May 18, 2006
The Dragon and the Pearl
East-Asian dragons are almost invariably portrayed with a red sphere in
their mouths, in front of their mouths, or-- as in Javanese art--on top
of their heads. In the famous lantern procession celebrated by Chinese
people on the 15th of the first month, the red sphere precedes the
dragon. This sphere is called huoh chuh, "fire pearl". Shown here
is a Buddhist gong-hanger produced in 18th- or 19th-century Korea. The
flames that erupt from the pearl in some representations parallel the
flames exhaled by dragons in other traditions. But what does the red
sphere signify? And where does the image of the dragon itself come from?
Scholars agree that the
pearl is celestial. But does it signify the moon, as some have
suggested? Or is it the Sun, as others have claimed? The spiral
inscribed upon the pearl remains an enigma.
Some specialists emphasize
the pearl’s connection with thunder. An ancient Chinese charm declares
that "a spiral denotes the rolling of thunder from which issues a flash
of lightning." Could this apply to the spiral imagery attached to the
dragon ball? The comparative symbolist, G Elliot Smith, believed so: The
dragon's red ball with engraved spiral, "which was believed to have
fallen from the sky, was homologized with the thunderbolt”. A Korean
piece of art in Deoksugung Palace, Seoul, depicts the red pearl between
the two dragons in the traditional shape of the Indian vajra or
lightning image.
The lightning theory would
interpret the pearl as a Chinese variation on the universal motif of the
thunderstone. The common belief held that thunderstones fall from the
sky during thunderstorms or battles of the gods. Thus huoh chuh,
the Chinese designation of the pearl, also means 'meteorite'. A
widespread superstition warns that when the blue dragon and the yellow
dragon battle in heaven, fire balls and pearls fall to the ground. Some
gemstones, known as "dragon's eggs", were believed to cause
thunderstorms: When the egg hatched, a young dragon would ascend to the
sky amid thunder, lightning, rain, and darkness. A large body of
folklore delineates the connection of the dragon with a stone, egg, or
ball that produces lightning.
Any explanation for the
Chinese dragon pearl must apply to similar traditions found across the
globe. The Vedic dragon Vritra concealed the sun. The "Worm" encountered
by Arthur's knight Peredur had a stone in its tail that had the ability
to turn everything into gold. Uncegila, a serpent in the mythology of
the Brulé Sioux, had an ice-cold heart "made of flashing red crystal".
The Caribs of Dominica believed in a serpent with a sparkling stone on
its head, described as an eye. And scores of other dragons around the
world swallowed, enclosed, or carried similar spherical objects,
alternately identified as the sun, an egg, an eye, the heart or soul of
the serpent, or a precious stone.
The catastrophist model
interprets the serpent and the sphere as a vagrant luminous object in
the sky accompanied by glowing plasma effects. One might interpret the
serpent and the ball as the tail and nucleus of a comet. But modern-day
comets fail to explain the detailed agreement between the universal
traditions. Something much more profound must have inspired the image.
Today, several independent researchers connect both the enclosing
serpent and the primordial "sun" to the axis mundi, a column said
to have once risen from the earth to the sky. This suggests that the
cross-cultural theme of the glowing serpent and orb might have been
inspired by intense plasma discharge in the heavens, perhaps comparable
to the aurora, but much more powerful. We know from plasma experiments
that such effects would likely include the cosmic “thunderbolt”
described in early traditions.
Contributed by Rens van der Sluijs
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