Imagine Dragons (Bonus Ep Unlocked)

folks, it's time to talk about dragons! we love them, we've always loved them, they are the best. we got a question from Ollie Cant about dragons and decided to answer it with a full episode. we talk about the earliest dragons, why humans all across the globe seem to create them in some form, the differences between Eastern and Western dragons, and then name some of our favorite folkloric dragons that you might not have heard that much about. we had a ton of fun with this!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, folks, it's Luke, And if you're hearing my voice
at the beginning of an episode like this, you are
almost certainly about to hear us unlock a bonus episode,
And hey, I wouldn't want to disappoint you. That's exactly
what we're gonna do. Doctor Eleanor was not feeling very
well this week and she was not up to talking
about the latest awful Dan Brown novel that she read

(00:25):
so she could talk about here on the show. So instead,
we're going to release one of our recent bonus episodes,
and yeah, we'll try to do the Dan Brown thing
next week. But yeah, every month we do two bonus
episodes for our patrons, like the one you're about to
hear on Dragons of Myth, Folklore, religion, and pop culture,

(00:49):
And basically, you know, this is just an example of
the kind of stuff we.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Do over there.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
We are typically doing at least one book club series
set of episodes. Right now, we are nearing the end
of Giovanni Boccaccio's The de Cameron, which we are we
just did the eighth episode on that as well. So yeah, basically,
if you like this, if you want to hear more
of it, please subscribe to the Patreon Patreon dot com

(01:19):
w NSD pod you know, five bucks a month. You
get to hear two bonus episodes plus all the other
episodes ad free. You can join our discord if you want,
and yeah, you can ask us questions like the one
that generated this.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Entire episode here.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
So yeah, it's it's a lot of fun. We think
you'll really enjoy it, and yeah, you should do it.
But without further ado, please enjoy the dragons. There's a
lot of them. They're really cool and we like them
a lot because yeah, they're dragons. All humans like dragons
and if they say they don't, they're liars. Anyway, thank

(02:00):
y'all for listening. Subscribe to the patreon if you want.
You know what, even if you don't want, subscribe, and
I'm just kidding, subscribe to the patreon if you want.
But yeah, thank y'all for listening. And we will be
back next week with another bonus episode and uh, you know,
the regular episode as well.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
I'll have a good one.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Hello, and welcome back to We're Not So Different podcast
about how dragons have always been cool.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Fuck yeah, let's right.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, folks, it is your first bonus episode of the
month of September and your uh, yeah, well this isn't
a series because we've been doing series on here for
so long. You know, I was going into series mode.
But yeah, today we're gonna talk about dragons and them
more abundantly. But I'm gonna be focusing a bit more

(03:28):
on the folklore, folkloric and mythical dragons, So we will
talk about a couple of you know, more contemporary ones
a little later on. But anyway, Yeah, So, somewhere deep
in the dark, somewhere deep in the darkness of the
collective human psyche, if such a thing could be said
to exist, a demon lurks. We call it a dragon,

(03:49):
but it has had many names before, a Pofos, a
Gotho's demon, Yorman gander, phallic, Tiamatt, Virtra near long drack,
quetzal coadal nik a Roachi, the rainbow serpent, piasa mon Yohe,

(04:12):
and a thousand others. Besides, it is a concept so
old that we have no idea how or even where
it began. Because dragons are endemic to human existence, or
at least they have been for the past seven thousand
years or so, they come down to us today as
myths and legends, larger than life characters from folklore, but

(04:34):
to our forebears they were all too real.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
However, it was.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
That dragons were initially conceived. Whether it was some shared
fever dream or the sum total of human subconscious fears
of serpents and other large predators coming down to us
through some epigenetic memory, or just a global coincidence, we
made them in our minds and then manifested them in reality.
Having grown so large in the collective consciousness and myth,

(05:00):
we naturally turned them into gods and arch demons to be.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Worshiped or feared.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
They were life givers, rulers of the underworld, elemental spirits, tricksters, devils,
and everything in between. As humans are wont to do,
we poured our hopes and fears into them, our dreams
and our sins, which only made us fear them all
the more. In turn, we then invented heroes and heroines
who interceded with them on our behalf, or who slew

(05:24):
them for our protection, who made shrines and works of
art and their honor, and even used the large bones
we sometimes found in the ground as evidence to justify
the existence of these creatures.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
In our reality.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
This is true not just of ancient China, which has
the oldest known history of j chronic folklore that we
yet know of, but of civilizations all over the globe,
even in places where serpents and reptiles are basically non
existent or that were fully cut off from the wider world. Eventually, however,
animists and pager religions fell by the wayside in favor

(05:59):
of organ as religion and the broad world religions, which
no longer worshiped the dragons of myth in the same way.
In spite of this, well most of them didn't, some did.
But yeah, in spite of this, humans retained I immediately,
I immediately thought of an exception.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
God, damn it.

Speaker 4 (06:16):
Well, look, yeah, i know I'm that history based.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Let me be neurotic.

Speaker 5 (06:20):
Yeah, I'm gonna let you do your thing, Babe, I'm not.
I'm not.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
No, you're good.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
In spite of this, humans retained both the obsession with
dragons in.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Belief that they were very real.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
They represented enemies or even final bosses for the Abrahamic
God to smote our fonts of wisdom living near Buddhist temples,
or simply scary monsters who lived just over the horizon.
Conceptions of dragons also changed, as the so called Western
conception of dragons branched off from the more serpentine forms
of early dragons, who gave way to the so called

(06:53):
Eastern conception. Still, time more on in our increasing awareness
of science and the broader world, led us to underderstand
that dragons aren't real creatures, they are legendary beings. While
that is a sad realization, humans still can't quit dragons
and their legacy endurers. They exist in pop culture still
the ultimate expression of power that we humans can imagine

(07:16):
and metaphors for our sins and fantasies to this very day.
And when you know what, those giant bones we mistook
for dragon limbs turned out to be fossils, to be
fossils of dinosaurs, real massive reptilian creatures who roam the
earth millions of years in the past, which really is
just one of the happiest coincidences in human history. Folks,

(07:39):
today we're talking dragons. Longtime patron Alie can't asked us
a question. He said, what are some of your favorite
dragon folkloric tales? And is it true that we still
don't know where exactly dragons as a concept came from.
I'd specifically love to hear about dragons from Asia in
similar non Western areas, since I've kind i kind of

(08:01):
had a renewed obsession with them lately, would love to
have some book recommendations as well, and by God, we're
going to do just that. We will talk about the
earliest recorded dragons, why humans always seem to create them,
the differences between Eastern and Western dragons, the evolution of
dragons up to today, and we will of course name
some cool folkloric dragons. But first, oh yeah, we must

(08:23):
talk about what we mean by dragon, because while we
do love to be somewhat pedantic about the differences between
dragons and wiverns and worms, and as you no doubt know,
a dragon has four limbs with wings on its back,
while a wovern has two hind legs and wings on forearms,
and a worm is a grounded dragon and no wings,
or at least impotent wings that don't work. However, the

(08:45):
word dragon has historically encompassed all those things and much more. Indeed,
many of the oldest dragons we will discuss today are
just really big, really powerful serpents. And then there's a
trove of medieval cryptids too. Thus, for the purpose of
this episode, dragon will referred to any and all of
the following dragons, wiverns, worms, drakes, serpents, world serpents, shape shift,

(09:08):
shape shifting serpents, basilisks, hydras, cockatritz's tarasquez, tarasqueues, oun't fuck it, terre,
that's not even, it doesn't matter, griffins, and even some
mythical birds with draconic features. Folks, it is a big dragon,
tent eleanor We will name some dragons later. But what
was the first dragon you remember from your childhood?

Speaker 5 (09:31):
So I spent a long time thinking about this, and
I think it was a stuffed animal.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
That's awesome.

Speaker 5 (09:38):
Yeah, we had a little dragon stuffed animal. I'm not
sure whose it was. I think it might have been
my brother Nates. But it was really cute. It was green,
It had like an open mouth with little with like
a it was pink inside with red tongue, and it
had a little white triangle teeth, and it had wings,
and I think it had four legs and a little tail,

(10:02):
and it was just really cute.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
So we always had this.

Speaker 5 (10:03):
Kind of like dragon around, and you know, when we
would play sort of like nights or whatever, Like the
dragon came up a lot, but also fundamentally it was
the stuffed animals, so we also snuggled it.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
I think I think that's it.

Speaker 5 (10:15):
I think that that's like my my prototypical formative dragon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, mine was my dad. So I was. I think
I've said this on the show before. I was bigger
into sci fi than I was as fantasy as a kid.
You know, I didn't I didn't hate it or anything,
but it wasn't my favorite. But so I didn't have
like a ton of exposure to like those more like
you know, classically literary, famous type dragons. Yet I vaguely remember,

(10:46):
you know, there's the one in the the Disney cartoon
King Arthur, you know, the red Yeah. Yeah, but the
one that I remember it was on the front of
a It was an old illustrated It was the works
of Tolkien illustrated. And it wasn't all of them, of course,

(11:07):
but it was just like it was just drawings that
people did over the years and stuff they commissioned, and
on the front of it was Smaug and he's just
sitting there on top of his like pile of gold,
and it is like burned into my head from when
I was five, I would, you know, I picked that
book down and I would look at it and I
thought it was cool, and you know, I mean, of course,

(11:27):
then I saw like there were pictures, you know, like Saramon.
It's like, oh this dark lord, like, oh this is cool,
but like that dragon, like he's kind of curled up
on his on his treasure. And it's always been burned
into my head. But what do you do you have
like a prototypical dragon now that you think of, like
you know, you just like one that you just kind

(11:48):
of really love.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
Uh So, I mean Smaug is in there, but it's
because you know, you know, I was a Tolkien nerd.
So we had one of my dad's old Tolkien calendars
like of which I like then put.

Speaker 4 (12:01):
Up on my wall.

Speaker 5 (12:01):
And it must have been from the nineteen sixties, I
don't or seventies or some shit. And you know, there
is that picture of Smoug and it had like Bilbo
being kind of invisible but showing up like like it
had came in kind of like a little bit of
a cloud.

