Here we go on this last confused flight. Any attempt to learn about truly complex subjects never ends. I'm going to simply quit looking for more shards of evidence and ideas and leave the rest to you. I was in the middle of the last blog entry when a friend sent me another dragon claim --- you can never achieve "completion" so don't try. I have friends who never publish anything because they are always waiting to "wrap it all up". Not a chance.
One of the things that I like most on that list is number 5, the dragon of Burley Beacon and Bisterne. This tale is about a very respectfully built dragon, legs and wings and reptilian and large, which has very inconvenient behaviors for the local populace. If one could take anything at all about this story at face value, the encounter took place in the 1400s, which in theory would be plenty "modern" enough for us to have good "history" and therefore credibility. In the tale, a historical character, Sir Maurice de Berkeley, confronts and slays the inconvenient monster, both he and his hunting dogs perishing due to the battle. Since that conquest, the Berkeley family became lords of that area's manor, and the dragon took its place on the family crest. The legend was consistently maintained for centuries thereafter.
If the culture of the times was like current US culture [even without our communications technology], the Berkeleys couldn't have gotten away with just making up such an "unusual" claim, and so we'd have good reason to believe that we had a good dragon story on our hands. But what if that is just what you did to create a family-establishing legend in those times and places? I don't know that culture. I cannot say. Some expert could.
Another prize of the era is of course this: the 1619 claim by Athanasius Kircher that a winged dragon AND a winged serpent flew from Mount Pilate to Lake Lucerne [Switzerland] and that's just that. Love it, but WHO said it, and why are we to believe it??
Here's the rest of these things [I told you that my files weren't too hot on this critter]. I have about five more cases which intrigue me more than most, and at least a couple of handfuls of maybes. Compared to Little People encounters, Sea Serpents, UFOs this topic is starving for evidence. Number forty is a full-fledged dragon rising from the ocean. If I had a dozen more I'd be in business.
That's the trouble with the narrowly-defined true dragon, rather than the great big reptile. There ARE a few dragons which ascend beyond being just big reptilians, but they are few.
Japan contributed a smallish Dragon recently [2003] when this Lake "lizard" crawled out of the water and flew away. Was it well-observed? Multiple-witnessed? If so, it would be a mini-dragon. And we'd all be happy.
This next business is colossally frustrating. Listen to this: 1946; 50 people out watching a meteor shower. A huge thing flies overhead. "Gigantic wingspread. Larger than any plane I've ever seen". Wings seemed luminous along front edge. Body grey color. Head like a serpent with scaly neck. Head and neck very long and held hanging downward as it flew, as though searching below. Eyes were a dull cherry red. Wings flapped and creature changed directions slightly. Then accelerated a flew rapidly out of sight.
Well... with the exception of no blast of fire-breath what else could I ask for? Nothing except a better witness report. Because..... the witness here is Mark Probert, a very famous at-the-time trance-control medium who "worked" for Meade Layne at the Borderland Sciences Research Association. Could this have actually happened? Probert claimed that Layne took greater than 50 phone calls the next day from people claiming to have seen something. Is this the case of the best case with the worst witness credibility? This sort of thing makes me cherish the fine, if rare, UFO field researchers that we've had scattered across the years. Will anyone really do good field detective work again? On ANY of these subjects?
By the way, Ulrich Magin, in his fairly recent book Investigating the Impossible has as his second chapter as pretty good candidate for an ocean-going Dragon [winged and all] from 1922 near Istanbul. I just read this so it's not in my files, but it's as good as any.
Alright. Since this subject refuses to cooperate, it's time to go Out Proctor, where you can run but you cannot hide. In the further hollows there seem to be several odd things relating to dragons.... let us cautiously see.
I've been informed that it's all down to the Djinn. Hmmmm..... Djinn are sort of the Faerie class of entities, so maybe I'm not entirely opposed to this.
Back in 1937, famous parapsychology investigator, Nandor Fodor, wrote to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research about the experiences of Professor E.G. Browne. Browne had said that during his travels in Persia, he had attempted to learn the secrets of the esoteric rites of the practitioners of that area, particularly as regards the Djinn. He was instructed in a method of "calling" the Djinn and under conditions wherein which they would be responsive to him. Browne's description of this ritual reminds one somewhat of a Vision Quest. In that, Browne was to take himself to an isolated spot, and gradually increase his fasting over a forty day period. He was also to repeatedly chant certain arabic incantations, all while seated in a circle drawn on the ground. At certain periods into his fasting and chanting, entities would come to him.
