SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Dragons: As Real as Mermaids

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1:55Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:05Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Dragonslayer Bryant. And, well, that's it. It's just the two of us. We can make it if we try, Chuck. Just the two of us. Dragons and us. And the great Bill Withers. Was that Bill Withers? Can't even say it with a straight C. We just had the same conversation like two months ago. I'm not doing it again. Oh, about Bill Withers? Yeah, I didn't realize that that was a Bill Withers song. It was a good song. Lean on Me, though, man, is just, whoa. I cannot take it. Grandma's Bed. What is that? Is that a Bill Withers song? I did not know that. It's good.

2:49He's great. And we probably had this exact same conversation.

2:52Chuck Bryant:I don't know if we have that one or not. But you know who else I like? Who's a little bit like Bill Weathers, not quite as cool, I guess, if you're like a cool person. But George Benson was amazing and still is. I think he's still around. You ever listen to his stuff? Yeah, but now I'm realizing that maybe I should just not correct myself and let people be sending a bunch of emails. Oh, I love that. I love that. Let me get a million of the same emails. It's grandma's hands. I was getting it. John Denver's grandma's feather bed kind of just was in the ether. Gotcha. Because we just talked about John Denver about karaoke.

3:30Grandma's bed.

3:31Chuck Bryant:Grandma's hands. The follow-up to Use Me Up. So dragons. Yeah, let's talk about dragons. Let's have a pleasant conversation about dragons, shall we, Chuck? Yeah. Dragons aren't real. and you'll notice by the title of this episode which is dragons colon as real as mermaids and it's funny because I think the week before this comes out mermaids is our pick for the select episode so it aligns perfectly that is perfect but dragons aren't real well okay please stop saying that because you're crushing my dreams sorry so when we talk about dragons we have to say right here at the outset that there's a lot of different kinds of dragons.

4:19Chuck Bryant:And typically when you think of like the flying winged, usually long, maybe scaly. Fire breathing. Fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind of serpentine tail. Sometimes it's even pointy like the devil. Sure. Which we'll see why. That's considered a Western dragon. And that is its own thing that kind of evolved from a number of different traditions. But there's also the Asian dragon, which, you know, has variations among different Asian countries, but it generally seems to be kind of the same ancient Chinese thing. That's a totally different thing, and it evolved on its own in isolation as well.

5:06Chuck Bryant:And so because you've got these different traditions of dragons that seem fairly similar in a lot of ways, there's a lot of people out there who say, wow, this is astounding. Every culture in the world has some sort of tradition of dragons. And that's kind of true. But at the – like throughout this episode, we'll see that's not really accurate. Like nowadays, it seems that way because we have overlaid the idea of dragons over everything. But if you really kind of dig into the past and look into the nuance of some of these things that we term dragons, they're very different. So it's a lot more accurate to say that like every culture in the world has mythical beasts, some of which share a lot in common with our modern conception of dragons.

5:54Chuck Bryant:And that's probably where our modern conception of dragons came from was all these different ideas of it in the ancient past. Yeah, there's a book called An Instinct for Dragons written by an anthropologist named David E. Jones about dragons and dragons throughout cultures and across cultures. And there's a theory he's got going, which is humans evolved and primates evolved with a fear of three predators, basically. Snakes, cats, which are big cats, not house cats. and eagles. And a dragon, it sort of makes sense that every culture sort of has something like a dragon because in folklore and myth and in storytelling, you might combine the three scariest things into one super scary thing, and that is a dragon.

6:46Chuck Bryant:Right, and you might say, like, well, wait a minute. Like, I think eagles are kind of cool. I'm not at all scared of them. Number one, have you ever been around an eagle when it was loose? I'll bet you'd be kind of scared of it because those talons are serious. Or one that dive-bombed you? Exactly. More to the point, though, or more to, I should say, David Jones's point, that this would be this fear, this innate fear that humans have, would be based much more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of eagles, like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the harpy eagle in the sloth episode?

