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Few images are as central to the imaginal language of heroism than the slaying of the dragon, but what is the dragon and where does it dwell?
Here, we go through a few dragon-slaying myths in terms of what they mean for the spiritual life.
Bull and Dragon (Lamb and Serpent)
The first point to make, laying out my interpretative framework, is that the ubiquity of a sacrificial beast—the Bulls of the Sun in Greek myth, the Passover Lamb in the Bible—and a Serpent/Dragon antagonist, present two fundamental steps in the spiritual life:
the slaying of the animal-self is the calming of the mind and body, of its constant reactions—constant oscillating need to be stimulated. That’s the Bull or the Lamb. The bull is a beast of burden; the Lamb is a submissive animal. The “Agnus Dei” accepts its death. The animal-self has been tamed.
Then, subsequently, having to face a reaction from that part of us that identifies with continuous thought and activity, that thinks it is dying when you set the ordinary reactions aside during deep contemplative practice. It is the primal fear within. The dragon/serpent. Once you calm the mammalian instincts, you have to deal with the deeper reptilian mind and its thirst for life, its profound primal fear of death.
In general, we encounter the dragon during the spiritual journey to the “centre of the self,” the heart, the “Axis Mundi.” It is when we’re trying to centre ourselves that we encounter this violent reaction, this contrary force. That’s when the serpent appears in its more sinister guise.
The lashing out of that deeper stratum of the passions takes the form of intrusive thoughts, powerful fear or desire seeking to obsess us.
I’m psychologizing these figures, but the dragon can also stand for something genuinely external to the seeker, which is, by virtue of our ignorance or unhealthy attachments, setting up a presence in us, instrumentalizing and tyrannizing our instincts—a real, spiritually destructive, influence out there in the world.
Let’s look at a few relevant myths.
Disclaimer: I won’t be dealing with “cosmic” dragon-slaying here, where a lightning-god defeats a primordial serpent (Gonggong attempting to seize the Throne of Heaven before Zhurong defeats him, in Chinese tradition; Vritra leading the Asuras to steal the elixir of eternal life before he is slain by Indra, in India; Michael the Archangel casting down Satan in the Bible, and so on). These are instructive but more properly belong to the realm of cosmology.
Also, as an aside, dragons have other meanings besides the ones discussed here, benevolent guises, especially in cultures like the Chinese. There’s also a difference between winged and wingless dragons that I’m not going to explore. We’re just dealing with a particular type of dragon, the most prominent meaning of the dragon/serpent in Western lore.
Heracles
At the end of his journey, Heracles goes to a western land, to the island of the Hesperides, the Far West which is the land of sundown, dusk. This is a place of death; it’s where the light goes out, so, in a sense, it’s the outer darkness, the edge of life. Heracles is facing death, but this is also somehow the centre because it is near where Atlas holds up the whole sky over the Earth at the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. Travelling to the Hesperides—the edge where the sun itself enters night—means facing the truth of ourselves as mortal beings, and so it connects us with the centre, the axial point at which the sky is held up, so to speak.
Heracles has already retrieved the animal-self by now—the Oxen of the Sun, which had been stolen by a tyrannical giant called Geryon—so that, by now, the body and mind are under his will. Heracles must now slay the dragon Ladon, the deeper primal fear, before receiving the fruit of immortality.
We have here a return to Eden.
The dragon is defeated, and a new garden as Heavenly City may descend. The idea of defeating the dragon and then entering into the presence of the sacred apples, receiving the fruit of the Hesperides, is the same as what we get in John’s Apocalypse: the dragon is finally defeated and the Tree of Life yields new fruit.
Thor
The same pattern occurs in tales around the Norse god Thor. He journeys to the centre by going to the outermost edge, to death—equivalent to Hercules going to the western edge of dusk. There, Thor finds the Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, who encircles the whole world with its huge, tail-like body, and is a sort of counterpart to the serpent encircling Yggdrasil, the central axis of the worlds. This encircling, this ouroboros, stands for the cycles of nature.
