MDDM Ch. 60, Serpents, Worms, Dragons

[Doug Millison]

"The only way even to make out the Serpent shape of it , is _from an
hundred feet straight up_." (596)

see also:
http://bventertainment.go.com/movies/signs/index.html



At 587.31 Dixon tells Zhang, "---Yet in Durham we mean something different
when we say 'Dragon.' Ours our not at all the Chinese Variety. Some, like
the Lambton Worm, lacking Wings and a fire-breathing Capacity, may indeed
be of a distinct Species."

This "Chinese Variety" supports a bit more looking into.

601.19 "Yet removing Trees to create a pair of perfectly straight Edges, is
to invite Sha, as Captain Zhang, ever eager upon the Topick of the Line and
its Visible expression upon the Landscape, with its star-dictated
indifference to the true inner shape, or dragon, of the Land, will be happy
to indicate to them."

As my guide to the Chinese dragon, I choose
Edward H. Schafer, Agassiz Professor Emeritus at the University of
California Berkeley. (I know his work originally from my now departed, dear
friend, Charlie Zemalis, North Beach Beatnik poet and playwright and
Berkeley storyteller extraordinaire, among other things compiler of a
wonderful list of names of people booked at the Oakland Police Station
during the graveyard shift where Charlie earned a living while a student of
Schafer in the Oriental Languages department at Berkeley in the 1950s.)

In his book _The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens_, Schafer
notes that dragons of northern and western Europe (the monster of Beowulf
and the Fafnir of Wagner's operas are his two examples here) "were treasure
hoarders and fire breathers, resembling their Far Eastern cousins only in
their serpentine form." Schafer says these Western dragons (the Lambton
Worm being yet a different variation, as Dixon notes) are "quite unlike the
beneficient, rain-bringing Chinese _lung_, whom we probably misrepresent
with the borrowed sobriquet of 'dragon.' The Chinese _lung_ is
"tempermentally [...] closer to the mild and generous fish goddesses of the
Mediterranean than to the northern firedrakes."

Schafer notes widespread folk beliefs in Babylon, Greece, Mongolia, Europe,
America, and Asia that associate serpents with water:  "snakelike spirits
are commonly regarded as rain bringer." And the original Chinese _lung_
were associated with rainbows, were feminine or sexually ambiguous: "Our
Chinese dragon, then, is bent and curved like a bow and, like the surface
of the sky dome itself, hovers over the aerial hemisphere [....] In the
earliest literature of China [...] the colored bow in the sky is an
attribute or manifestation of a beautiful rain goddess."

But the Chinese _lung_ is by no means restricted to this rainbow
manifestation:  "the most notable feature of the Chinese dragon was its
ability to assume many different visible forms."

"At about the time of the spring equinox, the summer monsoon comes up from
the South China Sea," Schafer writes. "Then the dragon rises into the sky
carrying the nimbus clouds with him. In the autumn the rains fade away, and
he returns to his hiding place in pond or abyss."

Chinese  _lung_ "fly through the air like birds."  And beyond the rainbow,
"other strange lights in the sky might seem to be the rain lords' fleeting
shapes--the aurora borealis, flashes of lightning, odd luminous mists, and
other unpredictable phenomena." They are also linked to crocodiles,
lizards, crabs, fish, sharks.

Chinese dragons in their various forms and ever-shifting from one to the
other through a world of words and texts seem to me quintessentially
Pynchonesque, never quite what they seem to be, not either/or but masters
in a realm where both/and ambiguity rules.

Schafer mentions another variety of Chinese dragon, _chiao_, which he
translates as "kraken" and of them he says, "These serpentine draculas,
thirsting for human blood, remained more or less anonymous lurkers in the
waters of north China until they achieved a sort of distinction in early
medieval times. Then in the short stories of the T'ang, they learned to
assume human guises for their own inhuman purposes." He also relates the
"kraken" to the eighth century medieval dragon kings, a "very masculine and
imperial beast who, unlike the old, undifferentiated rain-bringing
serpents, regularly assumed completely human shape, was accepted into the
official cult among the high gods who must be propitiated with offerings
and entertained by barefooted dancers in five-colored garments and
lotus-shaped headdressses."

