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Dragons: As Real as Mermaids · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Chuck, Dragon Slayer Bryant and well that's it. It's
0:20
Speaker 1: just the two of us. We can make it if
0:22
Speaker 1: we try, Chuck, just the two of us, dragons and
0:27
Speaker 1: us and the great Bill Weathers? Was that Bill with?
0:32
Speaker 1: You didn't say that this straight say? We just had
0:34
Speaker 1: the same conversation like two months ago. I'm not doing
0:37
Speaker 1: it again. Oh about Bill Withers. Yeah, I didn't realize
0:41
Speaker 1: that that was a Bill Withers song. It was a
0:43
Speaker 1: good song. Lean on Me though, Man is just I
0:47
Speaker 1: cannot take it. Grandma's bad? What does that is that
0:51
Speaker 1: a Bill Withers? I did not know that. It's good.
0:55
Speaker 1: He's He's great. And we probably had this exact same conversation.
0:58
Speaker 1: I don't know if we had that one or not.
1:00
Speaker 1: But you know who else I like, Um, who's a
1:02
Speaker 1: little bit like Bill Wether's not quite as cool. I
1:05
Speaker 1: guess if you're like a cool person. But um, George
1:08
Speaker 1: Benson was amazing and still is. I think he's still around.
1:12
Speaker 1: Do you ever listen to his stuff? Yeah? But now
1:15
Speaker 1: I'm realized, I uh maybe I should just not correct
1:19
Speaker 1: myself and let people be send in a bunch of emails.
1:22
Speaker 1: Oh I love that. I love that. And when we
1:25
Speaker 1: get a million of the same emails, it's Grandma's hands.
1:28
Speaker 1: I was getting it. John Denver's Grandma's feather bed kind
1:31
Speaker 1: of just was in the ether. So as we just
1:33
Speaker 1: talked about John Denver about Grandma's bad follow up, to
1:39
Speaker 1: use me up. So dragons, Yeah, let's talk about dragons.
1:43
Speaker 1: Let's have a pleasant conversation about dragons, shall we chuck? Yeah,
1:48
Speaker 1: dragons aren't real. And you'll notice by the title of
1:54
Speaker 1: this episode, which is dragons colon as real as mermaids.
2:00
Speaker 1: And it's funny because I think the week before this
2:02
Speaker 1: comes out, Mermaids is a is our pick for the selects,
2:07
Speaker 1: the select episode, so it aligns perfectly. That is perfect.
2:10
Speaker 1: The dragons aren't real. Well, okay, I please stop saying
2:14
Speaker 1: that because you're crushing my dreams. Sorry. Um So, when
2:18
Speaker 1: we when we talk about dragons, we have to stay
2:20
Speaker 1: right here at the outset that there's a lot of
2:22
Speaker 1: different kinds of dragons. Um And typically when you think
2:26
Speaker 1: of like the the flying winged, usually long, maybe scaly,
2:32
Speaker 1: fire breathing fire breathing dragon, often with a long kind
2:37
Speaker 1: of serpentine tail. Sometimes it's even um pointy like the devil,
2:44
Speaker 1: which will see why. Um that's considered a Western dragon, UM,
2:48
Speaker 1: and that is its own thing that kind of evolved
2:53
Speaker 1: from a number of different traditions. But there's also the
2:57
Speaker 1: Asian dragon UM, which you know has variations among different
3:01
Speaker 1: Asian countries, but it's generally seems to be kind of
3:04
Speaker 1: the same ancient Chinese thing. UM. That's a totally different thing,
3:08
Speaker 1: and it evolved on its own in isolation as well.
3:12
Speaker 1: And so UM. Because you've got these different traditions of
3:16
Speaker 1: dragons that seem fairly similar in a lot of ways,
3:19
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people out there who say, wow,
3:22
Speaker 1: this is astounding. Every culture in the world has some
3:25
Speaker 1: sort of tradition of dragons, and that's kind of true.
3:30
Speaker 1: But at the at the UM, like throughout this episode,
3:33
Speaker 1: we'll see, UM, that's not really accurate like that. Nowadays
3:38
Speaker 1: it seems that way because we have overlaid the idea
3:41
Speaker 1: of dragons over everything. But if you really kind of
3:44
Speaker 1: dig into the past and and look into the nuance
3:46
Speaker 1: of some of these things that we term dragons, they're
3:48
Speaker 1: very different. So it's a lot more accurate to say that,
3:51
Speaker 1: like every culture in the world has mythical beasts, some
3:54
Speaker 1: of which share a lot in common with our modern
3:58
Speaker 1: conception of dragon. And that's probably where our modern conception
4:02
Speaker 1: of dragons came from, was all these different ideas of
4:05
Speaker 1: it in the ancient past. Yeah, there's a book called
4:09
Speaker 1: An Instinct for Dragons written by an anthropologist named David E.
4:13
Speaker 1: Jones about dragons and and dragons throughout cultures and across cultures.
4:20
Speaker 1: And there's the theory he's got going, which is humans
4:24
Speaker 1: evolved in primates. H evolved with the fear of three
4:28
Speaker 1: predators basically um snakes, cats which are big cats, house cats,
4:36
Speaker 1: and eagles, and that a dragon. It sort of makes
4:39
Speaker 1: sense that every culture sort of has something like a dragon,
4:43
Speaker 1: because in folklore and myth and storytelling, you might combine
4:48
Speaker 1: the three scariest things into one super scary thing, and
4:50
Speaker 1: that is a dragon. Right, And you might say, like, well,
4:53
Speaker 1: wait a minute, Like I think eagles are kind of cool.