In order to catch it, Thor throws an ox’s head as bait. This is precisely the same symbolism that we’ve seen before: we slay the animal-self, the “beast-of-burden self.” Hercules retrieves the Oxen of the Sun that had been taken by the giant Geryon—the tyrant-ego—and that brings up the deeper primal reptile instinct that reacts violently to our efforts.
Unfortunately, Thor is with the giant Hymir, who is too fearful of the monster, so he cuts the fishing line so that the Midgard Serpent is able to get away. Heracles was able to steal away the Oxen of the Sun from the giant that had usurped it, but in the case of Thor, the giant that accompanies him is thwarting his efforts to move on to the next trial, the equivalent of Hercules defeating Ladon. Sometimes our grosser, coarse ego—“Hymir”—gets afraid and retreats from the exercise.
But this is to be expected. We should be gradual in our approach to spiritual practice, to entering that deep silence of wordless prayer. You can’t do it all at once, and Thor will, in fact, face the serpent again during Ragnarök. The thunder deity is prophesied to kill Jörmungandr with his hammer and to die from its venom after taking nine steps, which I take to be metaphorical for Thor’s ultimate rebirth. Nine is a symbol of birth, like nine months of pregnancy, so we can imagine a transformed, post-Ragnarök “final form” Thor, free of the old serpent, resurrected.
Siegfried
Staying in the North, we have the story of Siegfried, who defeats Fafnir, a dwarf-turned-dragon. Fafnir represents a part of our instincts, our forging faculties, the busy powers of the body and mind—the dwarves—but having grown monstrous, out-of-sync with the rest, hypertrophic. It’s reacting in a reptilian, primitive way.
Another dwarf, Regin, makes a sword for Siegfried that initially breaks when Siegfried tries to use it, so that, instead of facing the dragon head-on, Siegfried has to dig a pit in Fafnir’s path at the place where the dragon travels to drink water. Siegfried hides in this watery pit—like Hercules sailing to the Far West, Thor in the Outer Edge.
We should relate this pit to Jesus’ entombment, because it is something like a tomb that Siegfried has dug in the ground. When Fafnir slides over that tomb, the hero stabs the dragon from below in its belly, which is not covered by protective scales.
Siegfried is then rendered near invulnerable by the dragon’s blood, which pours on him from the open wound, symbolically equivalent to how the blood of the Lamb in the Bible, that protects believers. Siegfried, receiving this blood and being made almost invulnerable by it, carries the same symbolic weight. (Although it would be more consistent with other traditions if Fafnir had swallowed some sacred cattle, equivalent to the Greek Oxen of the Sun, and it was that creature's blood that spilled forth from his belly, anointing Siegfried—in any case, Fafnir is not a “pure” dragon, but a dwarf-turned-dragon).
St. George
Turning to Christian folklore, we have St. George. Once upon a time, a city was being terrorized by a dragon. The people had been sacrificing their children, who they would choose by lot in order to appease the beast’s hunger. Then came the turn for the king’s own daughter to be offered up to the dragon. Dutifully, the princess went to face her death, but it happened that a Roman soldier by the name of George was traveling nearby.
He told the people that he would slay this monster and save the princess, but they would need to embrace his faith. They agreed, and, sure enough, he was able to drive a lance through the beast. In some accounts, we have the people converting after seeing George make the sign of the cross over the dragon, and subduing it thusly.
It seems, then, that the evil of the dragon was spiritual, not merely physical. It can’t be beaten through brute force alone but by purifying the people themselves, as if it was drawing power from their spiritual darkness. We can also understand the princess as representing the people, so that she is saved when they convert—the way that the Church is a collective body of believers and is identified as a woman: the “wife of the Lamb” in the Apocalypse, the Church-as-bride.
Outside Europe
These themes recur in China. You have Li Erlang encountering a woman whose grandson is going to be sacrificed to a dragon to prevent floods. He restrains it, sometimes through the use of water from a mystical pool.
In West Africa’s Soninke culture, a serpent named Bida was the source of fertility, rain. Each year, a virgin had to be sacrificed to it, but when it came the turn of the fiancée of a man called Wagadu, he slayed the beast.
