The Penguin Book of Dragons

by The Penguin Book of Dragons (retail) (epub)

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  The examples before expressed being all extraordinary and beside nature, do not conclude, but that there is an ordinary hatred betwixt men and dragons, and therefore in the discourse of their enemies, men must have the first place, as their most worthy adversary, for both dragons have perished by men, and men by dragons, as may appear by these stories following.

  When the region of Helvetia [Switzerland] began first to be purged from noisome beasts, there was a horrible dragon found neer a countrey town called Wilser, who did destroy all men and beasts that came within his danger in the time of his hunger, insomuch that that town and the fields there to adjoyning, was called Dedwiler, that is, a village of the wildernesse, for all the people and inhabitants had forsaken the same, and fled to other places. There was a man of that town whose name was Winckelreidt, who was banished for man-slaughter. This man promised if he might have his pardon, and be restored again to his former inheritance, that he would combate with that Dragon, and by Gods help destroy him, which thing was granted unto him with great joyfulnesse. Wherefore he was recalled home, and in the presence of many people went forth to fight with the dragon, whom he slew and overcame, whereat for joy he lifted up his sword imbrued in the dragons bloud, in token of victory, but the bloud distilled down from his sword upon his body, and caused him instantly to fall down dead. And thus this noble conqueror, a man worthy to be remembred in all ages and nations, who had strength to kill the dragon being alive, yet had no power to resist the venom of his bloud, he being dead. But had it not been that his hand had been before imbrewed in the bloud of a man, I do not believe that the bloud of a dragon could have fallen so heavy upon him. But this is the judgment of God, either to punish murder in the same kinde, or else to teach us, that we should not rejoice in our own merits, lest God see it and be angry. For our Saviour Christ forbade his disciples that they should rejoice that the Devils were subject to them; and therefore much lesse may we poor creatures rejoice for overcoming men or beasts.

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  There be also certain little dragons called in Arabia, Vesga, and in Catalonia, dragons of houses, these when they bite leave their teeth behind them, so as the wound never ceaseth swelling as long as the teeth remain therein, and therefore for the better cure thereof, the teeth are drawn forth and so the wound will soon be healed. And thus much for the hatred betwixt men and dragons, now we will proceed to other creatures.

  The greatest discord is betwixt the eagle and the dragon, for the vultures, eagles, swans and dragons are enemies one to another. The eagles, when they shake their wings, make the dragons afraid with their ratling noise, then the dragon hideth himself within his den, so that he never fighteth but in the air, either when the eagle hath taken away his young ones and he to recover them flyeth aloft after her, or else when the eagle meeteth him in her nest, destroying her egges and young ones; for the eagle devoureth the dragons and little serpents upon earth, and the dragons again and serpents do the like against the eagles in the air. Yea many times the dragon attempteth to take away the prey out of the eagles talons, both on the ground and in the air, so that there ariseth betwixt them a very hard and dangerous fight . . .

  In the next place we are to consider the enmity that is betwixt dragons and elephants, for so great is their hatred one to the other, that in Ethiopia the greatest dragons have no other name but elephant-killers.28 Among the Indians also the same hatred remaineth, against whom the dragons have many subtile inventions. For besides the great length of their bodies, wherewithal they claspe and begirt the body of the elephant, continually biting of him until he fall down dead, and in the which fall they are also bruised to pieces, for the safeguard of themselves they have this device: they get and hide themselves in trees, covering their head and letting the other part hang down like a rope. In those trees they watch until the elephant come to eat and crop of the branches, then suddenly before he be aware, they leap into his face and dig out his eyes, then do they clasp themselves about his neck and with their tails or hinder-parts beat and vex the elephant until they have made him breathlesse, for they strangle him with their fore-parts, as they beat them with the hinder, so that in this combat they both perish. And this is the disposition of the dragon that he never setteth upon the elephant, but with the advantage of the place and namely from some high tree or rock.

  Sometimes again a multitude of dragons do together observe the paths of the elephants & cross those paths they tie together their tails as it were in knots, so that when the elephant cometh along in them, they insnare his legs and suddenly leap up to his eyes, for that is the part they aim at above all other, which they speedily pull out, and so not being able to do him any harm, the poor beast delivereth himself from present death by his own strength, and yet through his blindenesse received in that combat, he perisheth by hunger, because he cannot choose his meat by smelling, but by his eye-sight.

  There is no man living that is able to give a sufficient reason for this contrariety in nature betwixt the elephant and the dragon, although many men have labored their wits and strained their inventions to finde out the true causes thereof, but all in vain, except this be one that followeth. The elephants bloud is said to be the coldest of all other beasts, and for this cause it is thought by most writers that the dragons in the summer time do hide themselves in great plenty in the waters where the elephant cometh to drink, and then suddenly they leap up upon his ears, because those places cannot be defended with his trunck, and there they hang fast and suck out all the bloud of his body, until such a time as the poor beast through faintnesse fall down and die, and they being drunk with his bloud do likewise perish in the fall.

