Owledge

Origins of the western dragon stereotype?

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Did someone here study material that gives insight into why the dragon has such a different image in the west than in the east?

How comes that a creature like that, which one could argue has both fierce and calm attributes, is regarded as symbolizing things like wisdom in the east, while in the west it's regarded as a threat to humanity and associated with all kinds of bad character traits?

Now I could understand if this came from the same Christian-based mentality as all the other western religious dogmas, good and evil, being scared of the dark night and all, but I haven't come across any material that would connect the western dragon image to that.

To mention another example: goat creatures were villified by Christianity because they were part of pagan fertility symbology and pagans having been the declared enemy of at least the Catholic church. But did the church did the same regarding dragons? Did they villify them in order to antagonise eastern religion/mythology?

It seems too much of a coincidence that the "dragon" idea developed indepedently in two regions.

Edited by Owledge
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Did someone here study material that gives insight into why the dragon has such a different image in the west than in the east?

 

We live in a Head-Centered world. Dragons went the way of other Sky-Fliers, like Lilith and Dakini's,...the cerebral-centric don't want to know that everything they sense is meaningful, is actually meaningless.

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