So according to, um, the Mayans or something, the world is ending in about a week.
So with that in mind, I thought that I would first take a look at that most famous of apocalyptic (as opposed to catastrophic) dragons- the Red Dragon of Revelation.
There is little descriptive text concerning the Dragon’s appearance; all we really get in pretty much all the versions of the Bible is the following:
… a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads.
Revelation 12:3, NRSV
Now, before we go crazy with some sort of horns-per-head permutation chart, let me just say that I’m not doing that. After reading Revelation 12-13 a few times, the only thing I was able to find was that the woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet” at one point is bequeathed with wings and escapes the Dragon, so either the Dragon has no wings (and considering that it is often called “Serpent” in other translations, this would make more sense), or it is a very poor flier.
“13 So when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to her place where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent poured water like a river after the woman, to sweep her away with the flood.”Revelation 12:13-15, NSRV
Like many all of my research-driven projects, I specifically waited until I was actually worknig on it to do any fact-finding, and went forward from there. So naturally, I have a bunch of ideas, and almost no time to work on them. I know that the Dragon will have a form similar to the To Do Hydra, that is, two forelegs and a long serpentine body (there is special mention of the Dragon’s tail knocking stars from the sky in Revelation 12:4), but in order for it not to resemble the Hydra too closely, I decided that its heads should each be different. The problem then became, how to differentiate them?
And of course, the answer naturally lay not so much in the Bible itself, but in Christian teachings. Though if I had seen this image that associates each sin with an animal, I might have been compelled to draw on that a bit for inspiration as well.
Nicked from Wikipedia. That’s a toad in the upper right, and it (for whatever reason) represents avarice.
As it was, I should have known better than to try to do seven different-but-similar dragons at once, especially when it’s already about an hour and a half past when I wanted to be in bed, but this is what I ended up with (and will be kicking around for the next few days):
Diadems will probably be last on my list of things to do, FYI.
Gluttony’s horn needs some work, I was never really sure what to do with Greed, and Lust needs a bit of an overhaul, but Wrath, Pride and Sloth were pretty much no-brainers, though Sloth might lose its horn; I’m not sure. Envy might end up looking more like Pride, but without the horn and ostentatious head frills, because that suddenly makes a lot more sense, and I think that was what I was trying to do without realizing it.
