The Rehabilitation of Dragons and the Half Life of Symbols

Symbols are one of the most powerful aspects of language, but if you were ever set a quiz on symbolism in English class, you probably learned to despise them. The symbols you learn about in English class are treated as a kind of code to which you were never given the decoder ring. Being asked to find them in a set text for purposes of examination is more likely to put you off reading for good than to instill either a love of reading or an understanding of symbols.

In no small part, this is because there is a half-life to symbols.

Symbols, we are taught, are one thing that stands for another. Which is correct, but in the most unhelpful way possible. A less unhelpful way to say it is that a symbol is some element of a remembered story that instantly brings that story to mind when used in a particular context.

For example, take the Biblical story of the temptation of Eve.

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

By this story, the serpent becomes a symbol of Satan, the tempter.

But context matters, and there is another Biblical story concerning serpents, this one in the book of Numbers:

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.

Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

By this story, the serpent becomes a symbol of healing and is used as such by the medical profession to this day in the form of the Caduceus:

When you encounter a serpent in a story, is it a symbol of the Devil, a symbol of healing, or just a snake? It depends on which of these stories is invoked by the context and presentation. A serpent in a garden is more likely to evoke the Eden story, and thus the serpent will act as a symbol of Satan. A serpent on a pole is more likely to evoke the story of Moses’s brass serpent, and thus be a symbol of healing. But this is not a simple checklist kind of distinction. It is about the totality of how it is used in the story.

And it is also about how readily those symbols come to the reader’s mind, which, in the case of these two symbols, depends on how familiar they are with the Bible. And since familiarity with the Bible is in general decline, both of these symbols are losing their power.

The half-life of a symbol is the period in which half the reading public is no longer familiar with the story from which the symbol is drawn and to which it points. Unlike radioactive decay, symbols don’t decay at a fixed rate, so the half-life of a symbol is not a fixed period. (Clearly, here I am using half-life as a type of symbol since a fair proportion of my audience will be familiar with the concept of radioactive decay.)

When reading classic works of literature, you will inevitably come across symbols that have decayed, such that very few people any longer recognize the story they are designed to invoke. Since getting the full meaning and effect of the text requires that you recognize the story behind the symbol, there is often a footnote saying what each symbol stands for or a handout with a list of symbols found in the story. Unfortunately, they don’t always teach the story behind the symbol but simply list symbols and meanings as if they were some form of obscure code.

Even being told the story behind the symbol, though, isn’t really enough for the modern reader to experience the story as the reader of the author’s own time would have done. For a symbol to really work as the author intended, the reader would have to come to the work with those stories firmly implanted in their psyche. It is stories all the way down, and the true function of a symbol is that it provides instant recall of the original story. All the impact of the symbolized story flows from the symbol and into the story you are reading, adding to its power to move you and to produce in you an intensity of experience that can come only from the power of the two stories flowing together.

Without prior familiarity with the symbolized story, this bit of literary alchemy cannot take place, and no amount of analytically mediated symbol decoding after the fact can recreate the experience. You may understand the experience that the use of the symbol was meant to provoke, but you have not had that experience.

This is not to say that there are no symbols that have come adrift from their original stories but continue to serve as symbols, recognized as such by convention using just such a symbol lookup table as I described above. But these are the domain of the literati when they write for the literati. They are not something that the ordinary reader is going to recognize or respond to. When a symbol works properly, the reader is not aware of it as a symbol at all. It simply performs its function of pouring one story into another, producing the intended effect without the recipient ever knowing what caused it.

This is why the kind of symbol-hunting exercise set by English teachers is such a dreary and unproductive exercise. Symbols are not supposed to work by the reader recognizing them as symbols. Symbol hunting is not the way to make them work. It is the way to make sure they never work at all.

And this is why the half-life of symbols is a problem for any literary culture. To lose the stories behind the symbols is to lose the symbols as an effective force, and to lose the symbols is to lose the power they bring to storytelling.

Symbolism has played a much larger role in literature and art in the past than it does in the present. It is easy enough to see that as we have come to have fewer and fewer stories in common, so we must have fewer symbols in common, and the less common a symbol is, the less useful it is as a literary or artistic tool. (Though by the same token, the greater sense of exclusivity and erudition it confers on the writer who uses it among the literati and the readers who recognize its use.)

But it’s not just the natural decay of symbols over time that causes problems, nor the increasing diversity of our culture, which means we have fewer stories and fewer symbols in common. There are times when forces within a society go symbol hunting, deliberately overturning or subverting the older symbols, effectively blunting their power and, therefore, the power of the literature that used them. It is a way of forcing a kind of cultural revolution, rendering the works of the past less accessible and less relevant to the present, thus making room for the reception and exaltation of newer work.

The practice of overturning and subverting symbols is not a new one, nor is it confined to literature and art. During the conversion period in Europe (the period in which the peoples of Europe were converted to Christianity), the church conducted a systematic campaign to break down and overlay the old pagan symbol system with a new Christian symbol system based on Christian stories. This is why we have Christmas in December, overlaying the old pagan feast of Yule, and why we have Santa Claus, and why, before the purging of the ecclesiastical calendar, we had a thousand local saints, many of them invented, along with their stories, to overlay the local pagan deities, their stories, and the symbols that flow from those stories. 

In my lifetime, I have seen the secular culture wage a similar campaign against the old Catholic symbol system, which was incredibly rich, and which is woven through most of the poetry, art, and literature of the West. The symbolism of the rainbow, for instance, has been utterly transformed. It is no longer a sign that brings the story of Noah to mind or conveys Divine assurance against an all-consuming catastrophe. It now means something else entirely.