The first entity was to be a lion, which would enter his circle. Browne was not to panic but persist in his chanting until it left. This was at the 21st day. On the 22nd day, a tiger came. And on the 23rd day, "a most hideous and frightful dragon appeared". Browne, who had held up under the pressure of the lion and tiger, now cracked, and ran in panic, giving up his attempt at mastery of the Djinn. Browne decided later that all of this must have been hallucination, as it very well could have been. Nevertheless, it is of some interest that a dragon figured in the imagery experienced.
Possibly related to that tale is the reported experience of a modern scientist, while attending a workshop in 1984. This meeting was a naval presentation [he was in at the time] and the subject matter was not very exciting. It was about 11am and well into the orientation lecture when the officer began to see the floor beneath himself and the other officers in the room becoming transparent. He was not asleep in any way, as he remembered every word of the lecture "loud and clear", but his experience of the "floor environment" was radically changing despite the above-the-floor scene remaining exactly the same.
What he was now looking at below the floor was a set of apparent "connections" between every individual in the room with the back of a great animal --- yep, a dragon. Each man was attached to that great dragon through which seemed to flow an animating energy of life. He felt powerfully alive. The dragon, which seemed to extend forever, had a tiled/fitted scaly back composed of subtle jewel-like colors. It was "impossibly beautiful". Staring at the beauty, he then saw the beast writhe a bit, lift up its head, and momentarily stare back at him. The view of the dragon lasted several minutes until the floor again began "solidifying" and the vision was gone. "Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Momma", as John Lennon said.
F.W. Holiday in his Dragon and the Disk seems to have a totally different idea. After searching the Scottish Lochs and the Welsh countryside for years, Holiday sees that the dragons and the Balls-of-Light phenomena are somehow one. Although I like Holiday's originality of thought process as he pursued these mysteries, and have an instinctive itch telling me that somewhere in all of that mish-mash some truth lies, I still can't make any hard connection. Paul Devereux seems to be able to, as he has his Earth line energy concepts, and even called his work the Dragon Project. But I'm still not quite getting it. Strangely enough, in a recent book, Solomon Islands Mysteries, it seems that people in that part of the world have the exact same idea. And, as I have difficulty with any hypothetical cultural transferences between the Solomons and Wales or Loch Ness, that is even more intriguing.
But what does it actually mean? Are Earth energies [the physical textbook kind] generating brain-boggling electromagnetic fields [Michael Persinger and John Derr's hypothesis], and scrambling consciousness, burping up dragons? And the BOLS are just secondary physical side-effects? Or are the BOLS faerie, and the "dragons" or whatever else from "there"? Remember that Teodorani believes that the only sustainable hypothesis to cover the behavior of the BOLS he studies is that they somehow contain consciousness. Cue John Lennon again.
Let's go into a different Out Proctor Hollow. The above is a very early painted rendition of what Pierre Marquette saw of the Piasa Bird on that expeditition. Hmmmm.... just look at that thing for a moment....
" As we coasted along the rocks, frightful for their height and length, we saw two monsters painted on these rocks, which startled us at first, and on which the boldest Indian dare not gaze long. They are as large as a calf, with horns on the head like a deer, a frightful look, red eyes, bearded like a tiger, the face somewhat like a man's, the body covered with scales, and a tail so long that it twice makes a turn of the body, passing over the head and down between the legs, and ending at last in a fish's tail. Green, red, and a kind of black are the colors employed."
Not exactly a European dragon but certainly in the ballpark. My intuition is that the things were pictorially somewhere between the two renditions above.
The Sioux have a legendary creature, sometimes painted on rockfaces, called the Unktehi. It seems properly cryptozoological if not trending towards prehistoric or dragonish.
Could the pre-European Native Americans known of a dragon-like creature? If so, what does that do to our ideas as to whether anyone ever had true "external reality" encounters? As I said, folks: I'm trying as hard as I can on this one.
