I'll talk about important things later. I'm trying to stay light.
Sorry for being absent for the conversation! I was taking Brandi's birthday off so I could avoid trauma talk altogether. I'll talk about that stuff later.
When I feel a little stable-r.
@Sophy lol you do
not want to get me started on the history of humans as a species or as the inventors of civilization! I have enough words to fill books, and I am not even sure where to begin with your statement! It's one of my favorite topics to debate! Dragons!!!!
My favorite dragon is the first one in recorded human history, and y'all better help me bury this post because the books I write hover on themes related to it like all the time, lol.
Oof, I'm not sure I should rant about it though? Might accidentally lecture? oh man, I might get too excited and write a post that's ten pages long... I will try REALLY REALLY hard not to get carried away. Because I love that type of question you asked! Because the answer is so debatable!
When my grandfather fled Russia, he had people on the ship who also became important to history later (please don't look up the ship), and one of them was Samuel Noah Kramer, who is definitely one of my most influential teachers ever. Was. He passed away. But his books and philosophies didn't. I've read so many of them, many based on the origins of Judaism. He grew up in a religious family too (pretty much all the refugees did, it was the reason they were refugees), and his books study the origins of the Bible and Old Testament in ways that some scholars were afraid to even get into.
(Modern scholars seem to be pretty okay with it! It's important stuff!)
For example, know the Book of Job? Did you know that the monster, the Leviathan, is a heavily equated with Kur, the first dragon in history? :D:D:D
I won't get into it. It's fantastic though.
Anyway, dragons have been around for seemingly as long as human history. Several archaeologists have pointed out that humans in pre-history (who were incredibly intelligent) may have dug up dinosaur bones, and then described stories to explain their existence. Some biologists say that some reptiles seriously resemble dragons, like crocodiles, and may have been the basis of the myths. Or, someone stumbled into one and thought it was a dragon. (They look like dragons. Especially at night, when their eyes glow... like fire.) And, some human behaviorists claim that there's a secret instinct of apes in general to fear large reptiles in particular -- I disagree strongly with that one, because fear of reptiles seems to be mostly a learned thing? Maybe cultural?
Cultural evolution is a thing, though. You have to remember, humans are a species with an incredibly traumatic past as a species. And it had nothing to do with reptiles. Humans almost went extinct and there were less than 1000 individuals left at one point. Notice how all apes are kind of rare? Earth is not very ape-friendly, unless there are special circumstances. Or, amazing ingenuity to survive.
Probably, those very few humans who were left had stories to help them cope. I imagine dragons played into that, but I like to think that those dragons were nature spirits, like Kur. Kur is sort of a spirit of chaos and instability, which is why he protects the Primordial Waters from which the universe was created from (and why, when he was slayed, the waters began flooding everything -- but there are tons of different versions of Kur being slayed so you have to be careful, because sometimes "kur" is symbolic for something else completely). Kur was a representation of the universe itself, and therefore he counts as a nature spirit of a type, and he's one that shows up even in the modern world. You can find dragons globally that match his description, though he's depicted differently too.
But yeah, no one seems to know why every culture has dragons for sure. It's a neat mystery!
</rant>
Yay, I managed to not talk your faces off :p
I'll come back to be more serious later.
I love talking about religions' history, though, and dragons. Great topics!
Fun fact of the day: The Bible and Old Testament clearly suggest the existence of other gods. Abraham was a true monotheist, but most Jews were not, and Abraham makes of point of going against it. The Jews believed that the other nation's city gods did exist, but that they weren't as strong as their God. :)
There's more to it but that'll do for now, because I have no idea if y'all are the right audience for that or not! Last time I mentioned the gay king in the Bible here I got a couple of private messages from members who were disturbed so I'm trying really hard not to make people uncomfortable. If I make you uncomfortable, I'm sorry!
