Anthroposaurus
Are We Willing to Yield the Earth to the Dragon or the Worm?
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
Peace is in the grave.
The grave hides all things beautiful and good:
I am a God and cannot find it there.
That, except for a few final thoughts, is the end of the story.
Time is Running Out
Why are we perpetually interested in the dinosaurs? There seems an obvious connection with some mythical beasts, most particularly dragons. John Noble Wilford in The Riddle of the Dinosaurs draws attention to the battles of mythological heroes like St George, Siegfried and Beowulf with their respective monsters and likens these images to a “struggle with mysterious forces”. He argues that such thoughts must be elemental, deeply embedded in the psyche, because they are especially strong in children—whose primeval thought patterns are still unspoiled by experience and tuition. There is even a link with that other legend with which we are fascinated—the vampire—the monster that lies dead by day but comes by night to suck our blood. The root of the word Dracula is the Latin for dragon!
Do we have some mysterious memory of the monstrous beasts? Some psychologists are bold enough to attribute the similarities between the dragons and the dinosaurs to racial memory. The mammals had faced up to the dangers of the dinosaurs for so long and the experience was so terrifying that natural selection saw to it that those creatures which developed an intrinsic image and fear of the dinosaur were more fitted for survival.
Sociobiologists tell us that fundamental behavior patterns, instincts, if you like, are coded in the genes. Then why not racial memories? Plainly there was sufficient time and evolutionary pressure in the 140 million years that the dinosaurs dominated the mammals. Nonetheless, most experts think not. Even if memories could be coded in the genes, they argue that, in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs ceased to be a threat to the mammals, any previous advantage would have disappeared.
But is that necessarily true? The point surely about racial memories is that it takes countless years for them to become instilled because such effects are much more subtle and indirect than selection for physical traits. By the same token, they might not be easy to erase. The caution that such a primordial fear instilled in a creature might have given it a lasting advantage—a fear and suspicion that was of benefit even in the world of mammals—the lingering remnants of which we still possess deep in our subconscious minds.
Lyall Watson is one noted biologist who accepts that part of our brain gives us an archaic memory of the dinosaurs. Remember that our brains consist of three parts that developed at different times. The advanced part is the neocortex controlling active thinking, then there is the limbic system which controls emotions, and finally the oldest part is the reptilian complex. The latter is little more than a pronounced nodule at the top of the spine which has survived essentially unchanged since before the age of the reptiles. This very primitive area of the brain, Watson believes, is the source of primeval, subconscious ideas. Images of dragons are still recorded here and give rise to myths and legends in which the dragon represents inhuman power which has to be tamed or vanquished. The curious fact about dragon myths is that they seem to anticipate the idea of intelligence in a non-human species. Could these be echoes of the world of the dinosaurs and specifically the civilization of the anthroposaurs? Do they indeed hint at a racial memory of these earlier times? J
ust to put these points in context consider briefly some of the myths to which I refer. In Greek mythology, Gaia, the mother of the Gods by Uranus also produced serpents and dragons by Tartarus, the god of the Underworld. The immediate offspring were Typhon and his sister Echidna who incestuously mated to produce Cerberus, the hydra, the serpent, Ladon and the chimaera, amongst others. Echidna had a serpent’s body; Typhon had a hundred serpents’ heads; cerberus was a three headed dog but had a snake’s tale and a row of serpents’ heads along his back; the Chimaera had a snake’s tale; Hydra was a water serpent. The snake-like features of all these creatures must reflect the reptilian aspects of the dinosaurs.
In Mesopotamia, the role of Gaia was played by Tiamat. Her first brood were gods but they became rather delinquent and their father determined to get rid of them. Tiamat favored the children until they, hearing of their father’s displeasure, pre-empted his actions by killing him. This upset mother Tiamat who had a second brood of dragons and serpents to punish her former favorites. The strongest and cleverest of the gods, Marduk, slew the dragons (and his mother for good measure) thus making the world safe for him to create his servant man. Here there is a clear implication that a race of dragons and serpents had to be destroyed before the earth was safe for mankind.
In Norse mythology three monsters fathered by Loki, a sort of fallen angel, are shut away by Thor, but the legend has it that, in time, the three will escape and return to the earth. Cataclysmic earthquakes, volcanoes, poisonous gases, tidal waves and even an ice age are predicted, as a result of which mankind will become extinct until they are restored in a new Garden of Eden and the cycle continues. This myth suggests the frightening prospect that the monsters will re-emerge amidst cataclysm and pollution, destroying mankind and reclaiming the earth. Have we created the conditions for the primordial captives to escape Thor’s prison?
The serpent of The Garden of Eden in the Bible, which led to Adam’s fall, was not a snake. God punished the creature, for tempting Eve, with the command “crawl on your belly”. Previously it must have had limbs to support it, but thenceforth it became a snake. The Bible also described the tempter as the most cunning animal God had made! Curiously, before the Garden of Eden there had been “men” on earth. On the sixth day of creation “God created Human beings, making them like himself”—note the plural. Our ancestor, Adam, the first true man, was only made later in the Biblical creation story.
