Painted upon the walls of a church carved directly into the rock face of Göreme, in Cappadocia, is an image of a mounted knight driving a spear into a serpent in a coil. The fresco is approximately a thousand years old. An image of a deity wielding a weapon against a serpent of the deep was incised upon the surface of a stone seal in Mesopotamia more than three thousand years earlier than that. Between those two images lie a Norse picture-stone showing Sigurd in his pit, an image of Apollo battling a serpent upon a Greek vase, an Egyptian tomb-painting depicting a god killing a serpent that has attacked the sun-god within a burial chamber, and a hymn in Sanskrit declaring in a phrase that is older than any of these he slew the serpent. The figures dress themselves in new garb. The image does not.
This is the earliest conflict we have recorded, and we have never stopped painting it. The honest answer as to why lies deeper than dragons, deeper than religion, and potentially deeper than our own species. It begins with the understanding that the dragon has never been a dragon.
The dragon is a snake in disguise
Take away its wings, take away its fire, and strip away the rest of its iconography, and the one animal that remains beneath all others is the snake. The Greek term in the myths is drakōn, which means no more than a serpent. The Norse Fáfnir is an ormr, a worm or serpent. The Slavic dragon, known variously as a zmej, zmaj, or zmee, comes from the word zmija, snake. Revelation’s “great dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan” has “serpent” as the object noun. In fact, everything beyond the serpent is an embellishment. It was the medieval artists of Europe that gave their snakes wings and an internal furnace. The evidence that all of these tales are the same one story told repeatedly in time stretches beyond any coincidence.
The clearest evidence is in language. For decades the Harvard linguist Calvert Watkins devoted himself to the task of reconstructing an ancient line of poetry. In his 1995 book How to Kill a Dragon, he demonstrated that a series of Indo-European languages, stretching from Sanskrit to Hittite to Greek to Old Norse to Irish, all share a poetic formula that is preserved over generations and generations: a hero, a verb derived from the ancient Indo-European root gʷhen- meaning “to kill”, and a serpent. The formula derives ultimately from the myth of Indra as recorded in the Rig Veda, who slew the drought-serpent Vṛtra. The formula there is áhann áhim, literally he slew the serpent, with the verb áhann having survived in English as the word bane. The Armenians kept their dragon-slayer’s name. Their dragon-fighter Vahagn still bears the name Vṛtrahan, literally “Vṛtra-slayer”. Even a reconstruction of the ancient phrase is still to be heard in Armenian villages as late as the nineteenth century. As with everything else, Watkins was clear about what he had discovered. He had not found a myth that was universal to mankind. He had found a specific formula repeated over millennia of inherited speech.
This is a crucial qualification, and we will return to it. But remember first of all the image: people who could not communicate verbally anymore were still telling a story, in inherited words, of someone slaying a serpent.
Why a snake?
There follows a warning that the answers to this question are the most fascinating and the least proven. Let that stand as a cautionary introduction to what follows.
Anthropologist Lynne Isbell proposed an explanation that is breathtaking in its implications and scope. In her 2006 paper and a 2009 book The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent, Isbell argues that the primates had to evolve their excellent vision and fear response specifically to detect camouflaged snakes that threatened to strike. By this account, the snake in these stories is far more than simply a metaphorical opponent. It is the original threat to us, built into our sensory capabilities as an ancient memory. Evidence for this theory comes from visual search tasks demonstrating that both adults and three-year-old children are able to identify a snake amid a background of flowers faster than the opposite identification, and recordings from macaque brains showing neurons that respond to snake images in as little as fifty-five milliseconds, faster than responses to angry human faces.
The theory is hotly disputed, and an honest recounting must acknowledge that fact. A 2011 study testing the hypothesis against primate eye evolution found that none of the characteristics of primate eyes that Isbell attributed to snakes showed correlation with how much the species needed protection from snakes. If snakes were only one among several evolutionary pressures on primate eyes, then the snake-detection hypothesis is not the whole story. This is a genuine controversy and needs to be recognized as such. The theory stands as an interesting speculation, backed up by considerable research.
