Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The old countryside of eastern and central France — the Jura, the Franche-Comté, the Bugey, the deep rural provinces — kept a serpent whose whole legend turns on a single, brilliant, fatal moment of vulnerability. La Vouivre (the name descends, through the old wivre and guivre , from the Latin vipera , viper — the same root as the English wyvern ) is a winged serpent-dragon: a great flying serpent that streaks across the evening sky like a bar of fire, dwelling in the ruins, the old towers, the caves, and the springs of the countryside, guarding treasure. And she wears, set in her forehead — or held as her single eye — a jewel of incomparable value and power: a carbuncle , a great red gem (or a diamond) that blazes like fire, that lights her way through the dark, that is worth all the treasure she guards and more, and that is, in many tellings, her only eye — the single blazing gem by which alone she sees. And here is the whole of the legend, and the whole of the danger and the tem...

The legend begins with a sentence that no other mythology on earth has dared quite this baldly: the gods, when they were young, made mistakes. In the deep time of the world, say the traditions of South Africa's Northern Cape — where Khoikhoi and San memory mingled with the tales of the Boer frontier — the powers that shaped the animals were still learning their craft; and in their inexperience they made, early, a creature with too much of everything. They gave it the bulk and might and memory of the greatest land-thing they would ever design, and in the same body the cunning, the cold patience, and the endless coil of the subtlest. The result was the Grootslang — Afrikaans for "great snake," though the name undersells the horror — a serpent vast as a river with the head and forequarters of an elephant, or an elephant flowing away into forty feet of python: strength that nothing could oppose, wedded to guile that nothing could outwit. The young gods looked at what they h...

Every mythology sooner or later faces the problem of the treasure: the gold in the deep cave, the vein of bright metal in the hill, the honeycomb of riches that the earth so obviously keeps and so pointedly does not hand over. And every mythology answers with a guardian. The Norse set a dragon coiling on his hoard; the Greeks posted griffins over the gold of the north; the Nāga kings of India hold the jewels of the underworld beneath their hooded thrones, and the dragons of the East sleep on pearls at the bottoms of rivers. The Guaraní of Paraguay, when their turn came, produced a guardian like no other — and then, with the peculiar tenderness that runs through all their darkest inventions, made him the most harmless monster in the Americas. He is Teju Jagua: an enormous lizard — teju , the great tegu of the red-earth country, grown in myth to the size of a hillside — with the head of a dog, or, in the tellings that children remember best, with seven dog heads, ranged like a terri...