And with that: what then is this alleged Native American pictoglyph from Wupaki Park all about? Is it legit? A modern fake? Half legit with modern additions? Too bad that I at least don't know, as it is a fine, albeit crude, rendition of a dragon in my eyes.
So even here Out Proctor, I'm still haunted by Beowulf's Bane. Where did it come from? It doesn't seem like a reverie of the Lifeforce of the World, but more like an awesome cousin of the equally awesome Piasa Bird.
Desperate for inspiration, I'm turning to my least favorite Catholic saint, Augustine. Despite being a theological misfire of calamitous proportions on several major topics, he was a highly curious man with many contacts. And in an unfinished treatise on the creation of the world, Augustine stated flatly that dragons existed and that the pagans have known this for a long time.
When Augustine uses the word "pagans" he is usually referring to certain Greco-Roman area cults, one of which he himself belonged to as a youth. But Augustine also knew well the "paganism" of the British, as his main theological opponent, the one who tested his thinking most severely, was a British monk named Pelagius. In fact there was a lot more "commerce" between Britain and Rome back then than one imagines [we are speaking of the c.400AD era here --- the Dark Dark Ages]. What sort of dragons was Augustine hearing about, that convinced him of their reality? By the way, he speaks of these things as natural beasts from the creation, not icons of Satan.
I'm getting an itch that he's talking about this. You're allowed to get itches Out Proctor.
Here's another cylinder seal of that era. The fight now takes on a decidedly dragonish flavor, as the opponent is properly winged, and yet continues the flavor of the serpent/reptilian Tiamat in the back of one's mind. And... the griffin, which seems very close to our ancient dragon at this point, is a guarder of treasures as well.
Here we have an illuminated manuscript representing the biblical story of Daniel "defeating" the dragon, which is clearly a direct Old Testament steal from the old Bel and the Dragon Mesopotamian story. Our dragon here, happily in its cavern has a more dragony than eagle-like head, and one sees many legends running together on details.
Dragons and Griffins --- not really so different in appearance. Throw a Wyvern into the middle and you have rather smoothly translating physical set. How does this play into our story, though? I can't claim to have strong opinions about that. The legends, powerful legends possibly resting upon real sea serpent and monster encounters were there. They were so ubiquitous that they were in the minds of Bible writers and people like Augustine. Right with that were the Griffins. Based on encounters? All this was a stew existing in the scandinavian and british minds. The Beowulf poet lived in that legendary environment. He plucked it out. Was it a plucking of an idea based upon encounters? Or was this only a very emotive image of awesome force?
Lots of griffin, wyvern, dragon image exists. Shreds of claims and testimonies exist. The Piasa Bird stands there mocking. Dragons.... did any entity from faerie ever decide to manifest in that form? Where are the encounter stories?
I'm out of here. Dragons DO exist Out Proctor.... but I still don't know about anywhere else.
Till next time, and next topic: may your lives be full of wonders and only beneficent dragons.
Maybe it's a memory carried in our DNA of dinosaurs. As the story of E. G. Browne showed, perhaps the progression of time revealed the animals that were threats and as more time passed the deeper, more buried memories were revealed. Animals afterall do have built in recognition of their predators, maybe we have them, too.
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ReplyDeleteSorry for the above deletion --- I bolixed up the typing and site makes it tough to edit anything in comments. I'm about ready to leave for the plane to Michigan and will try to comment again later.
ReplyDeleteBack in Kalamazoo. What I was trying to say in the deleted bolixed-up post was that imprinting in animals doesn't seem to be precisely specific on things like shapes. To put it another way, anything with size, aggressive behavior, and a big mouth with large teeth will do. Browne didn't need some macromolecular memory hand-me-down to conjure up a dragon, as he already knew what a dragon is supposed to look like, and was told that it was one of the Djinn threats. That still, though, leaves me with the interest in where the masters that Browne studied with initially came up with the dragon as going to appear after the lion and tiger. As lions and tigers are admitted realities, why suddenly a non-reality creature?? It has been also pointed out by others that in the Chinese Zodiac, only the dragon is an unreal creature --- which raises the question: is it REALLY unreal then??
