cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Yes. The Aboriginies call it "the rainbow serpent".
Thats covered in the video I posted above.
^^^ What do you think the serpent represents? it's in every culture on earth
Dragons in modern pop culture have all kinds of animal features grafted on to them (mammal, avian, fish, bat wings) but they add up to being essentially reptiles that resemble dinosaurs more than anything else. So years ago when I was reading a book about fossils I came up with a theory that they ARE that. Carl Jung meets David Attenborough. Archetype meets paleontology.
Mammals and dinosaurs appeared at the same time in the fossil record. Dinosaurs were huge. Mammals (descended from large 'mammal-like reptiles')were forced to minaturize and become small shrew like insectovors. Mammals stayed small, became nocturnal, and sacrifice vision for scent. And thats how it was for the first 130 million of the 190 million years mammals existed. Our whole nervous system is adapted to...avoiding being eaten by dinosaurs.
Then the asteroid came. Wiped out the dinosaurs. Mammals took over and diversified. One branch took to the trees and became the primates. The primates became diurnal (living in the day time) and re evolved color vision. So we have this vision centered primate brain laid down on top of our early mammal brain adapted to hiding in the under brush in the dark from the day living dinosaurs. So when we evolved art and story telling we unconsciously recreate the dinosaur enemies that our mammalian brains were wired to hide from 60 million years ago. And thats why dragons look like T-Rex.
Trouble is when you research the dragons across time and across geography you learn that the farther back in time you go the less dragons resemble dinosaurs and the more they resemble modern day living snakes.
So I dont know. But humans in the tropics fear snakes (both big constricting kinds and the small poison bite kinds) and humans in the temperate zone fear the later as well. So snakes represent power. But also many cultures (even remote tribes in New Guinea) have the notion that snakes are immortal because you find their shed skins...which caused the notion that snakes can escape death itself. So wisdom, power, immortality. Combine that with a toxic bite than can morph in myth into breathing fire.