CHAPTER VI
BIRD AND SERPENT MYTHS
Culture Complexes in Dragon-lore—Polynesian Dragon Beliefs—Oceanic and African Fish-gods—Reptile Deities where no Reptiles are found—Chinese Dragons and Indian Nagas—Dragon-links between India, Tibet, China, and Japan—Birds and Snakes—Distribution of Egyptian “Winged Disk”—Horus and the “Secretary Bird”—Indian Mungoose supplants “Secretary Bird”—Mungoose form of God of Riches and Death—Bird and Serpent combined in Dragon—Babylonian Dragon was a combination of Eagle, Serpent, and Lion—Tree Forms of the Chinese Dragon, the Polynesian Mo-o, and the Indian Nagas—The Dragon, the Salmon, the Tree, and the “Thunder-bird”.
The intensive study of a country’s beliefs and ideas, as revealed in its myths and legends, is greatly facilitated by the adoption of the comparative method. It may not always be found possible to identify areas in which certain beliefs had origin, but when we detect, as we do in China, myths similar to those found in other lands, and especially highly complex myths, that had origin in one particular country and received additions in another, the imported elements may be sifted out from a local religious system without much difficulty.
The Chinese dragon has distinct and outstanding Chinese characteristics, but it is obviously not entirely a Chinese creation. Attached to the “composite wonder beast” are complex ideas that have a history outside China, as well as those ideas that reflect Chinese natural phenomena and Chinese experiences and habits of life and thought. The fused beliefs, as symbolized by the dragon, have passed through a prolonged process of local development, but those that were imported have not, it is found, been entirely divested of their distinctive characteristics, and remain preserved as flies are in amber.
Interesting and important evidence that throws light on the history of the Chinese dragon is found in Polynesia, India, and Babylonia, and even in Egypt and Europe. The cultural influence of Babylonia, which radiated over a wide area for a score of centuries or longer, is traceable in India, and, as is well known, Buddhist India exercised a strong cultural influence on China. But, as will be shown, Babylonian influence reached the Shensi province of China long before the Aryans entered India. Buddhist ideas regarding the pearl-protecting dragon-god of water and fire were evidently superimposed in China upon earlier Babylonian ideas regarding the water-dragon, which had no particular connection with pearls. At any rate, there is no mention of pearls in the Babylonian myth.
When it is found that many of the ideas connected with the Chinese dragon were prevalent in Polynesia, what conclusion is to be drawn? There is no evidence that Chinese culture was an active force in New Zealand or Hawaii, for instance. It cannot have been from China that the Polynesians derived their dragon, or their beliefs connected with the serpent, a reptile unknown to the islanders at first hand. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese and the Polynesians were influenced at an early period by intruders from other lands. The Polynesian intruders must necessarily have been sea-traders. Of course, the Polynesians may themselves have imported their dragon beliefs from their homeland. That homeland, however, was certainly not China.
The Polynesian Mo-o or Mo-ko (dragon) had, as was shown in the last chapter, a connection with pearls. “On Maui”, writes W. D. Westervelt,1 “the greatest dragon of the island was Kiha-wahine. The natives had the saying, ‘Kiha has mana, or miraculous power, like Mo-o-inanea’. She lived in a large, deep pool on the edge of the village Lahaina, and was worshipped by the royal family of Maui as their special guardian.” Royal families were invariably the descendants of intruding conquerors. It is of special interest, therefore, to find the Polynesian dragon-god connected with a military aristocracy.
