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By Root 420 0

in the myths of most peoples, where it has been worshiped as a god, endowed with both beneficent and malevolent attributes, combatted as a monster, or attributed supernatural power. It is mentioned thirty-one times in Judaeo-Christian scriptures, starting with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Dragons are often associated with water and sometimes live in caves under lakes or in the ocean bottom. In medieval tales the dragon dried up rivers and caused drought, forcing inhabitants to pay an annual tribute of gold or fair maidens. Many heroes of mythology are dragon slayers: Marduk, Hercules, Apollo, St. Michael, St. George, Beowulf, King Arthur. Some mythologists conjecture that the male dragon slayer is a symbol that represents the shift from egalitarian societies to patriarchal societies. The real source of the dragon myth may be frilled lizards, or reptiles that spit a toxic venom. But more likely it comes from a prebiblical Babylonian myth of the prime female deity who was a dragon named Tiamat. She was associated with the flooding of the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the beginning of the growing season, and her ritual killing by Marduk is possibly the source of many of the dragon and dragon-slayer stories in the world.

Similarly, werewolves figure prominently in mythology. The peak of prosecutions for lycanthropy—the “condition” of a human taking on wolflike characteristics—was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France. The most famous case was that of Jean Grenier who, in 1603, boasted to three girls that he was a werewolf, telling them that a man “gave me a wolfskin cape; he wraps it around me, and every Monday, Friday and Sunday, and for about an hour at dusk every other day, I am a wolf, a werewolf. I have killed dogs and drunk their blood; but little girls taste better, and their flesh is tender and sweet, their blood rich and warm.” Looking at this tale with the distance of almost 400 years, it is likely nothing more than male boasting and posturing; but since several children had been murdered at the time Grenier was fingered and convicted. Why a wolf? The earliest myths are associated with a ceremony of a man putting on a wolf’s skin for protection from the cold, or to act as concealment when hunting for food. This mutated into the theme that the wearing of the skin passed on to the man great magical powers of strength, speed, and stealth, not just for hunting, but for exacting vengeance or gaining power over others. From here it was but a small step to changing the man into a wolf through the common mythic motif of shapeshifting, where creatures or objects can change into other creatures or objects, either at will or under special conditions. An evolutionary argument could also be made that, as pack hunters, wolves were a principal competitor to early humans in northern latitudes. Dogs, as loyal friends and noncompetitors to humans, do not generate such myths as wolves. (It also should be noted that werewolves did not have a monopoly on the genre. There were werebears, weretigers, werehyenas, werecrocodiles, and werejackals. Vampires were a type of werebat. Shapeshifting is found in countless myths, including the Burma-Assam tiger men who can share a tiger’s body, or the leopard men of certain regions of Africa.)

Telling stories and constructing myths about animals have obvious survival significance to humans living in a paleolithic environment. Most simply and directly, it is a form of pedagogy and a medium of knowledge transfer of important information about the flora and fauna of the local ecology. A simple story can relay to a child that a particular food is poisonous or a certain animal is dangerous. A myth codifies this knowledge into the permanent record of a people’s store of wisdom. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, for example, in his study of the !Kung San people of Africa, observed that their knowledge of the local ecology was “detailed and thorough enough to astonish and inform professional botanists and zoologists.” And this knowledge, he noted, was often exchanged around the campfire