Forgotten Ages Research

Where Did All the Dragons Come From?—Exploring the Global Menagerie of Mysterious Monsters, Part Two

Report Topics:

• The secrets of Dragons and their hidden esoteric meanings, as they are connected with universal memory-visions of dinosuars that are part of the planetary collective consciousness.
• The Dragon image as it was artistically portrayed in China, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, the Ancient and Classical world, and in Celtic, Norse and Medieval Europe.

Full Report:

China—

It is said that the ancient land of the Yellow River is ruled over by Lung Mei, the hidden currents of the Dragon that serve as the primal energy for opening communications with the Ancestors of old. By deep contemplations on the Tao and the practice of Zen meditation, as well as utilizing such drugs as opium and other early narcotics, the Chinese mystics of old penetrated into the grand mysteries of the past, always led by the image of the dragon, as pictured in religious art, architecture and ceremonies.

Throughout its long history and sucession of imperial dynastic periods, many examples can be found of direct dragon-dinosaur memory-visions displayed in a wide variety of art forms. These include:

*A Shang Dynasty (1600 to 1046 B.C.E.) nephrite jade objet d’art that stands fifteen inches tall has all the tell-tale characteristics of a Saurolophus, right down to including a spike-like crest projecting from the rear of its head.

*In 2003, Chinese farmers discovered twenty-seven bronze sculptures in a sealed cavern in Shaanxi Province, dating from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045 to 770 B.C.E.). One of these is in the form of an inscribed decorative disk, to which has been attached along its edges four wide legs and feet, a long tail, plus a very long neck with a small-sized head. The overall artistic effect resembles a typical Apatosaurus shape and stance, as it has been found in the fossil record.

*The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has in its Oriental Collection a green bronze vessel with animal-headed handles, found in 1959 at Shilou Xian, and dating to the Shang period. The animal heads are that of a Plesiosaur, complete with the display of auditory-acoustic “horns” that were used for tracking fish.

*A type of Late Eastern Zhou Dynasty (third century B.C.E.) bronze work called Fang Jian, is featured in a large ornamental box that has four “dragons” for side handles. It measures a little over twelve by twelve inches, and is presently housed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The body anatomy, the three-toed claws, and in particular the shape of the head, clearly identify the four creatures as being of the Sauropod family, species Brachiasaur.

*In 1990, a beautiful bronze “dragon” inlaid with malachite and dating to the Spring and Autumn Period (722 to 476 B.C.E.) was excavated in Henan Province. The creature is shown on all fours, has a long sleak body, good-sized tail, high-perched neck, a wide open mouth and long tongue, also with large eyes and what appear to be decorative “horns.” Most intriguing of all, this dragon figure is being ridden by a human being sitting on its back. Here again we have a stylized version of a member of the Iguanodon family, with the “horns” representing the bony crests which appear among certain species.

*A so-called “winged tiger” inlaid with jade pieces, made during the Warring States Period (475 to 221 BC.E.) has the same long, low body, elongated head, flat-top cranium and small mouth of a Maiasaur.

*From the same Period, the Huebei Provencial Museum exhibits a brass support stand from the Tomb of Yi that sports a very long neck and small head that matches that of a Diplodocus.

Yet another piece from the Warring States era, this one only five inches tall and made of blackened ceramic, shows a man standing on the back of a long-necked flat-headed creature that is another representation of an Iguanodon.

*A Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E. to 220 A.D.) bronze cooking vessel has two figures of a duck-billed, long-necked, flat-headed Hadrosaur, of the species Shantungosaurus.

*Bronze free-standing serpentine dragons from the Northern Wei Dynasty (220 to 265) have anatomical affinities with the extinct species of Elasmosaurus.

*The Freer Gallery of Washington’s Smithsonian displays a limestone stela from the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279) showing an image of Buddha accompanied by a number of peculiar fauna. One of these, pictured at the feet of the meditating figure, is usually identified as either a stylized lion or traditional fu dog. The problem is, its “mane” is well shaped as if not being composed of hair, but is a solid piece, coming to a point toward the back of its head. This strange feature is not seen in any known feline or canine. However, such a configuration is characteristic of the small cranial shields in several Cerotop saurians, particularly the hornless Protocerotops recently discovered in Outer Mongolia.

