The Oldest Dragon Myths and its Origins

Today we're going to find out when, where, and why the dragon and its myths started. And considering dragons seem to come in all different shapes and sizes, we will also discover what the first dragons actually looked like, something we call their proto-narrative, and whilst we're doing all this I'll tell you a few myths about dragons that will tie this whole journey together. I'm John White, a specialist in Indo-European mythology, and if this sounds interesting then grab yourself a cup of tea, and welcome to Crecganford. Dragons appear in many myths and legends, although their purposes can often seem different, as can their attributes, with some kidnapping princesses, some causing floods, some are large, red, and scary, some small, green, and harmless. I mean, St George here looks like he's slaying nothing more than a green pig with wings. And yes, some fly, and some slither, some breathe fire, some live underground, some live in the sky, and others in the sea. And so whilst we can easily spot a dragon, can we actually define a dragon, considering they appear in so many different forms and for different purposes? Now your initial perception may combine imagery that myths from all over the world conjure up, from the Indo-European Ingui, to the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, to the Australian Rainbow Serpent, and the South African Rain Snake. These myths are so widely spread it almost certainly means the dragon motif itself is very old, existing long before written evidence. And so we should also ask ourselves, as we try to find the earliest myths, did such a widespread belief leave archaeological traces, and if so, how can such a well known motif as a dragon appear in so many cultures so consistently? And to help answer these questions, and explain how we came to the answers, let me take a few minutes to explain how this research was carried out. And this video uses the work from a paper by Julian de Hoy called Le Motif de Dragon sur les Paleolithiques, Mythologies et Archéologies, and this cites many papers, and I'll refer to all the important ones I've used in this video in the video's description below. But before I carry on, let me tell you a Chinese myth about dragons, as this will allow you to start seeing similarities in mythology from all over the world. There was a time when the earth had no rivers or lakes, just a sea to the east in which lived four dragons, the Long Dragon, the Yellow Dragon, the Black Dragon, and the Pearl Dragon. One day the dragons were playing, flying through the clouds, and they noticed people on the ground were praying, asking for rain so their crops would grow and they could feed their children. The dragons could not make it rain, but they knew that the Jade Emperor had the power to do so, and rushed off to see him in the heavenly palace. But the Jade Emperor seemed annoyed that the dragons had rushed into his palace, and asked if they were behaving themselves. The Long Dragon said they were, and asked the Emperor if he could make it rain to help people with their crops. And the Emperor said he would make it rain, the next day, and so the dragons left. Ten days passed and no rain came, people were eating bark from the trees and clay from the ground to try to stop their hunger. The dragons were sad knowing the Jade Emperor did not care about the well-being of the people, and so they made a plan to scoop water from the eastern sea in their mouths, and spray it over the lands as though it was like rain. And so they did this, and the people celebrated, and the crops started to grow. But the Jade Emperor was angry with the dragons for doing this, and so ordered the Mountain God to imprison each of the dragons under a mountain as punishment. And so the Mountain God made four mountains land on top of each of the four dragons and pushed them into the ground. The dragons were imprisoned forever, but they never regretted their actions. And as they had so much water in their mouths when they were trapped, they slowly let that water out, and created the four main rivers of China, the Heilongjiang in the far north, the Hengnejia in central China, the Yangtze in the south, and the Zhejiang in the very south. So here we have a story from China, where dragons who are flying in the clouds give water to a dry world to make sure people get food, before becoming associated with major rivers of the region. But more about the relevancy of this later, as we need to understand the research. And so what makes researching dragons difficult? Well firstly, there aren't any real dragons, but also there is a lack of good literature on the distribution of the dragon myth. And so to overcome this challenge, dragon myths from 23 different regions of the world were looked at, and I will reference all the sources in this video's description. And from these 23 regions and all these sources, 69 questions were asked of each one about the dragon in each myth, such as what were its physical attributes, its abilities, its association with folklore and motifs. So how can analysing these myths help us you may ask? Well, it is known that myths do not change rapidly within a natural evolution of culture, unless