ReplyDeleteAs far as the whole notion of genetically-handed down specific memories: I spent some of my science career as a biochemist and was interested in the speculation [long time ago now] that such memories were stored in RNA [not DNA] in the brain. Although intriguing as a reductionist concept, and therefore initially favorable to the academic anti-spiritual establishment, the theory never got very good laboratory support. Memory rather seems more like some more holistically stored system, and is perhaps not mainly materials-based at all [at least for certain interconnected "meaningful" things which we would call the products of higher consciousness, rather than just instinctive awareness and stimulus/response connected information]. This was the insight of Karl Pribram and his lab research and his application of that to the idea of the holographic memory.
Part 1
ReplyDeleteProf a little while ago after reading this I waited to see what arose within me in response and headed down to the kitchen wond'ring if I should write anything at all.
I looked out the back window in the direction of the setting sun and the out of sight River Mersey and what should I see beyond the low lying rooftops but a cloud in the form of a crude jutting jawed dragon raising and opening its wings as it began its skyward ascent.
'Hmm' I thought 'an omen' only to be overcome by feelings of 'What's the point?' as it seemed to grow more and more amorphous before my eyes though after making a cup of tea and looking out again ten minutes later what should I now see but the dragon's head'd become even more realistically dragon-like - ditto its wings which instead of dissipating'd raised and opened themselves all the more higher.
Hence the following:
Some time during the first half of the last decade I actually saw one afternoon a dragon over Liverpool (and since there were no contemporary local newspaper reports to that effect I presume I'm the only one).
Normally when I see weird stuff I experience i) something akin to a violent electric shock ii) the sense I'm seeing something I'm not supposed to see and iii) I'm innundated with enormous amounts of data I then have to verify via libraries or the internet before I'll even remotely credit what they purport to be revealing.
In this case though I got no data whatsoever so I struggled with all my might to turn it into things like i) a black bin bag tossed on the air ii) the silhouette of a seagull (which can actually resemble pterodactyls at times) iii) some sort of oriental style fighting kite or iv) a temporal aberration allowing me a snapshot of something from the dinosaur era.
But it wasn't - it was a pitch black dragon with huge crude hollyleaf-like wings and skeins of coils (like something from a medieval diagram) making it look distinctly unfeasibly aerodynamic.
As it happens it may've been an omen itself because I subsequently got somehow 'bumped' onto Parallel Perceptions the internet site of what I now take to be its 'owner' a guy called Lujan Matus who amongst other virtues has a guardian spirit that when it isn't busy protecting him takes the form of a tattoo on his arm.
[I'd recommend you visit this site if you're so inspired because it has excerpts of his book The Art of Stalking Parallel Perception: The Living Tapestry of Lujan Matus which even though at the time I first read them I thought what a load of Carlos Wan'obe hooey continued to reverberate in my nervous system for weeks and months afterwards alerting me to things I'd been observing going on in my interactions with other people for a long time but without having the words to quite define what it was I was seeing. The actual book itself should be required reading for the 'mystic' set because it contains powerful concepts not available anywhere else - I mean really powerful revelatory stuff.
[It may not actually be your cup of tea - though I was initially convinced it certainly wasn't mine! - but then we seem to disagree over Augustine who I see as an initiate of the old school(s) with the ability to recognize and place himself under the aegis of the latest exemplar of their newest phase - ie Jesus and Christianity - and the sense to create an ark to preserve as much of the the connective materials as possible. In much the same way I suggest Pontius Pilate (where pilaetus signifies wearer of the pileus - a hat worn by 'slaves'/'sailors'(!) who've been made 'free') may've been signalling to the Pharisees his suspicion they were dealing with the latest 'Moses' by performing sacred lustrations in front of him - otherwise if he was merely performing the political act of 'washing his hands' why their shock?]
You certainly lead a more entertaining life than the rest of us. I guess I'll have to stick with the books for any dragons I might find.
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ReplyDelete'If the culture of the times was like current US culture...the Berkeleys couldn't have gotten away with just making up such an "unusual" claim, and so we'd have good reason to believe that we had a good dragon story on our hands.'
