The Ecological Dragon

In the Deep Ecology movement, there seem to be two major gods in use-- Gaea and the Dragon.  I have never been able to get into female divinity.  That's just me.  It took a long time, though, even after I started on the Mythos, to arrive at 'the Dragon', of which the Drygand is a form.  I like the idea of an Ur-god of Nature, and it was Merlin in the movie Excalibur who really turned me on to the Dragon as the primordial pantheist God.  It works. 

Snakes, the basis of the dragon-concept, have been worshipped virtually everywhere-- it's their uncanny awesomeness.  They really are alluring and amazing.  A dragon is not just a snake, but a chimaeric creature, and I think there is something shocking, outlandish, monstrous about chimaeras, that can make them highly numinous, and a chimaera based on the snake is even moreso.

There are various ancient dragons or were-serpents that seem to be variations on an idea, maybe an extremely ancient idea. In going over my notes, I've come across a few of these which point toward a representation of the Drygand.

First is the ancient Greek Agathos Daimon, or 'good spirit-being', a guardian of the individual person, whose form is of a winged serpent.  Perhaps a development from it is Hermes' caduceus, a winged staff wrapped in two snakes helixing up it in opposite directions.  Hermes himself is quite interesting as a human-form god-- who knows how strange he was before he was human-ized!  Then there's Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent of the Aztecs, and he is also in the mold of a winged serpent, but feather-bedecked.  There was an Egyptian flying horned-snake, and the conventional Eurasian dragon has horns as well. There's also a Tibetan 'Naga' (Sanscrit for the etymologically-related 'snake'), whose upper half is human, and lower half snake-like, and it also has horns and wings.  This I find perfect for the Drygand, though as Pan-chimaera, he can take any biological form.  The Hindu nagas are treated more like wights than gods, I think, but are powerful beings nonetheless.  They do have a king, the Naga-raja, who could serve, combined with the Tibetan naga, as the perfect model for the Drygand.

I don't know if there are many neopagans who find the Dragon to be their ultimate expression of Godhood, but in the form of the Drygand, I find that it works.  It's primordial, preceding even the Titans, you could say; transhuman, and works as pantheist Nature God as well as Ecological Savior.  A very powerful image and concept.