7:23Chuck Bryant:Because they can mess a sloth up. They can mess a monkey up, too. So this guy's premise is like we have these ancient fears of these things. And as we evolved and became humans and started telling each other stories, these things combined, like you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which was basically the sum of all of our most primal fears. Yeah. And then, of course, if you look at ancient cultures, they always had sort of mythical stories and folklore to explain, you know, everything from weather phenomenon to things like volcanoes. And if they happened upon maybe dinosaur bones or whale bones, then a story might go along with that to explain it away.

8:05Like, you know, this was clearly some huge lizard-like creature or maybe a snake-like creature. And there was probably a story around it on why they should fear it or usually some sort of a sacrifice that they needed to make, you know, sort of in lockstep with those stories. But that's just sort of another theory on maybe how the dragon might have come about as far as folklore goes.

8:28Chuck Bryant:One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and we should say no one has a widely accepted answer for this, which I love as always. Sure. But that it was the bee, that the description, often in ancient cultures, they used to use like riddles and exaggeration and metaphor to discuss and talk about and describe actual things. And that the bee, a description of a bee, or I should say a swarm of a bee is what actually became the dragon in mythology. And at first, you're just like, that doesn't make any sense at all. But some of the points that these people made, there was a journal article in it, in I think like a journal on Tolkien studies or something like that.

9:18Chuck Bryant:But they say that a bee swarm moving together, it doesn't necessarily resemble a dragon, but it makes a lot more sense along those lines than it does when you're talking about an individual bee. It does in a cartoon. Exactly. It can make an arrow to point in a direction, you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. And then another one is that the fire, the idea of a dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the feeling of like your skin burning from a bee sting or the intense pain. And then lastly, in the Western tradition, a lot of dragons protect like mounds of gold or treasure. and that this is a metaphor for honey and gold, like the honeycombs that ancient people would have basically considered gold.

10:08Chuck Bryant:Not just, you know, food, but also it was used as medicine as well. So if you kind of put all that together, it seems like a pretty interesting theory. At least it makes a lot more sense than a bee, you know, when you really kind of dig into it. Yeah, totally. The word itself is, well, you can look back to the Iliad when Homer wrote about the D-R-A-K-O-N, the dracon, which supposedly is the first known use of the word. In ancient Greek sort of has some confusing etymology behind it, but basically Homer uses that word to describe snakes. Like unequivocally. Yeah, and not, you know, huge flying, fire-breathing snakes, but just snakes.

10:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, he even says, no, I'm just talking about snakes, everybody. Yeah, not dragons. Don't get ahead of yourself. These are snakes. And, I mean, they say that, like, he points out that he's talking about snakes because he even says a chimera, which is, I think, the head of a lion, the goat body, a serpent tail, and bat's wings. He even says the serpent tail, the back portion of the chimera, is a dragon. So he's talking about just regular old snakes for sure. Yeah, and other writers and other classical stories did the same thing, whether it was dracontus or draconus, using all these words sort of interchangeably with other words for snake.

11:34But then we go to the history of, not the history, but just the history of animals. And that's the first sort of scientific take on the dracon, which is an enemy of the eagle because an eagle as a bird of prey would eat snakes, obviously. And different people got a little more specific in later writings as to what kind of snake, but it's still just snakes.

11:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So over time, like that's where the word dragon came from, was to use the – it was a word for snake. That's it. And then over time, as people started to exaggerate here or there and conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors that aren't found in snakes but saying that they were, and they all kind of put that under the umbrella word for snakes dragon, dragon, it seems like the legend or the myth, the mythical version of dragon started to kind of plump up and grow. Yeah. And this is a point Ed, the Grabster put this together for us. But Ed points out something I kind of never really considered.

