Although the snake and the dragon were kin and super-natural snakes were also associated with Jems and gold, with fire and deep waters, the mythology of the West, as it comes down to us, assigns to the big winged dragon a male-valence and ferocity that were never associated with the snake in the Teutonic, Celtic or Slavic mind. The ake loves children, ith motherhood and no Votive offering but milk, Teoften has the status of a protecting: household deity oven where its close affinity with the greater "worm" is not forgotten. But in its emblem matic use, the snake discharges the same functions a8 the ferocious dragon, It appears, for instance, as often as the winged dragon on swords and helmets and to the same purpose—to impart greater destruc: tive fervour to the wearer or bea and to overawe his enemies.
The business of dragon killing, without which no hero's record was. complete In our earliest written literature, may have come to be no more than x literary convention, but. the fact that the hero almost me variably rescues some lovely maiden who is about to be wedded, sacrificed, to the dragon, gives an unmistakeable clue to its origin. There must have been a time when our more remote savage forefathers differed girls as anerifices or brides" to the dragon-spirits living in deep waters, just as the Egyptic ans annually married a girl to the spirit of the Nile by throwing her to the crocodiles. This in ited would give the dragon a reputation for implacable cruelty which would not live down for centuries. after a people had discarded the practice as barbarous. Once the make or dragon god of the sea, rivers or subterranean waters, ceases to be worshipped as a divinity he survives as a hostile force only and the hero who kills him invariably acquires not only fame but the maiden in distress, the guarded treasure—which perhaps grew out of a practice of making valuable offerings,—and the opportunity to harden his leathern jacket in dragon's blood and make it sword proof or to sprinkle himself with it and become invulnerable, A Reasonable Creature in China Now the Chinese dragon is no less awesome and can be just as terible, but is a much more rcasonable being. When duly propitiated and humoured he becomes the friend man, like his little cousin the snake Who substitutes for him so often in China. He has come to have so many conflicting attributes that it is hard to describe just what dragon ought to be. There are cold dragons and hot dragons, dree gons under the hills, dragons wells, springs wid rivers, and dragons'in the clouds. Some are on mountain tops and freeze travellers to death. I know of one such crea ture in Kunsu that hus been fre: quently seen gliding over the ridges in winter. There are others that set fields of standing grain on fire as they traverse them unless they benevolently retain their heat. 1 now of one that traversed a house without scorching a thing and then forgot himself when he got outside and melted all the iron implements that.lay about into shapeless. masses of metal. dragon's blood China has magic properties, as in the ancient Occident, and his bones are a sovereign remedy for many things. Symbolically he stands for awesome majesty and is therefore the emblem of imperialism.
Lizard or Snake?
The conventional dragon of mod-om art is not so much a winged snake as a splendid lizard and in current folk-lore lizards are runs away drayens whom the Dragon
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.