pin my faith to the less dogmatic method of general education. It is curious, by the way, to note that the devil is historically associated with knowledge and not with ignorance. It would take too long to explain how this bogey came to be hoisted, but it is still very commonly made use of to frighten children, and my true purpose is to plead that it is only a bogey, and that ignorance is the devil’s most effective weapon. ”

“ On his way he turned Atlas to stone (and you can see the Atlas mountains to this day) , either out of pity for his sufferings—he had to hold up all heaven on his head, and heaven was, as in early Christendom, completely solid—or, as some say, in revenge for some trivial rudeness. If so, it is a regrettable blot on his otherwise unsullied escutcheon; for even Medusa had longed to die. Flying on, he next beheld Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus king of Ethiopia, bound to a rock and waiting to be devoured by a dragon. ”

“ So they transferred their worship for the king to his office, killed him, and made his son divine. And when he too began to age, they killed him in turn, and his sons after him, so that they always had a young and vigorous king-god. Until in time an ageing king refused to submit, and this was the origin of the story of the wrath of the gods and the destruction of mankind. Time passed, and the monarch was replaced by a maiden among his subjects, and we are at the stage of ordinary human sacrifice, “human blood being thought of as the only elixir.” ”

“ They noticed, too, that water was the first necessity of men and beasts and plants, and that dead men and things stiffened and withered as though the water was gone out of them; and so they worshipped water as the principle of life, and the water-god was the second-born. ”

“ If we could betake ourselves to the Egypt of 5,000 years ago, we should find them worshipping a Trinity of their own: Isis the all-Mother; Osiris the Son, and Horus. Isis, the forerunner of all the gods of all mankind was the goddess of fertility—goddess, [58] not god, for what could be more evident than the female fact of birth, whereas male assistance went long unrecognized. ”

“ And what could be more natural than that a dragon should take up its abode in or near Glastonbury, this region of hills and swamps? For it is universally admitted that dragons are to be found on the tops of mountains or in the depths of marshes, and it is a generally accepted test of evidence that what has been believed by all men everywhere in [19] every age is true—absurd, perhaps, but not more absurd than the modern opinion that what one man has once believed is true. ”

“ The Supernatural Birth. “Heroes of extraordinary achievement or extraordinary qualities were necessarily of extraordinary birth. The wonder or the veneration they inspired seemed to demand that their entrance upon life, and their departure from it, should correspond with the impression left by their total career.” It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every old Oriental tale begins with the words: “There was a king who had no children,” and the means adopted by them for achieving their pious purpose may be the eating of fish, fruit, barleycorns, eggs, saltpetre, or a dragon’s heart. ”

“ It may well be that the repentant brother will see two snakes fighting: one kills the other, but in remorse brings it to life again with a magic herb: the sagacious fellow takes the hint, and all is well again. ”

“ Virtue always triumphs in fairy-tales.
Such is the early Christian legend: A dragon, a supernatural birth, a helpful horse, a faithful brother, a life-token, and a rescued maiden; and “the Church may be congratulated on having converted and canonized the pagan hero Perseus.” But before passing on to more modern evidence, it will be well to give some account of the popular variants which circulated all over the world as fairy-tales, superstitions, or romances, almost down to [34] our own day. ”

“ The Separatists say that their resemblances merely show how very much alike men are, the world over; the Communists that they are so very intricate and so far from obvious that they must have sprung from a common stock (cf. Mr. W. J. Perry’s and Professor Elliot Smith’s theories as to the common—Egyptian—origin of militarism, mining, and many other branches of megalithic and modern culture) . Personally I am a Communist; for it is a perfectly good [64] principle, common to science and theology, that miracles are not to be multiplied, beyond necessity. ”

“ Very commonly the hero has one or two brothers born with him in the same miraculous way, and they set out on their fortunes together. What enables them to keep in touch when they part is a magic life-token, also born with them in the same way—for instance, a tree which grows from part of the fish planted in the garden at the time that their mother ate her part. Each one of them will have such a tree or branch which thrives or withers according to his own fortunes, and by this token each knows when the other is in danger, and comes to his rescue as in the case of St. George. ”

“ I think that from this jumble of superstitions and fables and conjectures and absurdities there does emerge something that may repay you for the weariness of an hour, and throw some light upon the hopes and fears with which the unconquerable spirit of man has progressed through the ages to the crowning triumphs of this twentieth century. ”

“ In every case the function of the hero and all his apparatus is to rescue a distressed maiden from a monster to whom she is being sacrificed to appease the Gods. [40] Often the hero, having rescued the lady, “ungallantly refuses to see her home, saying that he wishes to see a little more of the world.” But, before departing, he takes some token—the dragon’s tongue or eye or other part, or the lady’s handkerchief or other ornament. His desertion leaves her a prey to the first impostor who comes along, claims the victory for himself and the lady in marriage. ”

“ By this means the brothers invariably rescue each other, or, if they come too late or if a witch has turned the unlucky one to stone, either the witch thoughtfully provides the elixir of life or she is killed and it is found among her effects, or the faithful animals find it. Safely reunited, they commonly agree upon the division of their very considerable spoils; but in some cases they fall out and one kills the other, in which case the “elixir of life” comes into play again and they all live happily ever after. ”

