Dragons of Lore Series: Biblical Dragons of the Apocalypse

Isaiah 34:13 And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

RISE OF THE RAVEN KNIGHTS! http://sufferthewitch.com

Biblical dragons are perhaps the fiercest of all dragons. These are not village destroyers, they are civilization destroyers! However, there are many possibilities about what exactly biblical dragons are. They could be evil human leaders, warmongering countries led by a devious cult of personalities, or they could even be comets, nuclear bombs or aliens. One thing is for sure, they are often not scales, blood and bone flying reptiles.

Before we go any further, let me add that I am not a biblical scholar or expert by any stretch. I have, though, personally read the Bible, as I have many ancient holy books from many different religions. That said, my views on dragons in the biblical sense are not to be construed in any way that I am challenging anyone else religious views. My opinion: believe in whatever you choose and have fun with it.

Revelation 20:1-15 

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection...

If I’m reading this correctly, the prophet is saying that Satan is to be thrown into a bottomless pit (wormhole?) for one thousand years. The souls of martyrs and those that didn’t take the number of the beast resurrected into heaven. The souls of the dead that followed Satan and the Antichrist are not resurrected and judged for 1000 years. After that Satan is freed. It doesn’t say what happens after that. This is not the way most people talk about the end-times! For my fictional take on it check out my apocalyptic horror novel series The Devil’s Prophet @ http://thedevilsprophet.com

Ezekiel 29:3 

Speak, and say, Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams, that says, ‘My Nile is my own; I made it for myself.

This passage seems to define the dragon as the Pharaoh of Egypt. Their dynasties lasted for thousands of years until they were taken down by first the Jewish God and then by my personal favorite conqueror, Alexander the Great. That dragon was slain!

Isaiah 27:1 In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

What kind of dragon could be in the sea? Was this prophet perhaps divining something that was too technologically advanced from him to accurately describe? Perhaps it could be a nuclear powered submarine firing nuclear weapons during World War Last. Another explanation could be invading aliens, who are known to make their bases in the sea.

Jeremiah 51:37

And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant.

I cannot possibly say about this prophet’s use of the term dragon. He does accurately predict the fall of Babylon, which happened twice, once in early biblical times by the Medes and the Assyrians (Persians) and the other, just recently, by a war the United States started. The actual ancient city-state of Babylon does in fact lie in ruins in the badlands of Iraq, just as the prophet predicted. A ghost town, which for a brief time, was the greatest and most beautiful city in the world, may in fact be housing some type of terrible spiritual dragons ready to awaken and take thousands of simmering years’ worth of vengeance out on humanity.

Daniel Chapter 14

23There was a great dragon* which the Babylonians revered.24The king said to Daniel, “You cannot deny that this is a living god, so worship it.”25But Daniel answered, “I worship the Lord, my God, for he is the living God.26Give me permission, O king, and I will kill this dragon without sword or club.” “I give you permission,” the king said.27Then Daniel took some pitch, fat, and hair; these he boiled together and made into cakes. He put them into the mouth of the dragon, and when the dragon ate them, he burst. “This,” he said, “is what you revered.”

This makes the apocalyptic prophet Daniel a world-class dragon slayer. There is not one clue in this text to point at a misconstrued technological device. It simply describes a biological beast that was obviously quite fearsome. How it came to be captured or what type of beast it really was is anyone’s guess. For slaying this beast, King Nebuchadnezzar listened to the pleas of the high priests of the dragon religion and sentenced Daniel to be thrown into a den of hungry lions. After several days, the King had his men open the den and Daniel walked out unharmed. Nebuchadnezzar promptly threw the wizards that worshipped the dragon into the pit and they were immediately eaten. Real or imagined, this is a great, great story.

