Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  A heated question

  In the medieval period, dragons begin to blast flames from their mouths. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, completed in AD 1136, an early king named Vortigern is desperately trying to build a fortified tower in what seem to be the hills of Wales. Yet every time his men lay down stones to build the tower, the ground trembles and the structure is destroyed. Searching for answers, Vortigern turns to his wise men, who advise him to find a boy without a father and pour the child’s blood over the ground to calm it so the stones can be properly placed. Vortigern sends scouts out to find such a child, and they ultimately discover a boy dwelling in what is today the Welsh town of Carmarthen being ridiculed by other children as a bastard. Bingo.

  Upon learning how his blood is to be used, the boy tells Vortigern that his advisers have got things wrong. He argues that there are dragons beneath the building site guarding the land, that the ground cannot be built upon, and that spilling his blood will do nothing to solve the fortification problem. When the king orders the earth dug up, dragons are indeed discovered in “hollow stones” fighting with one another and “breathing out fire as they panted.” Vortigern promptly dismisses his old aides and declares that the boy shall become his new adviser. The boy goes on to support Vortigern as well as his successors Aurelius, Uther, and, eventually, Arthur. He is, of course, the legendary Merlin, and revealing the dragons underground is his first demonstration of magical ability.

  Even before the tales of Merlin and King Arthur, dragons breathe fire in the epic poem Beowulf. The story, first told at some point between AD 800 and 1100, features a dragon that starts setting fire to everything in the region after a valuable cup is stolen from a treasure trove it is guarding inside a burial mound. Beowulf, known in the poem as lord of the Geats, goes to fight the dragon and faces dangerous flames.

  The hoard-guard heard a human voice; his rage was enkindled. No respite now for pact of peace! The poison-breath of that foul worm first came forth from the cave, hot reek-of-fight: the rocks resounded. Stout by the stone-way his shield he raised, lord of the Geats, against the loathed-one; while with courage keen that coiled foe came seeking strife. The sturdy king had drawn his sword, not dull of edge, heirloom old; and each of the two felt fear of his foe, though fierce their mood. Stoutly stood with his shield high-raised the warrior king, as the worm now coiled together amain: the mailed-one waited. Now, spire by spire, fast sped and glided that blazing serpent. The shield protected, soul and body a shorter while for the hero-king than his heart desired, could his will have wielded the welcome respite but once in his life! But Wyrm denied it, and victory’s honors.

  Beowulf is mortally wounded while fighting, but his ally, the earl Wiglaf, comes forth and saves the day: “’Twas now, men say, in his sovran’s need that the earl made known his noble strain, craft and keenness and courage enduring. Heedless of harm, though his hand was burned, hardy-hearted, he helped his kinsman. A little lower the loathsome beast he smote with sword; his steel drove in bright and burnished; that blaze began to lose and lessen.” The presence of so much fire breathing in medieval dragon lore suggests that the trait was important and connected to something that people were genuinely scared of. But what?

  Humans have been using fire for more than four hundred thousand years47 and, as such, there has been a long time for people to develop a healthy sense of respect for the damage that fire can do. Long before fire came under our control, it was present in the environment in the form of forest fires spawned from lightning strikes. When animals are exposed to fire and smoke, they universally flee, so it makes sense for a certain level of inherent fire fear to be deeply seated in the human mind.

  Forest fires, however, do not create the illusion of anything breathing fire, so it is unlikely that these fires or even out-of-control campfires inspired the dragon’s breath. With this in mind, it is worth thinking about situations where fires can seem to be alive.

  Fire needs only two things, a fuel to burn and oxygen. Deny it either of these things and it eventually dies. In the case of wildfires, if a fire were to reach an area where combustible material was found in large amounts, like a meadow filled with dried grass, the fire would roar to life. If it were to reach a vent of natural gas, it could easily cause an explosion that would have scared ancient people senseless.