Speaker 4 (12:16):
So that was that was certainly there.

Speaker 5 (12:19):
But also you know, for a while I went to
like hippie kindergarten. I think that's the best way to
put it is. Yeah, I went to Waldorf kindergarten and preschool,
and there was like a lot of Saint George and
the Dragon. There was like a lot of Saint Michael,

(12:39):
you know. There there was a lot of that. So
you know, we had a lot of kind of like
medieval esque pictures around of Saint George and the Dragon.
So he's absolutely in there. So like, yeah, like just
images of Saint George and the Dragon are like huge
in in my childhood, I would say. But then like
we just had all sorts of fucking books about you know,

(13:01):
because we just we skewed fantasy, right, So there was
just all sorts of books around the house with dragons
and like this and that, like you know, like kids books.
There's like some book about a knight and a dragon
who were friends making barbecue together.

Speaker 4 (13:13):
I remember that one.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
That's fucking sick. Yeah, I love. Yeah, we had.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
They Yeah, we we did, you know, we had we
had that one. I didn't growing up evangelically, I didn't
really get the stories about Saint.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
George and the Dragon.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Uh though, uh, you know, I always there was the Leviathan,
uh sea serpent Leviathan that's mentioned in the Old Testament.
There's uh the dragon you know that that they're going
to fight it at the end of time. Uh, the
Book of Revelation and so you know had those. But yeah,
like it was just it was you know, those kind

(13:57):
of classical Uh. It was kind of like the like
the classic pop culture dragons, like the large black dragon
that Milicent turns into and oh yeah, which I mean
is like the the like I was.

Speaker 4 (14:12):
The sleeping beauty dragon fucking kicked ass too.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
My kid was watching like one of those older Disney
movies and I was just like, god damn the animation
and these is so even like upscaled and everything into
HD Like it's just so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
But yeah, like it was.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
It was stuff. It was stuff like that, you know.
And I mean I loved Godzilla as a kid, and uh,
you know I think he I will make the the uh,
I will make the argument later. I think he's basically
like the prototypical modern dragon now, but yeah that's even
without the wings.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
But we'll get there.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, so, uh, early dragons, Uh, basically we alluded, you know,
as we alluded to earlier dragon veneration is so old
that it predates the earlier writing on Earth, especially in China,
which has the longest history with the creatures that we
know of. Motifs with dragon like features are found at

(15:13):
sites from the xing lang Wa xing lang Wa culture
dating back to roughly fifty eight hundred BCE. A carved
dragon statue has been discovered from the mid four thousands
BCE oft a yang Shao culture site, and early pig
dragon statues from these from this time still attest to
this fact. Pig dragons have the bodies of the serpentine

(15:38):
dragon bodies and then the heads of pigs.

Speaker 4 (15:41):
They're very good.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, they are cool.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
They do not look like dragons to me, but I
but you know.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
That's interpretive.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
That's interpretive, and so I'm not gonna judge because everybody
calls them pig dragons, and they're gorgeous anyway, so who cares.
Aside from the pig dragons, these resemble bill the slender
serpentine form that represent early draconic creatures in most cultures,
and they are chimerical to a degree, being formed out of,
you know, different parts of different creatures. You know, the

(16:12):
talons of an eagle or a hawk and the eye
or you know, the eyes of an eagle, the talons
of a hawk, the wings of a griff. You know,
all this sort of stuff. And you know, the vast
majority of early dragons are just large serpents with supernatural abilities,
such as the Egyptian of Pophas and oro Boros, the

(16:33):
Leviathan of the Biblical Old Testament, Yorman Gandhir, the various
forms of nauga in India, the feathered serpents of indigenous
American tribes, and the rainbow serpent of Australian Aboriginal tribes,
and more. So, it seems at first glance that all
early dragons were wingless serpents, and the larger, so called
Western dragons came much later, right, well, kind of they

(16:57):
did come later, but I mean, you know, if you're
judging from like how long they've had certain things in China,
we all came a lot later to most stuff. But yeah,
while most early dragons were serpentine, the dragons of Mesopotamia,
specifically especially the sumer the Acadians, and the Babylonians who
followed in its wake. The Mushusu had four legs, a

(17:21):
long tail, and a head like a snake, and the
later understanding of Tmot was that she was a giant,
four legged creature with grasping jaws like you would think
of with the dragon, whereas the dragons of the America
is often took more birdlike appearance, such as the Piasa
bird of the Mississippi and Kahokia culture and ni Quetzalcoato

(17:45):
of Aztec fame. The commonalities between all of these being
that creatures have. These creatures have extreme power, intelligent seeming, vulnerability,
a chimerical mixture of avian, reptilian, and mammalian features, and
and they often serve as gods or mystic entities of
some kind. We'll get to Eastern and Western dragons in

(18:06):
a moment, but first we have to come confront the
question that is, how is it that all human cultures
seem to come up with these creatures. They clearly aren't
all the same, as they very in size and shape,
and some of them are chimera of various creatures.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
But you know, we imagine.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Impressive, mystical, draconic creatures all the same. Now, eleanor in
your personal We're we're gonna talk about some different competing theories.
But in your personal opinion, why.

Speaker 4 (18:36):
Is this we long for a little guy?

Speaker 5 (18:41):
Humans, humans, We long in our hearts for there to
be a guy. Yeah, you know, I just think I do.
I think that there's something about us that just likes
to think about creatures. And I genuinely think that that
plays out. It's still in like a lot of our media.
So for example, you know, even with like with me
being more of a fantasy nerd and you being more

(19:03):
of a sci fi nerd, what is sci fi if
not an excuse to make the little creatures, you know.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
And and like, so you could put a dragon in space.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
There are plenty of space dragons.

Speaker 4 (19:13):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 5 (19:13):
Like I read this whole tear, like I cannot stress
how much these these comics are dog shit, but like
I'm gonna keep buying it. Like there's this this writer Leo,
who is a Brazilian writing in the French idiom, and like,
I mean, this man couldn't write a woman, Like I mean,
he's genuinely writing women like breasting boobulely and like discussing

(19:33):
their boobs and things like that, which is awesome. But
I keep reading these fucking things because like it's like
an Terry's and beetlejuice and all and all of these
because he's so good at making creatures, Like he's a
real motherfucking creature. Like, you know, they go to another
world and then there's a little guy and I'm like,
fuck yeah, I want to see the like and all
I want to do is see the little guy, right,

(19:54):
And sometimes there's a big scary guy and sometimes there's
a little guy, and sometimes there's little scary guy.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
Question work and.

Speaker 5 (20:00):
I love that shit, right, you know. So I do
think that there is just kind of something.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
About us because we are creative.

Speaker 5 (20:09):
You know, like to be a human is to kind
of think about things and imagine, like that's that's what
makes us what we are.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
And I think that we borrow a lot from other people.

Speaker 5 (20:22):
So you know, someone saw a pig dragon one time
and then they were like, oh yeah, fuck yeah, what
if this? You know, and you know, snakes are scary,
so like start off with that. And you know we've
seen lizards that's like a that's like a snake with legs,
And I mean, all I gotta do is look at
kmodo dragon and you're like, okay, real shit, Yeah, real.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Talk pretty damn big. Yeah, do you know how.

Speaker 4 (20:41):
Big those motherfuckers are?

Speaker 5 (20:43):
Dude, dude, dude, Like I thought I knew, and then
I saw one at the zoo in Sydney. I did
not realize they were the size of fucking cars like
I thought.

Speaker 4 (20:53):
I thought that they were like the size of like
a like a like a Golden Retriever. No, and I
was like, that is like the size of a Hyundai Accent,
Like what the fuck is going on? I was so terrified.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
It's like, yeah, like hell, like damn, that thing's like
like it like a like a nice low rider car,
like yeah, that thing is. They're they're huge, and they're
they're mean.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
And I mean that's fine, you know.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
I mean, like I mean, I'm probably mean if I was.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Like if I was like a living fossil. But you know, yeah,
it's like.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
I don't like how they bite you and then just
wait for you to die of hate that. I hate it.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
There's such dicks like they don't they like you're like, oh,
this guy's gonna eat me, like yeah, after you died,
because he bits some like tiny amount of poison into.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Your like oh god.

Speaker 5 (21:44):
Yeah, So yeah, I think I think that there's like
an imaginative thing. And also we share stories and humans
have always moved around a lot, so if one person
comes up with a guy, other people are going to
come up with a guy.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
That's what I think, Yeah, I yeah, yeah, I don't.
I think there are some things we're never going to
be able to properly answer, and this is one of them,
because there's nothing that accounts for all of it unless

(22:18):
you start making a lot of jumps in a lot
of jumps that seem a bit far for me. So
like the competing theories on this, In like around two thousand,
there were like three different books that came out and
they were all on this theory, and I do not
know why they all came out at the exact same time,

(22:41):
and then there was not like a similar rush later
to like mold this theory a little because people love
dragons and people love to write like pop science books,
popular science books about like stuff like this to try
and like get it to like a wider audience, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
But like.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
The first one, and I think the most famous one
is called Instinct for Dragons.

Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's by.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Fuck, his name's Jones. I forget his last name or
his David E. Jones, Sorry, he's an anthropologist, and basically
his thing is that whatever evolutionary instinctual forces that exist
the lizard, the lizard impulses in our brains that we hold,

(23:28):
the ones that like had to run away from komodo
dragons and crocodiles and stampeding mammoths and giant birds and
everything like that in the past, that that's passed down
to all of us, and so we all have this impulse.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
And we kind of invent.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Dragons, we invent draconic creatures in this way. And I
don't necessarily think that is totally like a total impossibility,
because humans do have evolutionary impulses that we that we
don't normally think about. You know, fight or flight kicks
in and we we fight or we fly, you know it.

