Dragons, today a symbol of the fantasy world populated by elves and orcs, not to mention publishing and other companies who use this symbol to evoke a feeling of mystery and majesty and the suspension of disbelief.

Are they so far from the mark? Consider the old maps of the world from the time when all of the corners of the world were not yet colored, and voyages of discovery were still possible. Around the blank edges of the known world fanciful and fierce creatures could be seen drawn with all the fantastic fearsomeness that the cartographer could imagine accompanied by the words “Here be Dragons”. These illustrations were not there just to fill out the page and add interest and enjoyment to the purveyors of the cartographer’s art. They were meant as a warning, a warning against traveling unprepared towards the edges of the world.

Dragons have come to us from the mists of antiquity through myths and legends and in some cases oral histories. But what evidence is there that these fierce creatures did in fact exist. The most obvious evidence would have to be palaeontological. Imagine the prehistoric hunter stone tipped spear in hand stalking his quarry through primeval forests when he stumble upon the massive bones of a dinosaur eroded out of the hill sides by the recent rains. He has never seen anything like this before and he hastens to include the other tribe members in his discovery. How do they explain such a large and frightening discovery. They make up a story about it based on their observations and their imaginations. Over time the dragon is created in the ethos of this band of people and the legend slowly spreads to other bands and other people, supported now and then by further evidence accidentally uncovered on the legends journey from the deepest antiquity to the popularized, commercialized present.

Almost all cultures have their dragons and I would submit that they all originate in similar ways and are propagated similarly through time and across space. The dragons that we in western cultures observe today in our popular literature and other media, is an amalgamation of the most prominent of our shared cultural myths. These serve to create a creature who embodies both evil and danger as well as beauty and goodness in equal measure depending on the end required by the story.

Dragons are a reflection of us, just as they are a creation of our culture developed over thousands of years. They tell us about ourselves as well as provide warning of the danger of the unknown in the world around us. Dragons provide a template onto which we can fix the most beautiful as well as the most monstrous of human nature, while at the same time representing the most dangerous of the mysteries of nature. In this way Dragons, those fierce creatures of antiquity, are both a reflection and a warning that have come to us from the past and serve to guide us by means both fair and foul to a happy and safe home.