  The Gryffins are likewise said to fight with the dragons and overcome them. The panther also is an enemy unto the dragons and driveth them many times into their dens. There is a little bird called captilus, by eating of which the dragon refresheth himself when he is wearied in hunting of other beasts . . .

  In the next place I will passe unto the poyson and venom of dragons, omitting all poetical discourses about the worshipping and transmutation of dragons from one kinde to another, such as are the hairs of Orpheus, or the teeth of the dragon which Cadmus slew, into armed men, and such like fables, which have no shew nor appearance of truth, but are only the inventions of men to utter those things in obscure terms, which they were afraid to do in plain speeches.

  It is a question whether dragons have any venom or poison in them, for it is thought that he hurteth more by the wound of his teeth, then by his poison. Yet in Deuteronomy, Moses speaketh of them as if they had poyson, saying: Their wine is as the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps.29 So also Heliodorus speaketh of certain weapons dipped in the poison of dragons.30 For which cause we are to consider that they wanting poison in themselves become venomous two manner of ways: first, by the place wherein they live, for in the hotter countries they are more apt to do harm then in the colder and more temperate . . . A second cause why poison is supposed to be in dragons is for that they often feed upon many venomous roots and therefore their poison sticketh in their teeth, whereupon many times the party bitten by them seemeth to be poisoned, but this falleth out accidentlly, not from the nature of the dragon, but from the nature of the meat which the dragon eateth. And this is it which Homer knew and affirmed in his verses, when he described a dragon making his den neer unto the place where many venomous roots and herbs grew and by eating whereof he greatly annoyeth mankinde when he biteth them . . . And therefore Aelianus saith well that when the dragon meaneth to do most harm to men, he eateth deadly poysonful herbs, so that if he bite after them, many not knowing the cause of the poyson, and seeing or feeling venom by it, do attribute that to his nature which doth proceed from his meat. Besides his teeth which bite deep, he also killeth with his tail, for he will so begirt and pinch in the body that he doth gripe it to death and also the strokes of it are so strong that either they ki
ll thereby forthwith or else wound greatly with the same, so that the strokes of his tail are more deadly than the biting of his teeth . . .

  Their mouth is small, and by reason thereof they cannot open it wide to bite deep, so as their biting maketh no great pain; and those kinde of dragons which do principally fight with eagles are defended more with their tails then with their teeth, but yet there are some other kinde of dragons, whose teeth are like the teeth of bears, biting deep and opening their mouth wide, wherewith all they break bones and make many bruises in the body and the males of this kinde bite deeper then the females, yet there followeth no great pain upon the wound.

  The cure thereof is like to the cure for the biting of any other beast wherein there is no venom and for this cause there must be nothing applied thereunto which cureth venomous bitings, but rather such things as are ordinary in the cure of every ulcer.

  The seed of grasse, commonly called hay-dust, is prescribed against the biting of dragons. The barble being rubbed upon the place where a scorpian of the earth, a spider, a sea or land-dragon biteth doth perfectly cure the same. Also the head of a dog or dragon which hath bitten any one, being cut off and flayed, and applied to the wound with a little Euphorbium is said to cure the wound speedily . . .31

  In the next place, for the conclusion of the history of the dragon, we will take our farewell of him in the recital of his medicinal vertues, which are briefly these that follow:

  First, the fat of a dragon dryed in the sun is good against creeping ulcers and the same mingled with honey and oyl helpeth the dimnesse of the eyes at the beginning. The head of a dragon keepeth one from looking asquint and if it be set up at the gates and dores, it hath been thougth in ancient time to be very fortunate to the sincere worshippers of God. The eyes being kept till they be stale, and afterwards beat into an oyl with honey made into ointment, keep any one that useth it from the terrour of night-visions and apparitions . . .

  And thus will I conclude the history of the dragon with this story following out of Porphyrius concerning the good successe which hath been signified unto men and women, either by the dreams or sight of Dragons. Mammea, the mother of Alexander Severus the Emperor, the night before his birth, dreamed that she brought forth a little dragon, so also did Olympia, the mother of Alexander the Great, and Pomponia, the mother of Scipio Africanus. The like prodigy gave Augustus hope that he should be emperor. For when his Mother Aetia came in the night time unto the temple of Apollo, and had set down her bed or couch in the temple among other matrons, suddenly she fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed that a dragon came to her and clasped about her body and so departed without doing her any harm. Afterwards the print of a dragon remained perpetually upon her belly, so as she never durst any more be seen in any bath. The Emperor Tiberius Caesar had a dragon which he daily fed with his own hands and nourished like good fortune. At the last it happened that this Dragon was defaced with the biting of emmets, and the former beauty of his body much obscured.32 Wherefore the emperor grew greatly amazed thereat, and demanding a reason thereof of the wisemen, he was by them admonished to beware the insurrection of the common people. And thus with these stories representing good and evill by the dragon, I will take my leave of this good and evill serpent.