4:56
Speaker 1: I'm not at all scared. Number one, have you ever
4:58
Speaker 1: been around an eagle and it was loose, but you'd
5:02
Speaker 1: be kind of scared of it? Because those talents are serious,
5:04
Speaker 1: or one that dive bond you, I think exactly more
5:07
Speaker 1: to the point though, or more toys, I should say, Um,
5:10
Speaker 1: David Jones point, um, that this would be this fear,
5:15
Speaker 1: this innate fear that humans have, would be based much
5:17
Speaker 1: more deeply in our evolutionary past when we were monkeys
5:22
Speaker 1: and you actually could be killed by certain kinds of
5:24
Speaker 1: eagles like the harpy eagle. Remember we talked about the
5:26
Speaker 1: harpy eagle and the sloth episode. Because they can mess
5:29
Speaker 1: a sloth up, they can mess a monkey up too.
5:32
Speaker 1: So this guy's premises, like, we have these ancient fears
5:35
Speaker 1: of these things, and as we evolved and became humans
5:38
Speaker 1: that started telling each other's stories, these things combined, like
5:41
Speaker 1: you were saying, into this one fierce mythological monster, which
5:45
Speaker 1: was basically the the sum of all of our most
5:48
Speaker 1: primal fears. Yeah. And then of course, if you look
5:51
Speaker 1: at ancient cultures, they always had sort of mythical stories
5:57
Speaker 1: in folklore to explain you know, everything from weather phenomenon
6:01
Speaker 1: to things like volcanoes. Uh. And if they happened upon
6:05
Speaker 1: maybe dinosaur bones or whale bones, then a story might
6:09
Speaker 1: go along with that. To explain it away, like you know,
6:12
Speaker 1: this was clearly some huge lizard like creature or maybe
6:14
Speaker 1: a snake like creature, and there was probably a story
6:17
Speaker 1: around it and why they should fear it or usually
6:21
Speaker 1: some sort of a sacrifice that they needed to make, um,
6:25
Speaker 1: you know, sort of in lock step with those stories.
6:28
Speaker 1: But that's just sort of another theory on maybe how
6:30
Speaker 1: the dragon might have come about as far as folklore goes.
6:34
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting theories that I saw, and
6:37
Speaker 1: we should say, no one has a widely accepted answer
6:41
Speaker 1: for this, which I love, is always um, but that
6:45
Speaker 1: it was the b that the that the description um
6:49
Speaker 1: often um in ancient cultures they used to use like
6:52
Speaker 1: riddles and exaggeration and metaphor to um discuss and and
6:58
Speaker 1: talk about and describe actual things. And that the the
7:02
Speaker 1: b um a description of a b or I should say,
7:07
Speaker 1: a swarm of a bee is what actually became the
7:11
Speaker 1: dragon in in mythology. And at first it just like
7:14
Speaker 1: that doesn't doesn't make any sense at all, But some
7:16
Speaker 1: of the points of these people made. There was a
7:18
Speaker 1: journal article in it um and I think like a
7:21
Speaker 1: journal on Tolkien studies or something like that. But they
7:24
Speaker 1: say that um, a be swarm moving together. It doesn't
7:29
Speaker 1: necessarily resemble or dragon, but it makes a lot more
7:32
Speaker 1: sense along those lines than it doesn't when you're talking
7:35
Speaker 1: about an individual b exactly it can do. It can
7:40
Speaker 1: point an air, It can make an arrow to point
7:42
Speaker 1: a direction, you know, where somebody's hiding, that kind of thing. Um.
7:46
Speaker 1: And then another one is that the fire, the idea
7:49
Speaker 1: of of dragon breathing fire is a metaphor for the
7:52
Speaker 1: feeling of like your skin burning from a be sting
7:55
Speaker 1: or the intense pain. And then lastly um in the
7:58
Speaker 1: Western tradition, a lot of dragons protect like mounds of
8:03
Speaker 1: gold or treasure, and that this is a metaphor for
8:07
Speaker 1: honey and gold, like the honeycombs that ancient people would
8:11
Speaker 1: have basically considered gold not just you know, um food,
8:16
Speaker 1: but also it was used as medicine as well. So
8:19
Speaker 1: if you kind of put all it together, it's it
8:20
Speaker 1: seems like a pretty interesting theory. At least it makes
8:24
Speaker 1: a lot more sense than a bee, you know, when
8:27
Speaker 1: you really kind of dig into it, Yeah, totally. The
8:30
Speaker 1: word itself is um. Well, you can look back to
8:34
Speaker 1: the Iliad when Homer wrote about the d R. A. K.
8:38
Speaker 1: O n uh. The drecon, which supposedly is the first
8:43
Speaker 1: known use of the word uh in ancient Greek, is
8:47
Speaker 1: sort of has some uh confusing etymology behind it, but
8:50
Speaker 1: basically Homer uses that word to describe snakes, like like
8:55
Speaker 1: unequivocally yeah, and not you know, huge, flying, fire breathing snakes,
9:00
Speaker 1: but just snakes. Yeah. Yeah. He even says, no, I'm
9:02
Speaker 1: just talking about snakes, everybody, not dragons. To get ahead
9:06
Speaker 1: of yourself, These are snakes, and I mean they say that,
9:09
Speaker 1: like he points out that he's talking about snakes because
9:11
Speaker 1: he even says um a chimera, which is um uh
9:14
Speaker 1: I think ahead of a lion, the goat body, a
9:17
Speaker 1: serpent tail, and bats wings. He even says the serpent
9:20
Speaker 1: tail that the back portion of the chimera is a dragon.
9:24
Speaker 1: So he's talking about just regular old snakes for sure. Yeah.
9:28
Speaker 1: And other writers and other classical stories did the same thing,
9:31
Speaker 1: whether it was uh, dracontis or draconis, using all these
9:35
Speaker 1: words sort of interchangeably with other words for snake. But
9:40
Speaker 1: then we go to the history of not the history
9:44
Speaker 1: but just history of animals, and that's the first sort
9:47
Speaker 1: of scientific take on the draccone which is an enemy
9:52
Speaker 1: of the eagle because uh, an eagle as a bird
9:54
Speaker 1: of prey would eat snakes obviously, and different people got
9:58
Speaker 1: a little more specific and later writing system what kind
10:01
Speaker 1: of snake, but it's still just snakes. Yeah. So over time,
10:05
Speaker 1: like that's that's where the word dragon came from, was
10:08
Speaker 1: to use the it was a word for snake, that's it.