These are fascinating legends. They all seem to suggest that dragons or serpents, one “the most cunning animals God had made” and evidently sufficiently human in appearance to merit being called “men” in the Bible, lived upon earth before mankind, fell from grace and are possibly waiting their chance to return. If they are waiting, could they be sending us messages? Are they saying, “We are rousing, humans. You had your chance and failed. It is our turn again”? Are some people particularly receptive to these messages?
H P Lovecraft anticipated the idea of intelligent dinosaurs in his story, The Nameless City, written in 1921. It was the first story recognizably in his Cthulhu series (termed by later admirers, the Cthulhu Mythos). The Nameless City of the title had been built in distant times by a race of intelligent dinosaurs depicted in sculptured low reliefs on the cyclopean stones of the ancient city. August Derleth in 1945 quoted Lovecraft as having explained:
All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on the outside, ever ready to take possession of the earth again.
Advanced technology could be described as magic and its accompanying pollutant effects are undoubtedly black!
Later stories filled out the original idea though not in a consistent way. In The Call Of Cthulhu of 1926, the pivotal tale in the group, one of the characters describes Lovecraft’s “theory”:
There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great stone cities. Remains… were still to be found as cyclopean stones… They all died vast epochs of time before man came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity… They all lay in Their great city of R’lyeh…
Further explanation is furnished in The Dunwich Horror of 1928:
Nor is it to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and by us unseen.
One of the weird characters in the story is savaged by guard dogs and is found to have a tail and “legs like a flesh eating dinosaur”.
In Lovecraft’s stories, the ancient beings communicate with certain human beings by telepathy in dreams or by visions. Meanwhile they are lying waiting; sleeping until the time comes for them to resume their rule.
Although this gamut of ideas was presented as fantasy, is it possible that it is real and, indeed, that Lovecraft was one of the people receiving dream messages from these sleeping creatures? Lovecraft was certainly odd in many ways. According to his biographer, L Sprague de Camp, he suffered from the disease poikilothermism—he was cold blooded! Not fully so, of course, but his body temperature was only partially regulated internally. In the hottest weather, when everyone else wilted, Lovecraft was at his best, bouncing with energy. But even at 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) he was beginning to lose his zest and in winter he could hardly move from his room. When he did venture forth he sometimes passed out from the cold. He also had a cold and deathly handshake. Did he have the same degree of warm blood as the dinosaurs?
Many of the ideas for his stories evidently came in dreams, or images that he had when he visited old buildings and places; (he loved anything antiquarian). Yet, if he were getting telepathic visions of some kind he never realized or admitted it himself and always remained entirely rational. He pooh poohed mediums and astrologers.
He was not rational however in his incredible ideas of class and racial superiority in which he felt himself to be of a higher breed. He described the poor and the immigrants of the time as “squat, squint-eyed jabberers with coarse ways and alien emotions” whom his “deepest cell tissue hates and loathes as the mammal hates and loathes the reptile, with an instinct as old as history…” Isn’t that a powerful and suggestive simile? The reference to the mammal’s hatred and loathing of the reptile reflects the equal or greater hatred and loathing of the mammal by the reptile, uttered thus to make sense in a mammalian world, yet expressing the feeling of the outcast dinosaurs. Could Lovecraft have been voicing the views of the sleeping inheritors? Was he a human so thoroughly influenced by the sleepers that his own physiology was affected?
Not only was his temperature regulation odd, Lovecraft was also totally unenthusiastic about sex. He deserted his attractive wife and yet condemned homosexuality. Apparently he could not stand any intimate contact with human beings. Indeed he wrote:
No effort would have seemed worth my exerting, if it could not earn me a place among those of my own mental type, free from common alien social contacts and influences
The “alien social contacts and influences” seemed to mean all those of the human race.
Interestingly, another theme of Lovecraft’s was that of degeneration. He often wrote about human beings degenerating to rat-like creatures, living in warrens, sewers and burrows. Mutatis mutandis, this conjures up images of the last days of the anthroposaurs, as they degenerated to contorted ciphers of their former selves. What lifeform would most vividly depict degeneration to an intelligent dinosaur? That of the loathsome rat-like mammals that scurried about the anthroposaurs’ polluted cities, living in burrows and sewers, thriving on the waste and decay, while the “superior” creatures fought a losing battle to maintain a spaceship earth.
Perhaps I am getting too speculative. Let me come to a conclusion.
Are we willing to yield up the earth, whether to the dragon or to the worm? Will we succeed in throwing off the shadow of the serpent and disown the dinosaur heritage? Or are we caught in one of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields and are destined to self destruct as surely as common salt has always crystallized as cubes and not hexagons? Are we locked into ritual ways of behaving—helpless resignation, mechanical left brain thinking, purblind optimism and obedience to the authority of dictatorial experts and governments? The only way we can find out is to make an effort: we have to reject behaviors and rituals that are plainly leading us and the world to destruction. Time is running out. The earth, like mother Tiamat, can replace us with monsters. The obligatory principle of our lives should be not to offend the earth whether directly or indirectly. All other laws follow from this one.
Two hundred years ago Cuvier warned his generation:
The present era will be reproached if we do not conserve for the future…
Two hundred years on little seems to have been learned and the situation is infinitely worse. No doubt there is comfort in knowing that there will be nobody left to reproach us, or even to gloat over our stupidity. Unless when we have gone… the sleepers awake!
Is this our destiny?
…Or this?
