Curing the monster Some images of and considerations - Prof. Dr ...

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Eglamour unknowingly had fought his own son, thus preventing him, like the ancient
Oedipus, from marrying his own mother, that the double marriage of Eglamour and
Chrytobel as well as their son and his wife could be celebrated in the far Orient.
That a woman or a virgin is part of the dragon fight myth, as in St. George's legend
or in fairy tales (Rank 1922), is also a constituent dimension of many of the dragon
images of ancient Greek mythology. There is, for instance, the Greek god of light,
Apollo, a son of Zeus, who killed Python, the dragon who had tried to kill Apollo's
mother Leto (Steffen 1984: 44). Perseus, another son of Zeus (together with
Danae), fought the dragon at the seashore of the red sea and thus gained
Andromeda as his wife (Redaktion ... 1985: 120 f.; Egli 1982: 218 f.), akin to
Cadmus, a hero from Thebes, who liberated Harmonia, a double of Aphrodite, by
slaying the dragon (Roheim 1972: 301). And most famous of all is the myth of
Amor and Psyche. Amor, the son of Venus and Jupiter, liberated Psyche, the
king's daughter, who, chained to the rocks, for the monster. He hurt himself with
one of his arrows. Thus he fell in love with her in order to save her.
In my attempt to understand especially these latter myths of the dragon fight I found
a contribution which Roheim (1972: 297 ff.) made, quite challenging. As this author
demonstrates a variety of connections between the ancient Apollo myth and that of
Cadmus, it becomes evident that both these dragon- or serpent-slayers are
serpents themselves. From such a reading of these myths it becomes evident that
"Apollo or Cadmus, the young serpent, killed the old serpent at springtime and
married the old serpent's daughter" (Roheim 1972: 307). As such "the idea of
death (is) associated with that of a new life" (ibid.: 304); thus the dragon or the
serpent turns into a symbol of fertility and initiation (cf. Drewermann 1984: 397 ff.).
- From another psychoanalytic perspective, i.e. from the Jungian tradition, Erich
Neumann (1953: 83, 162), makes the point that the serpent or the dragon
represents the archetype of the 'great mother' which has to be conquered in
adolescence in order to integrate the anima. Whereas the serpent or the dragon in
these ancient myths, no matter whether they were Greek, Egyptian or Judaic,
originally symbolized the relation between man and his cosmos or the universe, it
seems that particularly in the legends about various saints since the Middle Ages
the dragon became a container for the often unconscious anxieties related to