Prof let me suggest the possibility the de bERKeley family's use of their ancestor’s dragon on their crest may once’ve been signalling (“to whom it may concern”) the idea they were a lineage of initiates capable of harnessing and/or supressing what’s known in the Hindu take on these things as Kundalini a kind of evolutionary energy imaged as a ‘serpent’ coiled round the base of the spine which once activated rises through a series of ‘petal’ surrounded chakras to the top of the head bringing about enlightenment and the onset of siddhis (or ‘mystical’ type powers).
But the Aztecs may also’ve been alluding to this same energy (and those same ‘petals’) with their image of the ‘winged’ ‘serpent’.
Ditto the cult of Melek Taus with its Peacock Angel.
Ditto the Hebrew Cabalist notion of hierarchies of ‘angels’ ranked according to different numbers of ‘wings’.
And the same idea (amongst other things) may even be encoded in the story of Eve's interaction with the 'Serpent'.
Remember it’s only later on the ‘Serpent’ ends up cast on its belly in the ‘dust’ [‘ordure’ or base of the spine?] because at the beginning it seems perfectly capable of conducting Eve’s efforts to achieve the topmost region of the ‘tree’ (where of course the ‘petal’ surrounded ‘fruit’ can be attained) and its only after she then gets Adam to taste the ‘fruit’ too (without obliging him to actually ascend the ‘tree’ himself) things start going awry because he now starts acting all weird and self-conscious to the degree he becomes obsessed with concepts like nakedness (not to mention concealment of nakedness using garments) becoming so neurotically anxious in fact he becomes overwhelmed by the far more far reaching concept of fear hence his insane efforts to hide (from God!).
At which point of course God asks “Where are you Adam?” but if by definition God’s omniscient then He already knows where Adam is meaning I suggest He’s actually treating Adam much like a psychiatrist testing whether he needs sectioning giving him the opportunity to realise his recent experience’s so profoundly affected him his connectedness to and participation in the perfection and totality of the ‘internet’ of the ‘garden’’s been catastrophically severed leaving him no longer aware where or even who he really is.
Which in fact’s exactly what’s supposed to happen whenever the ‘Holy Ghost’/kundalini/baraka/hvarna/chi/lung/tummo/etc spontaneously gets loose inside an unprepared or insufficiently refined human being – the arising of chaotic external environment phenomena such as poltergeists and ‘hallucinations’ combined with mental confusion/bewilderment or/and increasingly inflated ideas about one’s importance and indispensability compared to others.
Cranking up the level of this ‘Holy Ghost’ effect (adding a dash more ego/conceptuality) produces say serial killers or cold blooded scientific types who imagine it’s their divine right to have the likes of Burke and Hare procure them ‘fresh’ corpses for their world important researches.
Cranking it up still more (and dashing in even more ego/conceptuality) results in would-be superhuman ‘Jealous God’ types (eg the likes of Jack the Ripper and Springheel Jack) who aren’t just content to cut a vast swathe of mayhem through their inferiors the highly dispensable masses but need to know their ‘peers’ aren’t missing a thing.
Nor is this restricted to particular individuals because supposedly collective manifestations can occur.
[Part Three to follow]
Part Three
ReplyDeleteNor is this restricted to particular individuals because supposedly collective manifestations can occur.
I’ve already alluded to the poltergeist effect (often associated with a disturbed young female) but the Saint George story may actually be an example of a collective version of this effect induced by the children of Silene’s awareness (on some level) their parents’re perfectly capable of sacrificing them to save their own arses unwittingly conjuring up or summoning the dragon in the first place (ditto Andromeda’s distress over her mother’s impious exaltation of her beauty).
In Tibetan Buddhism for instance it’s supposed the main reason we don’t all go round summoning up huge great ‘dragons’ by way of expressing our discontent (instead of the tiny little niggly ones we often unwittingly do)’s because this energy hardly ever gets the chance to do what it’s supposed to – flow in the manner of a perpetually rotating waterwheel up a channel running parallel to our spines before descending a matching channel running down inside our chests.
The reason for which’s supposedly the effect of karmic misbehaviour (such as that exhibited by Silene’s parents or Andromeda’s mother) combined with the belief reality can be made ever more manageable and eventually brought totally under our control by splitting it up into an ever expanding range of concepts ultimately causing our minds and thus the energy to split too leaving it trapped with nowhere to circulate in two lesser channels running alongside the central one.