(24:08):
Like you know, we have evolutionary impulses towards community, towards sex,
towards procreation and things like that. And these are all wonderful,
you know, and good improvable. But the thing about this is,
and the critique that most people have made of this,
is that firstly, there were places on the planet where

(24:31):
snakes have not existed for millions upon millions upon millions
of years. And I mean a good example of this
is yrman Gandhir, like the Norse world serpent that surrounds
it protects Midgar. There are not snakes or lizards or
many reptiles. I don't even know if there are any

(24:53):
reptiles up there. I don't think there probably would have
been back then either, because it would have been colder
and mo or you know, the terrain would have been
far less inviting to you know, the creatures like that.
But you know, how do you account for that? And
how do you account for the fact that, like basically,

(25:17):
like why would that impulse always or not always, but
very often tend towards reptilian creatures that so that often
resemble snakes that have this kind of power, that act

(25:41):
as gods that dwell like in you know haunted forest
or you know caves or something like that.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
And I mean, like.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
That we all came up with that thing simply because
we have like lizard brain impulses to this. I'm not
an ant apologists, but that seems to strain that it
strains credulity.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Credulity to me, I.

Speaker 4 (26:15):
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that there is.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Like I'm really iffy on like epigenetic memory. This almost
does epigenetic memory to me. And it's not he's not
arguing that, but like the idea that like you have
some kind of like impressed memories down from your ancestors.
I'm like, all right, dog, I'm not doing magic bloodline shit,
like I don't care, Like.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
Yeah, yeah, like I do.

Speaker 5 (26:39):
I think that like there's something I think something here
that I would kind of describe as like maybe when
we're creating a scary monster, we're attempting to create an
other reptiles are not like us.

Speaker 4 (26:54):
That is true, you know, I think of that.

Speaker 5 (26:57):
I think that that there's kind of like something there,
you know. I think that we have more of an
impulse when presented with things that look mammalian to be
like it's friend shaped, you know, like even down to
like unicorns were supposed to be bloodthirsty monsters and then
we turned them into a friend because we have a
harder time when things gets like a mammal yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
Like sick and it's a horse with a horn on
it said, why would be my friend?

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Like the other horse?

Speaker 4 (27:23):
Come on, like what what what's going on? You know?

Speaker 5 (27:24):
And so we we will do this more readily I
think with mammals than we will with reptiles because reptiles
just aren't like us. And I mean I could maybe
like there's maybe something like when they get kind of
bird like, you know, if we're talking about like a
cockatris or something like that, you know, when we're talking

(27:47):
about their like, I'm like, I get that because birds
are dinosaurs and you know, we certainly see things. So
for example, when the Maori find atro New Zealand and
it's full of MOA's, the thing they do is be like,
so we got to kill all these giant birds.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah, with the giant.

Speaker 5 (28:07):
Bird like that is uh, those will kill us all.
And to be fair, the moments were like, oh sweet,
I'm gonna.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
Kill these humans.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
I'm gonna kill you guys.

Speaker 4 (28:14):
Like that's great.

Speaker 5 (28:15):
So you know I do when when it's like the
bird thing, I'm like, well, we've got we know enough
about that. Like when presented like I'm I'm pretty scared
of giant birds, like I'm fucking terrified of casswarries for example,
I'm like, I don't think that they should come over
by me. I want them to go away like that,
you know, and and there is kind of like something there,

(28:35):
but I don't think that we now it's common knowledge
that like you know, dinosaurs to birds blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
I don't think that existed in the same way.

Speaker 5 (28:44):
So I guess that for me, I'm just kind of
like it's an other The lizards are others.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
It's like this guy is not like me. I'm unable
to read it, you know.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
And and predatory or current nimmers, birds or others too.
You know the bird that the hummingbird, it's friend, it's
it's tiny, it's cute, you know, the robin, the blue jay.
They sing for me. The hawk does not sing for me.
The hawk dives on my head and tries to steal
my my my puppy.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
You know. The yeah dog just had.

Speaker 5 (29:17):
The fucking eagle like like eats Prometheus's liver.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
You know.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
These are the exploits of the of the raptors, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, so yeah, I mean there's stuff like that, but
I there's it just seems like a stretch to me.
I've read most of Instinct for Dragons. He makes good points,
and I don't think he's wrong about a lot of it,
but I think there's just a step too far to
try and like come up with a workable theory. It's
too neat, it's too yeah, and you don't and you

(29:47):
cannot explain the places that do not have reptiles that
come up with their own stories like this. And Rman
Gandhi is not the only one faf nerrors up there.
There are of course Germanic dragons and and uh, you know,
Slavic and Russian and you know Asian dragons and the
cold places and everything like that. But it's like, you know, yeah, yeah.

(30:13):
The next book that came out it was called The
First Fossil Hunters and it was about, uh, the way
that Romans and Greeks interpreted the fossils that they found
and like what they took them to be, because they
clearly didn't think it to be as dinosaurs. And this
is by a woman named Adrian May, Adrian Mayer, and

(30:36):
I think it's probably the one that does come a
bit closest to something which is but it's not how
we it's not how we first created them, it's how
mad this thing and then reinforced it with this evidence.
And her theory is basically that like look when when

(30:57):
and We have countless examples of this. It's not just dagons,
it's giants, it's you know, uh, it's you know, massive
creatures that live in the woods, you know, all this
sort of stuff. And that's because when our ancestors found
giant dinosaur and mammoth bones and stuff like that, they
looked at them and went, nothing like this around. Nothing

(31:20):
of this size exists. None of my ancestors say anything
about this. Therefore, this must have been the creatures that
we have made up in our mind. And it works
as a it works as a reinforcing loop. It loops
in on itself and you go, okay, I you know,
my grandparents said the dragon lived just over that hill.

(31:44):
We have found a femur bone that is four times
the size of a human fever bone. It must be
either from the giants that live or from the dragons
that live over that hill, or the giants that live
over in Greece, or you know, whatever it is. And
it's like in China, the like trade and use of
dragon bones as evidence goes back at least two thousand

(32:05):
at least to two thousand BCE. Like this is a
very old practice, and so this does apply to a
lot of places again, except there are certain places on
the planet that don't have very medi fossils because of
glaciation and stuff like that. Again, uh, you know, Scandinavia

(32:28):
is a big thing here now. Of course Mayer is
quick to say with that, And I think this is
a good point that like, you know, they didn't see that,
but like it's very plausible to think that, like somebody
was like, dog, we found a femur that's six people high,
that that would get up to people that that would
get up to Scandinavia and they'd be like, oh fuck,

(32:49):
that's uh, that's faft.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Near, you know, something like that.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
And I think it's I think it's plausible as like
a reinforcing evidence thing, but I don't think.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
It is why we do it. I don't think it.
Maybe it is like that now, maybe it is.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Maybe people in China, people in Mexico, people in uh,
you know, in Poland found these things and they were like, fuck,
that's a giant.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
You know what I found.

Speaker 1 (33:14):
I found the the fossils of the actual Quetza Kuwatlis dinosaur.
And I mean maybe they did, and that's how they
cooked all this up. And I completely understand, but I
don't think that would explain the spread and some the
uniformity of this across everywhere.

Speaker 5 (33:36):
Yeah, And I mean, and that's the thing is, I
just think this is one of the ones that I
find quite interesting. Like so for example, like vampires, how
everybody's got a vampire?

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (33:47):
Yeah, right, And I find that those things really interesting,
like the worldwide things. And yeah, I mean so for example,
here we've got a lot of fossils, but they're all
like sea ones because we were underwater, right, so there's
like ichdeosaurs and stuff.

Speaker 4 (34:03):
And for sure, I think that.

Speaker 5 (34:06):
In this particular instance, I agree. I really I quite
like this book because what it does is it shows
you a great instance of working backwards, like Mayor does
a good job of showing that. But it's like, you know,
cimot existed, yeah, way before Romans and Greeks, did you know?

Speaker 2 (34:23):
So?

Speaker 5 (34:24):
And you can watch Romans and Greeks do they think,
but that's not where they got it from. It's more
reinforcement than anything else.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, And I you know, again, I
just don't think we're ever going to come up with
the satisfactory answer on this because I don't think there's
any way you can prove evolutionary memory. You certainly can't
prove like how the first person came up with the
first dinosaur and be like, oh, they did it from
a fossil. And this next theory with this next one,

(34:52):
which was a little less well received, it's called the
Origin of Dragons by Robert Blust, and he basically is like,
it's just people trying to explain things that they don't understand,
the same way that we create gods to be like

(35:12):
the that we created gods to be like the to
explain the thunderstorm, you know, because God is angry at us,
we did something wrong. We must sacrifice. And I mean,
I'm not reducing people in the past idiots, but that
is what our ancestors did and his I mean I.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Think that he is.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
I mean, I do think there's something to this, because
you know, like if you need to explain dragons are
so often associated with wind, rain storms, and especially water,
and so like, you know, if you've got that and
you're like you're praying that there's not going to be
a drought, like Okay, there's a big you know, serpent

(35:53):
in the sky. There's a big bird in the sky.
There's a big four legged thing with wings over there
that controls whatever. You know, it's it's like that.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
But I mean.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Sure, I mean I get like, I don't I can
see that as being a reason for it. But I
think that if that was like the universal reason, that
we would see a whole lot more very specific, uh
exact creation myths and gods than we have. And I mean,

(36:31):
like it's very difficult to like look at all the
gods throughout history, especially before world religions became a thing,
and and and and come even with the with the
small amount of uniformity that we have in all of
these different types of dragons, Like there are gods that
are men, women, they're ethereal deity. Like it's just it's

(36:56):
so vast and dragons. I'm I mean, we're giving a
wide berth to the term here. But like it is
weird that we all came up with like chimera that
are serpentine in some nature or feathered and.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
You know, like and have scales like that. I don't know,
I don't I yeah, I don't think.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, I don't think.

Speaker 5 (37:22):
I don't think that it really I just don't think
it works. Again, it's I think that we're stretching things
in order to come up with one neat story. And
I mean, I I guess that that my thing is
to an extent, we need we don't need to have

(37:43):
an answer for this.

Speaker 4 (37:44):
I don't think that we really do.

Speaker 5 (37:46):
I think that that it's one of those things that
sort of makes us human is our desire to imagine
a little guy, and we probably came up with them
at different times.