10:12
Speaker 1: And then over time as people, um started to exaggerate.
10:15
Speaker 1: Here they're conflate different types of snakes and different behaviors
10:20
Speaker 1: that aren't found in snakes, but saying that they were,
10:22
Speaker 1: and they all kind of put that under the umbrella
10:24
Speaker 1: word for snakes. Dragon. Um, it seems like the legend
10:28
Speaker 1: or the myth, the mythical version of dragons started to
10:32
Speaker 1: kind of plump up and grow. Yeah, and this, um,
10:36
Speaker 1: this is a point ed the grabster put this together,
10:39
Speaker 1: put this together for us. But need points out something
10:41
Speaker 1: I kind of never really considered back in the day.
10:44
Speaker 1: In the classical period, writers were writers. There weren't like, hey,
10:48
Speaker 1: I'm going to write h only about you know, natural history,
10:51
Speaker 1: and I'm only gonna write fiction and myth and storytelling
10:55
Speaker 1: like writers just wrote. So there were people that wrote
10:59
Speaker 1: natural history to homes and also myth and storytelling legends,
11:03
Speaker 1: and so a lot of this stuff could get kind
11:05
Speaker 1: of mixed up and confused. Exaggerated mistranslation is a huge,
11:10
Speaker 1: huge deal. Oh yeah, and a lot of this is
11:13
Speaker 1: sort of where the sort of the myth of the
11:15
Speaker 1: dragon came from. I just think of like some writer
11:18
Speaker 1: getting confused what they were working on that day, and
11:21
Speaker 1: now we have the myth of dragons. You know, it's like,
11:25
Speaker 1: was this real or not? I can't remember? Who cares?
11:27
Speaker 1: So um yeah, like you you really hit upon something
11:30
Speaker 1: really important. Mistranslations are at a different way to put
11:33
Speaker 1: his lazy translation have really kind of changed um our
11:39
Speaker 1: idea of what people were talking about in the ancient world.
11:42
Speaker 1: And I can't imagine how much nuance and understanding has
11:45
Speaker 1: been lost and how probably dumb in a lot of
11:49
Speaker 1: ways ancient people seemed compared to how they actually were
11:53
Speaker 1: because of this tradition of like, um, p, poor translation
11:58
Speaker 1: that was passed down over the year people. Yeah, that's
12:03
Speaker 1: very cute. And the reason why it's kind of lazy
12:07
Speaker 1: translation is it seems like anybody who came across an
12:11
Speaker 1: ancient text or a text in another language, um, who's
12:15
Speaker 1: translating something into English. Um, and they were seemed to
12:19
Speaker 1: be describing anything even remotely dragon like, any mythical beast,
12:23
Speaker 1: anything that might have wings, anything with a serpent tail,
12:26
Speaker 1: anything that breathe fire, boop, dragon, it's a dragon. And
12:30
Speaker 1: then now those of us who have a certain compartmentalized
12:35
Speaker 1: idea of what a dragon is, everything was a dragon.
12:39
Speaker 1: And now we reached that point where it's like, this
12:41
Speaker 1: is how we got this idea that every culture has dragons. No,
12:45
Speaker 1: we just kind of lazily translated what other cultures we're
12:48
Speaker 1: talking about into dragons along the way, right. I think
12:51
Speaker 1: that is a great first act. Thank you, thank you.
12:54
Speaker 1: I'm bowing, I'm throwing roses at your feet. Thank you.
12:59
Speaker 1: And uh, we're gonna take a little break and Rooney
13:01
Speaker 1: and be right back. So the rose petals I sent
13:36
Speaker 1: you arrived in time, just in time. Thank you for
13:40
Speaker 1: throwing them and not saving them for something else. I
13:42
Speaker 1: also realized I just went on ned Flanders with the
13:44
Speaker 1: break of Rooney. I've never said that before in my life.
13:46
Speaker 1: I liked it though. It was refreshing. We need that
13:49
Speaker 1: kind of wet behind the ears, you know, wholesomeness right now. Chuck, Yeah,
13:55
Speaker 1: in your fourteen No, not just us, I mean the world. Okay,
14:00
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, up up with Flanders? Yeah, up with Flanders.
14:04
Speaker 1: That's right. So my favorite thing always about Flanders is
14:08
Speaker 1: when he would be really buff, like every time he
14:12
Speaker 1: shirt good sexy Flanders. I know, it's hilarious. He he
14:17
Speaker 1: ascribed it to a healthy dose of vitamin Church. Oh man,
14:25
Speaker 1: I love it all. Right. Where were we here? Giants snakes, Yeah,
14:30
Speaker 1: we talked about them. We're talking about miss translations were
14:32
Speaker 1: a big problem, and I think a good place to
14:34
Speaker 1: start with that is back in Sumeria. Yeah, the Sumerian
14:38
Speaker 1: legends wrote about something called the use um u s
14:41
Speaker 1: u m um also called dragons or you know, at
14:45
Speaker 1: least referred to as dragons now. And these were kind
14:49
Speaker 1: of like you said at the beginning, these were just
14:51
Speaker 1: sometimes just large monsters, large scary things and not necessarily
14:55
Speaker 1: a dragon, but was sort of just translated as dragon. Yeah,
14:58
Speaker 1: and I should say sumer not Humeria. But um, they
15:02
Speaker 1: they were. These were like their gods that they were
15:05
Speaker 1: talking about. These were, you know, the like the god
15:09
Speaker 1: of the goddess of water who gave birth to the world.