  As mentioned with Chimera, natural gas vents do exist in some places on Earth and may be connected to fire breathing by being associated with some of the same scents as those emanating from tar deposits. So it is possible the concept of the fire-breathing dragon stems from the same environmental conditions responsible for Chimera. However, dragon legends from the Middle Ages onward frequently place dragons in subterranean locations and usually describe them as guarding treasure. Beowulf’s dragon is living in a burial mound where ancient valuables are hidden away, and Merlin’s dragons are living in stones beneath the foundation of Vortigern’s castle. Smaug, from Lord of the Rings, lives under the Lonely Mountain and has so many coins in his trove that many have become embedded in his underbelly. Even J. K. Rowling presents a dragon in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows guarding treasure deep below the wizard bank Gringotts. All of this hints that surface features, like the natural gas vents in Turkey, are probably not closely associated with these monsters.

  Is flammable gas found underground? Oh yes. In fact, it is much more likely for miners to run into explosive gas than it is for people walking around aboveground. Moreover, miners need light to see what they are doing and have a long history of bringing open flames with them into the depths.

  Imagine some ancient miners digging down in search of valuable resources. While holding torches to see what they are doing, the miners chip away at some rock and suddenly open up a vent that releases a burst of gas at them.48 A terrible fire would light up the cave, seemingly “breathing” forth from behind the rock. It would not be much of a stretch for people seeing such a sight, who had no understanding of combustion, to believe that there was a monster hiding behind the rocks attacking them with a blast of flame.

  This scenario explains the presence of dragons underground, explains their ability to breathe fire, and can even explain why people perceived them as large and powerful, since a really big combustion event could easily sound like the roaring of a huge beast. Indeed, the dragons that Vortigern’s men find with Merlin’s guidance below the hills of Wales could have been sources of flammable gases released by digging and ignited by torches. Moreover, Wales had vast coal deposits in its hills in the days before the Industrial Revolution. Based upon what we know today of coal deposits, we can guess that the gas in question was either methane, which can both suffocate miners and blow them up, or hydrogen sulfide gas, which stinks like rotten eggs, is poisonous, and is also explosive.

  One has to wonder if Merlin caught the scent of methane or hydrogen sulfide gas in the air, knew about the chemistry of coal mines, told Vortigern to have his men dig because he figured the chances were good that their torches would light something up along the way, and assumed they would view his ability to predict such explosive fire as magic. Moreover, not only does Merlin’s hometown of Carmarthen sit right next to the Welsh coal fields but the type of coal in the area and the geologic setting are both highly conducive to coal gas explosions. If true, it seems appropriate to consider Merlin more of a geologist than a wizard.49

  But as clearly as gases associated with coal can explain the dragons in the Merlin story, Beowulf presents a different situation. In that tale, the dragon awakens and starts setting fire to the land after a valuable goblet has been stolen from a treasure the dragon guards in a burial mound. In this case, it is not mining that awakens the dragon but thievery. How a theft could possibly start a fire might seem vexing, but fortunately two researchers, Elizabeth Barber, a linguist and archaeologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and her husband, Paul Barber, a research associate at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angel
es, put their minds to this task and proposed a rather brilliant solution at the Fifteenth Annual Indo-European Conference held at UCLA in 2003.

  In analyzing the Beowulf text, they noticed there are only six concrete elements present in the dragon battle of the story. First, someone takes a cup from an old burial site. Then fire erupts and spreads. Near the entrance to the burial site, Beowulf stabs at the source of the flames but is unable to kill the creature blasting the fire out. The flames are foul-smelling. Beowulf’s ally Wiglaf later stabs the monster and this time the flames weaken and die out. Finally, when Wiglaf goes inside the burial site, the line reads, “No vestige now was seen of the serpent: the sword had ta’en him,” suggesting that Wiglaf’s blade annihilated the monster, leaving behind no dead dragon to describe.