Speaker 4 (37:54):
And also it's like, you know, not all the thunderstorms
are started by dragons. Sometimes they are. Sometimes that's just
a guy, Sometimes that's just zeus. You know, sometimes that's.

Speaker 5 (38:04):
Just thor and like yeah, you know, and we tell
stories for varying reasons. And I mean, I guess that
my thing is that, like one way to think about
it is that we use myths all the time, right,
Like we like myths, and we use a myth as
explanatory devices. Right, they're not they're not lies. It's not

(38:25):
things where we're like, oh yeah, this is one hundred
percent real and how it happened. But we're like, okay,
well imagine something is like X, Y Z, and dragons
do a really great job in there, because it's like
imagine the scariest thing you possibly could, right, and a
scary thing that we managed to imagine is this because
it's not like us, and they're like whatever. Now, of course,

(38:46):
like in the Chinese tradition, sometimes dragons are very nice. Indeed, right,
let's not forget our good friend falcore right things of
this nature. But you know, what we're doing is we're create.
I think to an extent, what we're just doing is
we're constructing and other, which we're good at. We like that,
you know, and it's one of the things that makes
us human. We're like, here's the thing that is not
like humans.

Speaker 4 (39:06):
We're humans.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Sometimes the other is good and we and we call
it a god. And sometimes the other is bad and
it's a demon. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, take your
pick those you can check those books out there, are
you know, a lot of different you know, articles you
can find. Is like, there's just I don't think that

(39:30):
there is one answer. I think you probably blend those
three things together and get close to the truth. But
it's not like we're ever going to know. And I
mean I do think I think there's something to the uh,
the inherent mystery of these things that we can never
know and that's fine. I don't see a real reason

(39:52):
to have to know these things.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
But yeah, uh so.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
As time went along, the dragons they sort of coalesced
into what we call what we typically define as Eastern
dragons and Western dragons. But as we will note, there
is a secret third thing dragon. But the differences. So,

(40:18):
is there a big difference between Eastern and Western dragons. Yes,
it is a very defined difference. There are I mean,
you can you know, you can stack them up side
by side, and you know, like Western dragons are almost
exclusively evil. Eastern dragons are often benevolent, not always but

(40:39):
but but more so. Western dragons are associated with fire,
Eastern dragons with water. Western dragons are mostly male and
mostly have stable appearances. Eastern dragons can go either way
male or female or yes, and they are often shape shifters.

(41:04):
So like, there are definitely these differences. But I mean,
eleanor is there is there a reason why, you know,
is there a prevailing theory for why, like we ended
up with this, Like in the East they kind of
already had this inn. In the West, it was like,
you know, there's different divergent cultural histories playing out.

Speaker 5 (41:22):
I guess, yeah, I think that one of the things
that is happening is that, you know, within a Chinese
context in particular, for example, you just have a you
have more of a monolithic culture.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
This isn't to say that every.

Speaker 5 (41:36):
Single person that lives in what is now the quality
of China is like Han Chinese, but Han Chinese culture
is pretty domineering. I think, yeah, it would be, it
would be fair to say, and it has this tendency
to sort of exert itself on others. So I think
that you see this conception kind of play out because

(41:58):
they have such a hegemonic control of the imagination over there,
so like their imagined dragon is their imagined dragon, you know.

Speaker 4 (42:08):
I think also.

Speaker 5 (42:11):
Their religions tend to be very different to the kind
of like prevailing European religions, where they're sort of like
there's a good and a bad and there's a hell
in you know, a heaven, and there's this and that that,
you know, within Confucian culture and things like that, things
are very very different, you know, Confucianism being.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
Like the oldest of the yeah, of the.

Speaker 5 (42:35):
Of the Chinese religions, as we have well noted. But
I think that this leaves room for ambiguity. They have
room for ambiguity within their own moral culture, so you
can have these guys. So I think dragons are also
much more considered sort of like a part of the

(42:56):
animal kingdom there. So for example, if we consider just
like the zodiac signs, you know, and then like it's
like yeah, there's tigers and there's monkeys and their dragons,
we can all agree like that those are some guys
like the genaman animal, rooster, sheep, dragon, you know, and
it's just sort of like a guy, right, Whereas I

(43:21):
think the way that the West has tended to approach
them is like specifically as monsters. And also I think
that there is there's almost something here that is just
about translation. Yeah, you know where we're like, oh, yeah,
that's a dragon because it's like a big guy that
flies and things, and we're like oh yeah, and we've
just sort of like used a word to do this

(43:42):
smoothing over.

Speaker 4 (43:43):
But I you know, it's almost.

Speaker 5 (43:44):
Like a very different type of creature, right, like yeah
when you consider it, so we're like linguistic barriers are
sort of doing a lot here, Whereas you know, so
for example, like Babylonian dragons of whom I am very fond,
you know.

Speaker 4 (44:02):
Like I've got I've got a little.

Speaker 5 (44:04):
I have a little model that I got at the
Pergamon Museum of like one of the little Babylonian gate creatures,
and they're like, you know, they've got they've got like
little they've got four legs and like a big talon,
like a like a raptor, and and like a little
snaky mouth. But they look like a like a little guy,
like almost like a little horse, right, and you're like, okay,

(44:26):
but they're also protectors. And similarly they're on there with
like lions and there's like, oh, oh, don't don't mess
with the king. Yeah, dragons around the shop, right, So
I think that they just kind of enter the lexicon
over here as a monster, and then we just kind
of continue to use them as that in that way.

(44:48):
So I just think that they're they're entering the cultural
imagination for different reasons. Oh and here comes my whiskey
and soda. Thank you, justin Oh, nice full service around here, baby.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
So yeah, we're just going to talk about Eastern and
Western real quick, you know, just give a brief overview
the Western dragons. They they did come later, like, especially
like the European dragons, they are a later thing, and
I mean that seems you know, cultural transfer and all
that sort of stuff, and you just kind of roll
them all together with the monsters that you already have,
because I mean, like the tarasque is considered like a

(45:23):
form of of like a dragonic creature because it's like
a Komodo. It's it's I mean, it's a slightly bigger
Komodo dragon like essentially, and you know, so like it's yeah,
you know again, who can say, like how people like
kind of cook that one up, But I'm glad they

(45:44):
did because I like them both.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
So Eastern dragons broadly, the characteristics are serpentine. They have
chimerical arms, claws, fur, and hair. Sometimes they're wise, benevolent.
Often they are elemental or kings or emperors, especially elemental
deities for water and storms, they can control the elements.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Some of them.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Breathe fire, but it's rare, and they are occasionally or
often exiled, which is an interesting dichotomy. They are flying
or floating, but wings are optional, usually thought to dwell
in the sky in some form of ethereal heaven or

(46:33):
under the sea.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
As abyssal entities.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
There's one quote that I thought was pretty cool, and
it's about how like some of the like some of
the Chinese dragons are the sea the sea dragon kings.
They live under the water, and each is a link
a league in length and so bulky that in shifting
its posture it tosses one mountain aside against another.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
It has five.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
Feet, one of them being in the middle of its belly,
and each foot is armed with five sharp claws. It
can reach into the heavens and stretch itself into all
quarters of the sea. It has a glowing armor of
yellow scales, a beard under its long snout, a hairy tail,
and shaggy legs. Its forehead projects over its blazing eyes.
Its ears are small and fish are boiled by blast

(47:23):
of its breath and roasted by the fiery exhalations of
its body.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
So like, a lot of these.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Are cool, a lot of these are shape shifting, but
some of them are just like, holy fuck that thing.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
We don't like that thing?

Speaker 2 (47:38):
That dragon was moving. Dog. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
They can either be male or female, or androgynous.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
They are often.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Associated with fertility. They do marry other humans, and as
I said, they are shape shifters. Now there are some
exceptions to this. Certain dragon kings of Chinese rivers took
mischievous pleasure in flooding fields underwater. As I said, you know,
the underwater some of the underwater dragons are so massive

(48:08):
they move mountains. Japan has a history of some woman
eating dragons. Obviously, we've talked a little bit about the
Mesopotamian dragons. The Indian serpentine dragon demon Virtra personifies drought
and is the enemy of the king of Heaven Indra.
So like, they definitely have some some bad ones, some

(48:31):
some mean ones, some some true monsters, but it's not
the norm, now, eleanor you know what the characteristics of
the Western dragon.

Speaker 5 (48:41):
Okay, yeah, so the characteristics of the Western dragon we've
we've already talked about how there are there are different
kinds of ways of describing this. You know, Like there's
there's the woverins, who are personal faves. Yeah, but and
then they are like the dragons that have four legs.
And then there's also like worms who are the who
are the creepily crawley guys. But it's a general rule

(49:02):
of them, they're they're bad, right, And I thought that
we should talk a little bit about Saint George's dragon
as a way into this, okay, And the reason why
this is kind of important is that you know, I
don't like all the neat packaging that we heard of, like, okay,
well here are all these ways that you know, this

(49:23):
is the reasons why we come.

Speaker 4 (49:24):
Up with it.

Speaker 5 (49:25):
But as a general rule of thumb, you know, Saint George,
we know is like a morphed story that goes like
way way way, way, way way back, right, So we
there are certainly, for example, like one of the prevailing
ways of relating to Saint John, Saint John Saint George

(49:48):
is that he's kind of an update of what we
call the three Chian horseman.

Speaker 4 (49:53):
Iconography.

Speaker 5 (49:54):
And so this is something that is kind of like
Roman era, and it it's like and stop beving've heard
this one.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
There's a serpent that entwines.

Speaker 5 (50:05):
The tree of life like Nadog right in Norse mythology.
And then you have like a Roman calorie man who
is like coming in and stabbing him. And we have
examples of this all over. We've got like Serbian examples
and it's like we see Apollo doing this for examples.
So we also have some people who will argue that

(50:29):
this kind of like even goes back into like the
Egyptian period and that this is a way of looking
at like a thought for example, so you know that
our desire to see a guy on a horse like
fight a snaky looking thing has a really really long
and distinct way of looking at it here. So we know,
for example that like within the Egyptian things you like

(50:51):
rab fights Apep. You know the serpent who wants to
to eat the sun right there you go, and you
know Tmi is a dragon and she gets fought by Marduk, Right,
So we have all of these things that go go
back to this sort of thing, and then Saint George
it's just kind of like an example and if you

(51:13):
go look it up you can see an example that
is in the louver of Horace on horseback killing set
who's in the shape of a crocodile.