*Finally, a bronze dragon from the Ming Dynasty, circa 1400, was recently analyzed by investigators at the Genesis Park Museum, and was described in the following manner:

“It displays numerous characteristics of the beaked dinosaurs—tridactyl feet configuration, metatarsal stance, scale-like representation all over the body (except for the horn which has a striated pattern), a long and slender tail, elaborate head crest and a long neck.”

Their conclusion was that it configures a very specific species, classified as a duck-billed Brachylophosaur.

Southeast Asia and India—

Among the most ancient cultures of Indochina, which inhabited Thailand and Cambodia, was a rich array of dragon images that permeated their artwork and notable architecture. These two lost empires also possessed offshoot sects of both Buddhism and Hinduism whose priests once held a lucrative trade in drug trafficking throughout southern Asia and the East Indies. What is more, not surprisingly, ancient Thai and Khmer artistic expressions reveal many examples of out-of-place dragon-dinosaur connections.

One representative sample of this is a thirteen hundred year-old Thai metal incense burner affixed with large stubby legs and a long neck with small bulbous head and teeth-filled mouth, found in the region designated in 1991 as Phu Wiag Park. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the remains of a Brachiosaur found closeby in 1966, also in Khon Kaen Province.

A very similarly designed bronze incense burner depicting another more flat-headed species of Brachiosaur is indicative of the Thai-related Dongson Culture of the third century A.D., and is presently on exhibit in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. On the saurian’s back rides a second creature with the great wings and crested head of a Tapejara imperator.

A second Dongson piece, likewise dated to the third century, depicts two human figures taking a ride along the long neck of what can be easily identified as another Brachiosaur.

A late period Thai vase—a rare Sukhothai blue and white pearl-shaped ewer dated to 1400—has an elongated pouring spout shaped in a long neck with scales painted in detail along its length, with a long-snouted head featuring a unique crest. It is labeled as a “sea-horse” because that is the only living animal form that it even remotely looks like. Yet it far better represents an extinct dinosaur species called a Corythosaurus.

The ancient Khmer peoples of what is now Cambodia were the inspired designers of the magnificent forgotten temple complexes of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and numerous other architectural wonders rescued back from the encroaching rainforest only a century ago.

In one portion of Angkor called the Temple of Ta Prohm, dating to the twelfth century, is an entranceway accentuated on ether side by a squared column of white stone covered with typical ancient Khmer decorations and surrounding a vertical series of circular bas-reliefs. Most of these in their centers feature the portraits of religious figures and sacred animals that are, for the most part, recognizeable as contemporary peole and fauna. But it is in the second bas-relief from the bottom of the row that immediately catches the eye of every visiting tourist and starles them when they finally grasp the significance of what they are looking at.

The figure is large and fills almost the entire circle. It has a small head, short snout, small eyes, huge hump-shaped body, big hips and short legs, long tail—and along the length of its back all the way to its tail is a series of broad, prominent, slightly pointed plates projecting upward. The image is unmistakably that of a Stegasaur. In addition, the two front legs of the saurian are standing on the head of a porpoise-like animal, except that its eyes are far too large to be a member of the cetacea family. It better matches the fossil cranium of a marine-going Ophthalmosaur.

The wear-and-tear erosion on the figures—plus the precariously balanced condition of the stonework in general caused by the deterioration of the joints between the individual blocks making up the squared columns—are all indications these carvings are as old as the Temple itself, and could not have been added at a later date without bringing about the collapse of all the immediate architectural forms.

The Angkor complex started out with a Hindu design, then later was converted over to local Buddhist influences. In neighboring India are similar Hindu sacred precincts that contain multiple dragon-dinosaur depictions—including at Muktinath, where a topwall fountain waterspout shows the characteristic massive head, horns and head shield of a Tricerotops, dating between 400 and 700 A.D. Other images have been classified as Crylophosaurs and Dilophesaurs. Farther afield, throughout Nepal and Tibet, are still more dragon-dinosaurs in the form of roof extension decorations and ceremonial masks, classified as belonging to the horned Cetaceous Cerotops and the trunk-wielding Pleistocene Stegodont families.

Africa—

The Dogon are a well-known and mysterious tribe that live in the plateau region of Mali in north-central Africa. Studies made of their belief systems reveal they possess an advanced esoteric wisdom the origins of which are unknown. Their shaman-elders practice a deep-seated form of meditation, and many of their metalware pieces show unusual dragon figures interacting with human beings. One such example portrays a Dogon tribesman riding on the back of a wide-bodied creature with a bird-like head, duck-billed mouth, long legs and a long tail with a curl in the end of it. In proportion to the human riding on top of it, it is a good likeness of a Polacanthus, a form of early Ankylosaurus that was not anwhere near as armored as its later cousins.