In Cherokee culture, there’s the Uktena, a horned serpent with a diamond on its forehead called Ulunsuti, which could make one into a great wonder-worker. Uktena is finally defeated by a certain Aganunitsi (an instance of the “Dragon Stone” trope).
You have the Jewish story of Rabbi Akiva, a mystical figure whose daughter is cursed to be bitten by a snake on her wedding day, but she gives to the poor on that day and breaks the curse.
Muslim tradition tells of the miraculous waters of Zamzam that were occupied by serpent-shaped jinn when Muhammad conquered the city of Mecca, whereupon these snake-like beings were cleared out just as the idols were cleared out of the Kaaba.
These symbols recur from China to sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas to the Middle East and Europe: the dragon, the serpent is a false self claiming dominion over reality. It’s, in John’s Apocalypse, the devil who seems to be sovereign over a fallen world, marshalling kings and demons before its final, inevitable ousting—its defeat as false self and sovereign. It blocks our way to our own self and to our true Sovereign, to the perception of our genuine spiritual origin in the Divine.
Base Instinct
The serpent is basic life, base reptilian instincts: no legs, just devouring head and tail, close to the ground, the bottom of creation. It’s also often the cycles of nature and life, the constant cyclical patterns of the mind and of instinct and of desire represented by the ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, cyclical nature. This is not bad in itself, but becomes an instrument of evil because it becomes a trap when we are spiritually ignorant, when our will is dormant. We become slaves to those instincts, to those cycles of nature, of body, of ever-churning thought.
That’s how it appears in early modern European alchemical symbolism, for example. Writings associated with Bernardo of Treviso present the ouroboros as surrounding the Fountain of Life, blocking the path to rebirth.
Writes Jung in “Aion” of the dragon/serpent as primal instinct:
“Since the shadow in itself is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious or as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake or dragon guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other. Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness expresses the instinctual that, with ruthless cruelty, rides roughshod over all moral and any other human wishes and considerations—a chthonic spirit who dwells in matter, more especially in the bit of original chaos hidden in creation, the massa confusa.”
The Treasure (What the Dragon Guards)
Of course, once overcome, this energy—the powers of the instincts, the body’s deepest instinctual stratum—is made vertical: Moses placing a snake vertically on a pole; the snake on the caduceus of Hermes; the Kundalini in Indian tradition. Jesus says the faithful “take up snakes,” unaffected by their poison. This idea of taking up the snake is an integrating and raising up of the serpent.
Obviously, those symbols can also be taken in a sinister way, and I don’t go along with Jung that it’s the wisdom of instinct or the collective unconscious that is the treasure which the dragon hides and guards in these myths.
Rather, it is something genuinely spiritual which is not reducible to the collective unconscious or to instinct, but beyond it. It is the profound peace which, initially, the reptilian instinctive self resists because it’s afraid of being suspended and allowing you into those deeper layers of contemplation.
From Guénon’s “Symbolism of the Cross,” on the dragon as keeper and corrupt, depending on our spiritual state:
“The serpent or dragon, which is then an equivalent of it, as the guardian of certain symbols of immortality, the approach to which it forbids—we find coiled round the tree with the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides or the beech tree in the wood at Colchis on which the Golden Fleece hangs—that’s in the story of Jason and the Argonauts—these trees are clearly further forms of the Tree of Life, the world axis. The serpent is found coiled not only around a tree but also a number of other symbols of the world axis, and especially the mountain, as in the Hindu tradition and the symbolism of the churning of the sea, and often the serpent or dragon appears as the guardian of hidden treasure, such as those of the black stone or subterranean fire.”
The Dragon Stone
We should recall that, across traditions, Black Stones are often central. According to the Pythagoreans, the centre of the cosmos was a fire and a cube. One has to enter the centre to access totality—the bottom of the earth connects with the top of heaven once more: volcano/meteor, female/male, the edge/the centre.
Concerning the symbol of the centre as stone—bedrock of the self, Holy Mountain in miniature, the Philosopher’s Stone—Jung deals with its dual meaning:
“The stone is twin or twofold. The one is opaque and black; the other, though black, is brilliant and shining like a mirror. This is the stone which many seek without finding it, for it is the dragon’s stone—draconis lapis.”
