CHAPTER XVI
The woman is one of the ‘wonders’. And the other wonder is the Dragon. The dragon is one of the oldest symbols of the human consciousness. The dragon and serpent symbol goes so deep in every human consciousness, that a rustle in the grass can startle the toughest ‘modern’ to depths he has no control over.
First and foremost, the dragon is the symbol of the fluid, rapid, startling movement of life within us. That startled life which runs through us like a serpent, or coils within us potent and waiting, like a serpent, this is the dragon. And the same with the cosmos.
From earliest times, man has been aware of a ‘power’ or potency within him — and also outside him — which he has no ultimate control over. It is a fluid, rippling potency which can lie quite dormant, sleeping, and yet be ready to leap out unexpectedly. Such are the sudden angers that spring upon us from within ourselves, passionate and terrible in passionate people: and the sudden accesses of violent desire, wild sexual desire, or violent hunger, or a great desire of any sort, even for sleep. The hunger which made Esau sell his birthright would have been called his dragon: later, the Greeks would even have called it a ‘god’ in him. It is something beyond him, yet within him. It is swift and surprising as a serpent, and overmastering as a dragon. It leaps up from somewhere inside him, and has the better of him.
Primitive man, or shall we say early man, was in a certain sense afraid of his own nature, it was so violent and unexpected inside him, always ‘doing things to him’. He early recognised the half-divine, half-demonish nature of this ‘unexpected’ potency inside him.
Sometimes it came upon him like a glory, as when Samson slew the lion with his hands, or David slew Goliath with a pebble. The Greeks before Homer would have called both these two acts ‘the god’, in recognition of the superhuman nature of the deed, and of the doer of the deed who was within the man. This ‘doer of the deed’, the fluid, rapid, invincible, even clairvoyant potency that can surge through the whole body and spirit of a man, this is the dragon, the grand divine dragon of his superhuman potency, or the great demonish dragon of his inward destruction. It is this which surges in us to make us move, to make us act, to make us bring forth something: to make us spring up and live. Modern philosophers may call it Libido or Elan Vital, but the words are thin, they carry none of the wild suggestion of the dragon.
And man ‘worshipped’ the dragon. A hero was a hero, in the great past, when he had conquered the hostile dragon, when he had the power of the dragon with him in his limbs and breast. When Moses set up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, an act which dominated the imagination of the Jews for many centuries, he was substituting the potency of the good dragon for the sting of the bad dragon, or serpents. That is, man can have the serpent with him or against him. When his serpent is with him, he is almost divine. When his serpent is against him, he is stung and envenomed and defeated from within. The great problem, in the past, was the conquest of the inimical serpent and the liberation within the self of the gleaming bright serpent of gold, golden fluid life within the body, the rousing of the splendid divine dragon within a man, or within a woman.
What ails men today is that thousands of little serpents sting and envenom them all the time, and the great divine dragon is inert. We cannot wake him to life, in modern days. He wakes on the lower planes of life: for a while in an airman like Lindbergh or in a boxer like Dempsey. It is the little serpent of gold that lifts these two men for a brief time into a certain level of heroism. But on the higher planes, there is no glimpse or gleam of the great dragon.
The usual vision of the dragon is, however, not personal but cosmic. It is in the vast cosmos of the stars that the dragon writhes and lashes. We see him in his maleficent aspect, red. But don’t let us forget that when he stirs green and flashing on a pure dark night of stars it is he who makes the wonder of the night, it is the full rich coiling of his folds which makes the heavens sumptuously serene, as he glides around and guards the immunity, the precious strength of the planets, and gives lustre and new strength to the fixed stars, and still more serene beauty to the moon. His coils within the sun make the sun glad, till the sun dances in radiance. For in his good aspect, the dragon is the great vivifier, the great enhancer of the whole universe.
So he persists still to the Chinese. The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life- maker, vivifier. There he coils, on the breasts of the mandarins’ coats, looking very horrific, coiling round the centre of the breast and lashing behind with his tail. But as a matter of fact, proud and strong and grand is the mandarin who is within the folds of the green dragon, lord of the dragon. — It is the same dragon which, according to the Hindus, coils quiescent at the base of the spine of a man, and unfolds sometimes lashing along the spinal way: and the yogi is only trying to set this dragon in controlled motion. Dragon-cult is still active and still potent all over the world, particularly in the east.
But alas, the great green dragon of the stars at their brightest is coiled up tight and silent today, in a long winter sleep. Only the red dragon sometimes shows his head, and the millions of little vipers. The millions of little vipers sting us as they stung the murmuring Israelites, and we want some Moses to set the brazen serpent aloft: the serpent which was ‘lifted up’ even as Jesus later was ‘lifted up’ for the redemption of men.
The red dragon is the kakodaimon, the dragon in his evil or inimical aspect. In the old lore, red is the colour of man’s splendour, but the colour of evil in the cosmic creatures or the gods. The red lion is the sun in his evil or destructive aspect. The red dragon is the great ‘potency’ of the cosmos in its hostile and destructive activity.