Another controversial hypothesis goes even farther back, using statistical methods borrowed from biology to analyze stories as genetically related data. The mythologist Julien d’Huy reconstructed a proto-serpent myth by treating individual elements as genes and building phylogenies of these stories, proposing that the oldest serpent was an aquatic entity capable of flight. A major criticism of this approach comes from the observation that if oral legends could survive tens of thousands of years, as d’Huy proposes, then agriculture ought to have left a deeper footprint in mythology than it did. This theory needs to be seen for what it is, an unorthodox, heavily cited, and highly debatable hypothesis.
It deserves closer attention nevertheless, because where d’Huy’s analysis lands is striking. His hypothetical ancient serpent is one guarding water springs. This description happens to match perfectly the oldest serpent myths in the world.
The world-makers
The most ambitious and grand of all serpents were the ones that were killed to create the world. Scholars refer to this class of myths as the combat myth, or Chaoskampf, “struggle against chaos” in German, after an 1895 study by Hermann Gunkel. In these myths the serpent is the chaotic force preceding the universe and the one who kills it is a god whose action creates the order of the universe itself.
The most straightforward example is the Babylonian Enūma Eliš. In the beginning there is nothing but water, and the salt sea is the serpent-dragon goddess Tiamat. She betrays the younger gods and they send out the storm-god Marduk to deal with her. He divides her body, builds the sky from one half, and the earth from the other. The world is quite literally made from the serpent. When the Hebrew scriptures begin with “a wind moving over tehom”, or the deep, the word shares a Semitic root with the goddess Tiamat’s name. Elements of this battle are woven throughout the Bible, in poems describing how the Lord shall “punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.” The latter phrase is almost word-for-word the description of the five-century-old monster, Lotan, that was slain by the storm-god Baal in Ugaritic texts. Lotan is the same monster as the biblical Leviathan, in another spelling.
The pattern is repeated further eastward. In the Rig Veda, the god Indra slays the serpent Vṛtra and causes the release of the pent-up waters after he consumes the divine beverage soma. In ancient Egypt, the serpent Apophis attacks the sun god’s solar barque every night, and every night he must be destroyed that the sun might rise in the morning. Apophis is an exception that proves the rule. Egypt is not an Indo-European society, and so it lies entirely outside the linguistic genealogy studied by Watkins. But its myth shows clearly that resemblance between these stories is genuine without implying an origin in common. At least some myths involve a serpent that cannot be slain once and for all.
The Iranian branch of Indo-European myths retained this struggle but altered its outcome. In the ancient Iranian Avesta scriptures, the hero named Thraētaona brings down the tyrant serpent-king Aži Dahāka who ruled over Persia. Thraētaona is the ancient name for Fereydun of the Shāhnāmeh. The Iranian term for that serpent, aži, is the same as the Vedic áhi whom Indra kills, making the Iranian and Indian dragon-myths close cousins, a pair of reflexes in an inherited Indo-Iranian tradition of slaying serpents. While Indra destroyed his serpent outright, Thraētaona was warned that slaying the beast would free something far more evil, and so instead he chained the serpent alive under the holy mountain of Damāvand to await the end of the world. A serpent bound but not slain is its own ancient idea. It reappears in the two Welsh dragons buried alive in Snowdonia.
Further north, the myth has fallen into a forgotten folk song tradition. Scholars have reconstructed the myth of the Slavic thunder god, Perun, chasing the serpent Veles of the waters and the underworld, although this is a careful reconstruction based upon folk songs and place names and not something that any Slav committed to writing.
The heroes
Lower the camera from the gods to the humans and the serpent takes a new form, smaller and weaker, guarding a spring or a hoard or a woman’s virginity. Folklorists catalog this story as type 300, “The Dragon Slayer.” It has a recognizable structure: a monster that demands a sacrifice of the village, the hero who slays it and extracts its tongues as proof of the deed, the impostor who attempts to steal the victory by pretending to be the killer, and the exposure of the fraud through tongues.
