The Archetype of the Dragon Image as a Talisman

The first culture in which we find a lot of archeological remains of adornments bearing the dragon image in its original and most spiritually expressive shape is the Hongshan culture in what is now called Inner Mongolia encircled in the arms of the Yellow River.  I will not go back into the background of all the people who came down into this region, but will deal just now with the Hongshan New Stone Age agricultural society.  They enjoyed rich grasslands, and they raised domestic animals for food production.

Bones of animals such as cows, sheep, goats and pigs are found in the archeological sites.  The jade images from the Hongshan culture show that the animal need not have been domesticated in order to be important.  Images of eagles, lions, tigers, rabbits, gazelles and insects such as the cicada (locust) are prominent in the carved jade amulets in this society.  In later blogs we will be discussing the meanings that historians and archeologists have learned from the amulets buried with the owners.

While the Hongshan culture was developing along the lower reaches of the Yellow River, farther west along the same river and in the same time span of ca. 5,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., the Yangshao culture was developing its own treatment of the many of the same jade images.  If we moderns can discern the most important ancient sacred symbol by counting the replications of a certain image over the area from Syria eastward to the China Sea, we have to say that the dragon is by far the most important.  There is a work that discusses this phenomenon and relates this to a natural phenomenon observed by the people in that part of the earth in the Early Neolithic Age.

First, let me simply and rather superficially note how the writers explain the origin of this important manifestation of the image of a dragon eating its tail, or the ouroboros.  Let's look at a photo in order to have a point of reference.

This particular dragon symbol is antique, but not ancient.  It is given a more detailed treatment than the Hongshan or Mijiayao, and also shows the influence of later cultures within that same geographical area over the millennia.  A fuller description of this piece is HERE.

The archetype or original image of the dragon eating its tail was that, according to Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs and Anthony L. Peratt in The Ouroboros as an Auroral Phenomenon, the people of the time between about 10,000 B.C. and 6,000 B.C. observed an aurora or a flaming circle around the sun.  Because the sun flare, or simply a brilliant circle of light, suggested it to the human imagination, there arose an 'incipient dragon motif, lacking its hind feet' and having its tail in its mouth.  

For the people along the Yellow River, who definitely associated the dragon with sky and water (which falls from the sky), there could be a simpler explanation.  I thought perhaps the sinuous shape of the river itself might suggest such an image.  I hypothesized that if one stood on a high spot in the mountains, one might see what resembled just such an image by looking down at a river circling back upon itself at certain points.  I searched for and found a photograph of just exactly that.  It is a photo of the Yellow River taken from a low-flying plane:

After DisturbedShadow

The Yangshao or Mijiayao culture in what is now Gansu and Qinghai Provinces in China, jutting up against Mongolia, and in the shadow of the Kunlun Shan Mountains from which the Yellow River flows, embraced the tradition of the Hongshan dragon motif and much of the same cosmic iconography as the Hongshan culture.  So the dragon motif extended a great distance, even considering only the area of the earth East of the Himalayas. 

My own imagination that relates the dragon motif to the river rather than to a possible sun flare or atmospheric aurora does not explain the fact that at about the same time, a similar image of the ouroboros had developed in Northern Mesopotamia, a great geographical distance from the China Sea.  

But then no physicist has proven the event of an aurora around the sun that could be seen by all humanity in that region.  Neither has there been proof offered that such a sun flare happened within the time frame in which the ouroboros was born.  

This blog is simply to give us a point of reference in discussing the cosmic iconography that later became the mythical symbols and popular onamentation of so much of humanity.

Out of Mongolia - Ancient Symbols in Jade and Bronze

To begin in the middle of things, I will post a few entries on the central and most imposing image in the ornamental and ritual symbols created by the earliest jade craftsmen along the Yellow River in a part of the world we now call Inner Mongolia in the fourth millennium B.C.: the Dragon symbol in various forms.   The symbol is often in amulets or talismans; but it is also carved into small statues and is often an image on a vessel, on utensils or symbols of authority such as the jade axe head. 

This is a short introduction that I wrote on another blog that I am moving to this site because it more properly belongs with the much later spiritual symbolism in the tribal ornamentation of the Turkmen up into the beginning of the twentieth century A.D. 