The fact is, the metal body of the Dogon figurine shows its skin to be criss-crossed with rows of diamond shapes top to bottom. This was reflected in actual fossilized dinosaur skin patterns found among related Hadrosaur remains unearthed in Utah toward the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet the Dogon bronze did not first make its initial appearance among European collectors until the mid-1800’s, when this early form of saurian had just been excavated, and long before its accurate reconstruction was achieved.

The Kotoko Culture once flourished in the Lake Chad and northwest Cameroon regions as early as the fifth century B.C.E. These craftspeople were best known for casting small bronze figurines of warriors mounted on “horses,” some of them no more than three inches high, which were then presented as funerary offerings or memorials, buried with the honored dead. The difficulty here is that the so-called horses had beaked faces, usually with long necks, and very broad un-horse-like bodies. A better interpretation is they were a small version or possibly infantile form of Iguanodons or Hadrosaurs, that had been at one time domesticated for riding purposes.

In addition, many different ceremonial masks, ranging from the Congo Basin tribes to those of the historical cultural centers of Nigeria and Western Africa, portray in their designs anomalous animal heads that do not conform to any of the existing fauna species of the rainforest or veldt regions. A number of these are depicted with great pointed wings, long teethy beaks, small bulbous heads and pronounced crests that are reminiscent of fossil forms of Pteronodons and Pterodactyls.

What is fasinating to note is that, since the turn of the last century, there have been reports of physical in-the-flesh sightings of strange saurian-like creatures, particularly in the backwaters of the Congo and other tributaries in central Africa. The Native peoples call the beast by the names of mokele-mbembe, mahamba, mbiele-mbiele, ngama-moneme, ndendeki, chipekwe, nyamala or emala-atooka, and it is said to most resemble an Iguanodon. It attacks and feeds off hippopotamus and elephants, and leaves behind distinctive three-toed tracks.

In the first half of the twentieth century, expeditions from Britian, Germany, France, Belgium and America were dispatched to hunt down such mystery monsters, but always with disappointing results, because the elusive beasts seemed to vanish into nowhere before their capture. In the 1980’s and 1990’s more American and British teams failed to find anything substantive. Even a Japanese film crew tried in vain to capture these out-of-place saurian on film. Still other groups of crypto-zoologists returned empty-handed as recently as 2000 and 2005.

When several local indigenous tribal shamans from the Congo river basin were asked what they though was happening, they had answers very similar to what their Aboriginal colleagues in Australia said about the same kind of physical appearances of anomalous creatures in their outback scrub country—from time to time these animals “fall out” through “holes” from “beyond the edge of the world,” then just as inexplicably “fall back through” again and return to that “unknown place” that is “before when and where what is.”

The Ancient and Classical World—

In 1902, when German archaeologist Robert Koldewey was excavating into the ruins of ancient Babylon in what is now the country of Iraq, he was the first to bring back to the light of day from over two thousand five hundred years ago the magnificent City Gate of Ishtar, commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar. Its entire surface had been covered with blue-glazed tiles, as well as the repeated images of multi-colored bas-reliefs of three animal figures—a lion, a bull and a single-horned dragon. The latter was identified in cuneiform inscriptions as a sirrush or mushrushu, which translates as “wondrous serpent.” Koldewey—who, because the lion and bull were known animals, considered the sirrush to have likewise real—described it as having, “a slender body covered with scales, a long slender scaly trail, and a long slim scaly neck bearing a serpent’s head, from which a long forked tongue protrudes. There are flaps of skin attached to the back of the head, which is adorned with a straight horn.”

Further investigations reveal that the Ishtar Gate lion has closer affinities to an extinct Pleistocene Cave Leonine species, while the Babylon bull was an Auroch, a giant Ice Age bovine which, in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, was dyng out on the northern plains of eastern Europe and did not become fully extinct until the fourteenth century.

But where had the Sirrush come from? It best resembles an extinct form of Iguanodon. Several modern scholars have equated it with the Behemoth described in Hebrew literature, and with the story in the Apocrypha of Bel and the Dragon. Supposedly such a creature was alive in the time of the prophet Daniel and was worshipped as a deity in the Temple of Bel. Daniel’s response to such a blasphemy was to have the Dragon killed as a demonstration of the superior powers of Yahweh.

