Dragons!
 

So, does anyone else here like dragons? I'v liked them since... well, i've been drawing them since seventh grade, but liked them before that.

I'm quite fond of dragons, probably from playing Dungeons & Dragons far too much. :D

O0O0h, I like dragons too. I like to look at dragon fanart. Although, most of the time, I can't find it in large quantities.

I like dragons. They emanate power and ferociousness, two things I admire.

I like friendly dragons preferably with glasses. Koosalagoopagoop obviously is fantastic but he's a bit like Chorlton from 70s animation Chorlton and The Wheelies. Not many of you are likely to remember across Snodgrass from Puddle Lane who was the best friend of the wizard played by Neil Innes, the unpleasant minstrel from Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

Remember Scorch? He was the best ventriloquist dummy ever. He really blew fire.

Funny how there are dragons are in cultures round the round. Memories of dinosaurs perhaps, breathing misty/smokey breath on chilly mornings?

Yeah, it is really fascinating that in virtually every human culture, even that of the Inuit in the Canadian and Alaskan coasts, there is some sort of dragon concept/myth(?), or some belief in intelligent, reptile-like beings. The problem with the dinosaur theory, though, is that the dinosaurs, at least in the forms that we think of as dinosaurs(as opposed to BIRDS), supposedly became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, while the first hominids did not appear until a bit over 3 million years ago, and true humans, ie Homo sapiens, did not appear until around 30 thousand years ago, long, long after the dinosaurs died out. There is simply no way that any human, or even any true primate, had ever actually seen a dinosaur. While in some cultures, especially those of the Mongolians and Chinese, belief in dragons may have been influenced by finding dinosaur bones, which are very common in that part of the world, that is not the case in others. The Houmas Indians of southern Louisiana, for example, had a belief in a tribe of intelligent, upright-walking, scaly-skinned lizard or dragon-like beings that they called the "LeTeche". At the time of the last dinosaurs, that entire regions was still under the Gulf of Mexico, so there are no dino fossils even found there at all. Belief in dragons also appears in cultures on islands that formed volcanically, long after the last dinosaurs were gone, so there are no fossils there, either, and these same people clearly know the differences between dragons as most people know them, and large lizards and crocodiles which have evolved on those islands. It DOES make you wonder, though-since the universally widespread belief in dragons or other intelligent reptilians could not have stemmed from encounters with dinosaurs, or even their fossilized remains in most cases, just where DID these beliefs come from?

pitbulllady

Yes That's totally true. No human ever saw a dinosaur (except their bird descendents but that's a different matter). However something us and the rest of the mammals presumably descended from was around the same time and would have probably interacted with them on some level, either running away or snatching eggs.

Could reactions to certain forms be written into us? A chimp who's never seen a snake will react with great caution to an even inanimate snake-like object and probably most mammals feel something similar. Do they all dream of dragons too?

I think they'd come from several sources; 1) dinosaur bones, 2) tales of dragons carried by storytellers and merchants, and 3) crocodiles. Those people you mentioned in lousiana seems more like they beieved in somehtingmore like an intelligent crocodile rather than dragons per say, htough I haven't researched it, so I don't know.

I don't know, but it would really be interesting to find out exactly what animals dream, and how their concepts of things work. Chimps, even those born and raised in captivity, to a mother born and raised in captivity, who's never seen a snake, are inherently afraid of them, while human children who've never seen a snake express no fear of them whatsoever. We are not "hardwired" to fear snakes, but we are hardwired to LEARN to be afraid of certain kinds of animals. Oddly enough, no one has ever done a study to see if there is a mutated gene in certain humans, that makes them fascinated by reptilian creatures naturally, despite every effort to teach them otherwise! I'm certainly one of those humans, and coincidentally enough, my obsession with reptiles began as an obsession with dragons, at the age of TWO, before I could even say the word "dragon"! It endured in spite of my herpaphobic mother doing everything she could short of actually killing me to make me hate and fear these animals as much as she did, and I am seeing the exact same pattern in my three-year-old neice, Sydney, who was angry for her father for three days for him shooting a Copperhead in the yard, and insisted on giving the deceased pit viper a decent funeral!

