The Evolution of the Dragon
Sir Grafton Elliot Smith gathered three connected essays here to trace how one of humanity’s oldest symbols took shape. Drawing on his anatomist’s training and his theory that culture spread outward from ancient Egypt, he follows the dragon back through mummification rites, libations, incense, and the worship of the Mother Goddess, arguing that the creature began as an emblem of life-giving power before it hardened into a figure of evil. Along the way he examines rain gods, the elixir of life sought in the epic of Gilgamesh, and the folklore fastened to pearls, cowry shells, the octopus, and the mandrake. Smith’s diffusionist framework has long since fallen out of favor with scholars, yet the book endures as an ambitious early effort to read world mythology as a single, traceable human story.