This scenario’s often represented in two very simple forms: a two lined version (sometimes topped off by a cross bar) and a three lined one (not unlike a very stylised serpent with wings) such as the three dot topped lines converging on a common unseen centre depicted in the Druidic Awen diagram (which itself’s almost certainly based on the trapezoid formed by the ‘belted’ lower half of the Orion constellation – when you include the ‘sword’).
The Melek Taus Cult seems to use the image of the three fore toes of the peacock to represent this same idea.
Many ancient images depicting gods or goddesses flanked by twin creatures standing on their hind legs I suggest also allude to this same idea (amongst a number of others).
Other images depicting the likes of Moses or Alexander the Great with ‘horns’ allude to individuals who’ve successfully undergone the process of restoring the trapped energies to the central channel (as well as the two ‘prongs’ of the upper half of the Orion constellation) sometimes styled as reviving the ‘gods’ dwelling behind the temples of our skulls or using the twin pillars to restore the Temple.
This idea of restoring the side energies to the central channel I suggest’s also encoded in the story of Samson collapsing the pillars of Dagon (as well as transmitting the idea the Dagon spiritual era’s being superseded and the predictive notion any civilization without sufficient numbers of authentic ‘wise’ people must collapse).
But in concluding (and there was so much more I could’ve rattled on about [including how the ‘sleeping serpent’ transforming into the ‘winged dragon’ motif took the equally ancient form during the Crusader period of the sleeping cur transforming into the vaulting lion: viz by some accounts Richard the Lionheart]) let me point out how as Adam and Eve left the garden a fiery sword was left in place supposedly to deter their return.
Was that sword the ‘sword’ of Orion and was it really there as a signpost how to get back?
fascinating subject , the daniel's dragon incident are nicely documented in the bible, im curious how the king manage to get that gigantic animal (i assume it is snake) , maybe from african traders ? if i remember correctly the roman expedition to carthage in the first punic war (commanded by regulus) also encountered a massive snake that attacked roman soldiers from a river. The romans killed it with help from their siege engines (iirc catapult or ballista type weapons). It is saik the skin of that giant snake are returned to rome and measured about 100 meters (i dont know if its a translation error or exxageration)
ReplyDeletemy point is that the wild areas of the world back then can really produce bigger animals (compared to today).. might be these dragons from the legends are a variant of lizard or snake species ? off course just as you mentioned, the paranormal / unnatural / outproctor type explanation also possible..
paragraph one: what source are you reading? Pliny? He describes these matters in "Ethiopia" and in India. Getting a big snake to Israel would be child's play compared with the Elephants, big cats, et al brought to Rome from sub-Saharan Africa, I would think. ----"100" anything is one of those numbers that when you read it in old texts, you should think "symbolic of legend".
Deleteparagraph two: I believe that the "big snake/lizard" idea is covered all through the Dragon series of posts.
("F.W. Holiday in his "Dragon and the Disk" ... sees that the dragons and the Balls-of-Light phenomena are somehow one.")These are in my humble opinion, Djinn/Fallen Angels whose natural form is that of "light" or "smokeless fire." These beings are of pure quantum energy which exists in the UV spectrum beyond the visible range of human eyes. "Messengers between realms" as they have often been recorded can lower their frequencies to the visible range, manifesting in the physical forms of their choosing. Spend an hour looking into the Djinn and you will find descriptions matching the entire globes' ancient pantheon...start in Egypt with Anubis, Horus and Ptah and you will see what I mean. Egyptian, Greek, Biblical, Sumerian, Celtic, Native American, Hindu, Buddhist, Japanese, Chinese Dragon lore itself and many more traditions recorded the ability of their deities to transform into 'light' forms commonly called 'shining ones.' Google search "Zeus' true form of brilliant radiance" as an example. The fact that they are always here and generally in-perceivable to us makes a lot of sense to me. Most interestingly are the common descriptions of these "orb gods" and the modern UFORB phenomena. I believe it to be a deceptive return of the Djinn gods of old and not interplanetary visitors as the governments indirectly ensure that you perceive. Knowledge is everything! Great Study! Thank You for sharing such good research! Good Luck to all!
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