The Legend of Dragons

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China celebrates dragons. They are part of their history. They can be seen high up in the sky and then in a matter of seconds they can swoop down and cause great destruction. People are lifted high though the air and tossed miles away. Houses are destroyed, broken to pieces. They roar and people die.

But in the United States we also have dragons. We have more dragons then all the other nations of the world combined. They cause great destruction. About 15 years ago, I was attacked by a dragon. It swooped down and destroyed around 100 of my large trees. Many of these trees were a hundred years old. Some of the trees were smashed into the ground. While others were broke into two. It only took a few seconds and a massive amount of destruction occurred. This dragon was filled with great fury. It took me over a year to repair the damage that it brought.

In the U.S. we have another name for these dragons. We call them tornadoes.

The season of the dragon is beginning.

Last edited by jimmy m on 02 Apr 2024, 12:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The history of Dragons goes back thousands of years in China. But how many of them have come up close and personal with a Dragon?

In the U.S. we have so many dragons that we have people who race to track them down. A few years ago they made a movie about them. It was called Twister.

Dragons likely have nothing to do with tornadoes- if you're talking about the origin of the dragons as a mythical meme.

China virtually never has tornadoes. And neither does any other place in the whole length of the Eurasian landmass from the British Isles to Japan. That even though every culture in Eurasia from Britain to Japan has dragon myths (though the European Dragon is a very different creature than the Chinese dragon).

Amerinds of Mesoamerica (Aztecs, Mayans, etc) worshipped the god quetzelcoatal (who brought culture and agriculture) who was represented by the "feathered serpent" which in art and sculpture looks a lot like a dragon (especially like a Chinese dragon) without limbs.

So SOME Native Americans had dragon-like creatures in their mythology as well. Whether the north American Indians in the tornado alley of what is now the US Midwest had dragon like mythological creatures I dont know.

I saw a dragon flying through the sky when I was in China. Does anyone want to see the photo I took of it?

Ummm...sure.

I believe the closest we ever had to dragons in our world were the dinosaurs, and they went extinct long before humans came about.

Maybe the dragon myth came from ancient humans discovering dinosaur fossils in caves or something?

The word "dragon" derives from the word "draco" which is greek for 'snake'.

Like us today the ancients feared poisonous snake bites, and gradually info got exaggeratted and it became the very breath of snakes that were feared. And then folks stuck legs on snakes ...and you had "fire breathing dragons".

Sometimes it was the GAZE of snake that was imbued with the dangerous power...to turn you into stone. And thats how the separate myth of the baselisk got started. There are accounts of homeowners in the middle ages hiring crews of guys wearing strings of mirrors "to get rid of the baselisk in the basement". That myth got kinda forgotten...until Harry Potter movies revived it.

Oddly - its Western dragons that breathe fire. Chinese dragons, as I understand it, dont breathe fire.

In the West there was only one subcategory of dragon that had two legs and walked upright...the Wyvern. Most dragons were imagined as being the long snakelike four legged variety.

The wyverns are the only ones that look less snake like and more like the bipedal dinosaurs of the mesozoic (like hadrosaurs and T-rexes etc). But they wyverns are the most popular dragon today in pop culture.

Tornadoes rarely occur in other regions of the world. But they do happen. And when they do, they can cause great damage. So to explain the event in ages past, dragons became the only way to describe them and their destructive force. The sky splits apart and comes down to Earth with great fury.

Reread my two posts above that together thorougly refute your theory through history, and linguistics, and then...either admit defeat, or come up with a counter argument with your own evidence please.

Tornadoes are the tale of legends.

Anyone seriously interested in dragons should read the late John Anthony West's Serpent in the Sky

Tornadoes dont exist in China, nor in Europe, have few dragon like traits, dont reside in caves, and dont live in water.

Sorry. Doesnt fit.

This gentleman gives an ambitious, but rather convincing, hypothesis for the origin and spread of the dragon myth in in one place and time (southern Africa) and then tracing its spread across the globe in prehistoric times. May not be true, but it is convincing.

Dragons were originally serpents associated with rain and water. And were usually benevolent and only more recent millenia and only in Eurasia from India westward did they become malevolent. Dragons escort the emperor to Heaven in China and bring the farmers rain, but in Europe a saint has to rescue a maiden by slaying a dragon.


https://youtu.be/cwDPt1E4_Cg

I like the Welsh dragon. No maidens in that story though (that I'm aware of).



The story goes that there was a white dragon (representing the English) and a red dragon (representing the Welsh).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-473 ... h%20(white).

Do they have tornadoes in Wales?

Fun fact:

There are two nations that have a dragon on their flag. One of each. A European dragon and an Asian dragon.

The above flag of Wales is the one with the European style one, and the other is Bhutan.