a culture is invaded and a large replacement takes place, then the myth of the original culture would probably change, although the myth of the dominant culture would not. And so understanding this, that myths usually evolve very slowly, allows us to recognise similar but complex narratives, even if dispersed during humanity's major migrations across the world many tens of thousands of years ago. In effect, the underlying pattern of myth often stays the same across cultures, and we've seen this in examples of a previous video I've made on the creation myth, where I show an initial motif of humans coming from the underworld, evolving to the earth diver, and then evolving to the bird scout. And so we can show how motifs evolve with the myth, even if the myth is over 10,000 years old. And there are other examples too that I have shown, including the flood myth, and the stories of the cosmic hunt, and the ferryman of the dead, and there are many more that I will talk about in the future. This recognition of slow change within mythology allows a transformation that happens within myths to be compared to genetic evolution. And the best way to explain this is that myths transform over time, even if the teller of the myth believes they are accurately repeating it. And so we see two versions of the myth gradually diverge in time, evolving from its original source and so creating in effect two separate myths from this accumulation of mutations. And these mutations are often caused by an adaptation to the environment and cultures where they are being told. And this is recognised by mythologists as being analogous to nature, where most similarities between two species are then due to a common ancestor, with the more more recent the common ancestor. And it is this understanding, this similarity, that allows us to use statistical analysis that gives us the probability of myth dispersal. And this is exactly why we leverage the genetic and statistical tooling called phylogenetics to help us trace myths. And the result of this analysis for this dragon problem was over 40 million trees worth of statistical data. And these statistics produced a consistent answer, the same result kept appearing. And this result said that there was an origin to the dragon myth from a single place and a single point in time. But just because we now have the confidence that the myth has a source and know the source of that myth, it doesn't mean we've entirely ruled out that the image of a dragon could indeed, well, it could have emerged spontaneously as part of the human psyche, a Jungian view of things, so to speak. And so to counter this, all the myth data was compared without consideration of where the myths came from and when. And the result was still a high number of similar criteria found amongst all these myths, which really reduces the probability that the myth is an archetype. In fact, the result was actually better than you'd see in a majority of phylogenetic results on biological data. And part of the reason we see this is due to a presence of a phylogenetic signal alongside the myth dispersal, in effect showing that the myths migration aligns to human migrations. In effect, we can continue to be confident that the myth has a single source and dispersed in alignment with human migrations all over the world. And so before I tell you where and when this source was, and how this myth spread, let me tell you a summary of the story of Vritra, the Vedic dragon from India. Vritra was known to be the possessor of water, and the land needed rain. And so Indra, the war god, a storm god, and the lord of winds fought Vritra in the clouds. And Indra used thunder and lightning and wind to defeat Vritra. And when this battle was fought, you would have heard thunder, and you would have seen lightning, and you would have felt the winds become stronger. And if Indra defeats Vritra, it unleashes the heavy rains. And these rains are needed for crops to grow and so for people to eat. Now this story can be found in the Rig Veda, albeit in a more cosmogonic form. But it does seem to align to the Chinese myth where dragons watered the land. But there's an important difference. And that is that dragons who were good in the Chinese myth are now represented by a bad dragon in the Indic cultures myth. And with this understanding that the Chinese and Indian myths may be aligned, it is time to talk through the results of the research. The dragon narrative is at least 75,000 years old, and from South Africa, where it was conceived as a Shamira, whose body was part snake, and which was linked to water. And we see in the region, the rain snake myth, from an incredibly old mythological stratum, and our oldest example of a dragon myth. And it is this myth that would have come out of Africa around 65,000 years ago, with human migrations, and it travels to the far east via the Near East. The dragon of these myths coming out of Africa was then described as a giant snake possessing the head of another species. And it had ears, horns, human hair in certain points of the body, and scales, and also has the ability to fly, and would have been regarded as a storm god or a creature associated with the storm, and so can cause