15:13
Speaker 1: Like they had this incredibly detailed cosmology that explained, you know,
15:18
Speaker 1: where they came from, where the world came from, where
15:20
Speaker 1: the sun came from. Um, and we along the way
15:24
Speaker 1: translated that to dragons. You know. So luckily there are
15:29
Speaker 1: scholars who have learned to speak Acadian. I guess the
15:32
Speaker 1: world's oldest UM spoken language A K K A d
15:37
Speaker 1: I An not the the Canadian group that the Cajuns
15:42
Speaker 1: come from. This is different, um. But the so we
15:46
Speaker 1: understand now that there's much more nuance, much more detailed
15:50
Speaker 1: to it. But I think the upshot of this is
15:53
Speaker 1: that there there were conceptions of like fire breathing and
15:57
Speaker 1: like flying serpents and like potentially malicious, malevolent, evil mythical
16:04
Speaker 1: beasts that would resemble kind of what we would understand
16:07
Speaker 1: as a dragon dating back thousands of years. Yeah, and
16:12
Speaker 1: you know, this course goes straight to the Bible as well.
16:14
Speaker 1: In Revelations, UM, there's a lot of talk about the archangels,
16:20
Speaker 1: archangels battling a great dragon. Uh. In this case, the
16:24
Speaker 1: dragon is Satan. But again this is sort of a translation,
16:27
Speaker 1: like Satan was always sort of the serpent, at least
16:30
Speaker 1: in Genesis, at first appeared as a serpent, and so
16:34
Speaker 1: in the end, Satan is also a serpent, but spelled
16:38
Speaker 1: you know, with the d r A k O n
16:40
Speaker 1: like the ancient Greek. But yeah, but there's you know,
16:44
Speaker 1: I mean not in the King James version and stuff
16:47
Speaker 1: like that, obviously, but again you know pre translation uh
16:51
Speaker 1: and you know, there were uh sort of renderings of
16:54
Speaker 1: this of the big war for heaven and this is
16:56
Speaker 1: when we see, you know it kind of what we
16:58
Speaker 1: would see later on, which is metaphor for good versus
17:01
Speaker 1: evil in a big battle. So that's what William Blake's
17:05
Speaker 1: Paradise Lost is about, right, I've never read it. I
17:08
Speaker 1: haven't either, I'm just familiar with it from that movie
17:11
Speaker 1: Red Dragon. Okay, about the silence of the Lamb's prequel,
17:16
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, um, he's like, do you see you
17:21
Speaker 1: remember when Ray finds has got poor Philip seymore often
17:25
Speaker 1: strapped to that wheelchair that I had spoiler coming. I
17:31
Speaker 1: didn't love that movie. It was okay, but that was
17:34
Speaker 1: that shot of that burning wheelchair and body going down
17:38
Speaker 1: the parking deck is one of the most sort of
17:40
Speaker 1: chilling images I've seen in movies. I know. The thing
17:43
Speaker 1: that chills me about it though, is it's an antique
17:45
Speaker 1: wicker wheelchair, which is the scariest thing I've ever seen
17:48
Speaker 1: in my life. I hate those You don't like this,
17:50
Speaker 1: huh No, I think we just talked about it recently,
17:53
Speaker 1: and I every for the rest of my life, I
17:55
Speaker 1: will be creeped out by those things. I'm gonna get
17:58
Speaker 1: you one slide whistle this Christmas. Next Christmas, you're just
18:01
Speaker 1: gonna get an ancient quicker wheelchair. And I don't want
18:05
Speaker 1: I don't want to be wasteful, so I won't throw
18:07
Speaker 1: it away and I'll just have to live among it.
18:09
Speaker 1: It's gonna be terrible, like I'll never get used to
18:12
Speaker 1: it either. You could make a uh life size Chuck dummy,
18:17
Speaker 1: put it in there and set it on fire and
18:19
Speaker 1: roll it down to parking. Oh I wouldn't do that.
18:20
Speaker 1: I'd make a life size version of Chuck and just
18:23
Speaker 1: talk to you and be like, listen, I got a
18:27
Speaker 1: lot of stuff to say to you that's even creepier.
18:29
Speaker 1: But and you're gonna sit there and listen to it.
18:31
Speaker 1: I'll be wearing nothing but an apron, just like a
18:35
Speaker 1: real doll with a big fake beard. Oh man, Okay,
18:41
Speaker 1: so yeah, good versus Evil is sort of how a
18:44
Speaker 1: lot of these um tales and folklore play out and
18:47
Speaker 1: also incorporating stuff that you would see time and time
18:50
Speaker 1: again in literature later on, Like there's a dragon that
18:54
Speaker 1: lives out by itself near a village, and it's a greedy,
18:58
Speaker 1: eventful dragon, and we need to a piece of dragon
19:01
Speaker 1: with sacrifice once a year or else it will come
19:03
Speaker 1: down and like rain fire upon everyone. Yeah. So, um,
19:07
Speaker 1: all of this stuff, like this idea, this western dragon
19:10
Speaker 1: that you're describing, like that's taken from like um Bao Wolf.
19:14
Speaker 1: I believe that the dragon that killed bo Wolf in
19:17
Speaker 1: the I always thought it was a Norse legend, but
19:19
Speaker 1: apparently it's English, Old English. It's just set in Um
19:24
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands, or in Scandinavia in the north, I think,
19:28
Speaker 1: I think somewhere. I don't remember exactly where it sat.
19:30
Speaker 1: It's just set there. It's not written by them. Um.
19:33
Speaker 1: But that like that dragon was malevolent, and I believe
19:37
Speaker 1: it was guarding treasure. I think the reason it went
19:39
Speaker 1: berserk and Beowulf had to kill it was because somebody
19:41
Speaker 1: stole one of its golden goblets a k. A honey,
19:46
Speaker 1: because they're really talking about a b But so you
19:48
Speaker 1: have an idea of a a greedy, murderous dragon that
19:53
Speaker 1: protects treasure like that comes from an ancient tradition, but
19:56
Speaker 1: that's a pretty pretty standard feature of dragons. You were saying, Yeah,
20:02
Speaker 1: so all this is going on for many, many, many years.