The agathodaimon becomes at last the kakodaimon. The green dragon becomes with time the red dragon. What was our joy and our salvation becomes with time, at the end of the time-era, our bane and our damnation. What was a creative god, Ouranos, Kronos, becomes at the end of the time-period a destroyer and a devourer. The god of the beginning of an era is the evil principle at the end of that era. For time still moves in cycles. What was the green dragon, the good potency, at the beginning of the cycle has by the end gradually changed into the red dragon, the evil potency. The good potency of the beginning of the Christian era is now the evil potency of the end.
This is a piece of very old wisdom, and it will always be true. Time still moves in cycles, not in a straight line. And we are at the end of the Christian cycle. And the Logos, the good dragon of the beginning of the cycle, is now the evil dragon of today. It will give its potency to no new thing, only to old and deadly things. It is the red dragon, and it must once more be slain by the heroes, since we can expect no more from the angels.
And, according to old myth, it is woman who falls most absolutely into the power of the dragon, and has no power to escape till man frees her. The new dragon is green or golden, green with the vivid ancient meaning of green which Mohammed took up again, green with that greenish dawn-light which is the quintessence of all new and life- giving light. The dawn of all creation took place in greenish pellucid gleam that was the shine of the very presence of the Creator. John of Patmos harks back to this when he makes the iris or rainbow which screens the face of the Almighty green like smaragd or emerald. And this lovely jewel-green gleam is the very dragon itself, as it moves out wreathing and writhing into the cosmos. It is the power of the Kosmodynamos coiling throughout space, coiling along the spine of a man, leaning forth between his brows like the Uraeus between the brows of a Pharaoh. It makes a man splendid, a king, a hero, a brave man gleaming with the gleam of the dragon, which is golden when it wreathes round a man.
So the Logos came, at the beginning of our era, to give men another sort of splendour. And that same Logos today is the evil snake of the Laocoon which is the death of all of us. The Logos which was like the great green breath of spring-time is now the grey stinging of myriads of deadening little serpents. Now we hav
e to conquer the Logos, that the new dragon gleaming green may lean down from among the stars and vivify us and make us great.
And no one is coiled more bitterly in the folds of the old Logos than woman. It is always so. What was a breath of inspiration becomes in the end a fixed and evil form, which coils in round like mummy clothes. And then woman is more tightly coiled even than man. Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self- determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself. The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant’, she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilisation higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon. All our present life-forms are evil. But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realise that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.
So, tragic and tortured by all the grey little snakes of modern shame and pain, she struggles on, fighting for ‘the best’, which is, alas, the evil best. All women today have a large streak of the policewoman in them. Andromeda was chained naked to a rock, and the dragon of the old form fumed at her. But poor modern Andromeda, she is forced to patrol the streets more or less in policewoman’s uniform, with some sort of banner and some sort of bludgeon — or is it called a baton! — up her sleeve, and who is going to rescue her from this? Let her dress up fluffy as she likes, or white and virginal, still underneath it all you can see the stiff folds of the modern policewoman, doing her best, her level best.
Ah God, Andromeda at least had her nakedness, and it was beautiful, and Perseus wanted to fight for her. But our modern policewomen have no nakedness, they have their uniforms. And who could want to fight the dragon of the cold form, the poisonous old Logos, for the sake of a policewoman’s uniform?
Ah woman, you have known many bitter experiences. But never, never before have you been condemned by the old dragon to be a policewoman.
O lovely green dragon of the new day, the undawned day, come, come in touch, and release us from the horrid grip of the evil-smelling old Logos! Come in silence, and say nothing. Come in touch, in soft new touch like a springtime, and say nothing. Come in touch, in soft new touch like a spring-time breeze, and shed these horrible policewoman sheaths from off our women, let the buds of life come nakedly!
In the days of the Apocalypse the old dragon was red. Today he is grey. He was red, because he represented the old way, the old form of power, kingship, riches, ostentation, and lust. By the days of Nero, this old form of ostentation and sensational lust had truly enough become evil, the foul dragon. And the foul dragon, the red one, had to give way to the white dragon of the Logos — Europe with the glorification of white: the white dragon. It ends with the same sanitary worship of white, but the white dragon is now a great white worm, dirty and greyish. Our colour is dirty-white, or grey.
But just as our Logos colour began dazzling white — John of Patmos insists on it, in the white robes of the saints — and ends in a soiled colourlessness, so the old red dragon started marvellously red, glowing golden and blood-red. He was bright, bright, bright red, like the most dazzling vermilion. This, this vivid gold-red was the first colour of the first dragon, far, far back under the very dawn of history. The farthest off men looked at the sky and saw in terms of gold and red, not in terms of green and dazzling white. In terms of gold and red, and the reflection of the dragon in a man’s face, in the far-off, far-off past, showed glowing brilliant vermilion. Ah then the heroes and the hero-kings glowed in the face red as poppies that the sun shines through. It was the colour of glory: it was the colour of the wild bright blood, which was life itself. The red, racing bright blood, that was the supreme mystery: the slow, purplish, oozing dark blood, the royal mystery.
