An Instinct for Dragons

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An Instinct for Dragons is a book by University of Central Florida anthropologist David E. Jones, which seeks to explain the apparent universality of dragon images in the folklore of human societies. In the introduction, Jones conducts a survey of dragon myths from cultures around the world, and demonstrates that certain aspects of dragons or dragon-like mythical creatures are found very widely. Remarkably, even the Inuit have a reptilian dragon-like monster, even though (living in a frigid environment unsuited for cold-blooded animals) they have never seen an actual reptile.

Jones then argues against the common hypothesis that dragon myths might be motivated by primitive discoveries of dinosaur fossils (for example, there are widespread traits of dragons in folklore which are not observable from fossils), and observes that the common traits of dragons seem to be an amalgam of the principal predators of our ancestral hominids: the raptors, great cats (especially leopards) and pythons.

The hypothesis to which Jones conforms is that over millions of years of evolution, members of a species will evolve an instinctive fear of their predators, and he proposes ways in which these fearful images may be merged in artistic or cultural expression to create the dragon image and, perhaps, other kinds of hybrid monster.

Finally he suggests sociological reasons for why such images may be perceived differently at different stages of a culture, thus explaining why, for example, Chinese dragons are considered basically good and representative of government, but the great majority (although not all) European dragons are absolutely evil and often represent chaos.

Jones' theory was opposed in a brief but vitriolic article by Paul Jordan-Smith in the Spring 2002 issue of Western Folklore.

[edit] References

David E. Jones, An Instinct for Dragons (Routledge, 2002) — ISBN 0-415-93729-9
Paul Jordan-Smith, Review: An Instinct for Dragons. Western Folklore, Spring 2002