20:06
Speaker 1: Finally the rubber kind of meets the road as far
20:09
Speaker 1: as Western dragons are concerned. With the legend of St.
20:12
Speaker 1: George Um, who was a Christian saint, a real Christian saint,
20:17
Speaker 1: maybe a real person who may have been a Roman
20:19
Speaker 1: soldier who was you know, tortured and killed for converting
20:24
Speaker 1: Pagans to Christianity. This is sort of fourth century a
20:28
Speaker 1: d and because of stories getting passed around like a
20:33
Speaker 1: game of telephone. Um the actual first name of that
20:37
Speaker 1: story when it was told with Saint Theodore, but it
20:40
Speaker 1: was really St. George. So I saw that they're both
20:43
Speaker 1: possibly known as dragon slaying saints. Okay, it's not necessarily
20:49
Speaker 1: like George took that from theater. They're both known for
20:51
Speaker 1: having slain a dragon. But what's interesting is if you
20:53
Speaker 1: see um St. Theodore depicted with his dragon, it's very
20:57
Speaker 1: clearly a crocodile, and the the the origin story um
21:03
Speaker 1: of either one, but particularly St. George is that there
21:06
Speaker 1: is a town in modern day Turkey or possibly Palestine,
21:10
Speaker 1: I'm short, but in what would have been called Anatolia
21:15
Speaker 1: back then um where they had the spring. Like this
21:19
Speaker 1: town got their water from the spring, and it was
21:22
Speaker 1: guarded by a giant, massive crocodile, and that the townspeople
21:27
Speaker 1: would sacrifice as sheep to sometimes to a day, basically
21:31
Speaker 1: to distract the crocodile so they could go get the
21:33
Speaker 1: water and then get out of there. And then they
21:35
Speaker 1: ran out of sheep, so they said, well, what's what
21:37
Speaker 1: comes after sheep? How about maidens? So they started throwing maidens,
21:41
Speaker 1: sacrificing maidens literally throwing them to the crocodile to to
21:46
Speaker 1: distract it so they could get the water. And eventually
21:48
Speaker 1: they came upon the king's daughter. They drew straws to
21:51
Speaker 1: see what maiden was good would go next, and St.
21:54
Speaker 1: George apparently arrived just in time to slay the dragon
21:57
Speaker 1: a k a. The crocodile. But that that that's this idea,
22:00
Speaker 1: that that's where this story of somebody slaying a dragon
22:04
Speaker 1: could have been rooted in reality, that over the years,
22:07
Speaker 1: this massive crocodile, which was so fearsome and so murderous
22:11
Speaker 1: and killed so many people, was converted into a dragon
22:15
Speaker 1: over the years, and so St. George slew the dragon,
22:18
Speaker 1: and that's where that came from. And that was a
22:20
Speaker 1: real crocodile that lived by a real spring. Right. That's
22:23
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah, I thought so too. I'd love it
22:25
Speaker 1: when something that seems totally legendary had was rooted in
22:28
Speaker 1: some sort of fact. It's just people in blished or
22:30
Speaker 1: exaggerated over time totally. If you want to go with
22:35
Speaker 1: the sort of real great first image of what we
22:39
Speaker 1: think of as a Western dragon, you can go to
22:42
Speaker 1: twelve sixty eight D in an illustration in a medieval
22:46
Speaker 1: beastiary called MS. Harley. Uh, great title. I think Ed
22:53
Speaker 1: said it was probably a catalog designation. Yeah, I think
22:56
Speaker 1: the real title is peral this is theological miscellany. Yeah,
23:00
Speaker 1: which is that's an actual great title. Yeah. I like MS. Harley.
23:06
Speaker 1: It's it's cool looking. Though. You can if you're near
23:09
Speaker 1: a laptop or something, you can look this thing up
23:11
Speaker 1: and it is you know, you look at it and
23:13
Speaker 1: this is exactly what you think of as something from
23:16
Speaker 1: like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or whatever. Yeah,
23:19
Speaker 1: it's like it's a dragon. It's how a scene starts,
23:21
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, um so so oh sorry, I see
23:25
Speaker 1: what you're saying, Like the dragon that that shows up
23:27
Speaker 1: in their specifically the red one. Well, no, I just
23:30
Speaker 1: mean sort of the dragon that we all think of
23:32
Speaker 1: in in sort of literature and folklore, like this is
23:36
Speaker 1: clearly that. Yeah, and supposedly it's the first one from
23:40
Speaker 1: around twelve sixty Did you say that? Yeah? So um
23:44
Speaker 1: and yeah, when you see it, you're like, yes, this
23:46
Speaker 1: is probably the basis of the Western Dragon as we
23:49
Speaker 1: understand it. Um, and it would have spread to Europe,
23:53
Speaker 1: which it did. I think that was English. Um. It
23:56
Speaker 1: was by a guy named William Perrault, and I believe
23:58
Speaker 1: he was English. So it would spread from England to
24:01
Speaker 1: the rest of Europe, and that that kind of um
24:05
Speaker 1: set the stage for at least the visual version of
24:09
Speaker 1: the Western Dragon from that point on. Thanks to England Dan. Right,
24:14
Speaker 1: I think we said English Dan. It's England Dan. Oh?
24:16
Speaker 1: Is it English Dan? Makes way more sense? Yeah, England
24:20
Speaker 1: Dan's a little weird. Yeah, but hey, England Dan was
24:23
Speaker 1: a little weird. But your nickname is America Josh. Sure,
24:27
Speaker 1: how about all American Josh? Uh? Should we take a
24:32
Speaker 1: break now and talk about Asian dragons. Yeah, let's all right.