We may think of the white stone in the Apocalypse bearing the secret name of the faithful—each receiving this white stone as he is saved. Muslim folklore has it that the Kaaba stone descended white from Paradise and became black on Earth.
Jung continues:
“It was reputed to be a precious stone which could be obtained by cutting off the head of a sleeping dragon, but it becomes a gem only when a bit of the dragon soul remains inside. The gem is of a white colour.”
The draconis lapis is also the Holy Grail.
Some versions of the story of the Grail tell that it was a stone that fell off the crown of Lucifer when he was cast out of Heaven. It was then made into the Grail. This means that the part of the cosmic architecture which is dragged down, caused to fall by spiritual pride, dislodged by rebellion, is won back and precisely allows us to attain holiness.
Being a stone upon a crown, upon the brow, we may relate it to mental focus and contemplation, the “third eye:” “If your eye is single, your whole body is full of light,” as the Gospel puts it.
This brings us to an important aspect of all these stories: the dragon has to be defeated with cunning—intelligently, indirectly, in a subtle way, spiritually.
“Be as innocent as doves and as cunning as snakes.”
“Cunning as Serpents”
This element is ubiquitous.
Heracles defeats Ladon, but his journey involves trickery because Atlas gets the hero at one point to pick up the burden of holding the sky for him, and Heracles has to reverse the trickery by asking Atlas to take the sky again for a moment so that he can adjust his robe, which is uncomfortable. When Atlas agrees, Heracles obviously doesn’t resume being a pillar for the sky, but continues on his way.
Thor lures the Midgard Serpent with bait, the head of the ox, and actually has to have his quest delayed until Ragnarök to defeat the serpent finally.
Siegfried has to hide in a pit, a tomb, to cut Fafnir from below.
St. George has to convert the people before dispelling the evil of the dragon who terrorizes them.
Jung refers to tales in which the dragon's head has to be cut off while it sleeps.
In every case, the mission is approached indirectly; in some sense, there’s an element of “resist not evil,” as Jesus teaches, in all successful dragon slayers. When the fear of death and mental lashing out assails us, we do not argue our thoughts—
But we also have to dose our spiritual practice carefully.
This idea is all over traditions: find a balance, you have to be cunning.
In the Bible, the dragon is first released in order to be defeated—let go of a little bit—but even there, as in Thor’s story, it’s not defeated straightaway. First, it’s locked up, contained, then released at the right time.
The war is fought in phases; the hero must be patient, lest he face the dragon in all its fury before he is ready.
It’s worth emphasizing this: it is needful to postpone the death of the dragon until Ragnarök; lock it up until Apocalypse.
Purifying the Waters/Womb
The paradoxical image of a periphery or edge which is also centre is often presented as a journey into the outer waters or into a watery balm: the ocean surrounding the edge of the Earth for Thor, the pit on the way to Fafnir’s drinking hole in Siegfried’s story, Heracles sailing to the Hesperides island.
We may therefore liken it to the womb as well as to a tomb.
There’s a very interesting passage in a work called the “Philosophoumena,” or the 'Refutation of All Heresies,' by Bishop of Rome Hippolytus, who lived in the second and early third centuries AD, concerning how some (heretical) Christians approached the symbolism of the Gospel:
“The perfect Word of the light on high, the Logos, having been made like the beast, the serpent—so this is analogous to Jesus being cast in the role of a criminal, a wretched one—entered into the un-purified womb, we could say the world, the Earth, mortal life, beguiling it by its likeness to the beast so that it might lose the bands which encircle the perfect mind. This is the form of the slave, and this the need for the descent of the Word of God into the womb of a virgin. But in truth, after entering into the foul mysteries of the womb, he was washed and drank of the cup of living water.”
The inner parts of us—our primal substance, the womblike waters within—are blocked by the false self or reactive stratum of the self when it takes control (the serpent, primal reptilian fear). Once pacified, they are the overflowing Holy Grail, the renewal of the self, the Living Waters. We enter the depths and return—this is spiritual rebirth, the idea of being born again that’s mentioned across traditions, being born from above.
