Legends and Myths

Stories and legends of remarkable beasts and heroic deeds have been told countless times, spanning across millennia and cultures. One has to wonder if these tales of magic and high adventure have emerged from the seed of some ancient truth. Could it be possible that there may have been numerous cycles of civilization upon our planet - civilizations that may have flourished, then disappeared as a result of either man-made or natural holocaust?

Perhaps creatures and events such as these have existed in another time - another cycle - and that these stories and myths are, in fact, a collective racial memory of an age long forgotten, lost in the mists of time.

A Pallet Worthy of a God

All across the ancient world, people spoke of dragons when they spoke of first things - and India was no exception. Holy men of that land said that the world was supported by Sesha, an eleven-headed serpentine creature whose title was Ananta, meaning the Endless One. Far from being an agent of disorder, as most dragons were, Ananta served Vishnu, The Lord of the Universe, offering its long back as a couch when the god chose to sleep.

Sleepless Guardian of the Golden Apples

In Greece, poets told this tale. At the end of the world lay an island called the Gardens of Ocean, and on the island grew a tree that bore golden apples. Because a bite of the apples flesh would give a mortal the knowledge rightfully possessed by immortals, the gods had set the never-sleeping dragon Ladon to guard the tree. A mortal king sent the hero Hercules to find and steel the golden apples. Some storytellers said that the hero slew the many-headed monster and stole a branch of the tree, but others insisted that no mortal - not even a hero - could survive an encounter with Ladon. Instead, they claimed, Hercules persuaded the god Atlas - on whose shoulders rested the heavens - to travel to the enchanted gardens and pluck the magical fruit. While Atlas was away on this mission, Hercules assumed the god's role. The mortal stood on a mountaintop and held up the sky until its proper pillar returned with the apples.

Destroyer at the Roots of the World

According to Norse belief, an immense, unseen tree called Yggdrasil stretched from the vault of Heaven to the depths of Hell. A dragon named Nidhoggr gnawed perpetually at the roots, seeking to destroy the order of creation, but the order had a battalion of defenders. These godlike beings called Norns sat calmly near the dragon at the roots, spinning the threads of mortal fate. Stags browsed at the tree and watered the earth with dew from their antlers. A goat that chewed at the tree's bark provided mead as milk for mortal heroes who would rid the world of the dragon race. Of the birds that perched in Yggdrasil's branches, the greatest was the eagle - a steadfast dragon enemy that sang forever of creation and destruction.

Sojourn in a Watery Realm

Through the vineyards and olive groves of southern France, past the amber castles of the lords of Provence and the red- roofed villages of their vassals,rolled the river Rhone, and the stately sweep of its waters gave off no sign that it sheltered dragons. One dwelled in its depths, however. Near the town of Beaucaire, where the Rhone curved down toward the sea, was hidden the lair of the Drac, a huge and ancient creature wise in sorceries, which he used for is own bloody ends. The Drac liked the taste of human flesh and took pleasure in hunting mortals. From time to time he left his river for the marketplace of Beaucaire, where, invisible to the busy townsfolk, he loitered in the shade of the plane trees, a watchful shadow among the baskets of fish and mounds of fruit. With cold, pale eyes, the dragon observed the housewives of the town as they chattered with the tradesmen, with swift, curving claws, he snatched away any untended child. Sometimes for sport, on the other hand, the Drac lured mortals into his river and trapped them there. He did so once for a certain purpose, and this is what happened. .

One summer afternoon, when the sun beat hot on the town and fields, a young wife of the town went to the river to wash her infant's clothes. As she worked, the woman glanced idly at the sparkling water - and then stared. Floating on the surface just offshore was a golden cup. In the rich vessel shone a single pearl.

With scarcely a thought, she took the lure. She stretched her hand out to grasp the pretty bauble, but the cup bobbed just out of reach, glittering seductively in the sunlight. She reached again, leaning far out from the riverbank, and thus she lost her balance.

She fell, and as she fell, a claw struck out, a manacle that tightened at once around the mortal wrist. The young woman gasped and struggled, but she was helpless in the grasp. She felt a powerful downward drag. As her skirts filled with water, she saw a last image of the land - small clothes drying on the grass beside the river, the infant wailing all alone. The Rhone then closed above her head.

Inexorably she was drawn down into the river's cold depths, until all she saw was watery blackness, broken by tiny lights, bright and sparkling as stars in the night sky. She fainted. She opened her eyes, at last, to find herself in a cavern of crystal. Outside its translucent walls, water reeds danced slowly as if blown by a land wind. Fish darted by. Near her, within the walls, lay the golden cup that had tempted her and the pearl that it had held. And then she saw her captor. Vast and gleaming, the dragon crouched motionless beside the cup, steadily regarding her. Lost in its green gaze, the woman rose to her feet, and as she did so, the memory of her life in France faded. Her infant son, her husband, her house in sunny Beaucaire, the fields and the olive groves around the town, all became tiny images, miniature pictures remembered vaguely, as dreams are remembered. Only the dragon's words sounded in her head. The Drac spoke with a voice that echoed like a gong, and the mortal obeyed.

The Drac had lured and trapped the woman because she was young and healthy - and because she was the nursing mother of a baby son. The dragon needed mortal milk to sustain his own hatchling, a small and fragile dragon spawn. So the young woman, caught in a net of enchantment, became the slave of the Drac and the nurse to a dragon. Days passed peacefully, and one day was much like another. Lulled by the motion of the water outside and by the dragon spell, she lived as if in a trance. She suckled the hatchling of the Drac and cared for its other needs as tenderly as if it had been her own son. She slept when the Drac bade her and ate what he gave her. She watched the movement of the river through the opalescent walls of the cavern, and in time the creatures of the Rhone - the pike with its green and gold stripes, the twisting eels, the darting trout - became as familiar to her as the villagers of Beaucaire once had been. As each day passed, she saw the watery world that enveloped her more clearly and more intimately, as if the rocks and reeds were the fields and woods of her own forgotten home.