24:36
Speaker 1: We'll be right back with a kinder, gentler dragon right
24:38
Speaker 1: after this. Okay, So, Chuck, you mentioned something, you said, kinder,
25:14
Speaker 1: gentler dragon. It's true, like Western dragons are generally in
25:18
Speaker 1: the tradition murderous, greedy, wealth hoarding jerks boo who maybe
25:26
Speaker 1: pure evil personified in Asian dragon, which everybody is seen
25:30
Speaker 1: at the very least in like a photo of a
25:32
Speaker 1: street parade or in some sort of um uh like
25:36
Speaker 1: a Chinese silk screen or something like that. Um. An
25:40
Speaker 1: Asian dragon is typically much more benevolent than that um
25:44
Speaker 1: and usually is associated with rain uh water, that kind
25:49
Speaker 1: of thing. And so when you see those like a
25:51
Speaker 1: dragon being paraded around where it's a bunch of people
25:54
Speaker 1: like under like a dragon costume, that's actually based on
25:57
Speaker 1: a very ancient um ray dance, essentially a ceremony to
26:03
Speaker 1: invoke rain, because these dragons were associated with that. Yeah,
26:07
Speaker 1: and this is far far, far older than in the West.
26:12
Speaker 1: Thinking about six thousand b C. There were people in
26:16
Speaker 1: China that were carving little dragon jade figurines, and there
26:22
Speaker 1: was art back then, I think as far back as
26:24
Speaker 1: four b C. Where it's clearly some kind of dragon UM,
26:28
Speaker 1: but again supposedly independent from the sort of u evolution
26:34
Speaker 1: of the western dragon. Yeah, and so UM all of
26:38
Speaker 1: this was based on some of the early like Chinese religion,
26:43
Speaker 1: UM was based on animism, and not just Chinese, but
26:46
Speaker 1: a lot of ancient religions are based on animism, where
26:49
Speaker 1: like an inanimate object is um is a symbolic of
26:54
Speaker 1: like a larger thing or like a god, like the
26:56
Speaker 1: god of wind or the god of rain. And so
26:59
Speaker 1: these ancient dragons were considered gods of rain, and there
27:03
Speaker 1: were different um. There's different types, there's different kinds. But again,
27:07
Speaker 1: like the fact that they are generally um beneficial humankind
27:11
Speaker 1: rather than harmful, I think is is it's it's interesting,
27:16
Speaker 1: It's I wonder what that says about the two different
27:19
Speaker 1: cultures if anything. You know that dragons are harmful and
27:21
Speaker 1: they're gonna kill you, and they're gonna steal all your gold,
27:24
Speaker 1: or they're gonna bring the rain that's going to grow
27:26
Speaker 1: the food that saves your family. You know, where did
27:28
Speaker 1: that diverge or did they just they just don't have
27:31
Speaker 1: anything to do with one another. Yeah, that's interesting. UM
27:35
Speaker 1: sort of a side note, I'm playing. I've been playing
27:37
Speaker 1: video games some during the pandemic, which I'm usually not
27:40
Speaker 1: a big gamer, but I've been playing a game lately
27:43
Speaker 1: called Ghosts of uh Sushima, which is uh you play
27:47
Speaker 1: a Samurai warrior that's sort of traveling through Japan and
27:49
Speaker 1: ancient times. And it's really interesting to compare that to
27:53
Speaker 1: like the analog for the West would be like Red
27:57
Speaker 1: Dead Redemption in the Old West with gun slingers, and
28:00
Speaker 1: it's just such a different game design and everything. It's
28:04
Speaker 1: the one in Japan is ur The Ghost of Seshima
28:07
Speaker 1: is so peaceful. It's one of the most beautiful games
28:10
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. And instead of like a map telling
28:13
Speaker 1: you where to go, you press a button and the
28:15
Speaker 1: wind guides you. And if you see a fox, you
28:19
Speaker 1: follow the fox up to a shrine and you uh
28:21
Speaker 1: and you pay your respects to the shrine, and it
28:24
Speaker 1: it doesn't really get you much other than it's not
28:27
Speaker 1: like you get like a million points or something for
28:29
Speaker 1: doing that. It's just it seems like they really tried
28:32
Speaker 1: to honor Japanese traditions, and so much of this game
28:35
Speaker 1: and the motivations are always pure, like even when you're
28:40
Speaker 1: slicing guys up with your katana. It's because you're rescuing,
28:44
Speaker 1: you know, some old lady in a village, whereas the
28:47
Speaker 1: other game is just like, hey, just go and just
28:49
Speaker 1: pillage and murder and do awful things. Yeah, it's really interesting.
28:54
Speaker 1: I'm much more enjoying this game. Well, you said something
28:56
Speaker 1: that that struck a memory and me about dragons. And
29:01
Speaker 1: there's a commonality between um Asian dragons, particularly Chinese dragons,
29:06
Speaker 1: which are called long or long l U n g Um,
29:10
Speaker 1: and Western dragons, and typically they live in isolated areas
29:14
Speaker 1: away from everybody, and in Asia, the Chinese dragons usually
29:19
Speaker 1: live in old, ruined temples like that's where you'll find
29:22
Speaker 1: them dwelling. How interesting exactly so are their dragons in
29:28
Speaker 1: that game? Not yet, but now I'm kind of wondering.
29:31
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, look at it's pretty early because I did
29:33
Speaker 1: run across the Japanese type of dragon that um that
29:37
Speaker 1: is malevolent, not not very nice. I don't remember the
29:41
Speaker 1: name of it, so I guess beyond the lookout for
29:43
Speaker 1: all of them. Interesting. Yeah, so far, there's nothing supernatural.