The ancient kings of Rome, of the ancient Rome, which was really a thousand years behind the civilisation of the eastern Mediterranean, they painted their faces vermilion, to be divinely royal. And the Red Indians of North America do the same. They are not red save by virtue of this very vermilion paint, which they call ‘medicine’. But the Red Indians belong almost to the Neolithic stage of culture, and of religion. Ah, the dark vistas of time in the pueblos of New Mexico, when the men come out with faces glistening scarlet! Gods! they look like gods! It is the red dragon, the beautiful red dragon.
But he became old, and his life-forms became fixed. Even in the pueblos of New Mexico, where the cold life-forms are the life-forms of the great red dragon, the greatest dragon, even there the life-forms are really evil, and the men have a passion for the colour blue, the blue of the turquoise, to escape the red. Turquoise and Silver, these are the colours they yearn for. For gold is of the red dragon. Far- off down the ages gold was the very stuff of the dragon, its soft, gleaming body, prized for the glory of the dragon, and men wore soft gold for glory, like the Aegean and Etruscan warriors in their tombs. And it was not till the red dragon became the kakodaimon, and men began to yearn for the green dragon, and the silver arm-bands, that gold fell from glory and became money. What makes gold into money? the Americans ask you. And there you have it. The death of the great gold dragon, the coming of the green and silver dragon — how the Persians and Babylonians loved turquoise blue, the Chaldeans loved lapis lazuli; so far back they had turned from the red dragon! The dragon of Nebuchadnezzar is blue, and is a blue-scaled unicorn stepping proudly. He is very highly developed. The dragon of the Apocalypse is a much more ancient beast: but then, he is kakodaimon.
But the royal colour still was red: the vermilion and the purple, which is not violet but crimson, the true colour of living blood, these were kept for kings and emperors. They became the very colours of the evil dragon. They are the colours in which the apocalyptist clothes the great harlot woman whom he calls Babylon. The colour of life itself becomes the colour of abomination.
And today, in the day of the dirty-white dragon of the Logos and the Steel Age, the socialists have taken up the oldest of life-colours, and the whole world trembles at a suggestion of vermilion. For the majority today, red is the colour of destruction. ‘Red for danger’, as the children say. So the cycle goes round: the red and gold dragons of the Gold Age and the Silver Age, the green dragon of the Bronze Age, the white dragon of the Iron Age, the dirty- white dragon, or grey dragon of the Steel Age: and then a return once more to the first brilliant red dragon.
But every heroic epoch turns instinctively to the red dragon, or the gold: every non-heroic epoch instinctively turns away. Like the Apocalypse, where the red and the purple are anathema.
The great red dragon of the Apocalypse had seven heads, each of them crowned: which means his power is royal or supreme in its own manifestation. The seven heads mean he has seven lives, as many lives as a man has natures, or as there are ‘potencies’ to the cosmos. All his seven heads have to be smitten off, that is, man has another great series of seven conquests to make, this time over the dragon. The fight goes on.
The dragon, being cosmic, destroys a third part of the cosmos before he is cast down out of heaven into earth: he draws down a third part of the stars with his tail. Then the woman brings forth the child who is ‘to shepherd mankind with an iron flail’. Alas, if that is a prophecy of the reign of the Messiah, or Jesus, how true it is! For all men today are ruled with a flail of iron. This child is caught up to God: we almost wish the dragon had got him. And the woman fled into the wilderness. That is, the great cosmic mother has no place dn the cosmos of men any more. She must hide in the desert since she cannot die. — And there she hides, still during the weary three and a half mystic years which are still going on, apparently.
Now begins the second half of the Apocaly
pse. We enter the rather boring process of Danielesque prophecy, concerning the Church of Christ and the fall of the various kingdoms of the earth. We cannot be very much interested in the prophesied collapse of Rome and the Roman Empire.
CHAPTER XVII
But before we look at this second half, let us glance at the dominant symbols, especially at the symbols of number. The whole scheme is so entirely based on the numbers of seven, four and three, that we may as well try to find out what these numbers meant to the ancient mind.
Three was the sacred number: it is still, for it is the number of the Trinity: it is the number of the nature of God. It is perhaps from the scientists, or the very early philosophers, that we get the most revealing suggestions of the ancient beliefs. The early scientists took the extant religious symbol-ideas and transmuted them into true ‘ideas’. We know that the ancients saw number concrete — in dots or in rows of pebbles. And the number three was held by the Pythagoreans to be the perfect number, in their primitive arithmetic, because you could not divide it and leave a gap in the middle. This is obviously true of three pebbles. You cannot destroy the integrity of the three. If you remove one pebble on each side, it still leaves the central stone poised and in perfect balance between the two, like the body of a bird between the two wings. And even as late as the third century, this was felt as the perfect or divine condition of being.
Again, we know that Anaximander, in the fifth century, conceived of the Boundless, the infinite substance, as having its two ‘elements’, the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist, or fire and the dark, the great ‘pair’, on either side of it, in the first primordial creation. These three were the beginning of all things. This idea lies at the back of the very ancient division of the living cosmos into three, before the idea of God was separated out.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 990