flooding. This dragon myth found its way into the region of China around 60,000 years ago. And although the oldest archaeological evidence we have of Chinese dragons is limited to that of the Neolithic tomb of Guoxi Xipo in China, dating back just 6,000 years. And after this we see the myth travel back to the Near East, as well as up to Siberia. And at this point the myth is seeing some mutation, the dragon loses some of its features, becomes more snake like, and appears to be more aggressive, the bad party myths. And this is around 50,000 years ago. And then the Ice Age glacial maximum happens, forcing human migrations and allowing the Siberian mythology to spread into North America, as well as the myth is starting to head south, into Oceania from China. But the world warms, and sea levels rise before the myth can make it to Australia. But the Younger Dryas event happens around 12,000 years ago. And this again lowers sea levels, allowing the myth to finish travelling into Australia, suggesting that stories such as the Australian Rainbow Serpent are closer to 10,000 years old, as opposed to the 30 to 50,000 years old some people suggest. And we also see at the same time as the myth enters Australia, it crosses the Pacific Ocean, reaching Mesoamerica by about 10,000 years ago. Whilst the African and Eurasian myths are seeing dispersals continue across their regions. And so at 10,000 years ago, the myth is in Australia, populating South America through to Central America, and is across the rest of the world. And around this time, we see the dragon myth all over Europe too. But remember, this is before the Indo-European expansion. And in this form, the dragon is more like a giant snake possessing one or more heads, it has scales, but it retains a human side to allowing it to have human habits, the ability to speak, and sometimes a human head. It lives in or near water and may move away from it when necessary. And it also lives in caves or underground, and is aggressive and dangerous. This dragon also requires human sacrifice. But this dragon is also prone to be deceived by trickery, or it can be killed by cutting off its head or heads. But then at 8,000 years ago, we see the Proto-Indo-European language develop along with its associated cultures. And within a few thousand years, much of Europe, India, parts of Western Asia, and back into North Africa, especially around the Nile, all were influenced by this new version of the story. And in this version, cattle were being stolen. But we do see some exceptions in these regions, such as the Basque region of France and Spain, and the Arabian side of the Mesopotamian valley. And as time passed, the European version of this dragon motif altered by going from a many-headed dragon to a single-headed beast. Now you may have reasons for the spread of the mythology that I haven't mentioned yet, such as dinosaur bones being considered representations of dragons, and perhaps they were, but this was in no way significant to the creation of the motif, or indeed its continuation in certain regions. We also see motifs from a paper by Blurst, who wrote something on the origins of dragons, highlighting additional aspects of the dragon, such as fetid and poisonous breath, and the ability to change size and shape, or disappear completely. And there was even a motif to suggest the dragon was offended by female menses. Compared to this more complete research data, these attributes had only around a 50-50 probability of appearing in the first story, far less than the minimum 75% probability the research used as a target, and so are considered lesser characteristics, and so we must assume they didn't appear in the source myths. Now the same can be said about the lack of association with long life and immortality, as this was very difficult to define within stories, and so was left out of the research and descriptions. Now I do also want to say at this point that there was a lot of time and research carried out to make this video, and I want to thank my Patreons for their support that help make this work possible. There is a link in the description of the video if you wish to support the channel, and get early access to videos, access to papers, discussions, and other videos and information too. And I just want to thank them all for their help, support, and questions that made this video possible. And so before I conclude the research, let me tell you a story of the Indo-European dragon, Inui, in one of the younger versions of the dragon myth. One night a three-headed, six-eyed serpent known as Inui, stole cattle from the tribe of Yemo. Yemo asked his finest warrior, Trito, to retrieve the cattle, and so Trito sacrificed to his gods to gain strength through an intoxicating beverage. Then he travelled across the land and into the mountains where he found the cave where Inui lay. Cows were grazing near its entrance and drinking water from a river flowing from the cave. As Trito approached the cave he hid between the cows and when within range he threw his spear at one of the heads of the sleeping Inui. The dragon roared and lunged at Trito, who with his second spear threw it at her second head. Inui had difficulty moving with two heads so