Dragons: The Cosmic Serpent, Symbol of Power Across the Ages
Dragon illustration from Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch's *Bilderbuch für Kinder* (1806) — the Western fire-breathing dragon in its classic form. No creature in the human mythological imagination has achieved the global reach of the dragon . From the fire-breathing monsters of European legend to the divine serpents of Chinese cosmology, from the chaos-dragon Tiamat of ancient Babylon to the Leviathan of the Hebrew Bible, from the coiled Apep that threatened the sun's journey through the Egyptian underworld to the feathered Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica — across every inhabited continent and nearly every recorded civilization, a great serpentine creature of elemental power has appeared at the heart of the symbolic imagination. This universality is itself mythologically significant. The dragon is not a cultural borrowing or an accident of literary transmission; it is something closer to a primordial image — what Jung would call an archetype of the collective unconscious — t...