The Rev. George Brown, missionary and explorer, refers to similar dragon beliefs among the people of New Britain. He tells of a spring connected with the woman (goddess) who caused the deluge. The natives “say that an immense fish lives in it, which will come out when they call it”. The belief obtains among the Melanesians “that the creator of all things was a woman”. She “made all lands” and “the natives prayed” to her “when an eclipse of the sun or the moon took place”.2 The king of Samoan gods was a dragon. “This god”, Brown tells, “had the body of a man to the breast only, and the body of an eel (muræna) below. This eel’s body lies down in the ocean, and from the chest to the head lies down in the house. This is the god to whom all things are reported. The inferior gods are his attendants.”3
Gods half human and half reptile, or half human and half fish, are found in various countries. In the British Museum are bronze reliefs of the King of Benin (as the representative of his chief deity) half shark and half man. The kings of Dahomey were depicted as sharks with bodies covered with scales; their statues are in the Trocadero, Paris.4
That the Polynesian reptile deities were imported there can be no doubt. As early as 1825 Mr. Bloxam, the English naval chaplain, drew this necessary conclusion. In his The Voyage of the Blonde he says: “At the bottom of the Parre (pali) there are two large stones, on which even now offerings of fruit and flowers are laid to propitiate the Aku-wahines, or goddesses, who are supposed to have the power of granting a safe passage”. Referring to the female mo-o, or reptile deities, Mr. Bloxam says it was difficult for him to get an explanation of their name, the Hawaiians having “nothing of the shape of serpents or large reptiles in their islands”.5
But the closest analogy to the Chinese dragon is found in India. The Nagas (serpent-gods), which were taken over by the Buddhists, and the Chinese dragons have much in common. “Cobras in their ordinary shape,” writes Dr. Rhys Davids of the Nagas, “they lived beneath the waters like mermen and mermaids, in great luxury and wealth, more especially of gems.” Sometimes the tree-spirits (dryads) are called Nagas. “They could at will, and often did, adopt the human form; and though terrible if angered, were kindly and mild by nature.”6 Kerns says “that the Nagas are water-spirits represented, as a rule, in human shapes, with a crown of serpents on their heads”, and also as “snake-like beings resembling clouds”.7 They are “demi-gods”. Like the Chinese dragons, the Nagas are guardians of the four quarters of the universe. There are withal Nagas in the sea who control winds and tides, and one of the Naga kings is Sagara, who is a Neptune in Japan. The Nagas are also “Lords of the Earth”, and send drought and disease when offended or neglected. Ea, the sea-god of the early Babylonians, was known also as Enki, “The Lord of the Earth”.
In Buddhist art the Naga is shown in three forms: (1) as a human being with a snake on or poised over the head, reminding one of the Egyptian kings or queens who wear the uræus symbol on their foreheads; (2) as half human and half snake (the “mermaid form”); and (3) as ordinary snakes. The first form is found not only in India, but in Tibet, China, and Japan. Human-shaped Nagas are depicted worshipping Buddha, as they stand in water.
In Tibet, the Naga is shown with the upper part of the body in human shape and the lower in snake shape; there are horns on the head and wings spreading out from the shoulders. The same form is found in Japan.
This Tibetan link between the Indian Naga and the Chinese Dragon is important. The bird-god has been blended with the snake-god. In India the bird-gods (Garudas) are enemies of the Nagas (snakes), and Garudas in “eagle shape” are found depicted in low relief, carrying off Nagas in snake shape. This eternal conflict between eagle-like birds and serpents is one of the features of Babylonian mythology.
The story of Zu, the Babylonian Eagle-god, is found on tablets that were stored in the library of the great Assyrian King, Ashur-bani-pal. Zu, it is related, stole from the gods the “tablets of destiny”, and was pursued and caught by Shamash, the sun-god. In one version of the myth Zu, the eagle, is punished by the serpent, which conceals itself in the body of an ox. When the eagle comes to feast on the flesh it is seized by the serpent and slain.
In Polynesia the eternal conflict between bird-god and serpent-god is illustrated in wood-carvings. The Egyptian winged disk, as adopted by the islanders, shows the bird in the centre with a struggling snake in its beak. The Central American peoples had likewise this bird-and-serpent myth. Indeed, it figures prominently in their mythologies. In Mexico the winged disk was placed, as in Egypt, above the entrances to the temples.
The bird-and-serpent myth is to be found even in the Iliad. When Hector set forth with his heroes to break through the wall of the Achæan camp, an eagle appeared in the air, bearing in its talons “a blood-red monstrous snake, alive and struggling still”. The writhing snake manages to sting the eagle, which immediately drops it.8
In ancient Egyptian myths the bird was the Horus hawk and the serpent was Set. Horus assumed, in his great battle against the snake, crocodile, and other enemies of Ra, the winged disk form—the winged sun, protected by the two snake-goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt.
This strange combination of deities in the “winged disk” symbol was as distinctively an Egyptian cultural and political complex as the Union Jack is distinctively a British complex. As the Union Jack has been carried to many a distant land, so was the Egyptian winged disk, “the flag” of Egyptian culture. In those areas in which the winged disk is found, are found also traces of Egyptian ideas which, of course, were not necessarily introduced by the Egyptians themselves.
How did this myth of the struggle between bird and serpent have origin? The only country in the world in which a great bird hunts serpents is Africa. The bird in question is the famous secretary bird (Serpentarius secretarius), which is nowadays domesticated by South African farmers so as to keep down snakes. It is found in East and West Africa. “In general appearance it looks like a modified eagle mounted on stilts.”9 The bird attacks a snake with wings outspread, and flaps them in front of its body to prevent itself from being bitten during the conflict. Early Egyptian seafarers were no doubt greatly impressed when, “in the land of Punt”, they saw these strange birds, with heads like eagles or hawks, standing over snakes they had clutched in their talons, and then flying away with them dangling from their beaks. The mariners’ stories about the snake-devouring bird appear to have crept into the mythology of Egypt, with the result that the Horus hawk became the hunter of Set in his “hissing serpent” form. Above the hole in the ground into which the Set serpent fled for concealment and safety was set a pole surmounted by the head of the Horus hawk. As Dr. Budge puts it: “Horus, the son of Isis, stood upon him (Set) in the form of a pole or staff, on the top of which was the head of a hawk”.10 But, one may urge, it could not have been until after Egyptian vessels visited the coasts haunted by the secretary bird that the bird and serpent variation of the Horus-Set myth was formulated in the land of Egypt, whence, apparently, it was distributed far and wide. Horus was not necessarily an enemy of serpents, seeing that there are two in his disk.