terribly wounded, and the final spear saw her withdraw in pain to the back of the cave. This gave Trito enough time to herd up the cattle and take them back home where he was celebrated as the tribe's greatest warrior. Now we see the word for cattle get mistranslated over time and it turns into women, and that's why some myths have dragons kidnapping women in more recent tales. But let's get back to the research and what was found. What we have built here is a statistically probable model of dragons from the different ages, but what I also have to say is that this is a very simple representation of the dragon and its motifs. The dragon of our ancestors was much more complex than this, and one place we can see this complexity is in the Paleolithic European region, where within two caves in the French Pyrenees, two bodies of headless snakes have been found. Their skeletons remain intact, but without their heads. These snakes lay at the back of their respective caves, a place where they wouldn't get to naturally, and their bodies seem intact, meaning it's unlikely they were prey for animals, which would have eaten them. And finally both of these caves have rivers at their mouths. And so if you put all this together, considering their missing heads, it is thought that what we have here is evidence of a ritual to contain the dragon that lives within these caves, a ritual from about 20,000 years ago. And I can talk more extensively about this ritual and findings if you want to know, just let me know in the comments below. Now perhaps another question we should ask ourselves is why isn't there more evidence of dragon belief outside of South Africa or Australia, such as rock carvings or paintings. And this could be because of a taboo of the representation of certain living beings, as we rarely see lizards or snakes represented in cave art, and the same goes with human shapes too. But it could equally be hypothesised that dragons were not represented because Paleolithic man didn't see a need or point of representing them. Indeed there are two types of oral narratives, myths and tales, and I'm sometimes asked what this difference is, and I will quote Paul Mies' La Mer Deverante, Essay sur la morphologie des contes africains, or to summarise him at least, by saying that there is a noticeable psychological difference in content between myth and tales, regarding their time, place, and actors. They are not the same, and in fact there are specific prescriptions and prohibitions attached to each very differently, and so it could be argued that only myths were represented in rock art, without any archaeological trace being left as testimony to the tales, and the stories of dragons were tales, and not myths, as myths tend to be a representation of real things. But we do have enough evidence to know the dragon existed in our ancestors' stories, and if we examine the common core of the African proto-narrative and European proto-narrative, we can get a statistically reconstructed proto-narrative of the dragon. In effect, all dragon myths were built on a dragon which was giant, scaly-snaked, with a single head, and which lives in or near water, and is aggressive. This core has been preserved throughout the evolution of the motif, and so how can we explain the persistence of this core myth? Well, before I do, I want to tell you the story of the Rainbow Serpent of Australia, a myth that we have established is around 10,000 years old in this region. In the beginning there was no life on the surface of the earth, no animals, no plants. But beneath the surface of the earth there was the great mother snake, the Rainbow Serpent, and she slept, and had been sleeping for many ages. But one day it became the day she should wake, and when this was she burrowed away to the surface and crawled all over the flat, dry, and empty earth. She thought the land should be transformed, and so used her magic to make it rain. And it rained day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. And as it rained the serpent crawled around, her tracks filled with water, and became long winding rivers, some became lakes and seas, and occasionally there was a billabong. And at times when the serpent moved forward the earth would pile up and form hills and valleys, and sometimes even mountains. And in some places milk from the Rainbow Serpent's breast soaked into the earth and made it fertile. And here flowers, plants, and trees all grew, and as she looked around she liked what she saw, and woke all the other sleeping creatures below the surface of the earth. First she woke the mammals and led them up to the home she had made, the dingoes she took to the desert, the kangaroos she took to the bush, and the tree frogs she took to the rainforest. She woke the birds and the eagles she took to the mountains, the gala she took to the billabongs, and the emus she took to the plains. And then she woke and brought out the creatures who could live in the water, the barramundi she took to the rivers, the frogs she took to the shallow ponds, and the turtles she took to the lagoons. And finally she woke the insects, the ants, the beetles, the spiders, the scorpions. And she showed them the rocks and the crevices and the