Speaker 4 (51:29):
Right, So it's like, so this is just just something
that we enjoy kind of doing over in this part
of the world.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Right.

Speaker 5 (51:35):
And at first this isn't really Christian iconography at all.
There are some things particularly early on in like the
Patristic era, with Christian icoonography of like the christ militant
trampling the serpent, super super common imagery. Later on you'll
see Mary trampling the serpent, for example. And then at

(51:59):
first we the first guy killing a dragon who's a
saint is Saint Theodore actually, and he's a Macedonian saint,
and we think that we've got examples of him like
killing a dragon on a horse from like the sixth
or seventh century. And interestingly, we don't have examples of
Saint George killing the dragon until around about like the

(52:23):
tenth century, and we can't even then say that's definitively
George and not Theodore until about the twelfth century. So
we know from the twelfth century onwards that Saint George
begins to get associated with this particular legend. But oftentime
you'll see, especially with earlier kind of ninth and tenth

(52:44):
century ones like George and Theodore show up at.

Speaker 4 (52:49):
The same time doing this. Then we get the Golden Legend.

Speaker 5 (52:53):
Okay, And so the Golden Legend, which is written by
jacobis Dave Vorans in the thirteenth century, kind of in
the twelve sixties. He's the first person who definitively like
tells the Saint George story that we have written down,
and he says that, like Saint George lives in Silen,
which you know that just means western North Africa. There

(53:14):
is a venom spewing dragon who lives out in the countryside,
and the local township in order to appease that have
been like feeding it sheep sheep to stop working and
then they're like feeding it varying youths and eventually it's
got to the king's daughter, like and so you know
the like where we're going to send her out there.

(53:37):
Saint George h is usually imagined very specifically as a
Roman officer, and he goes out there to try to
save other princesses like no, like I got to do
my part.

Speaker 4 (53:49):
For the town.

Speaker 5 (53:49):
And he's like, no, don't worry about it, girl, I
got it. The dragon comes out of the pond. It's
about to do its thing. He makes the sight of
the cross bingo boingo, like he manages to start wrestling
with the dragon. The princess throws him her girdle. He
uses it as like a belt around the dragon's neck
and then like he's then able to like.

Speaker 4 (54:12):
Dog walk the thing.

Speaker 5 (54:15):
And then he like, take they take it back to
Silen and then and Saint George is like, I could
just like kill this guy for you if you'll all
get baptized, and everyone says.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
Okay, we will, and then everybody hurts to Christianity.

Speaker 5 (54:29):
George kills the dragon and the princess becomes a nun
and you know he in St. George, Saint George, right,
and so this is mad popular, you know, the Golden Legend.
That's where we get a lot of our saint stories.
And then from then on out you have like George
and the dragon. But this is really important because you

(54:50):
could just see how far back this is going. And
in the same way that we're like, I don't know,
like a mankind lungs in his heart to like why
do we all have dragons here? You can really see
Europeans are.

Speaker 4 (55:02):
Like I like that one.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
I like it.

Speaker 4 (55:05):
I like it when there's a guy on horseback and
any kills and.

Speaker 5 (55:08):
It's probably because they see guys on horseback and they
want and they want to do like a story with it.

Speaker 4 (55:14):
So you know, whether it's like raw.

Speaker 5 (55:16):
And a pep or you know, horse killing set, or
you know, any number of Romans doing their thing.

Speaker 4 (55:23):
We've got this.

Speaker 5 (55:23):
Right, So that's kind of like your your archetypical one.
But then I wanted to just like shout out a
couple of like the ones that you would expect. So like,
for example, let's think about the Wells Dragon, because I
like to right and how this is something that it
doesn't necessarily have bad connotations. It's like the dragons are fearsome,

(55:44):
but they really associate it with themselves, right. And we've
talked about this before, but it's like in the maven Donion,
that's the first time you get this, uh, you get
this particular story. And there is a dream in the
Lud and Leftliss story where the red dragon is fighting

(56:06):
with a white dragon who's invading, and the red dragon
basically represents like the Celtic Britons and the white dragon
is supposed to represent the invading Saxons and so and
then eventually, like the the red dragon like goes to
sleep underhill. Stop me if you've heard this one before,

(56:28):
and it's going to come back out like at the
time of need. Everybody loves this. This then gets gets
retold in the Historia Brittonium, which is written in the
ninth century and this is the first time ever the
dragon becomes red. You know that the Saxon dragon is
white the whole time, boo the Saxon dragon, but this

(56:49):
is the first time that the dragon is red, and
so this is kind of like this becomes like entangled
with our theory ona And then of course Jeffrey of
Monmouth repeats the same story again.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
This time it's like it becomes like.

Speaker 5 (57:12):
A dream that Merlin had, and King Arthur starts using
the dragon down his batner. Oh, I'm Glindur, who I've
been spending a lot of time reading about recently. He
like then takes on the dragon, although he has a
golden one as his symbol. So it's like, so this
is an example where the dragon is fearsome, but our

(57:35):
dragon is.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
A good guy, yea, and that dragon is bad.

Speaker 5 (57:38):
And also very classically, these dragons are like they're actual dragons.
They are not Withver's. They've got four legs, they've got
little wingies and whatever. But then I thought I would
just talk about one more kind of dragon. So there's
a dragon that I'm really obsessed with called the Herron Sug,
which is a basque dragon, and the reason why I

(57:59):
like this guy that he's kind of like the hydra.

Speaker 4 (58:03):
In that he's got.

Speaker 5 (58:04):
Seven heads and sometimes he's kind of like a serpent,
but sometimes he's kind of like a dragon.

Speaker 4 (58:09):
But he's got seven heads. And there's all kinds.

Speaker 5 (58:12):
Of stories that get told about him.

Speaker 4 (58:15):
So we've got like one.

Speaker 5 (58:17):
Where like, uh, there there, you've got the Tartalo.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
And the herron Sugi legends.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
So there's like Tartalo is a one eyed giant, so
he's a cyclops and he gets freed from like being
imprisoned by the mass king and h the the the
king gets uh, really pissed about this. His son, the Prince,
has has unleashed the Tartaro and Tartalo gets called into

(58:48):
back the prince up essentially, and look, so Tartaro, as
a the cyclops is smart, and he's like, look, we're
gonna lay low for a while. You are going to
become the garden or for the king the next next
kingdom over. We're just gonna lay low. And while he's there,
the prince is like a doing plant in you know,

(59:10):
roses or whatever the fuck, and ends up falling in
love with the youngest daughter of said king.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
But stop maving heard this one before the youngest daughter.

Speaker 5 (59:19):
Is supposed to be sacrificed to the terrible seven head,
a dragon, the heron Sigi, who lives outside, and so
the prince in Tartarlo create a caper and a way
of like defeating the the heronzug in battle, which like
involves like trying to cut off all the heads at once,
kind of like the hydra. Eventually they they defeat him,

(59:44):
and then the king goes, oh you can you can
marry my daughter, and then they're like, oh, actually I'm
a prince. Then everyone is happy, right, fantastic. There are
all kinds of stories involving thereon Suge, specifically within the
the the basque stories where it's like sometimes they live
in the woods. Sometimes it's like and a young man

(01:00:06):
helps an old crone out by giving her a cake,
and then she gives him a magic like staff that
will kill things in one blow. And then when he's
out shepherding the hair and Zuga comes up and she
hits it on the head. But the point of it
is this is a really kind of interesting legend because
it shows you that there is also this sort of

(01:00:26):
desire to have like the older kind of hydra dragons
around still and it still exists, right, so you know,
go to the Celts for some alternative alternative dragon stories.
You know, like I was kind of trying to think
about what I wanted to talk about, and you know,
we could talk about Nadog all day long, and I
love to.

Speaker 4 (01:00:47):
I'm not talking shit.

Speaker 5 (01:00:48):
But the point is there's all these interesting things going
on in the Western tradition and they usually follow the
Saint George path because what we're doing is we're retelling
these stories in ways that we want. But damn, sometimes
they're like a retail only hercules.

Speaker 4 (01:01:00):
Miss Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:01:02):
Sometimes sometimes like I'm not actually dog, the dragon's really cool,
and and that all depends on who you're asking, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
And then there are the secret third thing dragons which
have their own traditions. The feathered serpents are a big
deal in the Americas. A lot of traditions exist with them,
and the in Australian Aboriginal culture, the rainbow serpent is.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Ubiquitous in in in.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
A lot of the in a lot of those tribal
cultures as I understand it, and it dates back a
long time. So those are just some you know, different things.
The rainbow serpent is very similar to you know, just
the general you know, big serpent god type of deal.
And yeah, so we just got a couple more things

(01:01:58):
before we get out of here. First we are gonna
name some dragon and we are gonna briefly, we're just
gonna do three We're gonna go back and forth three each, uh,
and I'm just we're just gonna do two or three
minutes on them. There are obviously a lot more you
could go into, but uh, yeah, So I will start,

(01:02:19):
and I will start with quetsa coautals So puzzle Couaudal
is regarded as a god by pre Aztec cultures and
then became basically the chief deity to the Aztecs. I
was associated with the Sun venus, knowledge trade and more.
Takes the form of a feathered serpent or a shape

(01:02:43):
shifting humanoid creature with chimerical features like the face of
a snake. He is often born of a virgin. There
are a lot of tales. The first example of the
rainbow serpent in motifs showing up Mexico dates back to
nine hundred BCE, so there are a lot of and

(01:03:04):
and Quetzacadal dates back to the TiO tu Wacan culture,
which is like started around one hundred I think BCE,
so like we're there are a lot of different versions
of this. Usually Quetza Couadal is born of a virgin,
sometimes birth of a celestial deity that was birthing the

(01:03:25):
rest of the stars of the Milky Way. The Aztecs
believed that the current son is the fifth iteration. The
previous four had been destroyed by disasters of some kind,
but Quetza Couado went into the underworld and created mankind
from a mixture of his own blood and the bones
of the older races from under the previous suns.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
And then Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
One of the one of the tales that I could find,
which I thought was very interesting because it's going to
incorporate the phoenix motif as well, is that at Uh
this is the tale of Quetzquado's death. So uh Quetzaquaddal's
I think brother Teskettl tes Kettl Potla Uh gets quetz

(01:04:12):
Aquado drunk, and then Quetzquado goes off and cavorts with
his older sister, quetz ol Petlotel, who was a virginal priestess.
She called it caused her religious duties to lapse, and
most scholars think it means that he uh they had
they had in stual sex. When Quetzaquadal awoke, he was

(01:04:34):
so ashamed of his actions that he had his servants
build him a stone coffin. He put himself inside and
burned himself alive for his sins. Yet his ashes rose
into the sky and his intact heart soon followed, rising
to become the morning star or venus.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
Yeah, that is quetz a Quadal. There are many, many
different legends, but basically, uh giant uh feathered serpent that
is similar to a bird create creator deity for for
the Aztecs, and uh yeah pretty cool. I find the

(01:05:15):
feathered serpant things so funny because you know we we
found the feathered serpents too. They were dinosaurs, they had feathers,
and yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
I just find that funny.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
Anyway, Yeah, eleanor what do you got?