The idea of the infested womb—the deep contemplative parts of us being cut off so that we cannot be as children, as Jesus says—represents a blocking off of our origin. Our perception of our own originating source in God has been occluded so that instead we are subject to a false origin. We perceive primitive instinct and fear as having primacy over us—the serpent seems to be our father or parent, sovereign and king of the Earth.
Thus, the motif of the snake stealing the baby: in the Apocalypse, the dragon waits to devour the pregnant woman’s saviour son; we have Python as enemy of Leto’s son Apollo; we have the snake sent to murder the infant Heracles. The false father, who is also a false womb, is the Saturn who devours his children (his belly an anti-womb). This myth about Saturn, who is often linked to the serpent in medieval alchemical symbolism, is the core of counter-spirituality. (Jung notes the relation of Saturn to dragon at one point in “Aion.”)
In spiritual darkness, we don’t perceive the divine origin; instead, all things seem to us to come from nothing—life from inanimate matter and higher thought from ancient animal instinct.
The relation of son to father, of creation to Creator, is antagonistic here because the origin is conceived as chaos. Spirituality becomes an arbitrary slaying of the prior order of gods by new upstarts who may build on them. In Biblical narrative, the dragon is indeed evil authority (per Ezekiel’s reading of Isaiah) which is initially cast out by Michael (per John’s Apocalypse) and finally defeated.
Revelation (12:11) teaches that believers “conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” Again, first the animal-self is slain, then the dragon. The idea that the dragon is defeated by the blood of the Lamb is interesting because it means Pharaoh in Exodus is, in some sense, the dragon. It was with blood from the Passover Lamb in Exodus 12 that the Israelites protect themselves against death and initiate their final exodus from Egyptian slavery. The blood of the slain animal-self protects us from death. If we properly subdue the reactive mind and body, the impulses, we can overcome spiritual death—the ordinary dulling of awareness, somnambulism—in which we usually go about our lives.
Meditation
To slay the Lamb is to part the Red Sea (Red Sea and blood are analogous symbols; as is Christ’s walking on water to Moses’ crossing the sea). To master the ever-ebbing-and-flowing waters of the instincts and the mind.
And as we progress, we are pursued by the old self, the reactions, the serpent, oppressive, obsessive authority—the tyrant Pharaoh—but we should not engage it, not directly. We but have to continue on our way, and it will drown behind us, so long as we don’t turn back, like the wife of Lot who turned and was destroyed. “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God,” as Jesus teaches. Once more, the dragon is defeated through a kind of subterfuge—indirectly, in a subtle way, intelligently, not by frontal confrontation.
When we’ve subdued the animal-self, it can no longer drag us from our path. Then can we enter a state of lucid contemplation. The blood of the Lamb—the overcoming of the animal-self—will protect us during that trial. We can leave the old dwelling, the old slavery. Symbols of slain sacred animals that confer protection, such as the Golden Fleece, convey the same meaning as the Passover Lamb’s blood on the doors of Israelite homes before the Exodus.
Christ as both King and Lamb precisely teaches this process.
His non-reaction on the cross—“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do”—is a non-looking-back when crossing the sea, a letting the satanic authorities drown. Christ’s water and blood (the Red Sea) that flow down the lance of Longinus lift the Roman’s blindness—spiritual blindness, Pharoah, has been drowned.
The dragon will lash out against us after we succeed in initially entering contemplation. In Gospel terms, we’ve gone up on the cross, and now we have to face the lance of Longinus or the three days in the tomb: silence, contemplation, when we must remain conscious, deliberate, aware, present. We mustn’t fall asleep. We are in death, but not dead. We’re coming back. Resurrecting. This also means not bringing too much attention to those sudden spasms of the instincts that want to disturb our peace.
And if the lashing out of the reactive mind does end up being too powerful, that’s alright. We simply dose our spiritual asceticism by returning to the previous phase. The dragon has not been restrained long enough, our Ragnarök/Apocalypse needs patience.