Speaking of great stories, please give my own dragon story, Rise of the Raven Knights a read. It is a fantastic dark fiction tale, about dragons, owls, ravens, knights, ghosts and gargoyles that battle evil witches who plan to control demons and take over the world. http://sufferthewitch.com

Be sure to check back into DeThroe’s Blog in two weeks as I explore in depth, the possibility that the ancients mistook comets and UFO’s as dragons!

Dragon of Lore Series: Ancient Greek Dragons!

Dragon myths run deep and long in ancient Greek culture. There were all sorts of different types of dragons and from that sprang dozens of brilliant stories of Greek gods or heroes battling these terrible beasts, and of course saving their fellow countrymen and Greek civilization in the process. In fact, there are so many fantastic dragon stories that there is no way I could get to them all in this blog article. Instead, I researched the ones that greatly appealed to me and from that will offer you a taste of ancient Greek dragon lore, while strongly encouraging you to dig deeper on your own.

Greek mythology cannot be discussed in a broader sense without first mentioning Zeus, the chief god and centerpiece of a once thriving religion. Zeus seemed to have the talent, or power, if you will, to control dragons. He used them in various ways, but mainly to protect something he valued or to give grief to his enemies. To attain this power he had to battle the father of all dragons, Typhon. Typhon attacked Zeus in anger after Zeus defeated the Titans. But Zeus defeated and entrapped Typhon beneath Mt. Etna in Sicily, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. 

After that, Zeus used the Nemean Dragon to guard his sacred groves. This beast was killed by an angry mob of soldiers after the beast devoured the baby crown-prince. The sacred grove of Zeus, along with his temple was most likely destroyed in the fifth century by Roman emperor Theodosius II, who had great disdain for its’ pagan leanings.

In Greek mythology there are four main types of dragons. All their ancient dragon lore came from one of these four species. Dracones were serpents with viciously sharp teeth, fatally poisonous bite, sometimes had multiple heads and usually guarded a great treasure, magickal grove or spring. Some of the more prominent Dracones were the before mentioned Typhon, Python, who guarded the Oracle of Delphi before Apollo took over, the Trojan Dracone who tried unsuccessfully to warn the people of Troy about the Trojan Horse.

The next dragon species are the Cetea. These are great sea serpents. The Kraken loosed by Hades in the Perseus story was a Cetea. The creature’s real name was Cetus, not the Kraken as described in modern contemporary movies. Kraken is actually the name of a Norse sea monster that resembled a giant octopus. But, who would let facts stand in the way of a great Hollywood movie?!

The third Greek dragon species are the fire-breathing Chimaera. Often depicted as part lion, part goat and part serpent, this is the type of dragon which was later adopted into medieval dragon tales, such as St. George and the dragon, which we explored in a very popular piece that appeared earlier in the Dragons of Lore series.

The fourth and final species of dragon were the Dracaena, which means She-Dragon. These creatures where thought to be beautiful human-like nymphs from the waist up, but scaly serpent in their lower half. Think evil mermaids! These beasts where the spawns of the most evil dragons of lore and were so powerful in their own right that they could usually be slain by gods such as Zeus and Apollo or demigods such as Heracles and giants such as Argus Panoptes.

Speaking of Heracles, he was perhaps the greatest dragon slayer of all-time. He is credited with slaying the multi-headed Hydra as one of his twelve labors of King Eurystheus. He tricked Atlas into stealing golden apples from the dragon Ladon, by offering to hold the world on his shoulders, which was Atlas curse. After Atlas stole the apples, Heracles asked him to hold the world momentarily while he found some sheep fur to protect his shoulders. He took the apples and ran! 

Heracles also slew a Cetea dragon to save the Trojan princess Hesione, in a story eerily similar to the Perseus story. Heracles then mated with a Scythian Drakaina, named Enchinda, who had stolen his cattle. She was a type of mermaid/dragoness. The result of this union was three sons, one of which began a long line of Scythian kings. His name was Skythe and his empire prospered for several hundred years, before finally being destroyed by the Goths. Pretty decent legacy for Heracles the Dragon Slayer.

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