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Confronting the Dragon
Dec
10, 2008
It has
the body of a snake and the head of
a lion. It has legs that end in
clawed feet. It often has wings: it
flies, or at least it comes from the
sky. It breathes fire.
It’s an
absurd creature, and the stories
can be dismissed as the fantasies of
idle primitive minds. Except…
The stories come from Mesopotamia
and Mesoamerica, from England to
Australia. They emerge from the time
before recorded history. They are
part of a voluminous literature of
stories that are called myths and
legends. All are absurd. Together
with rock art, they constitute the
oldest heritage of our species: they
come from where we came from, and
they give context to who we are and
why we are who we are.
They have a regularity, like sunrise
and sunset, but a regularity that is
chillingly alien. How could all
these apparently unconnected
societies tell essentially
the same story and draw
essentially the same figures with
many of the same specific details?
Curious minds want to know why—not
the why of the dragon, of the
individual stories and images, but
the why of global absurdities. The
intelligibility to be understood is
the consilience of myths and
petroglyphs everywhere.
That they are stories and images of
nature satisfies the “global” part;
the “absurdities” part cannot be
dismissed by saying that ignorant
primitives, who lived in and were
more dependent on nature’s
regularities and vicissitudes than
the knowledgeable experts today,
didn’t know what was really
happening.
The ancients were smart enough to
trace the path of Venus and to
predict her appearances. Why, then,
did they identify her with a dragon?
By the time of written histories,
among cultures that are recognized
to have had astronomies, the planets
were
identified with the mythical
gods and the legendary heroes. Was
this an arbitrary identification? If
so, why were the same
identifications made
around the globe? Were the
identifications instead
differentiations from prior
undifferentiated unities?
For the ancients, the stories were
not fabulous: they were real.
Reynolds Price remarks in the
introduction to A Palpable God,
“If we call them untrue, we must
call them insane. They are plainly
not deceitful….” They are
“eyewitness reports of external
events.” They were told to provide
consolation: narratives of origins
and causes.
We modern people also tell stories
of origins and causes: a big bang
from which the universe gradually
expanded, evolution by selection of
random mutations, plate tectonics
that slowly grind continents
together. Our stories are different,
not because we’re smarter but
because our lives—and their origins
and causes—are different. Our nature
is different. We are born from and
into a nature of continuity,
uniformity, gradual change—a
universe without dragons. Except…
In plasma labs, plasma dragons again
breathe fire and roar deafeningly.
Plasma instabilities contort
discharges into the same forms
pecked into
ancient rocks. Space telescopes
take pictures of
axial columns and
ouroboroses in other stars and
galaxies. Space probes measure the
electric currents that make up
similar features around the Earth.
If the power in the Earth’s currents
were to increase sufficiently, these
currents would begin to glow. We
might then see a nature similar to
what the myth-makers saw.
The mythical stories are provincial
in that they tell about only one
state of nature—a cataclysmic one.
In the same way, modern stories—the
big bang, evolution, plate
tectonics—are provincial, telling
about only one state of nature—a
stable one. However, we see in
plasma labs, in space, and in the
ancient past that nature has several
states.
We need new stories—new
theories—that can tell us about the
origins and causes of this
multi-state nature. We need new
stories that can console us as we
struggle to live lives that seem to
bridge these dual and dueling
states.
By Mel Acheson
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