sandy places where it was best for them to live. And when all the animals had settled on the earth, the rainbow serpent woke two humans, woman and man, and she took them to a place of food and water. And whilst they ate and drank, she taught them the law by which they should live. The law was simple, they must respect all living things, and they must respect the earth, including the rocks and the waters, as all these things were sacred. And then she said she would go back under the earth to sleep again. But before she did, she gave woman and man a warning that they didn't own the earth, they were just its guardians. And if they abused the earth and didn't follow the law, then she would come back and create a new world, this time it would be without woman and man. And so here this Australian story is showing a snake in control of water, helping the creation of the earth, almost in a flood myth type of way, as it is adding water to the land and not land to the water, something I explain in my creation myth video. But this creature is also passively aggressive to humans, warning them to be good, and if they aren't, they would be punished. It is almost a reflex of the Abrahamic story of the Garden of Eden, where god is good and the snake is bad, but in this story the snake is god and good. But let's answer another question, which is why dragons persist in this form all over the world. We've shown it isn't an archetype, it doesn't come from uncovering dinosaur bones, and it is not seen from snakes on a day to day basis, and we know the latter because stories of dragons appear in places where snakes rarely grow more than a metre in length, and nor do snakes always live near water. And I do believe we have an answer for this, an answer that lies in millions of years of evolution. Snakes are the oldest predators of mammals on the planet, as whilst the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to spread across the planet, snakes became mammals, including primates, biggest enemy, especially constrictors. Our ancestors had to develop ways to defend themselves and avoid being eaten. Some mammals relied on their speed and agility, but primates, and so man, have improved our visual system to identify dangers, including identifying snakes potentially hidden in the environment. It is one of the reasons we have developed a vision which sees in colour and in three dimensions. The result is that primates have tremendous snake detection capabilities, and studies have shown that humans are able to visually detect a snake even before being aware of its existence, and can detect a snake faster than it can detect spiders or other animals, and this function is even in young children. Similarly, the presence of a snake in our field of vision decreases our ability to focus on something else, with part of our attention automatically focusing on this potential predator. And this can be coupled with the known psychological observation that human perception of distances and sizes of objects is influenced by the importance given to them by those who observe them. In effect, the size of snakes is often overestimated by the observer, and this could be applied to the dragon motif. And then, if we wrap all this up in a scary emotional story, and such stories are more easily remembered in our minds, then we have all the components to create a story that we would never forget as we dispersed around the world. In short, it is human nature to be aware of snakes, much more rapidly than our consciousness reacts, it is human nature to exaggerate their size, and when coupled with a scary or amazing story, these myths become much more memorable than other stories. Which is also probably why you haven't remembered to click the like and subscribe button, because it isn't a scary snake, so please press it, it doesn't bite, and it really helps this channel, especially the notification bell, which could be there, or there, or somewhere there. Anyway, thank you if you do press it, I really appreciate that. And so now let me talk about the South African myth, the oldest of the myths we know. And whilst we haven't a story here, we do have a ritual wrapped around the myth of the rain snake. Now much of this information comes from an interview of a Bushman in the middle of the 19th century, who explained the meaning of some paintings found in the Lesotho region of southern Africa. Now this place is where the river Tsihonhon meets the Senkou, and this was visited by explorers who were with the Bushman. And this is how the story of the rain snake came to be known to us mythologists. Here is an enhanced picture of one piece of rock art, showing hunters with some quadrupeds, possibly rhinoceroses at first glance, but the Bushman said they were water animals, snakes, and he inferred this was not a wilder beast, a water hog, not even a hippopotami. But the term snake was translated correctly, and so this seems a bit confusing. And the long lines out at the top of the animal's nose is what is known as a reem, a long leather rein made of ox hide. But what is equally interesting is that this picture is an underwater scene, and the small lines are representative of something underwater with the animals, maybe fish, or