Her vision came from dragon magic, although she did not know this. Each night, as she was ordered, she anointed the hooded eyes of the hatchling with a salve the Drac gave her. The salve endowed the infant with a dragon's piercing sight, and whenever the woman happened to rub her own eye, a little of the ointment lodged there, so that she received something of the creature's magical power.

Seven years passed. The hatchling grew large and strong, and the day came when the Drac had no further use for his captive. He did not kill her as he might have done, for she had nourished his own offspring. Instead, he released her, setting on her spells of forgetfulness, and sleep before he bore her up through the river and into the daylight.

The woman awoke on the riverbank near her own home. She looked around in some confusion, for her recollection was of a hot and sunny day when she had washed her white linens and laughed at her infant as he played on the grass. But now the sun had set and the lights of the town were winking on one by one. Neither the linens nor her baby were anywhere to be seen. She hurried across the fields and through the streets of her town.

The door of her house stood open to the cool of the evening, and the woman walked in. Two half-familiar faces turned to her - a bearded man and a boy who resembled her husband in his youth. For a moment she stared at them and they at her. Then the man leaped to his feet with a sharp cry. While the boy watched wide-eyed, the man embraced her. He was her husband, who had thought her drowned and had mourned faithfully for seven years. He plied her with questions, but she could give no answers, for she had no memory of the dragon's world. The young boy was her own son, but he spoke not at all to the white-faced, ragged stranger. She alarmed him by her silence.

Still, the father's love of his wife was so strong and his joy on her return so great that the son came to accept the stranger. So, too, did her neighbors in the weeks that followed her strange reappearance. Her seven years' absence remained a mystery to them, and her talk sometimes frightened them. She dreamed of dragons, she often said. But her neighbors were kindly people, and they let the woman be. She settled into the orderly, placid pattern of her early life, cooking and taking care of the man and the boy, and working with the townsfolk in the fields.

She would have continued thus, save for the dragon sight. One day she went to the marketplace, as was her habit, and there among the vegetable vendors and the fishmongers she saw the Drac. Scaled and shining, he loomed above the townsfolk. His mighty head reached almost to the rooftops and his eyes glowed green, but the busy merchants and those who bought their wares went unknowing about their business. Only the woman saw him. When she cried out, he looked sharply at her. "You see me, mortal?" asked a voice in her head. "I see you, dragon," she said aloud, and at that moment she remembered all of her lost seven years. She stood motionless as the dragon claw descended and covered her left eye. "Do you see me now?" said the dragon voice. She still saw him. The claw moved to cover her right eye, and where the dragon stood she saw only the marketplace and her neighbors. Obediently, she told the Drac that she no longer saw him. Instantly her head was pierced with a blinding pain. The claw had put out the eye that had the dragon sight.

The woman lived on, half-blind, for many years, and she told her dragon tale over and over. The villagers thought her mad and ignored her pitiful warnings. Thus, year after year, children continued to disappear from the marketplace, and no one ever knew the reason why.

An Enchantress' Shifting of the Odds

A young warrior named Jason, son of a King of Thessaly, outwitted a dragon once and retrieved the treasure it guarded. His feat happened this way. At the urging of his uncle, Jason embarked on a quest to obtain the fleece of a fabulous golden ram that had been sacrifced years before in the kingdom of Colchis on the shores of the Black Sea. The fleece was guarded by a dragon that never slept. Jason sailed to Colchis with a company of the heroes of Greece - Hercules, Theseus and Orpheus among them. When the men arrived, they found the Colchian King, Aeetes, reluctant to give up his treasure, he consented only on the terms that Jason sow a collection of dragon's teeth in the earth. As the King well knew, those teeth would spring from the ground as warriors and fall upon Jason. But the King's plans were foiled by his daughter, Medea, a sorceress of great power. She desired Jason, and he promised her marriage in exchange for her aid. This she gave. When Jason sowed the teeth in the ground, they did indeed spring up as fierce warriors, but Jason threw Medea's magic stone among them, and they fell upon one another, not on him. After that slaughter, he approached the guardian dragon, armed with a charmed distillation that irresistibly induced sleep. As the beast slumbered, he made off with the fleece. Then, taking Medea along, he returned to Thessaly in triumph.

The Desperate Combat of Lancelot Lancelot of King Arthur's court once slew a dragon - and thereby set great events in motion. Here is the tale. In a tomb in the part of France where King Pelles ruled, a dragon made its home. Each night it ventured out to main and slaughter. When Lancelot reached that kingdom on his travels, the people begged for his aid. The gallant Lacelot went to the tomb and opened it, the dragon surged out upon him, but he slew the beast. Inscribed upon the tomb were these words. "Here shall come a leopard of  king's blood, and he shall slay the serpent. And this leopard shall engender a lion in this foreign country, which lion shall surpass all other knights." King Pelles knew of the inscription. He had a daughter named Elaine, and he believed that if Lancelot lay with her, she would bear the child who would become the knight of the prophecy. But Lancelot loved Arthur's Queen Guinevere and would not lie with another lady. So by means of enchantment, Pelles gave Elaine the form of Guinevere. She invited Lancelot to her chamber in the evening, and he went willingly. Nine months later,   Elaine bore Galahad, who, true to the fortelling, became the greatest warrior in all of Christendom.

Excerpts from The Enchanted World