  The Barbers argue that there is a lot of truth to the tale. Neolithic and Iron Age people in Europe often built chambers for their dead, where they placed many valuables, including dead pets and horses, for their friends and relatives to carry with them into the afterlife. These burial chambers frequently had mounds heaped over them, and the sediment was often so fine that it effectively sealed the tomb aerobically from the surface environment. Archaeologists have noted in recent years that the sealing effect of these mounds was so significant that methane-producing bacteria, which normally live in the oxygen-poor human and animal intestines, are able to expand their range and consume much more than waste inside the gut. As they spread, they produce lots of methane, which builds up inside the small, well-sealed, mound.

  Methane can smell bad as it burns, and for this reason the Barbers propose that the dragon in Beowulf is nothing more than a burst of methane escaping from a tomb that a torch-holding grave robber opened up and accidentally set ablaze. This is why the flames spouted by the dragon smell foul and why, after the dragon has “died,” presumably because all of the methane has been consumed, Wiglaf can find no trace of the creature. There was no creature, just one imagined by those who could not comprehend flames leaping out of a burial mound all on their own.

  It is worth noting, though, that while fire-breathing dragons are clearly present in the tales of Beowulf and the early Merlin stories, neither Tiamat nor Dracos, the creature in the story of the Golden Fleece, is ever described as having this ability. For that matter, fire-breathing dragons are not found in any Babylonian, Egyptian, Inca, or Native American mythology. There is a reasonable chance that this is linked to climate and geology.

  It is well known that the Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Incas, and many other people built extensive tombs where they sealed away their dead, but methane explosions inside pyramids and other burial structures are unheard of. Part of the reason for this is related to the larger size of the tombs. Some Egyptian pyramids had vents running between different rooms, and this, along with their size, may have been enough to keep any methane that did get produced from accumulating. However, the arid climate where these people lived also played a role.

  Dense and moist soils, which are common in northern Europe, allow almost no gases to pass through them. When used for building burial facilities, this soil creates the perfect gas trap. In contrast, dry and sandy soils, like those found in the Middle East and in the mountainous areas where the Inca dwelled, readily allow gases to pass through them. Under these conditions, even corpses buried behind a wall of soil inside a cave or pyramid would not have ended up in an oxygen-starved environment, since oxygen would constantly leak through any erected sediment wall. These geologic realities, along with the presence of extensive coal mines in Wales, may be why fire-breathing dragons seem to exist as monsters only in Europe.

  But geology does not provide a perfect explanation for the phenomenon of fire breathing when Asia is taken into consideration. “Fire pit graves” have historically been described in the Yangtze region of China, where grave robbers foolish enough to carry torches as they broke into well-sealed tombs were met with fiery explosions. The geologic conditions in many regions of China were effectively very similar to those in northern Europe, and to make the situation even more dangerous, tombs built during the Han dynasty (c. 200 BC–c. AD 200) were often coated with thick layers of sticky clay. Robert Lee Thorp, a professor of Chinese art history and archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, explains that the tombs easily trapped methane from decaying organic matter inside the chamber and that fires were often started by grave robbers who created sparks with their shovels. He also notes that Wang Ch’ung, a scholar who lived in China during this period, wrote that “flames shot out of a burial chamber and burned to death several hundred persons nearby.”

  A closer look at Wang Ch’ung’s writings reveals the tale of two dead princesses. The myth describes the princesses as having had hatred in their hearts, and when people came to open the coffin of the first princess, a foul smell spread out and killed many. When the grave of the second princess was opened, the fire that incinerated hundreds blasted out. This hints that the malevolent spirits of the princesses themselves were somehow playing a part in these catastrophes, but it backs away from directly linking the events to the presence of monsters and definitely does not make a connection to dragons.

  The Chinese did believe in dragons though. They even had a dragon in their stories known as Fu-ts’ang lung who functioned as a guardian of hoards, priceless jewels, and precious metals within the deepest and darkest vaults of Earth. Yet descriptions of this dragon breathing fire are not found in any art or literature. Part of the reason for this might be because Chinese dragons had a long history of not being viewed as monsters at all.