The list of heroes is endless. The hero Perseus kills the sea-monster that demands Andromeda as a sacrifice. Heracles burns the heads off the Lernaean Hydra, the monstrous water serpent. Cadmus slays the dragon of Ares and plants its teeth, and armed warriors grow from them. Further north, Sigurd digs a pit that forces the dragon Fáfnir into its path, and then drives a spear up through its heart, tastes blood on his fingers, and learns to understand the birds warning him of his impending betrayal. In the North again, Beowulf slays the dragon guarding its treasure hoard and dies in its poison before sunset. In the Japanese Kojiki, the storm god Susanoo prepares eight vats of strong rice wine, awaits the arrival of the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi, drains the creature until it collapses drunk, chops the serpent apart, and finds a sword within its tail. Even the Bible records a dragon slaying, an incidental one in the additions to the book of Daniel in which the prophet kills an enormous serpent worshipped by the Babylonians by filling its belly with cakes of pitch, fat, and hair.
Michael, and the saint who is mistaken for him
The dragon-slayer enters the Abrahamic world in two mythological figures who are constantly confused, and for which clarification is necessary.
The first is the archangel Michael. He shares his name with the question, Mîkā’ēl, or “Who is like God?” Michael in the Book of Daniel serves the function of angelic protector of Israel, but he evolves to the role of slayer of the serpent: “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon,” and the dragon is cast down to the earth, “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan.” It is the same chapter that Gunkel cites when he draws the connection between the Babylonian myth and the Abrahamic one in his 1895 work. This connection was purposefully made, fusing the chaotic serpent of the deep, the snake of Eden, and the Christian devil together as a single evil being. Thus Michael takes the place of the serpent-slayer in heaven, slayer of evil. Instead of the man with a spear, he becomes an angel, captain of heavenly armies; instead of the beast, the evil to be slain is abstracted as “the devil.”
The popular image of Michael that is widespread in our culture is the casting-out of the rebellious angel Lucifer, an event that is not in scripture anywhere, but a combination of passages from the Old Testament, elaborated upon and fixed in popular consciousness by John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The second figure is the saint named George. The saint is a soldier of the third century CE who is executed during the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian around the year 303 CE. The dragon-slaying and princess rescue do not appear in any literature until the eleventh century. They come in part from Saint Theodore, and become famous in Western culture through the Golden Legend circa 1260. So when people think of “the dragon slayer”, the one who comes to mind is the medieval newcomer, Saint George, and they mistakenly identify him as Michael, his distant and more mysterious predecessor. The easy rule of thumb is that if there are wings, the hero is Michael, but if there is just a horse without wings, the hero is George.
There is an appealing argument that George is simply the Greek Perseus in Christian garb, since Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea-serpent on the Levantine coast near the place where George was celebrated. However, modern scholarship treats the dragon-slaying and princess-rescue as a wandering folktale that appeared independently in several places. It would require too smooth a line of descent to assume Perseus became George. It is far likelier that a familiar story-type is used in many places, with some local fusion at most.
This is important. The point is that the serpent-slayer does not require importation from town to town. It keeps coming back because the ingredients are always at hand.
The serpents nobody kills
The best cases to examine are those that explicitly turn their backs on the entire genre. They prove the existence of choice.
First are the heroes that subdue the serpents rather than kill them. Jason does not engage in combat against the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece in the oldest version; Medea sedates it and Jason takes the treasure. In India, the child Krishna dives into a river tainted by a poison and is enveloped by the serpent king Kāliya. The god dances upon the many-headed serpent’s hood and defeats the serpent; at the request of the wives of the serpent, he spares the creature and casts it into the sea. Here a hero triumphs, but the serpent survives. In the Balkans, the distinction is codified in language itself, for the good serpent, the zmaj, is a protector and thus never an adversary, while the evil serpent, the aždaja (which is an adopted Persian word), is slain by the dragon-slayer. When the Saint George myth arrived in Serbia, it placed St. George against the aždaja but left the benevolent zmaj alone. Even in Christian culture, some communities keep a tamer for their serpents: Saint Martha in Provence tamed the Tarasque, the beast that threatened her community.
