After singing the praises of imaginary beings yesterday, I felt a pang of sadness for the loss of dragons from our biblical translations. In particular, the old translation for one of the Psalms sung at the late night office of Compline, Psalm 91, says 'the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.' More modern translations speak prosaically of 'serpents'. But these beasts are more terrible than any mere serpent. These are the tannin who appear in Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7 as 'sea-monsters', as 'monsters' in Psalm 74:13 in the New Jerusalem translation. 'Monsters' of whatever sort get us closer to a sense of mythic, archetypal terror but they're still not quite as close as 'dragons'. You might hear zoologically categorised beasts referred to as 'monsters' in the more sensational brand of wildlife TV programme, but 'dragons' are something else entirely.
Borges talks about the ubiquity of dragons across world cultures and impishly observes that 'science distinguishes several kinds' from subterranean to terrestrial and celestial varieties. Of the sea dragons (such as those created on the 5th day in Genesis 1), he notes that they have the ability to boil up a mighty feast of fish with the heat of their breath and that they can whip up whirlpools, typhoons and storms. A prize if you can spot the dragon in this picture which lives down the road from me in Edinburgh:
In banishing dragons from biblical texts, we play right into the hands of the boringly literal-minded, taxonomically accurate sorts who think we ought to read scripture in the way we read a school science text book. But biblical texts offer us something much more than mere fact - they offer food for the imagination and a rich source of archetypes. Our imaginations don't simply cook up images out of nothing - they draw on deep sources of human experience, creativity and emotion to offer us images of true (sic) terror and wonder. A dragon is more terrifying than a serpent because it comes from an unseen, untameable place and it is the unseen, untameable places of our deeper consciousness that are the breeding grounds for our most ancient sense of dread where the stability of existence itself feels to be under threat. It's our appreciation of what lurks beneath the surface that gets banished when we are embarrassed by talk of dragons.
Thankfully, human culture is too robust and flexible to lie down in the face of the onslaught of the literalists. And if all else fails, we can be fairly sure that no one will dare paint over the more fanciful output of Hieronymus Bosch with stills from the latest Attenburgh series...
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Posted by: online forex | 01/23/2013 at 01:31 PM