People are acting like all these cultures were completely isolated. Probably the dragon idea showed up in one place first, and the stories were popular and were incorporated into many mythos. There are many mythic themes that are common in many mythologies, i.e. the Great Flood. These are probably very distorted legends based on things that happened tens of thousands of years ago.
You have to remember that prople did move around in those days, and myths got carried along. The Welsh Dragon, for instance, was taken from the Roman legions in Britain (one of them had it as a standard), who in turn had picked it up, IIRC, on a Persian campaign.
That would be St George, patron saint of England. If you ever find yourself at the National Gallery in London, you can find about a dozen paintings of the slaying.
It seems to me that the defining characteristic of a “dragon”, at least in the modern European conception of said beast, is that it breathes fire (or some other dangerous substance, to be fair to fellow role-players). Is this true of Chinese dragons as well?
This month’s Scientific American has a brief review of a book called An Instinct for Dragons by David E. Jones (Routledge, New York, 2000). According to the review, Jones’ thesis is that “the concept derives from the experience of ancestral humans and prehumans with three kinds of predator: ‘Over millennia,’ he writes, ‘the raptor, big cat, and serpent began to form as a single construct–the dragon–in the brain/mind of our ancient primate ancestors.’ Jones got his idea from the behavior of vervet monkeys in Africa. They have three different alarm calls that provoke three different defensive responses: one for the leopard, one for the martial eagle and one for the python.”
And to think that I chose my screen name almost a year before reading this thread about dragons and phoenixes…
The psychedelic experience very commonly includes visions of dragons and other reptilian imagery. I interpret this as a manifestation of our deep-seated instincts left over from the Age of Reptiles. We once were reptiles and for millions of years thereafter we lived in fear of being eaten by them. So the image of the gaping maw of a vicious reptile became what we learned to fear the most. And although this kind of instinct became buried by subsequent evolutionary development, these images can sometime well back up from the depths of our psyche. This is called the “R-complex”. People from various cultures may have experienced this type of psychosis and, not suprisingly, associated it with the concept of evil as part of their culture. I’ve noticed that the maw of the dragon is flaming, and to be swallowed if to fall into the firey pits of Hell. Reptiles, falling, flames, it’s all instinctive. Far out, man.
And of course, St. George directing his long, pointed lance towards the hot, gaping mouth of the dragon certainly makes for a highly interesting Freudian analysis 
Can someone stuff some unicorn info into my skull? I’ve only ever heard about the horse-like creature.
whoops, misread the statement. Still, could anyone shed some light on the eastern and western unicorns?
And does anyone have any ideas on why Phoenixes are shared by different cultures? Or is it just chalked up to talking wanderers, because that’s kind of anti-climactic. Spiff it up a bit, this just won’t do at all.
According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, the phoenix myth is of Egyptian and/or Greek origin. It’s possible that one culture developed it, and the myth spread to the other; the exact transimission is unclear.
Either way, the phoenix is portrayed as a type of bird, not lizard, so it’s not very similar to a dragon. Just to confuse things, the Chinese also had an mythogical animal similar to a phoenix, the feng-huang.
My two cents on the matter–European/Asian/Nordic/North American dragons were only vaguely alike in their original myths (i.e., they were giant and reptilian), but began to resemble each other in post-modern revisionist tales. I blame Anne McCaffrey, Tolkein, and the lot.
Also, each geographical area must have had some sort of large reptile or snake that served as the source figure for the mythological creature. There are large poisonous snakes in all those places, and also alligators & crocodiles in most of those places (or near enough that travellers would return home to tell stories about them). After umpty-ump generations of telling the story, the portrayal of the real-life animal gets exagerated into, well, folk-loric proportion.
My $0.02:
The phoenix is simply a myth pertaining to the sun. Every morning the sun is “reborn” in a flaming sky, “flies” across the firmament, then “burns” at sunset. The next morning it is repeated. In most places, the only animal that flies is the bird. (Most cultures thought bats were birds, and I dunno about bugs. They just don’t seem cool enough to be mythical, except scarabs.)
So there you have it–The sun is a bird that is destroyed and reborn in flames. Pretty universal. And once one culture got the mythology down, it was pretty easy to transmit to others. 