However, there are two other alternative possibilities to what actually happened. Did the high priests of Bel invoke the collective vision-memory of such a saurian-dragon in their religious meditations and intoxications, and Daniel simply exposed the transitory nature of the beast by forcibly interrupting the group vision quest and abruptly ending it? Or did the Babylonian priests have the power to momentarily manifest a real Iguanodon into physical existence within their temple enclosure—much in the same way that Australian and African shamans claimed to also know about? And then Daniel had the out-of-dimensional-time animal killed as soon as it appeared?

Throughout the long history of the succession of Mesopotamian civilizations—starting in 3300 B.C.E. with the Sumerians through to the Babylonians and Assyrians of the first millennium B.C.E.—are numerous images found impressed in cuneiform clay records and fashioned in mud brick wall engravings of long-tailed, muscular-bodied, long-necked, small-headed and prominently-crested beasts which only last existed in the Cretaceaus era.

Contemporary cultures, such as that of Luristan to the north of Mesopotamia, and the Greek Mycenaeans among the Aegean islands to the west, offered their own examples of ceramic, silver and bronze wares containing recognizable figures of a wide species variety of Sauropods and Pterosaurs. Likewise, portraits of Hadrosaurs, Aralosuars, Maiasuars and Brachylophosaurs showed up in Syrian bronzes from the first millennium B.C.E.

Even into the late Classical period, dinosaur-dragons made their appearance in the most unusual places. At the Roman site of Umm El-Kanatis, located on modern Israel’s Golan Heights, are the remains of a Jewish Synagogue dating from 400 to 700 A.D. that was excavated in 2007. Incorporated into its main limestone architecture are two figures, the first of which is a bipedal creature with a long tail, massive hind legs, a large retilian head with a large opened mouth, and a large crest on its cranium. The shape and stance of the beast is that of a Cryloposaur or Dilophosaur. Next to it is the portrait of a hapless horse who is in the process of having its flanks bitten into by a huge serpentine monster with a roughly triangular head, not unlike that of an extinct marine Koolasuchus.

In the second century A.D. an Egyptian artist from Alexandria named Demetrius the Topographer was commissioned by a Roman patron to create what has come to be known as the Nile Mosaic of Palestrina, a beautiful multi-hued panorama depicting a journey along the Nile into the heart of Ethiopia.

This work of art is recognized for its fine details of natural landscapes—and for its depiction of strange beasts which do not exist either today or were extant during the Roman Classical age nearly two millennia ago. The scenes contain an odd mixture of both Cretaceous creatures such as several species of Iguanodons, plus a number of Pleistocene mammals including extinct forms of giant pigs, lions, horses, camels, as well as trunked and tusked members of the Mammoth and Mastadon families. Was Demetrius’ artistic visionary trip more than a physical journey, but rather an odyssey through time?

Celtic, Norse and Medieval Europe—

In the first millennium B.C.E. the Celtic civilization held sway over a large part of northern Europe and Britain, managing to hold off Roman advances, and eventually passing on their heritage to the later Saxons and Norse. The heart of Celtic wisdom was held by the enigmatic religion of the Druids, whose spiritual roots extended all the way back to the Megalith Builders of Stonehenge and hundreds of other prehistoric circles, menhirs and mounds scattered across the European continent and beyond. Before that, they harkened to humanity’s lost primordial connections with nature as comprehended and exercised by the Cro-Magnons, whose origins went back twenty thousand years.

In Celtic art the most predominant sacred symbols were the Dragon and the Tree, the one often depicted wrapped around the other, with the serpentine twists and turns melded with the swirled entangling of arboreal branches and leaves in the typical Celtic endless circling geometric motif.

With the coming of Church missionaries in the early Middle Ages, the newly predominating Christians simply incorporated the two “pagan” symbols together as a reflection of the Old Testament Tree of Life and the Serpent of Satan, the epitome of Good and Evil. But originally the Druidic priesthood regarded the Tree and its narcotic leaves as the source from which powerful dreams and visions came, and the Dragon was the vehicle of inspiration through which hidden knowledge and illumination were carried into consciousness.

The Celts called the dragon-dinosaurs they encountered by many names—Belua, Addunc, Carrog, Afanc, Wyvern, Gryphen. In most cases the winged forms were invariably described having the exact same attributes as Pterosaurs, Pteronodons and Pterodactyls.

