Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (16 page)

Stories of other Greek dragons further complicate the situation. In Euripides’ play
Medea,
which describes Medea’s activities after she helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece, she runs into trouble with the law in Corinth after she murders its king and his daughter. To make her escape, she uses her magic to conjure dragons. Yet these creatures can fly. A text that has historically been attributed to Apollodorus describes them as “winged dragons” pulling a chariot. Yet the Roman poet Ovid writes that after pulling Medea’s chariot over great distance, the dragons “sloughed their aged skins of many years.” They had wings, a distinctly nonserpentine characteristic, but shed their skins just as snakes do. This hints at snakes being key for dragon inspiration, but venomous snakes help to explain only some of the physical appearance of dragons. When
it comes to their size, venomous snakes don’t provide much of a model at all.

Dinosaurs and their kin make an obvious choice for the ancestors of dragons since they were often very big and left behind skeletons that appear distinctly dragonlike in form. However, dinosaurs present a problem because their fossils are not found in Greece and are rare throughout much of the Mediterranean. Even so, some Greeks sailed to far-off places and may have encountered large reptile skeletons on their travels.

Pytheas, a Greek explorer, made it to Britain around 325 BC and seems to have traveled as far north as Scotland and as far west as Cornwall. If he really did make it that far west, he would have sailed along the Dorset coast, an area littered with the fossils of giant marine reptiles.

Toothy and fierce-looking plesiosaurs, pliosaurs, and ichthyosaurs are all commonly found eroding out of the rocks in this region. In fact, so many of these animals have been found in the area that it has come to be known as the Jurassic Coast. Pytheas would very likely have stopped along these shores and possibly encountered fossils along the way. And that is just the story of Pytheas. Himilco, a Carthagian explorer who was active roughly a hundred years earlier than Pytheas, journeyed to Spain, France, and England, and may have had similar encounters.

If a plesiosaur neck, or the neck of some closely related species, was found embedded in rock, how would people living long ago have made sense of it? Would they have come to the conclusion that it was the neck of a giant snakelike monster? Most large marine reptiles had sharp teeth too. These teeth were not anything like the fragile, venom-injecting fangs found in snakes but more robust and dragonlike. If just the head and neck of one of these animals were found, it seems plausible that this could have raised fears that such huge carnivores really existed. But there is more.

In
The Dragons of Eden,
Carl Sagan argues that we should consider the ancient environment where early mammals first lived when
thinking about the fears that humans have. Mammals evolved during the Mesozoic era, when reptiles ruled the world. Dinosaurs were everywhere, and the few mammals that were around were tiny rodentlike creatures that spent most of their time scurrying away from death in the form of
Velociraptor
and juvenile tyrannosaur teeth. For this reason, Sagan suggests that the appearance of any mammalian genes that coded for an inherent fear of and respect for large reptiles would have led to increased survival, and this fear would have been driven by natural selection to become common throughout the early mammal population.
45

In recent years, Sagan’s theory has gained a lot of support. A paper published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in 2011, which documented the interactions between preliterate Philippine hunter-gatherers and giant pythons, found that fifteen of fifty-eight people (26 percent) in the local population had been attacked by huge pythons during living memory. Most exhibited substantial scars from the bites made during the snakes’ attempts to grab hold of them. Moreover, a startling 16 percent of the people knew at least one tribe member who had been killed by the reptiles. The researchers behind the study counted up a total of six fatalities in the past generation.

One man named Dinsiweg was found inside the body of a large snake that was killed and cut open by his son in 1940. Another, a twenty-five-year-old man named Diladeg, did not return home from hunting one day and was found the following afternoon crushed to death in the coils of a python. Two children had been consumed by a python that slithered into their home just before sundown in 1973, and in the same year a woman named Pasing died from an infection that developed from a python bite.

The researchers learned from the people’s stories that most
attacking pythons were between 16 and 32 feet (5–10 meters) long, tended to make ambush attacks when men were walking through dense rain forest seeking game, and were most often fended off with large knives. What struck the scientists as astonishing, however, was that even with the availability of metal knives, fatalities still often occurred. They reasoned that in the days before the natives had metal knives, fatalities would have been far higher than the 9.6 percent of the population per generation that the giant snakes currently claim. They don’t give a proposed percentage, but even if it were 14 percent, that would be quite a lot. As a comparison, if 14 percent of the U.S. population were picked off by pythons in a generation, that would be more than 40 million people.