  From dragon to deity

  Today, good dragons, like the beasts in Rob Cohen’s DragonHeart, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, and Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’s How to Train Your Dragon, are as common as bad ones, but benevolent dragons are not a modern invention. The scholar Wang Fu, who was active during the Han dynasty, did not describe dragons as evil. Instead, he wrote about them as good and whimsical godlike creatures.

  Like Zeus, Hera, and Apollo of the Greek pantheon, the Chinese dragons could fly, even if they were wingless; had magical powers, allowing them to control natural events (like the weather); and had tremendous shape-shifting capacities. They often brought rainfall to farmers whose lands were suffering droughts and luck to those in need. They were sometimes capricious in their ways, but mostly well-meaning.

  Dragons were almost always associated with power, and numerous Chinese lineages claimed descent from unions that took place between mortals and dragons disguised in human form. The robes of the emperors were even adorned with the five-toed imperial dragon as a symbol of their status. However, unlike the gods of classical Greece, the dragons of China were clearly animalistic.

  Wang Fu describes them as carrying the features of nine distinct entities, “The dragon’s horns resemble those of a stag, his head that of a camel, his eyes those of a demon, his neck that of a snake, his belly that of a clam, his scales those of a carp, his claws those of an eagle, his soles those of a tiger, his ears those of a cow.”50 Dragons were obviously believed to be creatures of mixed qualities, and paleontologically this makes sense. In the ancient Chinese text I Ching, which dates back to around 800 BC, it is noted that finding dragon bones in fields was viewed as an omen of good luck.51 This work is clearly talking about fossils turning up in Chinese soil, but from Wang Fu’s description, these “dragon bones” were not just the bones of ancient reptiles. China is loaded with other fossilized animals, including camels, cows, stags, clams, carp, etc. It seems that any fossilized bones, whether they were mammal, bird, reptile, fish, or invertebrate, simply became classified as having belonged to dragons.

  The mixed traits were not just physical, though; ethically, dragons were also somewhat chimeric. While demons are bad, and tigers, eagles, and snakes are all predatory, camels, cows, stags, clams, and carp are all benign animals that play important roles in human life as either service beasts or food. Moreover, Wang Fu wrote that dragons had exactly 1
17 scales. Of these scales, 81 were infused with yang energy, which is a positive energy associated with goodness, and 36 were infused with negative yin energy. So they were mostly filled with yang but carrying enough yin to lead them to sometimes behave badly.

  With the tomb guardian Fu-ts’ang lung, such a mixed description makes sense. Here was a dragon that was a protector of the dead and their belongings fulfilling a noble role, but also the ruler of an environment that generated deadly earthquakes and was filled with poisonous and sometimes explosive gases. In a way, this dragon served a purpose that was much like that of Pele in Hawaii, and he was in good company.

  The sky-dwelling dragon of Chinese myth, Shen-lung, fits equally well into this dual persona. Best known as the storm bringer, Shen-lung had a terrible roar that could shake the entire landscape. The roar of this beast clearly invokes the idea of thunder, which would have been understandably frightening to ancient people. However, just as the storms that produce these effects can be scary and sometimes damaging, they are vital to human life. Without rain, there would be famine, and for this reason the dragon was a being embodying the two sides of life, good and evil, life and death.

  To a certain extent, good, or at least neutral, dragonlike creatures found their way into the myths of other cultures. The Moki Indians, who lived in what is today the state of Arizona, worshipped a serpent known as Baho-li-kong-ya. Drawings of this beast often resemble a rattlesnake, which is logical considering where the Moki were living. Baho-li-kong-ya even had horns on its head just like the ancient drawings of Tiamat, but what is fascinating about this Moki creature is that it was also a fertility symbol. There are many snakes and snakelike beings in Egyptian mythology that also were not evil.