Speaker 5 (01:05:29):
I went out of my way to find some dragons
that were not the normal dragons, and I found one.

Speaker 4 (01:05:36):
Of my one of my favorite stories. Have you ever
heard of the Lambton worm?

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
I have, but only because I came across it while
researching this.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
Yeah, so the Lampton War is cool. He's from He
is from Durham.

Speaker 5 (01:05:48):
And the reason why I like the Lambton worm is
there's a whole fucking family curse about.

Speaker 4 (01:05:52):
It, which is awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:05:54):
Uh So, basically, there's like the Lampton family. There's a
the young John Lampton is a bit of a tear away, okay,
and he decides not to go to church one Sunday
and to go fishing instead. You know, like there are
different ways of telling this, but one way or another,
homeboy is not a mess, right, and he is like

(01:06:17):
not catching anything until church lets out, and then he
gets like a kind of like eel uh of the
creature and he's like, okay, well weird, but you know whatever.
And the eel has nine holes on each side of
his head, and he's like huh okay. Now, now here's
where stories start to diverge. Okay, they can either be

(01:06:38):
about either this guy's like about three feet long or
he's like a tiny little size of the thumb and
they're like, all right, you know, sometimes it's a snake,
sometimes it's got legs whatever. So anyway, at this point
in time, they're like, huh okay, weird, all right, And
his dad comes up and it's like, what the fuck
is going on? And John is like, oh, well, check

(01:06:59):
this out. I've caught the devil and I'm just gonna
like throw this shit down a well, okay, And then
like his dad or sometimes it's just an old man,
is like, oh, you shouldn't have been like out catching
monsters or whatever. So anyway, he then grows up to
be a man, does young John, and then realizes he

(01:07:19):
used to be a real piece of shit and decides
to go on crusade.

Speaker 4 (01:07:22):
Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:07:24):
Meanwhile, while he's way on crusade, the worm is getting
bigger and bigger and bigger, and the well becomes poisonous
as a result, and the.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
Local villagers are like, huh.

Speaker 5 (01:07:35):
My sheep sure to be going missing. Don't know what's
going on like that, And eventually the worm gets so
big that it completely coils itself around a local hill
which we now call worm Hill, and there's like and
you can people will be like, oh, you can see
the marks from the worm on it. It's like, you know,
he's eating sheep, he's eaten children, he's stopping cow from

(01:08:01):
getting like giving milk and things like that. Anyway, John's
dumbass eventually returns from the Crusades, and it finds out like,
oh damn, everyone is like broke and his father's estates
are like run down because this fucking worm, right, so
he has got to go ask a wise woman for help.
And the wise woman or which depending on when the

(01:08:22):
story is getting told, is like, dude, remember that worm
you pulled out?

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
And he's like, oh shit. She's like okay, So here's
what you gotta do.

Speaker 5 (01:08:32):
You got to cover your armor in spear heads, and
you're gonna have to go down into the river where
the worm is now living. And basically what you have
to do is attempt to like goad the worm into
fighting you and like getting around you so that like
the spearheads will will get it right, and if you

(01:08:54):
don't do it, you're fat, like everything is going to
be bad, and that if you don't, after you kill
the worm, okay, you have to kill the first living
thing you see. And if you don't kill the first
living thing you see, you have your family is going
to be cursed not to die in their bed for

(01:09:16):
nine generations. John's like, okay, puts the spearheads on it, right,
And so basically he manages to he says to his dad, look,
gotta go, gotta go kill the worm, right, and then
he says, Okay, when I kill the worm, I'm gonna
blow my horn three times.

Speaker 4 (01:09:34):
And toot my own horn three times.

Speaker 5 (01:09:37):
And then when that happens, let my favorite dog run
to me, which harsh.

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
And then I'll kill him and then.

Speaker 5 (01:09:46):
That way we're all gonna avoid the curse. So fights
the worm. Worm tries to crush him, but he gets
all speared up and he eventually dies. And he has
to fight the worm in the river because if the
pieces could go back together again, it would just be whole.
So the pieces of the worm go out to see

(01:10:07):
and he can't get joined up again. Okay, John blows
his horn, but his dad is so excited that the
worm is dead he forgets about letting the dog out
and runs up to congratulate him, and John's like, I
can't kill my dad, And then they're like, okay, well, look,
why don't.

Speaker 4 (01:10:24):
We just like kill the dog now? But it's too late.

Speaker 5 (01:10:28):
And we know for a fact that there is kind
of like a number of generations of Lampton's who died
like so Robert Lampton drowned. Sir William Lampton was killed
out on the Marston More. William Lampton died at the
Battle of Wakefield. Things of this nature. So I really

(01:10:49):
like this one because it does a lot of things.
It's got like the kind of like hydro myth thing
of like the coming back together. We've got like a
named fucking family, you know, like at these guys have
really bad luck, and it's got it just got all
of these nice little medieval pieces to it, like the
try to kill.

Speaker 4 (01:11:06):
A Dog, which is like how you get like man
drakes and things. We love him? What a great worm? Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
My next one is called the Dragon King's Daughter, and
this is from China in the Middle Ages. This translation
comes down from all what is that guy's fucking name?

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
W or etc.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Warner in the Myths and Legends of China, which is
from the early twentieth century, and he relates this tale
which is dated to.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
The reign of Feng.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
I'm sorry, the Emperor cal Sung of the Tang dynasty,
and this is his rule would have been six seventy
six to six seventy nine CE. And yeah, a thing
about Chinese. A lot of the Chinese dragons is that
every river's got a dragon. They're all noble, and sometimes

(01:12:07):
they do stupid things that get really fucked up for it.
So yeah, there was this guy. He was a graduate.
His name was Lou and he unfortunately had just failed
one of his rounds of the Chinese Civil Service exam
and he was on his way home when he saw
a woman tending goats and she said to him, I

(01:12:31):
am the youngest daughter of the dragon king of tung
Ting Lake. My parents married me to the son of
the god of the river Qing, but my husband, misled
by the slanders of his servants, repudiated me. I have
heard that you were returning to the kingdom of Wu,
which is quite close to my native district. So I
want to ask you to take this letter to my father.

(01:12:54):
And she gives the guy the letter and he's like, okay,
what am I supposed to do that, you know, if
you're a dragon, and he's and she says, look, go
up to the lake and Tngunting. There's a large orange
tree there. It's called the protector of the soil. Hit
it three times with your girdle and someone will appear.

(01:13:17):
And so the guy took it and he was apparently
worried enough about it to go deal with this, but
not for a few months, it says, so he went.
Some months later. He went up to the orange tree
and struck it three times, and a warrior arose from
the lake and saluted him. And you know, it's like,
what do you want? And he's like, I've got this

(01:13:38):
letter for your king, and the warrior strikes the water.
He creates a mystical passage that Luke can walk down.
He led him to the underwater palace and this is
the palace of the Dragon King, ling Sue, who then
appeared and uh, Lou says, hey, I got this. You know,

(01:14:06):
I'm a failure. I failed to do all this. I
failed my my exam, which I don't know whether Dragon
King would care, but you know whatever, man, and uh,
he says, I found your daughter. She was disheveled, and uh,
she wanted me to give you this letter. And he
read out the letter and the king wept and everybody,

(01:14:27):
all his courtiers wept, and then the king said stop it,
stop yelling, and uh, and they were like, stop crying,
or my brother will here and uh and make fun
and make fun of me. And he has a terrible
temper and might hear about this and cause a lot
of problems. So instead they send out a retainer and uh,

(01:14:52):
a retainer dragon, and he is described as a red dragon,
a thousand feet long, with red scales, may of fire,
bloody tongue, and eyes blazing with lightning. He passed through
the air rapidly and then disappeared, and then barely a
few moments had elapsed when he returned with the young woman,

(01:15:12):
who uh, Lou recognized as the goat herder and uh yeah, uh,
her husband's dead. That dragon went and took care of
that shit real fast, came back and uh so he's
uh so, the dragon King's like, look, you got my

(01:15:33):
daughter back. He got her out of this terrible situation,
take her hand in marriage. And Lou was like, oh,
I can't do it. I failed my exam. Did I mention?
I failed my exam because I failed my exam. And
he also didn't want to do it because it would
bring shame upon his name and his family because it
would look like he killed her husband for the purposes
of marrying her. I don't know how they would know that,

(01:15:55):
what with all the dragons doing it. But hey, man,
uh you know.

Speaker 2 (01:15:59):
You do you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
So Chang or so Lou went home and he married
a woman named Chang, but she died, and then married
a woman named Han Han, but she died and he
so he decided, uh to move. He moved to another city,
and UH was sad and lonely, and he wanted to
marry again. And so this guy was like, hey, I'll

(01:16:23):
set you up.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
I know a woman. She's great.