But,  _chiao_ were also a friendlier-sounding race of mermaids or nereids
in the waters of South China, where they lived in underwater palaces and
guarded pearls and _pongees_ ("a cinnamon-colored cloth woven from the
byssus of the pinna mussel"). "Chiao" written with a different character
also means "shark", so Schafer calls them "shark women", and he notes that
shark marrow was a staple of medieval Chinese druggists:  "Applied to the
face it produced a lovable complexion. It was also useful in facilitating
childbirth. It is understandable that the innermost substance of a variety
of dragon, ultimately a promoter of fertility, would be useful both in
attracting love and easing the production of its fruit." [My Chinese wife
has a jar of shark oil cream, a gift from relatives in Beijing.]

On to the Mound, of the Line, or of Silbury and its signs of goddess worship.

"The grandest copulations between women and dragons were those that
engendered future kings," Schafer tells us.

And:  "A very old legend tells how the frothy sperm of the guardian dragons
of the mythical Hsia dynasty, back at the beginning of time, was kept in a
casket in the palace of a Chou dynasty king, many hundreds of years later.
This vital essence escaped and congealed in dragon shape, causing panic in
the palace of the parvenu king. The regenerated dragons were finally
exorcised by the imprecations of naked women--presumably female shamans."
[MDMD(21) note: That "Hsia" dynasty may be what Mr. Pynchon means by "Hia"
at the beginning of Chapter 64/]

Female shamans, shamankas, mediate between mere humans and the Goddess.

"One prestigious lamia outlived the suppression or secularization of the
archaic serpent women of China. This was Nu Kua. That powerful goddess was
commonly represented as half serpent, half woman [....] Her gradual
degradation from her ancient eminence was partly due to the contempt of
some eminent and educated men for animalian gods, and partly to the
increasing domination of masculinity in elite social doctrine [....]"

The ancient feminine/sexually ambiguous rain goddess/dragons of China were
thus shoved aside by masculine deities, went from feminine, moist yin to
masculine, fiery yang; thus the Chinese dragon could a thousand years later
be associated with the European dragon as Dixon does in M&D.

Scratch a Chinese dragon and you find a rain maiden cavorting beneath a
rainbow, and no limp-wristed fairy, either. Schafer links the ancient,
sexually ambiguous rain goddess _lung_ through classic Chinese poetry and
prose (a sparkling journey indeed) to other ancient Chinese water
goddesses, including the Lao Tzu goddess, the Divine Woman of Wu Shan
(Shamanka Mountain) a.k.a. the "Tourquoise Courtesan" in the Yangtze River
gorges soon to disappear beneath a man-made flood of China's giant Dam to
ease flooding and generate power for the Grid, and the Goddesses of the
Rivers Hsiang and Lo -- powerful goddesses all.

Caress a lovely maiden and a dragon may emerge.  Schafer concludes his
book, speaking of the figures he finds in T'ang poetry and prose, by which
time the masculine dragon has come to rule the sky:  "[...] the water
goddesses, however glossed they may be with gauze and rouge, however remote
they seem from their fierce and powerful originals, however much--in
short--they may resemble tinted photographs or fashionably painted dolls,
remain pitiless nature spirits and lethal sirens underneath. Whether they
are represented as female crocodilians or as nightclubbing naiads,
ultimately they see their lovers as their natural prey, to be drained
either of blood or of virility. Only occasionally, when tinctured with the
lore of popular Taoism, do they hold out the prospect of something like
lasting bliss--but  these philosophical ladies are truly dominos in a
masquerade, by no means the water spirits and dragon women whose wardrobes
they have plundered."

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