Still, on the whole dragon thing, along with a belief in sentient reptile-like beings that lived among humans, you have to really wonder why it's so common. Even today, people are utterly fascinated with the whole concept of dragons. It cannot simply be explained by misidentification of common reptiles; how would an Inuit living in the high Arctic of Canada have encountered a crocodile or lizard, for example? Those beliefs pre-date contact with Europeans, also.

pitbulllady

It's a really cool concept. I dunno, though... space aliens?

There are no crocodiles in Louisiana, have never been dinosaurs, and the beliefs and stories of the LeTeche pre-date any contact with Europeans. There ARE alligators, but alligators were simply another animal to the native tribes of that area, and the LeTeche were not thought of as simply intelligent, anthromomorphic alligators, but as a race of reptilian "people", if you will, with their own tribal customs, language, etc. As I pointed out earlier, even the Inuit have traditional dragon stories that also pre-date European contact, so there's no way that their beliefs could have been influenced by tales told by travelers, and there have been no reptiles indigenous to that area for millions of years. At that time that they first arrived in North American via the Berring Land Bridge, virtually the entire upper portion of the Northern Hemispere was coverd in ice, so even those who pushed further south, and might later encounter tribes who'd remained in the far north, would not have so much as encountered a small skink that they could somehow "twist" into a "dragon". It's THAT sort of thing that makes the whole dragon concept so fascinating-just WHAT did the universal belief in dragons stem from?

pitbulllady

Ahhhh, I see. I stand corrected. It is indeed a fascinating subject...

Space-lizards! Heehee! That's what David Icke thinks and he's nuts. He believes they already control the planet like in THEY LIVE (80s sci-fi film)and are causing global warming to make Earth more like their home-world.

There is something inherently fascinating about Reptiles. When I was kid I was obsessed with seeking out Slow-Worms which look like baby snakes but are your basic lizard without legs. One time my dad told me he'd seen one dart under a shrub in our garden so I dived in there only to be faced with a Grass Snake - Britains biggest snake. I very nearly soiled myself.

Isn't David Icke the guy who thinks that Britain's Royal family, along with the Bush family and many other prominent Americans, are really "Lizard People", who can shape-shift to look like humans when they are in public and wish to avoid detection? If so, I've heard of that guy! I guess it would suffice to say that HE isn't a big fan of Randall Boggs, either, huh?

Speaking of Boggs, one of the members on our Boggs Board is in England, and she often laments the scarcity of reptiles in England. She's never even encountered a Grass Snake! She gets sorta jealous every time I post about catching a Corn Snake in my driveway(found one crossing the highway recently, but she's in shed, so once she changes her outfit, I'll post some pics), or post pics of alligators in the wild. I really do have to feel sorry for people who live in reptile-deprived areas, since finding a snake under a shrub in the garden is one of the highlights of any day for me! Grass Snakes are so cute, very much like our Garters, that would have been a great find. It is odd, though, that the belief in dragons is especially traditionally powerful in the British Isle, which have very few native reptiles themselves, and none that actually get to be large or impressive. There's only one venomous snake, the Adder, and it is not even life-threateningly venomous, but more lilke our Copperheads. The Celts of the British Isle had many tales of dragons, and this was before any contact with large, dangerous reptiles by any Brits, which would have been with Nile crocs and monitors during the Crusades.

pitbulllady

I once saved an Adder's life on the Quantock Hills by having well-maintained drum-brakes on my bike. Really nicely marked. Only Adder I ever seen. One is placed in a prosthetic leg as a murder-weapon in Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory.

The hilly Celtic land of Wales still has the red dragon on it's flag. Again, no idea why. Perhaps they're waiting for me to return and free them from the English. I reckon.

Are you kidding? I LOVE dragons! They're so cool! In fact, that's my user name, of course!;)