12:38Back in the day, in the classical period, writers were writers. They weren't like, hey, I'm going to write only about natural history and I'm only going to write fiction and myth and storytelling like writers just wrote. So there were people that wrote natural history tomes and also myth and storytelling legends. And so a lot of this stuff could get kind of mixed up and confused, exaggerated. Mistranslation is a huge, huge deal. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And a lot of this is sort of where the sort of myth of the dragon came from.

13:11Chuck Bryant:I just think of like some writer getting confused what they were working on that day. and now we have the myth of dragons. Right. You know? It's like, was this real or not? I can't remember. Who cares? So, yeah, like you really hit upon something really important. Mistranslations, or a different way to put it is lazy translation, have really kind of changed our idea of what people were talking about in the ancient world. And I can't imagine how much nuance and understanding has been lost. Oh, sure. How probably dumb in a lot of ways ancient people seem compared to how they actually were because of this tradition of like pee-poor translation that was passed down over the year.

13:55Chuck Bryant:Pee-poor. Yeah. That's very cute. And the reason why it's kind of lazy translation is it seems like anybody who came across an ancient text or a text in another language who's translating something into English. And they seem to be describing anything even remotely dragon-like. Any mythical beast, anything that might have wings, anything with a serpent tail, anything that breathed fire. Boop, dragon. It's a dragon. And then now those of us who have a certain compartmentalized idea of what a dragon is, everything was a dragon. And then now we reach that point where it's like this is how we got this idea that every culture has dragons.

14:38Chuck Bryant:No, we just kind of lazily translated what other cultures were talking about into dragons along the way. Right. I think that is a great first act. Thank you. Thank you. I'm bowing. I'm throwing roses at your feet. Thank you. Thank you. And we're going to take a little break-a-roonie and be right back.

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17:36Chuck Bryant:So the rose petals I sent you arrived in time. Yes. Just in time. Thank you for throwing them and not saving them for something else. I also realized I just went all Ned Flanders with the break-a-roonie. I've never said that before in my life. I liked it, though. It was refreshing. We need that kind of wet-behind-the-ears, you know, wholesomeness right now, Chuck. Yeah, and you're 14? No, not just us. I mean the world. Okay. You know? Yeah, up with Flanders. Yeah, up with Flanders. That's right. So my favorite thing always about Flanders is when he would be really buff. Like every time he took off his shirt magically.

18:14Chuck Bryant:Stupid sexy Flanders. I know. It's hilarious. This is so funny. He ascribed it to a healthy dose of vitamin church. Right.

18:25Chuck Bryant:Oh, man. I love it. Yeah. All right. Where were we here? Giant snakes. Yeah. We talked about them. We were talking about mistranslations were a big problem. And I think a good place to start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah, the Sumerian legends wrote about something called the Usum, U-S-U-M, also called dragons or, you know, at least referred to as dragons now. And these were kind of like you said at the beginning. These were just sometimes just large monsters, large scary things, and not necessarily a dragon, but was sort of just translated as dragon. Yeah, and I should say Sumer, not Sumeria.

19:01Chuck Bryant:But these were like their gods that they were talking about. These were, you know, like the goddess of water who gave birth to the world. Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology that explained, you know, where they came from, where the world came from, where the sun came from. And we along the way translated that to dragons. Right. You know, so luckily there are scholars who have learned to speak Akkadian, I guess the world's oldest spoken language, A-K-K-A-D-I-A-N, not the Canadian group that the Cajuns come from. This is different. But the—so we understand now that there's much more nuance, much more detail to it.

19:51Chuck Bryant:But I think the upshot of this is that there were conceptions of, like, fire breathing and, like, flying serpents and, like, potentially malicious, malevolent, evil, mythical beasts that would resemble kind of what we would understand as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah, and this course goes straight to the Bible as well in Revelations. There's a lot of talk about the archangels battling a great dragon. In this case, the dragon is Satan. But again, this is sort of a translation like Satan was always sort of the serpent, at least in Genesis, it first appeared as a serpent. And so in the end, Satan is also a serpent, but spelled with a D-R-A-K-O-N.