29:47
Speaker 1: It's uh mongols that are the bad guys. I got
29:50
Speaker 1: you and then there's another type of Japanese dragon I
29:53
Speaker 1: ran across called Ryu, and this one actually bears a
29:56
Speaker 1: lot in common to the intelligent Western dragon, and that
30:00
Speaker 1: it um writes poetry. Yeah, it uses um shed scales
30:06
Speaker 1: from its belly his paper and you and um. I
30:10
Speaker 1: don't know what it uses for ink, but I think
30:12
Speaker 1: it uses its tail as a pin and quill poetry. Yeah. Yeah,
30:17
Speaker 1: it's super super nice except for that one thing. Yeah,
30:22
Speaker 1: we could just get it some ink. Right, There's something
30:25
Speaker 1: else I should think people should look up here if
30:27
Speaker 1: you're looking up images, which is um. An artist named
30:30
Speaker 1: chen Wrong g E n R O n g very
30:33
Speaker 1: famous painter in Asia of Dragons, and this was like
30:37
Speaker 1: thirteenth century a d. And if you look up some
30:39
Speaker 1: of the stuff, it's really really neat looking. Yeah. About
30:42
Speaker 1: the same time as um uh paraldis is theological miscellany
30:47
Speaker 1: was was done with that first Western dragon. Chen wrong
30:51
Speaker 1: was making these mate just amazing works of art. I
30:54
Speaker 1: think one of them is in the Boston Museum of
30:57
Speaker 1: Fine Art. It's called like nine Ragons or something, but
31:01
Speaker 1: it was um. It reminded me of the artwork in
31:06
Speaker 1: the original Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.
31:09
Speaker 1: I never read that they do that artwork and there
31:12
Speaker 1: is just amazing, but it has like all these weird
31:14
Speaker 1: kind of splotchy clouds of ink and chin chin wrong
31:20
Speaker 1: makes use of that as well. It's it's really kind
31:23
Speaker 1: of startling how how closely that to resemble. I wonder
31:26
Speaker 1: if the artist from Scary Stories of Telling the Dark
31:30
Speaker 1: was inspired by that in some way. Yeah, nothing wrong
31:34
Speaker 1: with that. No, No, that's not ripping off at all.
31:37
Speaker 1: I don't know why I would even say that. Why
31:39
Speaker 1: would you even bring ripping off? Yeah, So we should
31:46
Speaker 1: probably talk about famous dragons at this point, because we've
31:48
Speaker 1: thrown a couple out, like the one from BeO Wolf,
31:50
Speaker 1: who apparently doesn't even have a name. Yeah. I mean,
31:54
Speaker 1: you know, there are so many stories in literature, uh
31:58
Speaker 1: and movies obvious lee that have had dragons throughout the years.
32:02
Speaker 1: Certainly Tolkien uh in the mid nineteen thirties when he
32:06
Speaker 1: wrote The Hobbit Um this was a really evil dragon
32:11
Speaker 1: and um, you know, drawn from that Western sort of
32:14
Speaker 1: influence of evil dragons. Yeah, s m A U g
32:21
Speaker 1: Um Dungeons and dragons in the seventies was a very
32:25
Speaker 1: big um sort of you don't know how much dragons
32:29
Speaker 1: had fallen out of the sort of pop culture I
32:32
Speaker 1: but it really brought it back in if it did
32:34
Speaker 1: fall out, because in the game there were different kinds
32:38
Speaker 1: of dragons. There were a couple of different sets who
32:41
Speaker 1: were indicated by different colors red, green, black, white, and blue.
32:46
Speaker 1: I think we're evil. And then there were the bronze, brass, silver,
32:49
Speaker 1: and gold, which were for the most part good and
32:52
Speaker 1: they all had different things they could do in different
32:55
Speaker 1: temperaments and UM. Something that we talked a little bit
32:58
Speaker 1: about is the fire breathing thing they were. There are
33:00
Speaker 1: lots of different theories as to how that came about,
33:02
Speaker 1: maybe the tide of Satan with fire UM. Early on
33:06
Speaker 1: when they were just serpents, perhaps they were drawn spitting
33:09
Speaker 1: venom and that could have looked like fire. Yeah, that
33:11
Speaker 1: makes sense, But there's always some sort of breath emitting
33:16
Speaker 1: weapon going on. It seems like, Yeah, over time it's
33:19
Speaker 1: translated into UM. I think like the white dragon in
33:23
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons blue like basically ice like cold um.
33:28
Speaker 1: Some dragons uh blue out electricity UM, which you would
33:34
Speaker 1: think would be kind of new, But apparently the Leviathan,
33:37
Speaker 1: which is mentioned in the Bible is a sea dragon
33:40
Speaker 1: basically supposedly spit electricity out. Um. But there's something weird
33:45
Speaker 1: coming out of the dragon's mouth that's probably going to
33:48
Speaker 1: kill you. Yeah, you don't want to you don't want
33:51
Speaker 1: to test that no. Um. And we were saying also
33:55
Speaker 1: that the first visual depiction of dragon shows up in
34:00
Speaker 1: in uh Harley. Um. The first mention of the dragon,
34:06
Speaker 1: and like a story, like a fictitious story, supposedly comes
34:09
Speaker 1: in Spencer Edmunds The Fairy Queen. Oh yeah yeah. And
34:13
Speaker 1: then it shows up after that a little while later
34:15
Speaker 1: and um, Marie Catherine Dull Noise the Green Serpent, and
34:21
Speaker 1: then it just kind of takes off from there. You know,
34:24
Speaker 1: you have a connection to Pete Dragon. I do. My
34:27
Speaker 1: friend Toby was a producer on Pete Dragon. Yeah, for
34:31
Speaker 1: the remake obviously, yes, um, which was really really good
34:35
Speaker 1: and and touching and tear jerking a little bit. I
34:38
Speaker 1: never saw the remake. I need to check that out.
