Having moved to the Land of the Red Dragon nearly eight months ago I began to ponder over the relationship between the Welsh Red dragon and one of my personal dragon links – a huge white dragon.
The legends of conflict between the red and white dragons came from various sources. In the medieval story of Lludd and Llefelys the warring dragons were a source of trouble and stress to the point they were killed and buried at Dinas Emrys in north Wales.
The original source of the legend seems to come from the earlier writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100-1155). In Geoffrey’s ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, Merlin was called upon to solve the problem of newly built castle walls constantly collapsing. The young Merlin confirms that the collapse being caused by the fighting dragons and instructs Vortigern to cut into the hill that he was building on, to release the dragons. Being one never to miss a political point, Geoffrey of Monmouth also identifies the white dragon as that of the Saxons and the red dragon of the native Welsh.
The status of the white dragon linked to the Saxons was taken further in the 18th century by Sir Walter Scott, when he also aligned the Saxons to the white dragon in the poem “The Saxon War Song”. Indeed even more recently Welsh-born Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002-2012 wore robes showing a white and red dragon when he was enthroned in 2003.
This sounds fine at superficial levels, but there were two things nagging in my mind:
1 – ‘warring dragons’ is indicative of unbalanced earth energies. So the dragons that Merlin released were geopathic energies that were disrupting the stability of the building works. Parts of the UK are still quite active geologically, especially if building works were to be carried out near one of our many rift-valley cliffs.
2 – In Tibetan and Chinese traditions the colours red and white represent female and male respectively. Male is represented by white (semen) and female by red (menstrual blood).
Taking these into account it puts a logical answer to Merlin’s wisdom on the collapsing towers. However it also sheds a different light entirely on the relationship between the red and white dragons. Like the black/white of yin/yang – the red dragon energy cannot maintain balance without the white dragon energy and vice versa.
This in turn makes me wonder about the underlying relationship between England and Wales. Is this essentially a male/female, yin/yang relationship with one balancing the other?
(This first appeared in ‘Notes from the Edge of the Epynt’ March 2015)
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