Speaker 1 (01:16:27):
Uh you you'll love her. She just her husband died,
you know. Uh, it should be a great match. And
Lou agrees to marry the woman. Uh, And at the
end of the year they had a son. And then uh,
she said to him, She says, I am the daughter
of the king of tongue Ting Lake. It was you
who saved me from my miserable plight on the blank

(01:16:49):
on the bank of the Qing, and I swore I
would reward you. Formerly you refuse to accept my hand,
and my parents decided me to to marry me to
a silk merchant. But I cut my and never cease
to hope that I might find you, And so they
were reunited. Lou finally decided to quit being a baby,

(01:17:11):
a big baby bitch about it and they went back
to the river where her father lived, and no more
as said of them. But you know, there you go
just as classic, you know, as classic a medieval Eastern
dragon things you can and shape shifting dragons, marrying bear

(01:17:36):
bearing children, a thousand foot long dragon like leaving and
coming back in like ten seconds to kill another guy
because he was a dick to your kid, you know,
standard stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:17:49):
Oh yeah, like obviously, this is this is the stuff
we love to see, you know. I decided for another
one of my dragons to go with a Polish classic,
which is the vowel dragon. And the vowel Dragon is
a really fun one because it's genuinely, genuinely medieval and
it comes to us for the first time in the

(01:18:11):
thirteenth century in the Chronicle Polarum or the Polish Chronicle.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):
And.

Speaker 5 (01:18:18):
It is said to have showed up in the reign
of a king Kroc or like Gracas, if you want
to be like Western about it, and like this is
you know, he's kind of like vaguely mythological, but you

(01:18:39):
know he has to get brought up all the time
to kind of like.

Speaker 4 (01:18:41):
Explain the origins of Polishness.

Speaker 5 (01:18:43):
Okay, so this guy is pretty neat because it's like,
one of the other fun things about it is it's
the first time we have the word holophagus used, which
means that he's a dragon so big it can like

(01:19:04):
swallow someone whole. Oh right, so it's really it's really fun.
So anyway, the Vavel dragon is a terrible and cruel
beast that dwells in the depths of a certain rock
or cave, like near the Vavel Hill. Okay, now stop,
maybe've heard this one. But the dragon needs to be

(01:19:26):
fed cattle every week or it will it'll eat humans instead.

Speaker 4 (01:19:31):
Right, this is getting to be a problem, all right.

Speaker 5 (01:19:38):
We're running out of cows, guys, you know, don't We
don't have enough cows to keep feeding this so so
so croc the King comes up with a plan and
he says to his two sons, look, you're gonna go
out there and you're gonna have to figure out a
way of killing this dragon because we can't keep doing
this right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:59):
Now.

Speaker 5 (01:19:59):
They go, they observe the dragon and they're like, yeah,
I can't do it, bra he'll probably swallow us home,
like he's too large to take on.

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
So they come up.

Speaker 5 (01:20:08):
With a bit of a ruse where they take a
cow's skin and they stuff it with smoldering sulfur.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
And they got a terrible smell.

Speaker 5 (01:20:22):
Yeah, and they feed it, they feed it to the dragon,
and the dragon eats it and basically like blows up
like from the His fire combined with the fire of
the of the sulfur means that he just like imploates. Okay,
now cool, sorry, cool story. But Da Da Da, the

(01:20:45):
younger of the two princes, is like, hmm, now that
we've killed this dragon, now is a great opportunity for
me to bump off my older brother and then I'm
going to be able to inhit I'm going to be
able to inherit the kingdom. I'm gonna get all the
credit for killing the dragon. Right, So kills his kills
his brother, and then everyone is like, oh yeah, like hey,

(01:21:08):
where's your brother? And he's like, oh man, it was
crazy because like the dragon swallowed him whole. And then
everyone's like really because is not his body over there?
And it's like, oh, So as a result, Kroc the second,
the younger prince, is expelled from the country.

Speaker 4 (01:21:24):
Why is this important.

Speaker 5 (01:21:26):
Because they use this story to explain why the Princess
Vonda becomes the queen right, and why it is that
a particularized woman is in charge and not a man.
The Princess Vonda of her own we think she actually existed.

(01:21:49):
She was probably real. She's probably like an eighth century
Polish princess, but a lot of what we know about
her is that she is like a kind of a
legend in the There is kind of like this idea
that she was converted Christian and like basically a still
pagan German wanted to marry her and then she's like, no,

(01:22:11):
I'll never do that and like kills herself instead. So yeah,
like sometimes she kills herself by throwing herself into the vistiala.

Speaker 4 (01:22:21):
YadA, YadA, YadA.

Speaker 5 (01:22:22):
But the point is, like all of this is a
setup to explain how you get to Wanda or Vanda.

Speaker 4 (01:22:29):
This gets told a couple other times.

Speaker 5 (01:22:31):
You get it in later chronicles as well, like the
Chronicle of Greater Poland, which is kind of like in
the fourteenth century. These kind of like sometimes you will
see the princess get swapped around, whether it's the younger
or older one who dies. And then you also have
an alternative version of it, which is that a shoemaker,

(01:22:53):
like a cobbler called Scuba Szva like defeats the dragon
and as a result is kind of like elevated, and
you still have the cowskin full of sulfur with bait,
and you know, the legendary dragon's cave is something you

(01:23:15):
can still go see.

Speaker 4 (01:23:17):
So I like this.

Speaker 5 (01:23:17):
One because here we have an instance of a dragon
that is being used to specifically tell a story about
Poland and succession, and it's like, how many how do
we explain how we got to this myth? We're going
to need another myth to do it. And I think
that's really cool.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
Yep, yep, And I'll finish up mine with Tiamatt Yah.
So talked about Tiamat before, but yeah, she's a deity.
She's part of the ancient Mesopotamian religion, which is just
like the catch all term for everything from the precursors

(01:23:55):
of the Sumerians back in like six thousand BCE, survived
all the way up until five hundred CE. Tiamat is
famous from the Babylonian creation epic Anuma Elish, but her
association with Marduk and the Mushusu indicate she's likely far older.

(01:24:16):
And probably had her origins in a Sumerian cult of Namu.
It was a female water creation deity, and though she
is an antagonist here, it's likely that earlier Tiamatt became
the female water creation deity and was seen as benevolent

(01:24:37):
and the mother of gods for a time. Classically, she's
depicted or described as either a sea serpent or a
European style dragon. The numa Alish doesn't specify this. It's
because it's much older. It's more vague. On the description.
She's described as having you know, a stomach and utter

(01:25:00):
and eyes and a gaping mouth that's large enough to
try to eat mardut cole and ahead and neck and
will become very importantly internal organs and viscera in her
hind parts were large enough for Marduk to stand upon.

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):
So go off, queen.

Speaker 1 (01:25:19):
It's vague, but the story kind of shows why people
would think that she's like a massive like monster. So
in the primorial we'll see the gods Apsu and Tiamat
lived and they mixed their waters and they begat children
who were also gods. There was Lamu and Lahamu, and

(01:25:41):
they were the personified versions of the Earth and the heavens,
and there were more god children, and Tiamat filled the
Chao or filled the cosmos with the void of space
and primordial waters. Yet not all was well because Apsu
is a cranky old man and he was tired of
the damn kids and there you in their loud hippity

(01:26:01):
hop music and everything that they were doing. And Uh,
one of the grandchildren of Tiamat named Iya or inky Uh,
had a premonition that Apsu was going to kill all
of the younger god children because they were being too
damn loud and he wanted the kids to knock it off.

(01:26:21):
And Uh, yeah, that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Aya didn't like that.

Speaker 1 (01:26:27):
He took Apsu captive and then killed him beneath his
own temple, and Kingu, who was another son of Tiamat,
reported this. Tama was very upset. She created eleven massive
demonic creatures to take vengeance. These include the Mushusu serpent

(01:26:48):
and the usu usum Galu, which is a dragon. They
so like, we're covering both types of dragons in this,
even if Tiamat herself was technically not a dragon in
their understanding, she created them. But this really does seem
like the snow white fighting prince charming or the dragon

(01:27:11):
in snow white fighting prince charming kind of thing, but yeah.
Tiamat then adopted Kingu as a lover and gave him
the Tablet of Destinies to take into battle. The god
children were then saved when a champion named Marduk, who
was a younger godchild, promised to do battle against Tiamat's host.

(01:27:33):
He had many weapons. He had arrows of the wind,
an unbreakable spear, a large net, a giant club, and
all of the younger deities, including Lamu and Lahamu, agreed
to make Marduk their overlord if he won, because otherwise
they were going to die. Before the battle, he was fainted.
He was feted as a as a true god and

(01:27:56):
was given additional weapons of mace, bolts of lightning, the
seven winds themselves, and his body was lit a flame.
So like you know, he's he's he's going all out,
Like they're pulling out all the stops here. They're going
to describe all the stuff that happens with Marduk, and
they're not going to describe Tmot that much.

Speaker 2 (01:28:18):
But yeah, he boo.

Speaker 1 (01:28:20):
He travels to face Tamot in single combat. Uh, he's
flying in a chariot drawn by four creatures. During this fight,
Tiamot is not described as trying to grab him, just
as trying to eat him or use her body to
ensnare him. However, Marduk uses a clever strategy and he

(01:28:43):
prevails over the much larger Tiamot by using his holy
net to frustrate her attacks and uh stop in and
uh stop her movement and uh. Then he used the
seven wins to buffet her mouth. When she tried to
swallow him whole, the wind filled her mouth, her belly

(01:29:05):
became distended, and Marduk saw his chance shooting the arrow
of wind threw her throat into her heart and killing her.
Hey then climbed atop her body, smashed smashed her head
flat with a club, split her body intwo and used
half to form the heavens that we see today and

(01:29:25):
have to form the corporeal earth upon which we stand,
after which point Marduk became.

