The dragon: the only invented animal of the twelve

You can go and look at eleven of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac in a zoo. With the fifth that becomes difficult. The dragon is the only creature in the series that has never existed — and therefore the only one where what comes to your mind at the name depends entirely on which stories you have heard.

Two creatures, one word

The word came to the West from Greek by way of the Latin draco, and the stories came with it. The European dragon is an adversary. It guards a hoard, lays waste to a country, and sooner or later someone stands before it with a sword — Siegfried, Saint George. The outcome is always the same.

The East Asian creature that is rendered by the same word is called lóng in Chinese and lives in altogether different company. It is not slain. It is petitioned.

A creature of water

The lóng belongs to rivers, lakes and the sea, but above all to clouds and rain. It rises, and the moisture comes with it. In a farming country that hung on rain arriving in time, that was not meant poetically: it was the most important question of the year, and when a drought dragged on, people turned to it. The images show it accordingly: not a squat body with wings, but a long, winding animal between bands of cloud, more current than monster.

Then came what is usually named first today: at court it became the sign of imperial rule. Rain, good fortune and power — that mixture is the source of the standing the sign still has in East Asia.

The blue-green dragon in the eastern sky

Now it turns astronomical, and here lies a point that hardly any popular account mentions: in Chinese sky lore the dragon occurs twice.

The older division does not cut the starry sky into twelve sections but into four great fields, one each for a cardinal direction and a season, each of them under an animal: in the east the blue-green dragon for spring, in the south a red bird, in the west a white tiger, in the north a dark tortoise. Blue-green because the Chinese colour word covers blue and green at once. Each of the four fields takes in seven of twenty-eight sections, against which the course of the Moon was read off.

The same name, a different order: there the dragon marks off a quarter of the whole sky, here a twelfth of the years. Anyone who confuses the two is left puzzling over details that seem to contradict one another and simply come from different systems.

The fifth place in the circle

In the circle of twelve the dragon has nothing more to do with any of this. There dragon names a place and describes no animal: the fifth earthly branch of twelve. This place carries the phase earth and lies on a seam, namely where spring passes into summer — four of the twelve places lie on such seams, and all four carry earth. That is why tables give earth for the dragon and not fire.

Three layers, one name

When dragon appears in an English text, three things can be meant: the monster of European legend, the lóng of East Asian tradition, or the fifth earthly branch of the calendar. What the three have in common is the name, and little else. With eleven of the twelve signs the question does not arise, because the animal is the same in every language. With the dragon it is worth asking every time.

And in practice? If the sign interests you, start with the place in the circle and not with the animal; you can read up on the creature with the clouds afterwards at your leisure, and it is the finer half of the story. You will find the other animals, and the way the system is put together, under Chinese astrology; how the European zodiac is built, by contrast, you can read under the zodiac signs.