Thunderous Wings: Dragons of Creativity and Chaos
Rev. Lilli Nye
February 18, 2007
As I was looking for music and readings for this service, I noticed something that had first occurred to me a few weeks ago as I was working on a previous service, also on the subject of power. I had searched our “Singing the Living Tradition” hymnal from cover to cover—at least twice—reviewing all the hymns and the readings. I found almost nothing that celebrates power, our own interior power, energy, and primal strength.
There are worshipful references to Divine Power, and refined poetic praises for the glory and wisdom of nature. But even those pieces seemed intellectualized, couched in abstraction and stilted language. I did find among the hymns and readings a certain pride in the human faculties of reason, cultural creativity, moral conviction, and courage. I found confessions of guilt at our abuse of power. But I found no real embrace of power as a pure resource in itself.
I have in my own library many collections of poetry and meditations for worship. Some have been written by Unitarian Universalists; some are compiled from a wide variety of cultural sources but are intended for liberal worship. Many of them I acquired from the UUA bookstore. Again, these collections affirm the qualities of compassion, justice, moral awareness, appreciation of beauty, a sense of awe and wonder at the mystery of life—all good things. But, still, I could find almost nothing that celebrated raw power, elemental power, or the animal vitality within us. Perhaps only the poet Mary Oliver, with her deep observations of the natural world and its citizens, delights in the fierce, amoral vitality of creatures.
My somewhat fruitless search suggested to me that we Unitarian Universalists, maybe liberals in general, are quite ambivalent about power. Perhaps, all too aware of its history of abuse, we have disowned it. Perhaps we are overly civilized, something that Carl Jung and his school of psychology thought was a psychic disaster for us industrialized, domesticated citizens.
As we gaze at these powerful images of dragons,* ancient, contemporary, and from many cultures around the globe, what do they exude but incredible intensity. Whether destructive or benevolent, they can be seen as embodiments of our own vitality—often our disowned vitality—as we ourselves are also beings of nature, ambivalent though we might be about that.
Taken as a collection, these images also tell a story about the human struggle to understand our relationship with elemental power. Are we to worship it, as the ancient Chinese did, or destroy it? Are we to control it, harness it, tame it, befriend it? Is it evil enemy, totem power, or ally? Are we at the mercy of the immense natural forces and cosmic energies symbolized by the dragon? Or does the dragon live inside us as our own creative and destructive potential? If we conquer the dragon, does that mean we have stamped out its qualities altogether, as when the dragon is portrayed as malevolent, immoral force that must be quashed? Or does the hero battle and defeat the dragon so as to take charge of all his or her powers—in other words, is it a story of self-mastery and integration?
The beautiful thing about mythic images is that they allow all of these possibilities to exist at the same time. They are non-linear. They are mirrors showing us our own conflicts, fears, and paradoxes.
There is a moment in the third Alien movie, staring Sigourney Weaver as the brave but besieged astronaut Ripley (one of the few icons we can find anywhere of a female dragon slayer). The film takes place in a prison colony on a desolate planet. Ripley and the inmates have discovered that her nemesis, the dark, slimy, multi-jawed Alien, has followed her there and is eating its way through the residents. One of the inmates is speculating about where the monster might be hiding out, and Ripley says bitterly, “I know where it is. It’s down in the basement.” Her companion says, “But this place doesn’t have a basement.” And Ripley replies, “It’s a metaphor!”
The character of the Alien in these films represents the most malign version of the dragon, transported into contemporary science fiction. Although the beast is terrifying to the audience, what is it but pure, primitive instinct? Like a reptile or an insect, it knows nothing except that it must eat, reproduce, and protect itself—and, in the case of the Alien Queen, protect her young.
This resonates with the passage I read from the Jungian Aniela Jaffe, who describes how the instinctual self surfaces in our nightmares as an animal pursuing us. In archetypal terms, Ripley’s monster in the basement can be understood as the most primitive dimension of the human self, which has been utterly split off from consciousness and disowned. Relegated to the darkest shadows, it constantly threatens to emerge and destroy our safe and domesticated existence.
Unlike any other creature on the earth, as far as we know, humankind is the only species that lost its unselfconscious union with the natural world. As we gradually became what we are, we began to experience ourselves as separate, at first only subtly, but then by greater and greater degrees. We became self-reflective. We reflected upon our existence, rather than simply being in it, the way other creatures are. And so, too, we began to struggle, through the vehicle of story, to make sense of our relationship with the natural world, a world from which we were increasingly estranged.
The many different dragon myths from around the globe mirror how humans have experienced that struggle in particular times, cultures, and environments. For example, one of the earliest stories if that of the battle between Tiamat and Marduk:
According to ancient Babylonian mythology, Tiamat was one of the two original beings of the cosmos. She was the female principle, the spirit of saltwater and of primeval chaos, depicted as a monstrous, scaly, serpentine being with legs and horns. Her consort was Apsu, the male principle, the spirit of freshwater and the void in which the world floated.