The later Norse would further personify the visionary journey by placing the images of dragons on the prows of their long-ships, equating their sea-faring voyages and their far-seeing visions as one and the same experience. The figure of the dragon likewise pervaded through both Celtic and Norse artistic expressions in all aspects of their weavings, wood carvings, clothing decoration, helmet and weapons’ ornamentation, and in their architecture.

During the later Middle Ages, the succeeding Gothic Church art that borrowed so heavily from their Celtic forebears was likewise replete with decorative dragon figures, portrayed both outside and inside the great cathedrals of Europe. During this same period, many medieval chroniclers described in great detail numerous attacks by flying dragons, fire-breathing dragons, bejeweled dragons, two-headed dragons and other similar phantasmagorical creatures.

Such occurrences paralleled periodic outbreaks of ergotism, when local storehouses of wheat and rye used for baking bread became contaminated with a form of mold that produced lysergic acid, having a similar chemical composition to modern LSD. Whole village populations were subject to prolonged powerful hallucinogenic visions, which led to sudden collective openings of the inner psyche into awakened memories of the far distant past, when dragon-dinosaurs reigned supreme. For the masses of people who were caught up in such visionary trauma, their “recall” of creatures from bygone ages became externalized and took on the semblance of physical reality. Affected knights and “dragon-slayers” fought what for them were not imaginary but rather very real battles.

These terrorizing apparitional instances were then in turn preserved by Church artisans who immortalized such “manifestations of devils” into the very outline of their cathedrals. By this mental process of creating sacred therapeutic art on the collective level for all to see and contemplate, the unwanted visions could be more safely sanctified, healed and released.

At times, however, the portrayal of dragon-dinosaurs appears to have been the result of a single individual’s repeated religious contemplations. One of the most mysterious of such examples can be found today in Carlisle Cathedral, in northwest England, engraved on a nine-foot long brass fillet that runs along one side of the metal-inlaid tomb of Richard Bell, a former Bishop of Carlisle who lived from 1410 to 1496. Bishop Bell initially became a monk at the age of sixteen, entered a monastic life of constant prayer and contemplation for fifty years, before eventually receiving a degree at Oxford University, rose to become Prior of Durham, and was finally appointed to the Carlisle Bishopric in 1478.

His tomb’s brass fillet, worn with age, had its bottom half broken off long ago, but what remains on the top portion is an etched Latin inscription between the words of which are depicted a series of animal outlines. Most of these are not very remarkable—some fish, an eel, a dog, a pig, a bird and a weasel. Yet also making their appearance are the unmistakable profiles of two Apatosauruses, of the same general family as the more familiar Brontosaurus. They are correctly portrayed in their latest understood stance, having both their long necks and equally long tails held out horizontally to the ground as they moved. They are also shown with their bodies facing each other, their necks entwined in the same attitude that many long-necked male animals—such as giraffes— do today as rivals in a test of strength and dominance in competition for a female.

Nearby to these figures is the engraved image of another dinosaur, this one having a bulkier body, long tail, and a large head with gaping mouth with prominent teeth. It best matches what modern paleontologists identify as a Postosuchus saurian from the Late Triassic period.

We know that the brass fillet in question is as old as the tomb itself, dating to the fifteenth century, and even the engraved figures themselves exhibit considerable wear and tear. Church historical records verify they were certainly not added at a later date. The problem is, the Bishop was buried three centuries before the first fossil bones of such saurians were systematically unearthed—and even then, for almost a century more afterwards, the earliest attempts at reconstructing their bones was very inaccurate. And it was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that we finally discovered from the fossil record what the actual body stance for an Apatosaurus really was. Even the fairly recent popular movie, Jurassic Park, got it wrong.

So where did this anachronistic scene of two such dinosaurs “necking” in competition with each other come from?

And where did the additional image of the Postosuchus originate, an obscure early dinosaur species that was not successfully identified and properly reconstructed until the mid-twentieth century?

Since we find no physical evidence that five centuries ago such huge creatures were casually wandering over the English countryside, peacefuly grazing on medieval grasslands or crops, the source of the original imagery had to have come from Bishop Bell himself. In his half century of monastic contemplation, did he receive a memory-vision of a bygone world inhabited by forms of life even his fellow scholars at Oxford in their day could not have imagined had ever existed? Did he then, in his later years, commission these visionary images to be added to the decorations for his tomb? Here, to this day, the dinosaurs are clearly seen, and in a very accurate pose, testifying that the Bishop’s memory-vision was true.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]