“ Then imagine a man well content with a mistaken religion, a dreary home, and an unlovely wife (and this describes nearly all mankind) . What happens when you educate him? It is difficult for him to change his wife, very difficult to change his religion, and impossibly difficult to change his home—and the man is uprooted and miserable for life. ”

“ And men so struggling are not altogether delightful. The point about them is, by what right or merit of yours do you live so much more easily, with so many more opportunities of the good life; and do you use your opportunities? And can you be of any use to others less fortunate than yourself? ”

“ They hung the tomb with magic shells, that the dead might be born again. And when, after all, the body still decayed, they made statues instead for the soul to inhabit, and tried their charms on [68] them; and from the idea that statues can come to life grows the contrary idea that men can be turned to stone. ”

“ The next stage is that Isis the slayer becomes Isis the slain, whose sacrifice will atone for the sins of mankind. The grandmother goddess then becomes a mere mortal, “a beautiful and [61] attractive maiden”—say a virgin: the virgin is then abandoned to her fate, and rescued by the conquering hero, and we are hot on the trail of Perseus and St. George. ”

“ They hated death, and in the presence of it protested their belief that somehow, somewhere, the dead continued to live, needing all the gifts his family could bring—a primitive doctrine of immortality. ”

“ In exactly the same way the gods of old Egypt became inextricably mixed. The tale told of one is easily applied to another, and God the doer easily becomes God the done-by; while the symbol of the god will equally well pass for (say) the enemy of the god, or the weapon with which he fought. Like the old lady in the story, they “do not distinguish.” (Compare how our Arthur and the Saxon Cedric, whom he fought at Langport, were both identified with the dragon.) ”

“ Mankind as a whole has had a hand in these imaginings for half-a-hundred centuries; our certain knowledge of [74] our surroundings is to this day infinitesimal; and “it is part of our human make-up to bridge the gaps in our experience with rumours, with conjectures, and with soothing traditions.” ”

“ And yet, in England at any rate, the dragon is not dead.
What are the chief characteristics of modern Englishmen—not the ornaments of society, nor artists, nor any other lovely ones, but these poor plain people who earn their daily bread, with or without the sweat of their brows, because they must; who make up nine-tenths of our population; who control our political destinies ”

“ Scheuchzer, the learned Botanist who toured the Alps in the first ten years of the eighteenth century, frankly adopted the compromise implicit in Aldrovandus—always to believe half of what he was told; but he thought [55] the dragon-stone in the museum at Lucerne entirely convincing; for (says he) a dishonest man would not have invented so simple a story as its falling from the sky—but rather some fabulous tale about its coming from the farthest Indies ”

“ I have but shown a few examples of what incredible things men believed almost down to our own day, and still believe. One of the chief functions of History is to show what wrongs good men have tolerated, and what absurdities wise men have believed, as a warning to [12] their later sons to look warily about them for the like. ”

“ For countless years the simple islanders had displayed it for the glory of God and without thought of gain, and it would perhaps be uncharitable to connect its disappearance with the recent development of transatlantic transport, or with the discoveries of modern science, which have shown that the skeleton of the dun-cow at Warwick is simply that of a whale. And, finally, they will show you to this day in Rhodes the cave where the dragon lived.”
The story of the Dragon of Bologna is tame by comparison. ”

“ Eating its heart confers peculiar qualities, notably fertility and the gift of tongues, and the draconite or precious stone which lies embedded in its forehead has incredible properties in the way of medicine and magic, but only if you catch the animal alive and remove the stone without otherwise injuring it. ”

“ Comfortable folk too commonly ignore the prosaic foundations of imperishable things. Many of the more delightful virtues are impossible vices to men struggling for the bare necessities of life (as you may see [9] any day if you try to practise ordinary courtesy in mounting a ’bus) , and it is complacent cant to propose such virtues to them. ”

“ To this day the neglect of the poorest grave is regarded as a more than callous crime, and there are not wanting those amongst us who shudder at the desecration of the age-old tombs of Egyptian kings. ”

“ It must be admitted that most of the facts recorded are obviously untrue and that most of the theories are unsupported by evidence and highly improbable; though the facts are guaranteed by the highest authorities of the most ancient religions and the theories upheld by the most eminent modern scientists. ”

“ It will be objected that the dragon is already dead, as has been shown in the course of the study. It is true that the living, breathing, devouring dragon has passed away with Perseus and the gods of old ”

“ The consequence is that the men have no character and the women no [6] charm, and we rule over a quarter of the world with complete satisfaction to ourselves. These three together make up our modern dragon. Respectability is the deadliest, for it is a plausible substitute for better things ”

“ However that may be, the dragon has been identified with nearly all the gods and devils of nearly all the religions of nearly all mankind—primitive man does not distinguish between the two, both being primarily non-moral beings of enormous and terrifying power—and Christian evidence is undivided in associating the dragon with the powers of darkness. ”