The shocking thing about this recent python study is that it provides good evidence that huge, nonvenomous snakes have been feeding on humans for a long time. So it raises the question: Were the depictions of the Babylonian Tiamat the result of sand viper characteristics being mixed with those of giant constrictors? Probably.

According to reports made by several Roman historians, in the midst of the First Punic War in the late summer of 256 BC, Roman troops heading toward Carthage (in Tunisia) were attacked by a great serpent when they came to a river. The following is an account by the historian Orosius:

Regulus, chosen by lot for the Carthaginian War, marched with his army to a point not far from the Bagradas River and there pitched his camp. In that place a reptile of astonishing size devoured many of the soldiers as they went down to the river to get water. Regulus set out with his army to attack the reptile. Neither the javelins they hurled nor the darts they rained upon its back had any effect. These glided off its horrible network of scales… so that the creature suffered no injury. Finally, when Regulus saw that it was sidelining a great number of his soldiers with its bites, was trampling them down by its charge, and driving them mad by its poisonous breath, he ordered ballistae [wooden devices similar to
catapults] brought up. A stone taken from a wall was hurled by a ballista; this struck the spine of the serpent and weakened the constitution of its entire body. The formation of the reptile was such that, though it seemed to lack feet, yet it had ribs and scales graded evenly, extending from the top of its throat to the lowest part of its belly and so arranged that the creature rested upon its scales as if on claws and upon its ribs as if on legs. But it did not move like the worm, which has a flexible spine and moves by first stretching its contracted parts in the direction of its tiny body and then drawing together the stretched parts. This reptile made its way by a sinuous movement, extending its sides first right and then left, so that it might keep the line of ribs rigid along the exterior arch of the spine; nature fastened the claws of its scales to its ribs, which extend straight to their highest point; making these moves alternately and quickly, it not only glided over levels, but also mounted inclines, taking as many footsteps, so to speak, as it had ribs. This is why the stone rendered the creature powerless. If struck by a blow in any part of the body from its belly to its head, it is crippled and unable to move, because wherever the blow falls, it weakens the spine, which stimulates the feet of the ribs and the motion of the body. Hence this serpent, which had for a long time withstood so many javelins unharmed, moved about disabled from the blow of a single stone and, quickly overcome by spears, was easily destroyed. Its skin was brought to Rome—it is said to have been one hundred and twenty feet in length—and for some time was an object of wonder to all.

The “serpent” is clearly a snake of some sort. It has ribs but no feet, moves sinuously, and glides over the ground. The creature’s “poisonous breath” can be explained by a foul smell from the river and, even though no snakes can eat multiple adult humans in such a short time, it is possible that numerous men were bitten and drowned by a single large snake. However, no snakes attain 120 feet (36 meters) in
length.
Titanoboa,
a python relative from the days of the dinosaurs, grew to 48 feet (15 meters), but snakes of such huge size have never coexisted with humans. Were the authors of the story just making this up? Or were they somehow getting their measurements wrong? In 2004, Richard Stothers at the Goddard Institute for Space Science
46
wrote about the Bagradas River incident in the journal
Isis,
proposing that the ancient reports of this snake mixed up 120 feet in length with the figure of 120 rib pairs (which the snake could have had). Moreover, he argued that even though large constrictors are not found north of the Sahara today, Pliny the Elder reported large snakes sometimes swimming in groups across the Red Sea from Ethiopia to Arabia. If this were true, he reasoned, they might have made it to the Bagradas River as well.

All of this hints that classical civilizations may have been encountering some very large constrictors in northern Africa, and when these stories are coupled with the hundreds of people who have died in living memory in the jaws of crocodiles, Sagan’s theories make a lot of sense. There might really be an ancient, genetically based fear of all reptiles present in mammals that is still being selected for by evolutionary forces. It is an intriguing idea to be sure, and one that could easily work in concert with fears of snakes and ancient reptile bones. Yet neither giant constrictors nor marine reptiles explain the fact that dragons ultimately evolved the ability to breathe fire.

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 years
47
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.