maybe representative of cuts with a sharp edge of some kind. Now what is also interesting is that it looks as though animals are being hunted, but some of the depictions are of men who have died, and whose spirits are now living in the and other depictions of men are those who are alive, but who are dancing in a trance like state, clapping, and their noses are bleeding. Here is another picture, a clearer version, and here we have men dancing the trance dance, clapping their hands with their noses bleeding, but with a giant snake. They have a reem, and there are many cuts around the snake, and the Bushman said that this was also happening underwater in the spirit world. Obviously this snake is not a depiction of a real snake, its head alone is three or four times the size of the people, but it is showing a ritual taking place around the snake, a ritual where people are in a state that makes their noses bleed. But we also have paintings of serpents, which also occur in the southern Free State and northern eastern Cape Provinces of South Africa, and this shows serpents as being enormous, who sometimes sport tusks and antelope ears, suggesting that these creatures were far from ordinary. And you will see from the picture I have put on the screen, that this serpent too has a nose bleed. Now they also look like there are cuts on the body of the snake, and these have been interpreted as being ritualistic, and were done to make the rain fall. In effect the snake was seen as a rain animal, and this was a rain snake, and when it was charmed and caught and cut, rain would fall. Now this didn't mean the snake was in possession of the rain, it just created rain when a ritual was performed on it, and this could be hypothesised as being because the snake turned up in the spring, having spent the winter in a semi-hibernation kind of mode, and in the spring this was the time of year when rainfall arrived. The snakes were just a coincidental victim of this ritual, this trance and rain dance and cutting. But here we see an animal called a snake, a serpent, a dragon to us, alongside associated quadrupeds responsible for bringing rain to a region. And so this is where it seems the dragon myth started in southern Africa, where the dragon was associated with water, sometimes blessing the head of another species, such as a lion or antelope, and also had horns, ears, and human hair, and its body was like that of a giant snake. This was potentially a good dragon helping to create rains and crops grow. And then this myth spread to China, again as a helpful dragon with the rains, and then back to the Near East and into Europe where the dragon had some association with creation in its earlier myths in this region, as well as being part of the chaotic sea and responsible for storms. And we see this further in dragon myths associated with water as they developed into the myths of Tiamat, and Typhoon, and Jormungandr, and Vutra over time. The South African myth has some of its primitive parts still in it as it reaches Australia, where the rain snake turns into the rainbow serpent, and is responsible also for placing water on the earth. As the myth reaches Mesoamerica, we see traits from the Chinese dragon in the Central American cultures, especially in its appearance. The dragon myth has become one of the most widespread motifs in human history, dispersing alongside the lines of a genealogically founded path dating back over 75,000 years, and if we are honest it could probably go back to 130,000 years old in its most primitive origins. And the dragon motif was alive and well in Paleolithic Europe, and this motif was so powerful and stuck in human cultures, rituals were made to keep the dragon at bay, through snake beddings in caves, because it was descriptive of the dangers we as humans have evolved to fear. It became an enemy in Indo-European stories, and became corrupted to become the story of a knight rescuing a princess from a dragon in later European mythology. So once again I have to say that I have literally just scratched the surface of many of the ideas within this video. If you want me to make specific videos about the rain snake, or the Paleolithic snake rituals, or anything else, then please let me know in the comments below. To me this is just another fascinating subject in mythology, touching on a form of creation myth, as well as the fear and power the thought of a snake must have had in our ancestors, much of which is not really considered by many of us watching this video today, in our day to day lives. Which is a kind of nod to how far we have left some of our ancestors thoughts and beliefs behind. And I do hope one day researchers have a chance to expand on this research with more motifs and more geographical areas, allowing our analysis to be refined, especially where multiple motifs exist in the same area, or to allow a better understanding of particular motifs, like the dragon slayer. For me for now, I hope you enjoyed that journey, and thank you for all your support, feedback and comments. Thank you to my patrons for their support, and I do hope you will come back to watch more videos on Crecganford. So until then, please stay safe and well, and this was Crecganford.