Apsu and Tiamat's union produced a horde of lesser monsters, among them the first gods of the primordial universe. They rebelled against their parents, and Apsu was killed. After his murder, Tiamat turned against her children, determined to avenge his death. She spawned a new brood of offspring to support her, an army that included giant snakes with poisonous blood, dragons so formidable that whoever looked upon them would collapse in horror, horned serpents, demons, rabid dogs, scorpion-men, fish-men, and centaurs—a cornucopia representing all that was terrifying to human beings.
The leader of her foes was the god Marduk, who armed himself with lightning, bow and arrow, mace, and fishing net. He pursued Tiamat in his storm-chariot, escorted by the four winds. After a great battle, Marduk slayed Tiamat and ensnared all her helpers in his net. In a final, gruesome act of domination, Marduk sliced Tiamat in half as if he were gutting a fish. He hoisted one half of her upward to create the celestial roof, and with her waters he made the seas, binding them with the land so that they could not escape.
This myth of Marduk’s ascendancy over Tiamat was not born all at once. As the “patron saint” of Babylonia, Marduk may have initially been only a minor god. But as the city of Babylonia gradually rose to be the dominant political and economic power in the Euphrates Valley, so too Marduk rose in the collective imagination to become the lord of the Babylonian pantheon, able to conquer the forces of chaos embodied in Tiamat and her army.
Proponents of the feminist theory that earliest cultures were matriarchal and worshiped the mother goddess point to the demise of Tiamat and other such myths as marking the rise of patriarchal power. The supplanting of the dark, watery mother with the sky god is an oft-repeated mythic theme, showing up as cultures grew more urban and civilizations flourished. What does this suggest about humanity’s gradual alienation from and fear of our origins in nature?
The story of the hero vanquishing a threatening power in the form of a dragon repeats again and again throughout cultural history. As you can see, there are many images in the slide collection that depict this. I actually took several of them out because I found it disturbing to see the dragon slaughtered over and over again. I can remember even as a child siding with the dragon in its battle with St. George.
The dragon-as-evil-foe arose with real ferocity in the Middle Ages, in such
legends as St. George and the dragon. This was a time in which the ancient nature-based
pagan religions of Europe were being aggressively stamped out with the spread
of Christianity.
We can look back now with our feminist sophistication and see it as a tragedy.
We see the obvious demonization of the feminine principle and of the worship
of nature, those beliefs that were so threatening to the ascendancy of the church.
At the time, however, it was a battle for souls. Right or wrong, the missionary
powers believed that salvation was at stake, and that the old ways were indeed
dark, dangerous and forsaken. The story of the knight, his armor emblazoned
with a cross, slaying the malevolent dragon provides a mirror of that struggle
seen from the perspective of the victor.
Maybe the contemporary emergence of stories of good dragons, sympathetic dragons, such as the very popular Eragon trilogy, expresses our growing desire to reintegrate what had been so harshly rejected in at an earlier stage of our culture.
Unlike the western dragon, the Chinese dragon has never been vilified. Although Chinese dragons could surely be dangerous because of their immense, wild, elemental energy, they also symbolize fecundity, creativity, blessing, and divine protection. They reside in the seas, heavens, and mountains, embodying the spiritual power of those places. Rather than fire, they breathe life-giving mists, bestowing the gifts of water, rain, and weather for the benefit of humankind.
Dragons of Slavic mythology demonstrate mixed attitudes towards humans—or more honestly, the stories express the mixed feelings of humans toward the dragon! The female dragon is an enemy of humankind—no surprise there, unfortunately. She is destructive and wicked. The male dragon is seen as a protector.
Interestingly, in Bulgarian legend, the male dragon, known as a Zmey, will often fall in love with a human maiden, and may grow pale and lovesick, pining away in unrequited longing. As you can imagine, a dragon’s love can be fatal, so one must repulse the dragon’s advances with talismans and herbal potions. But the Zmey is seductive. Especially with his exquisite playing on the kaval, the wooden flute, he may be able to woo his beloved.
This legend of dragon and human love has found its way into Bulgarian wedding rituals. I’d like to close with this Bulgarian wedding song, a ballad that would be sung while decorating the wedding tree—traditionally a fir tree:
Oh beautiful Ela, young maiden,
A dragon is coming, Ela, circling,
And to Ela he softly says:
"Grow, Ela, grow tall,
So that we two can become lovers."
And to him Ela softly replies:
"Oh, you forest dragon,
I cannot smile and look into your eyes,
For how can we become lovers?
From your eyes strong sparks fly,
From your mouth a fierce flame leaps,
The horse you ride is like a mountain,
The clothes you wear burn like a fire."
And the dragon to her softly says:
"Grow, Ela, grow tall,
So that you and I can become lovers.
Don't be frightened, Ela, of me."
This playful song gives me hope that we might make peace with our dragons. I hope that these stories and images have awakened your imaginations, seeded your dreams, and stirred up your sense of your own elemental energies. Let us claim them for the life-giving powers that they are.
* The service included a slide show of over 70 images of dragons drawn from
many different cultures, mythologies, and times, ranging from ancient Babylonian
carvings to Chinese scrolls to Renaissance paintings to contemporary cinema.