Dragons in Ancient Himalayan Cultures

I will begin this series of blog posts with my interest in the ancient symbol of the entwined or coiled serpent, especially the amuletic expression of the whorled serpent.  It began as a stone carved in the image of a serpent or serpent dragon with its tail in its mouth.  It is the ancient ouroboros.  As the word is spoken it almost sounds like a wheel-y motion if you roll the 'R' while pronouncing the word.

I found my first ouroboros as a Bactrian artifact in an antique shop in Ghazni, Afghanistan.  It was lying in an old bronze pot, and I knew I had to buy it.  I am glad I did; I had no idea whence it had come, nor what age it was.  I knew it appeared to be an ancient whorled serpent symbol that I had studied and imagined for years already at that time -- 1974.  

This is my very own Ouroboros that I bought that day, beginning our collection of Bactrian artifacts, though we did not know it was Bactrian.  

I assume that the stone cutter of this piece and the one that carved the naturalistic statue in the header above had two different things in mind or that they were separated in time, distance, status or even lived in two different artistic traditions, but both were in Bactria at some time long ago.  The difference is evident between the abstract and rather primitive ouroboros and the naturalistic domesticated dragon statue above.  He is wearing a collar, so he is apparently a domestic animal belonging to perhaps a royal person in the community.  We will find that there is a strong relationship between the dragon and the ruler of a settlement or a kingdom.  

Some days after I collected this ouroboros, my husband found a spectacular detailed Bactrian ouroboros in a Kabul antique shop: 

This is a very different kind of ouroboros.  The whorl design is there, but there are two serpent dragons and they are not eating each other or their own tails.  They are eating a goat.  The goat later becomes a sacred ancestor symbol among certain of the Altai-Himalayan tribes, so this may have been an early intimation of that spirituality, expressing a struggle between two forces, one good and another that is devouring the good.  

This is a very short and rather superficial introduction to the study of dragon images in two different Himalayan communities of late Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age: the Bactrian  culture on the west side of the mountains and the later Tocharian culture on the east side of the Himalayas.   The connection between the Euro-Iranian Tocharians in what is now Northwest China and the Chinese culture in South China is JADE.  It is from jade that the Chinese nobility wanted their amulets and statuary made.  And it was the people that lived near the Hotan River in Northwest China that could bring it to the developing dynastic rulers to the South of them.  

 This is a very small print of a copy of a Hongshan jade amulet purported to be from about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.  Such symbols were carried by tradition into the Bronze Age and respected by the dynastic families.  The nobility wanted their status symbols made of jade, too.  And for many centuries the jade dragon has been carried as an amulet or protective jewelry for those who could afford the price of jade.  Phoenixes and a combination of a dragon and phoenix have come into modern times as noble symbols, especially when expressed in jade. 

In later posts, we will fill in the history of how the Himalayas came to be the home of people who dressed like the ancestors of Europeans, looked like them and spoke many words that English speakers could still recognize, in a language somewhere between Old Persian (Iranian) and Old Celtic, which was spoken until Medieval times in places as far apart as  what is now Ankara, Turkey and Ireland.  

Furthermore, we will discuss the significance of jade and agate in the amuletic traditions on each side of the Himalayas.  Though the Bactrians spoke a language related to the Tocharian, their attitude toward ornamentation seemed to differ.  The Tocharian mummies found in the Tarim Basin of China wear beautifully woven clothing, but the jewelry either had been removed or they did not wear much of it.  Their relation to the jade dragon amulets made by the successors of the Hongshan culture in what is now called Inner Mongolia seemed to be through trade.  They supplied much of the Hetian or Hotan jade that the successors of the Hongshan people used to make the dragon amulets.  The Tocharian mummies in what is now Xinjiang Province in China are dated ca. 2,000 B.C. around a thousand years after the Hongshan culture had passed into history, except for the legacy of jade dragon symbols that continued to be reproduced into modern times.  

While the Indo-Europeans of the Eastern side of the Himalayas seemed not be a heavily bejeweled culture, the Bactrian ruins were found to be full of highly symbolic ornaments of very valuable materials, from beautifully shaped colored agate amulets and beads to life-sized gold masks.  

These names and places will be filled out for us in the upcoming blogs.  For now, the dragon will sleep.