In Tibet, as has been stated, the bird and serpent were combined, and the “composite beast” was given a human head with horns. The horned and winged dragon of China is thus, in part, a combination of the original secretary bird and the snake.
The later blending process was, no doubt, due to Buddhistic influence. Both Nagas (snakes) and Garudas (eagles or secretary birds) were included in northern India among the gods and demons who worshipped Buddha. The Nagas understood the language of birds. They gave charms to human beings so that they might share this knowledge. In European and Arabian stories folk-heroes acquire the language of birds, or of all animals, after eating the hearts of dragons. A Naga king causes an Indian king to understand what animals say.11
“The jewel that grants all desires” is possessed by the Indian Nagas, as it is by Chinese and Japanese dragons. In the Mahábhárata, the Pandava hero Arjuna is, after being slain in combat, restored to life by his Naga wife, who had obtained this magic jewel from the Naga king.12
The Nagas are guardians of pearls, and the females have many pearl necklaces.
Note may here be taken of interesting Indian evidence that throws light on the process of transferring to a local animal complex ideas associated with another animal figuring in an imported myth. The great enemy of African snakes is, as has been said, the secretary bird; the Indian enemy is the mungoose. In early Buddhist art the mungoose, spitting jewels, is placed in the right hand of Kubera, god of wealth, who stands on the back of a Yaksha (a bird demon). By devouring snakes (Nagas) the mungoose (according to the myth) “appropriates their jewels, and has hence developed into the attribute of Kubera”.13 Here the pearl-guarding shark, having become a jewel-guarding dragon-snake, is substituted by the jewel-spitting mungoose which has “devoured” its attributes.
The god Kubera has a heaven of its own, and is a form of Yama, god of death. In his form as Dharma, god of justice, Yama figures in the Mahábhárata14 as a “blue-eyed mungoose with one side of his body changed into gold”, his voice being “loud and deep as thunder”. Here Yama links with Indra, god of thunder, who, having a heaven of his own, is also a god of death. Egypt had its “blue-eyed Horus”.15 The god Horus was the living form of Osiris. The living Pharaoh was a Horus, and the dead Pharaoh an Osiris, as Dr. Gardiner reminds us.
The combination of bird and serpent is found in Persia as well as in Tibet. On an archaic cylinder seal from the ancient Elamite capital of Susa, the dragon is a lion with an eagle’s head and wings; the forelegs are those of the eagle, and the hind legs those of a lion.
A form of the god Tammuz, namely the god Nin-Girsu (“Lord of Girsu”) of the Sumerian city of Lagash (Girsu appears to have been a suburb), was a lion-headed eagle.16 The god Ea had a dragon form.17 The dragon of the Ishtar gate of Babylon is a combination of eagle, serpent, and lion, and is horned.
There can remain little doubt that the Chinese dragon has an interesting history, not only in China but outside that country. It cannot be held to have independent origin. At a remote period dragon beliefs reached China, India, and Polynesia, and even America.18
In each separated area the dragon took on a local colouring, but the fundamental beliefs connected with it remained the same. It was closely connected with water (the “water of life”), and also with trees (the “trees of life”). Thus we find that in China a dragon might assume “the shape of a tree growing under water”;19 a boat once collided with drift-wood which was found to be a dragon. Crocodiles are sometimes mistaken for logs of wood.
In Hawaii two noted dragons (mo-o) lived in a river. “They were called ‘the moving boards’ which made a bridge across the river.”20
The Indian Nagas were not only water deities but tree spirits, as Dr. Rhys Davids has emphasized.21
Behind dragon worship is a complex of beliefs connected with what is usually called “tree and well worship”. In Gaelic stories, the sacred tree is guarded by the “beast” in the sacred well, and a form of the “beast” (dragon) is the salmon; in the tree is the “thunder bird”. Dragon, tree, and bird are connected with the god of thunder who sends rain.
When Buddhism reached China, imported Naga beliefs were superimposed on earlier Chinese beliefs connected with the dragon-god who controlled the rain-supply, as Osiris in Egypt controlled the Nile, and the Babylonian Ea the Euphrates.
In the next chapter various beliefs connected with the dragon are brought out in representative legends.