Scholars find dragons in the literature of many ancient civilizations and peoples. Dragons exist most famously in the writings of people in the ancient Near East, Asia, and early Europe. The oldest recognized tales depict dragons as large serpents, many with wings, legs, and horns. In later traditions, writers gave them the capability of breathing flames. Despite this common association with fire, some cultures connect dragons to different elements, giving them unique names and assigning their attributes accordingly. While ancient Near Eastern tradition describes dragons as being large and terrible serpents confined to the ground, the Bible speaks of the power of the dragon called Leviathan, a creature of deep water. As I researched this topic, I realized that descriptions of dragons and other large serpent-like beasts vary widely across temporal and cultural lines, but most fall into categories corresponding with the five classical elements.
Much like dragons, the elements have a history that spans a wide number of cultures, ideologies, and time periods. As early as the times of ancient India, Hellenistic Egypt and ancient Greece, philosophers debated the substances and materials that made up physical matter. Across the board, they concluded that there were at least four elements, which they generally believed to be fire, water, earth, and air. Later, some would add a fifth element called aether, void, chaos, or quintessence (the names for this fifth elusive element vary, but it generally acted as a catch-all for substances that the philosophers could not understand, such as space). This breakdown allowed philosophers to achieve a very early understanding of the characteristics of matter.
As I thought about what I wanted my writing to reflect, I realized that these two ideas would play together nicely. In researching different topic possibilities, I kept coming back to both the elements and dragons. I wanted to explore the early philosophy surrounding the elements as well as the many cultures the classical elements appear in, but I also wanted to read more about dragons, a topic I've loved since my childhood. Because they're both fairly universal topics, I decided to research both of them in conjunction. In this storybook, I plan to focus more on the dragons themselves than the philosophy of the classical elements, but I hope to do so in the context of the five elements. My plan is (time allowing) to write several stories describing dragons from different cultures and to organize them within the context of the elements, assigning to each element a corresponding tale.
Travel Here for the Tale of Vritra, Dragon of Drought