Then there are the societies that never raised their hands to a serpent. The Chinese dragon, lóng, is the bringer of the rain and of rivers, and the representative of the Chinese emperor. It is something to be worshipped or petitioned. China has plenty of serpent-slaying myths when it feels like writing one, such as the girl Li Ji who lures a man-eating mountain serpent out from its cave by offering it a basket of sweet rice cakes and kills it by slicing it into pieces. Here the slain creature is a shé, the common serpent, but the esteemed lóng is never a target. The feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs and Kukulkan of the Mayans is not a creature to be slain, for he is the creator and shaper of the world and the ancestors. He played a role in fashioning humanity from the earth and teaching it to live. In Aboriginal Australia, the Rainbow Serpent created the rivers and waters for the peoples of Australia, and it has been the subject of ritual offerings for millennia, depicted in cave paintings, never hunted. The West African rainbow serpent Aido-Hwedo carried the creator in its mouth while the world took shape and lies wrapped beneath the earth in its coils to maintain it. At Ouidah in Benin, Aido-Hwedo is still housed in a living temple, a place in which it is a sin to kill a python.
Finally there is a fourth possibility: neither killing nor submission. Much of Native North American serpent lore is paired with its complement, a contest between the Thunderbird above and the water-serpent below: the Cherokee Uktena set against the Thunderbird, the Underwater Panther of the Great Lakes set against it too. A hero might occasionally come and kill the Uktena, stealing the precious fire-stone from its crown, but the contest is one that must continue if the world is to hold itself together.
The dragon-slayer
In all of these stories the serpent takes different forms and is treated differently. But one thing is consistent: the theme keeps recurring. Lay the map out on the table and it becomes clear that the serpent-slayer is not a human universal but rather just one choice among several.
The other face of the serpent
The reason why this choice is so difficult is that it touches the heart of the entire narrative. The serpent was never just the monster: the very same creature that represents death can also mean life, and the people who created these stories knew that well.
Witnessing the snake shed its skin and come out renewed, one feels inclined to believe that this animal cheats death, and rejuvenates itself when we grow old. This image, actually, can already be found in the oldest written tale we possess: at the end of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the protagonist manages to defeat death, but fails to escape its clutches. He finally obtains the plant that bestows immortality, lays it aside to take a bath, and a snake slithers over and eats it, shedding its old skin in the process. The man departs empty-handed to an inevitable death, and the animal gets eternal life. This is the price that the serpent paid for becoming the source of immortality and healing. Since then it has remained an emblem of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, and so of the practice itself. (The two-snake caduceus, mistakenly used as the main symbol by some American hospitals, is associated with Hermes and commerce, not healing.) In addition, the serpent bites its own tail forming the ouroboros, a ring without a beginning and an end that is a symbol of eternity, first mentioned in the context of the shrine in Tutankhamun’s tomb and later inscribed into the alchemists’ motto that all things are one. In the Book of Numbers, Moses is ordered to make a bronze serpent to hang on a pole and heal those poisoned by a bite; later, a king shatters this object after finding out that people started to worship it. Thus, the serpent acts both as the instrument of healing and the object of devotion. It is worth mentioning, too, that the serpent of Genesis is introduced using the adjective ʿārûm, which elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible means “shrewd”, the quality of a sage, rather than “evil”. The very serpent that brings about disaster possesses knowledge.
Therefore, the slayer cannot be just a hero, but rather the destroyer of something that also stands for renewal and healing. It is this dichotomy that accounts for the persistence of the myth.
Why the motif persists
Given the variety of elements that make up the complex picture, the temptation to link all of them with one common origin becomes irresistible. However, it is impossible to establish such a line, which makes that conclusion the honest end of the inquiry rather than a lack of a clear answer to this question.