Speaker 2 (01:29:31):
The king of the gods.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
So, yeah, that is a Tiamot, and you can see
why people would think of her as a giant, monstrous creature.
And the dragon kind of works, or it does work,
because why else would you have a giant net, Like
why would you need to buff why would you need
the seven winds to buffet the mouth of a creature

(01:29:56):
like a humanoid creature that was your size?

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
Like, how is that creature going to try to swallow
you whole? Et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (01:30:04):
Eleanor what you got? What's your last one?

Speaker 4 (01:30:08):
I want to talk about the Tarasque.

Speaker 5 (01:30:11):
Yeah, it's so cool and I like how it's still
a very important French tradition.

Speaker 4 (01:30:18):
So the taraska is cool because it is recorded for us.

Speaker 5 (01:30:22):
In the Golden Legend, you know, much in the way
that we get the Saint George story. So shout out
to the Golden Legend right for being really really devoted
to bringing us a selection of dragons, Thank you very much.
It is not like other dragons. She's different.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
So she's got a I'm not like other girls, like.

Speaker 4 (01:30:47):
She is a pick me dragon. So she's got a
head like a lion. Her body has a turtle.

Speaker 5 (01:30:54):
Shell that's so awesome that that protects it. She has
six feet instead of four that have bare claws, a serpents,
and a serpent's tail that breathes poison. Fucking go the
fuck off queen, and she's in particular associated.

Speaker 4 (01:31:17):
With Saint Martha.

Speaker 5 (01:31:19):
So Saint Martha goes out to be like, get out
of here, Tyrosque, we don't like you and the Tarascus
going around swallowing humans hole as you do. But Saint
Martha goes out there and basically like stops this from happening, right,
So Saint Martha's like, get out of my face. And

(01:31:42):
so sometimes Saint Martha gets to dog walk the they're
really into dog walking the dragons, like is able to
kind of like tame it and use it kind of
like as a like as a pet.

Speaker 4 (01:31:57):
It's able.

Speaker 5 (01:31:57):
She's able to put her girdle around it, and then
that allows a night to kill it. And there are
some really fucking brilliant medieval images of this, like especially
from the fifteenth century. I fucking love the Tarasque, and
this oftentimes very specifically, it places the Tarasque like somewhere

(01:32:17):
in the Rhone, like so like it's it's like a
provensul guy. And you know, oftentimes the Tarasque in this
particular version of the story, it doesn't just eat humans.
It lives in It lives in the Rhone, and like
it will capsize boats, it will you know, like kill sailors,

(01:32:39):
it will do things like that, right, So.

Speaker 4 (01:32:43):
It's it comes up a lot in local legends.

Speaker 5 (01:32:45):
So like if if basically, if you're out on the
Rhone in your boat capsizes a new drowned, people.

Speaker 4 (01:32:49):
Will be like, oh, it's the tarasque, right, okay, so
which is cool.

Speaker 5 (01:32:55):
Interestingly, we also have like an extra tarrosque thing that
specifically associates the tarasque with Mary Magdalene as well, So
it's like, in this case, it's the association of Mary
Magdalen with Mary the sister of Martha, and then but

(01:33:18):
we only get that one time, right.

Speaker 4 (01:33:20):
So basically.

Speaker 5 (01:33:22):
You can see the tarosque sometimes associated with Avignon, sometimes
associated with aurl and so here's a fun description of
it from the the pseudo Marcella in the Around in
the thirteenth century says, it is a huge dragon, half animal,
half fish, fatter than a bowl, longer than a horse.

(01:33:47):
It had the face and head of a lion, teeth
sharpest swords, the mane of a horse, a back that
was hatchet sharp, with bristly scales, keen as augurs, six
feet with bear like claws, the tail of the serpent
and a double carapace like a tortoises on each side.

Speaker 4 (01:34:05):
Fucking great.

Speaker 5 (01:34:07):
What's even better about it is its poison breath, which
says of the terrible Dragon's unbelievable length and great bulk.

Speaker 4 (01:34:17):
It breathed out.

Speaker 5 (01:34:18):
Poisonous fumes, shot sulfurous flames from its eyes, and admitted
fierce hissings with its mouth and horrible noises with its
curved teeth. With its talons and teeth, it torch pieces
anyone who crossed its path with its poisonous breath. It
killed anyone who came to near. Unsurprisingly, medieval people fucking
love this u and the tarak will show up in

(01:34:42):
column capitals. It's usually the way you see Saint Martha
depicted is along with the tarak, and in a very
fun way.

Speaker 4 (01:34:50):
The tarak is still.

Speaker 5 (01:34:52):
Associated with the varying feast days, and in particular it
gets like brought out at the feast of Saint John,
which is funny. So you'll get like these little fiberglass
versions that get brought out for like Pentecost, yeah, you know,

(01:35:13):
and things like that.

Speaker 4 (01:35:13):
So they still do it today.

Speaker 5 (01:35:15):
And I fucking love the turusk and it's very very cute,
and I like it very much, so shout out to her.
She didn't do anything wrong except for everything.

Speaker 1 (01:35:27):
I like that they I like that they created the
ankle as sore from first principles. I think, yeah, it's
gotta it's got a it's got a protected back with
the you know, with with with spikes. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 4 (01:35:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:35:43):
I wonder if that's like what it was very specifically,
you never know, but yeah, I think that. I think
it's really cute exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:35:50):
Yeah yeah, yeah, probably probably not because I think the
ankleosaur only lived in North America, but.

Speaker 4 (01:35:58):
All right, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (01:35:59):
Yeah, but uh.

Speaker 1 (01:36:00):
Yeah, And honestly, something I found out recently was the
ankleosaur might have been like it was one the very
last dinosaurs to evolve, like at the very very end,
they might have less than a million years old when
the asteroid hit. Yeah anyway, yeah, uh, folks, we talked

(01:36:22):
a lot about dragons.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
Uh, just a couple more things than we're going.

Speaker 1 (01:36:25):
To go first. The dragon dinosaur irony is just so
funny to me. We used the dragon, We used the
bones of dinosaurs they've been dead for millions of years
to prove that fictional dragons are real for thousands of years,
only to come to understand that dragons are mythical and folkloric,
and then figure out that all those bones that we

(01:36:46):
said were dragons actually belonged to dinosaurs, which were giant,
sometimes funny looking lizards with thick hides, extreme powers, and
sometimes they were essentially feathered reptiles. And I find that neat.
There's absolutely no way that humans had any inkling of

(01:37:06):
dinosaurs before, like before like the seventeenth century or so,
like we just didn't understand. We hadn't come that far.
I'm not saying that, but I do think it's funny
that we created dragons, used the bones of dinosaurs to
prove that they exist, and then later found out that
these creatures that were as massive as anything we dreamed

(01:37:30):
up did live on this earth millions and millions of
years ago. And yeah, and I think the end here,
I think the synthesis of all this is kind of
the epitome of the modern dragon is Godzilla. Now how
you have wings. I understand that he doesn't technically fly,
but I would argue that now we don't need him

(01:37:50):
to fly, because we can fly. We can get in planes.
There's no, Godzilla doesn't have to fly, just goes back
into the ocean, the place where we can't really go,
and he goes to sleep. And sometimes he's nice and cool,
like an Eastern dragon, and sometimes he's mean and shitty
and treats us like idiots, the idiots that we are.
Like a Western dragon, and I mean he it's a come.

(01:38:16):
It's a dragon who's made of a combination of dinosaur features.
It looks like a t rex with a smaller head
with stegosaurus.

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
Spines on its back.

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
That fights other creatures, one of whom is Angeiris, who
is just like a supercharged kaiju ankleosaur, and who also
fights other typical dragons like King Gadoro, which is a
three dragon based on similar Japanese dragons from folklore. And

(01:38:47):
you know, I think that's that's really cool, the Western dragon.
I think that conception does pretty much rule the world
now basically, even like if you look at Japanese anime
and video games and stuff like that, the dragons that
they do are typically far more Western in conception, especially

(01:39:09):
like the Berserk line of you know, berserk, dark souls,
all that sort of stuff. They definitely have Western dragons,
but they aren't, but they also a lot of them
are intelligent and some of them are are benevolent stuff
like that. So yeah, that's a lot about dragons. But
they're really fucking cool. And yes, we don't know, we

(01:39:32):
will never know why we all come up with them,
but it doesn't really matter because we do. And sometimes
they look like a Komodo dragon, even though you live
in France and would have never seen one. And sometimes
they look like a snake, even though you live in
Oslo and.

Speaker 2 (01:39:49):
You've never seen one.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
Sometimes they look like and sometimes they look like you know,
the fucking hydra or the quetzal cut, you know, they they.

Speaker 2 (01:39:58):
We found a bird.

Speaker 1 (01:40:00):
It's so big that we gave it the name quetzel
koat list. It's probably the largest flying guy thing that's
ever existed. And yeah, that's so fucking cool to me.
Like there' I am not implying anything that we knew
about dragons beforehand. I think it is so neat that
we just backed ourselves into that and ended up being

(01:40:23):
right in a really odd kind of fucked up way,
And I think that's cool. So yeah, dragons, they're great, folks.
Thank you very much for subscribing. Thank you for sticking
with us. It's a long one, but what do you
expect we got, uh when we got dragons to talk about.
We will be back next week with the next episode.

(01:40:47):
I believe it's episode eight in the book Club series
on the Cameron, as we are getting closer to the
end there. But uh yeah that uh, that's about going
to do it for us today. Oh next month, I'm
going to talk about the dinosaur or the asteroid that
killed the dinosaurs on the bonus and uh so if

(01:41:09):
you want to hear more about that and how all
of those beautiful dragons died so so fast. Friends, our
good friends, the real dragons. But yeah, thank you all
very much for listening.

Speaker 2 (01:41:21):
And we'll see you next time.

Speaker 4 (01:41:23):
Maybe the real dragons were the friends along.

Speaker 1 (01:41:26):
The way they were they are there are friends until
it helps us sometimes, right, It's true.

Speaker 4 (01:41:32):
We love you guys by.

Speaker 2 (01:41:37):
So fucking stupid.

Speaker 3 (01:41:38):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (01:41:40):
That's awesome, all right, h