Dragons are certainly popular these days. Books, cartoons, television shows, movies, they’re featured everywhere. Why dragons? For that matter, why were the villagers in stories dating back hundreds of years required to sacrifice a daughter to the dragon terrorizing them?
We know actual dragons don’t exist on earth; we have no evidence that they ever did. Yet, we all seem to know that great courage and strength is required to conquer them, and that, if captured, they are very hard to train. Let’s take a look at a specific dragon from a specific story.
The Archangel Michael (pronounced in three syllables), who is celebrated each year on September 29, has everything to do with the dragon we will talk about today. But first, let’s look at Raphael’s painting depicting Michael conquering the dragon.
Why was this battle a subject for so many artists? We can learn from studying spiritual science that long ago, when humankind still possessed an innate spiritual vision, cosmic images of spiritual realities explained the heavens and the earth to humankind. The knowledge imparted by these cosmic images is the basis of our religions, and though mankind had lost access to direct knowledge of the spiritual world, the artists of the Renaissance like Raphael and Michelangelo kept painting these images.
The paintings by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, depict the cosmic images revealed to the writer of Genesis. Is God an elderly white man with a flowing white beard? No, of course not. And dragons as a species aren’t a thing. So, when we look at these paintings, we must keep that in mind. To refresh this kind of thinking, please refer to the blog from October last year. (https://www.whoareyou.blog/invisibility).
Why are we talking about any of this? Because a cosmic truth is revealed when we understand that a being depicted by the dragon was cast out of his milieu by Michael and found its new residence within us. We don’t see the dragon, but we see the results within us in the form of many evils to which we succumb in our lives. When we contemplate the image of Michael conquering the dragon, we need to understand that the Dragon, cast out of the heavens, is now an earthly problem; a problem each of us must attend to. Why? Because as human beings we need to cultivate courage and strength to fulfill our destiny.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
When we turn our gaze back into earlier times of human evolution, we are inevitably struck with the change that has come about in our conceptual pictures of nature and of spirit. Nor do we need to go back very far to observe this change occurring. As late as the eighteenth century the forces and substances of nature were thought of in a much more spiritual manner than they are today, while spiritual things were conceived more in pictures taken from nature. It is only in quite recent times that ideas about the spirit have become so utterly abstract and ideas about nature have become based on matter that is devoid of spirit and so impenetrable for human thought and vision. For present-day human understanding, nature and spirit are sundered from each other; there appears to be no bridge leading from one to the other.
It is for this reason that images of a sublime worldview, which in past times had great significance for the human being as he sought to comprehend his place in the universe, have passed completely into the realm of things deemed to be no more than airy fancy—to which man could only give himself up so long as an exact science was not there to forbid him. One such cosmic image is that of Michael fighting with the Dragon.
The picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon expresses a strong awareness that man himself must give to his inner life of soul the direction and guidance that nature cannot give. Our present-day thinking is inclined to mistrust such an idea. We are afraid of becoming estranged from nature. We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world…
Excerpt from: The Festivals and Their Meaning. Article: Michael and the Dragon, Das Goetheanum, Sept. 30. 1923.
That last sentence bears repeating: “We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world.” We are afraid of accepting spiritual truths. Yet, once we do, we recognize the inadequacy of the purely materialistic understanding of life, the universe, and everything.
Maybe we could try to embrace this image of Michael conquering the Dragon. Maybe we could set it before our mind’s eye, and through it accept that a real battle with a real dragon is occurring inside us. We need to emulate Michael. We need to find the courage to recognize the dragon’s influence within us and the strength to conquer the evils to which we’ve fallen prey.