[NoraSpinnor]

In nearly every ancient culture, the dragon appears as a central symbol of chaos, destruction, and transformation. But what if the dragon was not merely a mythical beast, but a cosmic event? Not imagination, but memory?

Comets have long inspired dread and awe. They arrive with no warning, a streak of fire slashing across the night sky. When they descend, they do so with terrifying speed and brilliance, like a fiery intruder from the heavens plunging through the atmosphere, trailing smoke and sparks, erupting in an explosion of light and sound. The impact is cataclysmic. The ground shudders. Fire sweeps across the landscape. And then, a deep rumbling can be heard from the ground, as if the Earth itself is groaning under the blow.

This is where the symbolism becomes too consistent to ignore. The dragon is almost always described as a winged serpent, a creature of fire and fury, a destroyer from above, but also a dweller of the deep. In many traditions, it breathes fire from the skies and then vanishes beneath the ground, curling into caves or coiled beneath mountains. This strange duality mirrors the behavior of comets. They appear from the heavens in fiery brilliance and, when they strike, vanish into the Earth with a deafening subterranean roar.

Ancient myths tell of dragons darkening the sun, scorching forests, boiling rivers, and flattening cities. These aren’t just fantastical flourishes. They echo the ecological consequences of real impact events: forest fires ignited across continents, skies turned black by dust and ash, rivers rerouted by the force of collision, and civilizations erased in a single day.

Even the word “dragon” itself carries the echo of the draconid meteor shower, which radiates each October from the constellation Draco, the Dragon. The ancients saw the meteors emerging from this sky-serpent and assigned meaning to what we now quantify. But the association is more than poetic. The Draconids have historically been capable of fireballs and intense meteor storms, precisely the kind of spectacle that could lodge itself in generational memory as a celestial beast.

The Bible is full of cometary language veiled as divine wrath: the sun darkened, the moon turned to blood, stars falling to Earth, and mountains melting like wax. In Revelation, the great dragon falls from heaven and is cast into the Earth, along with his angels, a cascade of flaming projectiles hurled from the sky. In the Hopi traditions, fire rains from above and below, engulfing the Earth until only those sheltered within the womb of the Earth, the ant people’s caves, survive. Again and again, we see the same narrative: fire from the sky, tremors in the Earth, a beast both divine and infernal.

These stories are fragments of memory, retold in the only language early humans had: symbol and myth. The dragon was their way of expressing the unexplainable: a comet’s light, heat, terror, and power, the way it seemed to arrive from nowhere and destroy everything in its path.

What do you think about ancient dragon myths?

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