34:40
Speaker 1: It's it's very good. They did a really good job
34:42
Speaker 1: with it. But you know, if you haven't seen the
34:46
Speaker 1: movie Rain of Fire, just stop what you're doing and
34:49
Speaker 1: watch that, because that is the king Daddy of all
34:52
Speaker 1: dragon movies. I have not seen that? Do we? Should
34:54
Speaker 1: we pause, come back and finish the episode after. It's great.
34:59
Speaker 1: It's one of those movies, is that. Um. I don't
35:03
Speaker 1: know how well it did at the box office. I
35:04
Speaker 1: don't think super well. But it's one of those that
35:07
Speaker 1: has really become sort of a cult classic since then
35:11
Speaker 1: with McConaughey and Christian Bale. It's so over the top
35:15
Speaker 1: and just so fun. Uh, it's really really good. So
35:19
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the Pacific Room of Dragon movies. Yeah,
35:24
Speaker 1: or Starship Troopers of Dragon movies. Oh man, that's another
35:28
Speaker 1: great movie. Um. There's also Puff the Magic Dragon. Don't
35:31
Speaker 1: forget him God, the saddest song of all time. My
35:34
Speaker 1: mom taught my daughter that it's the worst. Who. Yeah,
35:37
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with pot so just you know,
35:40
Speaker 1: forget that hippie. It's just sad. It is a very
35:44
Speaker 1: sad one. And then also I think our younger UM
35:47
Speaker 1: listeners would be really mad if we didn't mention Dragon
35:49
Speaker 1: ball Z right, And there's you know, I didn't watch
35:54
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones, but I know there was there were
35:55
Speaker 1: a little trained dragons in that one that grew. Yeah,
36:00
Speaker 1: and Chuck is just so satisfying to look over all
36:03
Speaker 1: of the different depictions of dragons that you see in
36:05
Speaker 1: all the differences and all the similarities, and realized that
36:09
Speaker 1: all of them are talking about bees. Yeah you know. Yeah.
36:13
Speaker 1: Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? There's
36:16
Speaker 1: a dragons. Well, if you want to know more about dragons,
36:19
Speaker 1: head out to a ruined temple, or maybe go search
36:23
Speaker 1: for gold in a cave and you might encounter one yourself.
36:26
Speaker 1: And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. Uh,
36:31
Speaker 1: this is a story about corn and poop. Go hey, guys,
36:37
Speaker 1: here's my corn story. When I've repeated often throughout my
36:40
Speaker 1: lengthy life. I just turned seventy. Nice this from Mary
36:45
Speaker 1: Mary seventy. Well, not happy birthday, but happy happy decade turning? Okay,
36:52
Speaker 1: what I think birthday still works? No, but it wasn't
36:56
Speaker 1: her birthday necessarily, but happy decade. Yeah, like when you
37:00
Speaker 1: hit seventy or sixty or fifty. Sure, no, I know
37:03
Speaker 1: exactly your time. It's a rich history of saying happy
37:07
Speaker 1: The song happy decade turning? What song is that? Happy
37:12
Speaker 1: happy decade turning? Is that a Bill Weather's song? You
37:16
Speaker 1: made it another ten years? Lean on me there, man,
37:23
Speaker 1: I think I awkwardly got my way out of that
37:25
Speaker 1: really awkward sentence. You did. It was really good. I
37:28
Speaker 1: grew up in Houston, Texas. Guys. One blazing hot summer
37:31
Speaker 1: day when I was about three or four, is out
37:32
Speaker 1: in the driveway standing around, kind of checking out the
37:34
Speaker 1: neighbor kid who was in her driveway, who was about too.
37:39
Speaker 1: It's hotter than the blazes. Her name was Bianca. She
37:41
Speaker 1: was younger than me and still in the diaper phase
37:44
Speaker 1: of life, but it was so hot she wasn't wearing
37:46
Speaker 1: a diaper or anything else. Nature called to Bianca and
37:49
Speaker 1: while a couple of little poos were deposited on the summit,
37:53
Speaker 1: being a curious child, and went over to check it out,
37:55
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, they're in the poop embedded securely
37:58
Speaker 1: but definitely visible. Were core colonels, unmasticated yellow against the
38:04
Speaker 1: brown corn colonels. Right. Yeah, no, we've we got it,
38:07
Speaker 1: just the corn crenels. Uh, fussily. I've never been able
38:11
Speaker 1: to look at corn, nor God forbid, eat corn literally
38:15
Speaker 1: in any form ever since. Yeah, I could see that
38:19
Speaker 1: happen if I hit you in just the right way,
38:21
Speaker 1: especially at a certain age. Yep, she says, not even
38:24
Speaker 1: corn pone, which I had to look up. I didn't
38:27
Speaker 1: even know what corn pone was. It's like corn bread,
38:28
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, not even corn pone. God, how
38:32
Speaker 1: have you lived seventy years without corn pone? A great
38:36
Speaker 1: emotional scar was born that day. The only benefit of
38:39
Speaker 1: that experience is that whenever I want to cross I'm sorry,
38:41
Speaker 1: gross anyone out, I just pull out the corn in
38:44
Speaker 1: the poop story. All adults hate it, all children are
38:47
Speaker 1: gleefully grossed out by it. I love your show, guys,
38:50
Speaker 1: especially when y'all wander off topic and then wander back.
38:54
Speaker 1: I think in the Chili Pepper episode, y'all wandered over
38:56
Speaker 1: to Yoko oh No, which was interesting. And that is
38:59
Speaker 1: from Mary Foy in Issaqua Washington. Well thanks, well, yeah,
39:04
Speaker 1: I guess, thanks in quotes Mary for that one. But
39:09
Speaker 1: thank you also for listening to us. Uh. If you
39:12
Speaker 1: want to write in and kind of gross us out
39:14
Speaker 1: like Mary did, We're always up for that kind of thing.
39:17
Speaker 1: You can take your best shot, UH, send it off
39:20
Speaker 1: to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
39:27
Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
39:29
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
39:31
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
39:34
Speaker 1: favorite shows.