  DWELLERS BELOW1

  While Edward Topsell was a quintessential armchair explorer, his near contemporary the German Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) was a daring adventurer. Throughout his life, Kircher nursed a gnawing obsession with the idea that there were habitable lands beneath the surface of the earth. In 1638, he was so intrigued by the possibility that volcanoes provided gateways to these lightless realms that he had himself lowered into the active crater of Mount Vesuvius at the Gulf of Naples! A few decades later, Kircher published his lavishly illustrated, two-volume Subterranean World (Mundus subterraneus), a sprawling potpourri of scientific knowledge and folkloric accretion about the geography and ecology of subterranean places, with long digressions on the existence of underworld megafauna, most notably dragons. Gathering his information from ancient and medieval authorities as well as the testimonies of early modern scholars, Kircher affirmed the existence of dragons not only in the distant past but also in contemporary Europe. His work was a veritable treasure trove of early modern dragon lore. Whether nesting in subterranean caverns or in flight between remote aeries in the Swiss Alps, dragons persisted in the early modern period as a carnivorous menace haunting the fringes of human civilization.

  There is a great deal of debate among writers with regards to dragons: do animals of this sort actually exist in nature, or, as is often the case in many other things, can they only be found in fables? For I was also stubbornly undecided for a long time as to whether these animals have ever in fact existed. At last, however, it was necessary for me to set aside my doubts, which I did easily, in light of having not only read excerpts from a variety of established authors, but also having heard the accounts of trustworthy eyewitnesses. Because monstrous animals of this kind quite often make their nests and rear their young in underground caverns, we assert with a solid basis that they are a verifiable kind of subterranean species, in accordance with the worthy topic of this book.

  We know for a fact from recent writers that this kind of animal is of two types: one with wings, the other without. As to whether the first is in fact a living creature, no one can doubt this, nor should he, unless he dared to contradict Holy Scripture (itself an unspeakable act), where in the Book of Daniel mention is quite plainly made of the dragon Bel, whose cult was maintained by the Babylonians.2 Dragons are also mentioned in various other places in Scripture, and it is quite plainly stated that animals of this sort make their lairs in the hidden depths of the earth; and that, when any means of egress is found, they emerge to cause great harm both to animals and to humans . . .

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  So let us go forward to those accounts which describe not only bipedal dragons, but the four-footed variety as well . . . All say that the remote fastnesses and inaccessible caves of the Swiss Alps sustain a population of dragons, which delight in such places. Even now, according to the memories of men of recent generations, these creatures can be found there. Thus it is impossible to doubt the truth of these amazing monsters. But I shall also here treat of flying dragons, which witnesses describe as visible in the air by the great flapping of their wings. The lesser kind of this variety, with which I shall begin, are the notorious flying snakes known to inhabit the land of the Egyptians. They are depicted in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of that nation. Pliny, Aelian, and Solinus confirm that to this very day it invariably happens that winged snakes come from Arabia to Egypt after the flooding of the Nile has occurred. Once there, their offspring are born as insects in the decaying matter of the muddy slime left behind by the flood.

  In 1660, in the month of November, a Roman named Lanio was in the coastal marshes trapping birds. Instead of finding birds, he ran into a dragon about the size of a very large vulture. He judged it to be a bird and unloaded his shotgun into the creature. Wounding its wing in this way, he succeeded in enraging the beast. Then, in counterattack, the dragon charged the hunter, propelling itself headlong with a semi-flying run. When the hunter realized that he had used up his supply of ammunition, he cut its throat, and it died. After he had returned home on that same evening, he died himself, either from the toxicity of the creature’s blood or from the virulence of its breath. His entire body was suffused with poison. Since this was a matter of concern to the entire city, it occurred to a certain very curious person, who had been informed of the incident by a relative of the deceased hunter, to go to the location where the struggle had taken place. There he found the rotting body of the dragon. So that he could in all truthfulness bear witness to the matter, he brought back the dragon’s head to the city. This was conveyed to me even as I wrote this treatise by the most expert Lord Jerome Lancta, curate of Cardinal Baberini’s museum. This head was
very carefully examined and I received the report that it was indeed a true dragon, with a double row of teeth just as one can find in a snake’s mouth. The dragon itself was bipedal; and it had the bizarre feature of webbed feet, like those of a duck. It is on display for all to see in my own museum. It is an example of the bipedal type of winged dragon.