20:41like the ancient Greek. Oh, is that right? Yeah, but there's, you know, I mean, not in the King James Version and stuff like that, obviously. Sure. But again, you know, pre-translation. And, you know, there were sort of renderings of this, of the big war for heaven. And this is when we see, you know, kind of what we would see later on, which is metaphor for good versus evil in a big battle.

21:04Chuck Bryant:So that's what William Blake's Paradise Lost is about, right? I've never read it. I haven't either. I'm just familiar with it from that movie Red Dragon. Okay. About the Silence of the Lambs prequel, I think. Oh, sure. Yeah. He's like, do you see? You remember when Ralph Fiennes has got poor Philip Seymour Hoffman strapped to that wheelchair? Oh, man. And he's showing him like crime scene photos. Spoiler coming. Didn't love that movie. It was okay. But that shot of that burning wheelchair and body going down the parking deck is one of the most sort of chilling images I've seen in movies. I know.

21:43Chuck Bryant:The thing that chills me about it, though, is it's an antique wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate those. You don't like those, huh? No. I think we just talked about it recently. And for the rest of my life, I will be creeped out by those things. I'm going to get you one. Slide whistle with this Christmas. next Christmas you're just going to get an ancient wicker wheelchair I don't want to be wasteful so I won't throw it away and I'll just have to live among it it's going to be terrible like I'll never get used to it either you could make a life size Chuck dummy put it in there and set it on fire and roll it down a parking lot I wouldn't do that I'd make a life size version of Chuck and just talk to you be like listen I got a lot of stuff to say to you That's even creepier, by the way.

22:30Chuck Bryant:And you're going to sit there and listen to it. I'll be wearing nothing but an apron. Just like a real doll with a big fake beard. Oh, man. Okay, so, yeah, good versus evil is sort of how a lot of these tales and folklore play out and also incorporating stuff that you would see time and time again in literature later on. Like, there's a dragon that lives out by itself near a village, and it's a greedy, vengeful dragon and we need to appease this dragon with sacrifice once a year or else it will come down and like rain fire upon everyone. Yeah, so all of this stuff, like this idea, this Western dragon that you're describing, like that's taken from like Beowulf, I believe, the dragon that killed Beowulf in the, I always thought it was a Norse legend, but apparently it's English, old English.

23:23Chuck Bryant:It's just set in the Netherlands or in Scandinavia in the Norse. I think somewhere. I don't remember exactly where it's set. It's just set there. It's not written by them. But, like, that dragon was malevolent, and I believe it was guarding treasure. I think the reason it went berserk and Beowulf had to kill it was because somebody stole one of its golden goblets, a.k.a. honey, because they're really talking about a bee. But so you have an idea of a greedy, murderous dragon that protects treasure, like that comes from an ancient tradition, but that's a pretty standard feature of dragons, like you were saying.

24:02Yeah, so all this is going on for many, many, many years. Finally, the rubber kind of meets the road as far as Western dragons are concerned with the legend of St. George, who was a Christian saint, a real Christian saint, maybe a real person, who may have been a Roman soldier, who was tortured and killed for converting pagans to Christianity. This is circa 4th century AD. And because of stories getting passed around like a game of telephone, the actual first name of that story when it was told was St. Theodore, but it was really St. George.

24:42Chuck Bryant:So I saw that they're both possibly known as dragon-slaying saints. Okay. It's not necessarily like George took that from theater. They're both known for having slain a dragon. But what's interesting is if you see St. Theodore depicted with his dragon, it's very clearly a crocodile. And the origin story of either one, but particularly St. George, is that there is a town in modern-day Turkey or possibly Palestine. I'm not 100 % sure, but in what would have been called Anatolia back then. where they had this spring, like this town got their water from the spring, and it was guarded by a giant massive crocodile and that the townspeople would sacrifice a sheep to, sometimes two a day, basically to distract the crocodile so they could go get the water and then get out of there.