The same is true of dragons. In the mythological taxonomy, the class of serpents includes both snakes and dragons. Thus the serpent that symbolizes Satan at the beginning of Genesis appears again as a dragon, with the same symbolism, at the end of the book of Revelations:

And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having even heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.… And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels. And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him

The dragon has been the symbol of Satan throughout the history of the West. (It is different in the East, where it belongs to a different set of stories.) But of late we have had a campaign of rehabilitation on behalf of dragons. The earliest example I am aware of is Edith Nesbit’s The Last of the Dragons (1925), in which the princess and the prince befriend the last dragon in England and convince him to fly children to the seaside for holidays. (Comment below if you know of earlier examples.) The Last of the Dragons leads where The Paperbag Princess and How to Train Your Dragon merely follow. This is part of a trend in which all the fairytale horrors of past centuries, from ogres to fairies to witches, get a makeover as the misunderstood and the oppressed, rather than as forces of evil. Dragons go from being a symbol of evil and deception to being a symbol of the unjustly persecuted. St. George becomes a bully and the dragon his victim.

Films like How To Train Your Dragon also mark another cultural departure. The old fairytale tradition always treated magic as something dangerous to be avoided and virtue as the only charm against it. Modern fantasy has taken a Promethean turn in which magic is something to be mastered and used and dragons are a power to be tamed and ridden. This is, almost exactly, the temptation of the serpent in the garden and, equally, the temptation of Christ in the desert: You will gain power over the world.

The notion that you can train a dragon, or befriend one, in other words, is a claim to power and mastery. It is the antithesis of the Christian teaching that our salvation lies not in our own power and strength but in our surrender to Christ.

I write this on the eve of heading out for the annual Catholic Writer’s Guild Conference. One of the aims of the conference, and the Guild, is to foster a new Catholic literary renaissance, the last being the one that occurred in the mid-20th century with such writers as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor. Any such revival has to reckon with the loss of the old Christian symbol system. But it is not just Catholic writers who have to reckon with it. Any writer who values, and wishes to create within, the great literary tradition of the West has to reckon with it too, for whether they are a believer or not, it is the same Christian symbol system that underlies the cultural inheritance of the West.

One of the effects of this usurpation of the old Christian symbol system is thus to make the great Western heritage of art and literature less accessible to modern people and, in many cases, to reverse how they perceive its meaning. This is a great and tragic loss, and it makes the tasks of reviving Catholic literature specifically and the task of continuing in the Western literary tradition generally all the more difficult.

You might argue that that ship has long since sailed. You might be right (though the pagans have successfully reclaimed Yule after 1500 years). You might point out that I am of the last generation who grew up before this transformation was complete and that younger generations have to deal with the culture as they find it. Again, you might be right. But I grew up and learned to read at a time when a dragon was still a dragon and a rose was still a symbol of Christ, and we knew exactly what was meant by the hymn "Lo How a Rose E're Blooming" and exactly what Mr. Eliot meant in East Coker by the lines:

If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. 

And this is why I have no appetite for happy friendly dragons. They remind me of what has been lost.

Stories are always enculturated, of course. They depend for their effect on the responses conditioned into the reader by the culture that they know. When you are setting out to be counter-cultural, as every self-consciously Catholic author is today, and, I suspect, a growing legion of other authors besides, then you have to make choices about which cultural tradition you want to operate in. Do you want to operate in the traditional Western culture, which has been so sadly wounded by the hostility of the secular world, or do you want to operate in the secular culture that is more familiar even to most Catholics today?

It's a hard problem, and I'm not suggesting that anyone is wrong to choose the latter path (though the fact that some of us choose one path and some the other does nothing to help with the revival of Catholic arts and letters or with the perpetuation of the culture of the West). If you choose to operate in the traditional culture, you have to deal with the fact that its symbols and stories are already lost to many of your audience. If you choose to operate in the present secular culture, then you have to deal with the fact that it was created in a deliberate act of rejection and destruction of the old Christian culture and of classical Western culture more generally. It seeks to stamp out all traces of Western and Christian culture, just as the church in the conversion period sought to stamp out the pagan cultures of Europe.

There is no easy answer to this problem. I choose to invoke the symbols of the older culture (mostly) because that is the one I grew up in and love. Thus in Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, I evoke the older meaning of Elf Knight (another incarnation of Satan, common across countless folk songs and ballads) rather than the modern one (the quasi-angelic elves of Tolkien or the lios alfar of Alan Garner), and I have Isabel mastered by the enchanted tools she takes up, rather than mastering them. This is a large part of why I choose to call it a fairy tale rather than a fantasy. 

As I head off to the conference, I am well aware that many of my fellow Catholic authors today have chosen to adopt the now fashionable image of the rehabilitated and misunderstood dragon. I see their point. It is an image of dragons more common among the audience they seek to reach, an audience that now knows little or nothing of the great stories of the Christian West and therefore cannot respond to its symbols.

I tip my hat and wish them well. But don’t expect any friendly or misunderstood dragons from my pen. Every generation of artists must have a love/hate relationship with the generations of artists that came before. On the one hand, they are our teachers and our inspiration. It is for love of them and for their work that we embarked upon this mad course of life at all. On the other hand, they suck all the oxygen out of the room as long as their work continues to be widely shared and admired. Where will the time, the money, and the audience's attention come from for our own work while the masters of the past still dominate our culture? Thus, we must pay homage in destruction, if we are to be heard at all.

But for me, there is another consideration, one which trumps the desire to tear down statues that we may climb upon the plinths ourselves. It is stories all the way down, and without the stories of the past and the symbols they give us, we are left with very poor tools for making new art. And with poor tools, we will be condemned to do shoddy work. A dragon is still a dragon, then, say I. And a rose is still a rose.