It can be shown, however, that there really is a common heritage shared by certain dragons and serpent-slayers, and it comes from Indo-European mythology. What is more, there are traces of specific lines of descent: Lotan into Leviathan, and the deep into Tiamat. Apart from that, all similarities can be accounted for by the common presence of a specific element and by the absence of explanation, so the three hypotheses compete without a clear answer. The dragons and their slayers can have a common ancient ancestor too old to trace, or they can develop independently because the idea is simple and serpents are everywhere, or they can rise from a primordial horror lurking beneath every culture, the instinct of recognizing serpents that evolved before human language.
There is evidence that supports the latter hypothesis: the motifs are less common among people who never had the chance to develop the fear of serpents. In Ireland, where there are no snakes, the motif of fighting serpents was introduced in a much later period and is associated with Saint Patrick, who, incidentally, is known as the man who drove the serpents away, even though there probably were none in Ireland. Likewise, the people inhabiting most of Polynesia, who also lack snakes, simply lacked the story of the slayer-hero. The only one they have is Māui, who creates islands by catching them with his hook and restrains the sun by tying it to the roots of a tree; instead of a snake, the hero fights an eel. This observation, again, favors the snake-detection thesis: where there are serpents, there are slayer-heroes.
None of this forces us to throw out either reading. The serpent is the prime monster as well as the prototype of any concept of return, and the figure of a man raising a weapon over it is as old as mankind itself. Saint Michael standing over the serpent and pressing its head into the ground with one foot is only the latest reincarnation of the ancient myth of a fight between the two. The serpent has been destroyed countless times across many centuries, yet it continues to appear in new stories and wait in the grass, which is what its earliest creators would expect it to do.
Image Sources
- The mushhushshu serpent-dragon of the Ishtar Gate, Babylon (c. 575 BCE). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Sigurd Kills Fáfnir, Arthur Rackham (1911). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- The Archangel Michael, Guido Reni (c. 1636), Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Dragon detail from Nine Dragons, Chen Rong (1244), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Ouroboros from the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra (alchemical manuscript). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995
- Fontenrose, Joseph. Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959
- Gunkel, Hermann. Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1895
- Isbell, Lynne A. The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009
- Isbell, Lynne A. ‘Snakes as Agents of Evolutionary Change in Primate Brains.’ Journal of Human Evolution 51, no. 1 (2006): 1-35
- Wheeler, Brandon C., Brenda J. Bradley, and Jason M. Kamilar. ‘Predictors of Orbital Convergence in Primates: A Test of the Snake Detection Hypothesis of Primate Evolution.’ Journal of Human Evolution 61, no. 3 (2011): 233-242
- Van Le, Quan, et al. ‘Pulvinar Neurons Reveal Neurobiological Evidence of Past Selection for Rapid Detection of Snakes.’ PNAS 110, no. 47 (2013): 19000-19005
- Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales (ATU index). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004 (tale type ATU 300, ‘The Dragon-Slayer’)
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (Standard Babylonian version)
- Enūma Eliš (Babylonian creation epic), Tablets I-IV
- Rig Veda 1.32 (Indra and Vṛtra)
- Völsunga saga, chapters 18-20, and Fáfnismál (Poetic Edda)
- Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE), the slaying of Yamata-no-Orochi
- Bhāgavata Purāṇa, Canto 10, chapter 16 (Krishna and Kāliya)
- Bel and the Dragon (Daniel 14, Septuagint additions); Revelation 12:7-9; Numbers 21:4-9; 2 Kings 18:4
- Avesta, Zamyād Yašt (Yt. 19); Ferdowsi, Shāhnāmeh (Fereydun and Zahhāk / Aži Dahāka)
- Movses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians (5th c.), the Song of Vahagn
- Gan Bao, Soushen Ji (In Search of the Supernatural), 4th c. CE (Li Ji slays the serpent)
- Taçon, Paul S.C., Meredith Wilson, and Christopher Chippindale. ‘Birth of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land Rock Art and Oral History.’ Archaeology in Oceania 31 (1996): 103-124
- Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900 (Uktena)
- Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), c. 1260 (Saint George; Saint Martha and the Tarasque)
