The Dragons of Somerset by Roy Snelling

Author:Roy Snelling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roy Snelling
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

In ancient Greece ‘Typhon’ was the final son of Gaia, the Earth goddess, being fathered by Tartarous. From the waist down Typhon’s body was formed from numerous coiling serpents. His wings blacked out the light of the sun. His heads touched the stars. It was later thought that the fire and lava from Mount Etna was Typhon’s fire, as Zeus had buried him under the Earth. Our modern word ‘typhoon’ comes, via the Persians and Arabs, from the Greek Typhon. A ‘Ladon’, a serpent-like dragon, was entwined around the tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, where it guarded the golden apples (Garden of Eden?). The Ladon could have up to 100 heads and was associated with the constellation of Draco. With the death of Ladon the Goddess Hera, consort of Zeus, set his image among the stars, which to this day we can see as the constellation of Draco (Latin for Drakon). But an alternative to this storey is that the ‘new’ gods of the ancient Greeks did battle with the ‘old’ gods. One of the old gods, Drakon, who was lord of chaos, was cast into the sky by Athena. The constellation of Draco includes the star ‘Thuban’, which was the pole star in 2,700 BCE, the early Bronze Age. The ‘Lernaean-Hydra’ was a dragon-like water serpent with venomous breath, blood and fangs. It was the daughter of Typhon and Echidna. It could have 7 or 9 heads. If a head was cut off it became immortal. The Ladon was eventually slain by Herakles. The Pytho (or Python) was an earth dragon that guarded Delphi. It was slain by the Sun-God, Apollo, who then took the Delphic Oracle as his own. Another child of Typhon and Echidna was the Colchian-Dragon. It never slept, had a crest on its head and 3 tongues. The Ismenian dragon guarded the spring of Ismene at Thebes. This dragon was slain by Cadmus. In Greek mythology the spirit of storms was a giant chimera that could take on many forms. But all these forms consistently have claws, a scaly tale and breath fire.

Staying in Ancient Greece we also have the rod or ‘caduceus’ of Hermes, which is in the form of a winged staff surmounted by a winged sun disk with two snakes entwined around the staff. The caduceus was an ancient astrological symbol of commerce. It was not until the 7 th. century CE that the caduceus became associated with medicine. It was then based upon the hermetic principle of using the planets to heal the sick. Hermes as a herald was a messenger of the Gods who conducted the dead to the other side. He was also a protector of merchants and thieves. The Greek word for dragon, ‘drakon’, actually means to see or to watch.

Besides dragon stories in Germanic and Greek mytholoy there are references to dragons in Slav, Celtic and Latin lore. As mentioned in chapter 3, there are at least 89 dragon stories in the British Isles, many relating to Celtic lands rather than the tales brought in by the Germanic / Norse peoples.

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