The 17,000 Year Old European Dragon Ritual, and its ancient mythological origins

seventeen thousand years ago our Paleolithic ancestors were in a cave in France and they enacted a ritual created from the mythology of Dragon Slain how do we know this well because within two caves in the south of France we're found evidence of this ritual and this video is the story and research of how we know this and a fascinating Journey Through the mythology and Archeology that proves it and so if you're interested in Dragon Slain or Warrior horses or headless animals or even a 17 000 year old myth then grab yourself a cup of tea and welcome to krakenfold hello I'm John White a specialist in Indo-European mythology and our journey starts with the skeletons of two snakes found in separate caves of the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France the caves are called montespan and latak the order Burr and these caves have a few things in common both were quite deep both had Rivers associated with them both Joe dividends have been inhabited by Homo sapiens in the Paleolithic period but most interesting of All To Us is that in both caves a skeleton of a snake was found in good condition but both Rivers striking exception a rather unique feature as both were without their heads the caveat let's talk is well known for the artwork that Paleolithic men left within it alongside a wealth of footprints on the clay floor left 17 000 years ago some of which were around the Broken Skull of a Cave Bear and we have on the walls of this cave many drawings of horses bison and other animals but perhaps what the cave is most famous for are the representations of two bison created around 17 000 Years Ago by our ancestors on the clay floor of that cave and if we look at the other Cave the montespan Cave there we find another clay sculpture that of a Cave Bear and which is around four feet or 1.2 meters in length but this bit has an interesting feature as it was made without its head it was headless now I will look into the archaeological finds Within These and other caves in the region in more detail later in this video but to justify looking into this we need to consider all this activity by the Paleolithic people who inhabited these caves and then considered the information we know about the snakes that were found and with this it allows us to form an interesting hypotheses you see for a snake to be that far within a cave which was around 150 meters or a bit close to 500 feet from the entrance it almost certainly must have been placed there for there are very few examples of snakes living in caves let alone inhabiting so far into a cave and if we add to this the consideration that the snake's body was so well preserved all of its bones or their bones of his body were still connected obviously with the exception of the head a suggesting that it was not prey or that it was not caught by an animal to be eaten otherwise we would expect to see the skeleton damaged along its body where it was attacked and to this we remember that just the heads were removed with no other damage to the rest of the snake's body which suggests the removal of the head was deliberate but with an amount of care and finally if we observe the scene we see that both of these snakes lay near clay animals that have been modeled by those same Paleolithic human hands that may have killed the snake as well as one of the snakes were actually placed in the center of a Gower which is a natural pool of water that forms within a cave and so if if we put this information together then we can form the hypothesis that these snakes didn't get to these places by their own making and that they were not taken there by a carnivorous Predator but instead that they were placed there deliberately either been decapitated there or close to the cave before being brought inside and this helps us come to the conclusion that this was all part of a ritual now like most things I teach there will be some of you who say that what we have here with two snakes found like this is just a coincidence but to me this seems unlikely considering the cave was inhabited at the time the snake was deposited within it and so humans would not have let a random dead snake just lay in the cave and and if we coupled this with the fact that both caves had Rivers coming out of them and that the snake skeletons were found close to artificially shaped clay and that the snakes were in good condition but both without their heads then the chances of this being a coincidence is incredibly small and so I will proceed with the confidence that this wasn't a coincidence now another reason for considering this is a ritual is because the snakes were in great condition but headless a form of snake a cephale if you will but is there any further evidence to support this claim of ritual and so which will allow us to understand what exactly is going on here well it could be argued that the snakes of these caves were harmless Lakes which the Paleolithic peoples would have been aware of if they were but if this was the case then why take their heads off why do it deep within a cave a cave with a river and then to leave the rest of the snake's body intact well the answer to this is that the snake was seen as a symbol by men to refer to something else through its resemblance or Association and that to behead it and leave it at the back of a cave was this ritual act but to also prove this was a retract we must reconstruct what was happening here and to do that we must first accept that Paleolithic ritual and mythology are linked and if we can do this then we could try to reconstruct the way people thought at the time and the perception they had of snakes and as a ritual doesn't make myth but myth informs ritual then it would be necessary to accept a hypothesis that myth was the source of the ritual and so to better understand what I mean let me tell you an example of this in a better tested culture was an example of the ancient Greeks who explained the origin of a cult through an etiological myth a myth where they calls is known and here we can use the example of the Athenian Festival of the apertures where the ephibians sacrificed their hair to commemorate the deception used by the Athenian menanthios by cutting his hair and so who triumphed over his opponent which is a clear example of a ritual act to recognize the mythology and this is an important point about belief in ritual and so in culture and so in primitive beliefs these rituals these ceremonies around them the customs of the cultures and Society some of them at times have direct references to myth or regarded as a result of mythical events we can also see examples of this in Christianity which has ceremonies based on fixed rituals fashioned by mythology from the holy communion with the bread and the wine and Easter with the cross and celebrating Resurrection we see rituals and symbolism formed from these myths and so this is why we should have confidence to assume that the mythology shaped a ritual we see in the scenes Within These caves and so let's look at the impact of the Paleolithic mythology on this scene and we can do this using a process called phylogenetics which is the use of statistical probability of myth dispersal and development mapped against or alongside human migrations coupled with any other evidence to find the probability of a myth occurring somewhere when that myth would have been at the location and what that myth was about its key motifs and so using this process would allow us to see if there were myths concerning dragons in this region of Southern France during the Paleolithic period and if so what these myths were and whether if we can recreate the mythology whether we can apply them to this Dragon ritual now the data for this analysis is sourced from a number of copper including the honor Thompson Uther index and whereiskins database and some of data of these can be found on the crack and fold website at krakenfold.com but what can't be found on there is the like And subscribe buttons which can be found down here somewhere and should be pressed if you like drinking tea or Dragon slam thank you now if we get back to the Academia the analysis looked at 42 different mythological narratives over 22 Geographic areas where each area defined covered at least 10 narratives and which all would include the word snake within their titles and we have confidence in this data as it was used in other studies and I've referred to these studies in my other videos including those on the origin of the flood myth the origin of the Croatia myth and the origin of the Dragon myth and over oh we found that the data showed that these myths tended to travel with human migrations and change slowly unless there were impacted by a large cultural shift such as an invasion or colonization and so knowing this we should have confidence of being able to reconstruct the mythological narratives of the Paleolithic Europeans and so how do we interpret the Headless snake well this decapitated snake at the bottom of a cave could represent the symbolic neutralization of the Dragon we see such myths endure throughout time from ancient Mesopotamia during the Babylonian Empire where we see a ritual of marduk's fight against Tiamat every new year and this is in a ritual called the atiku a fight where the dragon is killed to create the world and this is discussed by Phantom Rose who also writes of a very similar ritual and reenactment of that ritual for mentioned Egypt and we see in Japan how ritual women of the killing of the dragon by Susan no their storm God being formed in Japanese villages and until recently there were many cultures in Western Europe who used to have possessions featuring Dragons Who either tamed or killed by a saint or heroic Warrior but on their own these are not prove the Paleolithic ritual or mythology going from a snake to a dragon and it being enacted out in effect we see that humans act out Dragonstone mythology and have done so in terms of the literary records for thousands of years and I'm not going to cover the origins of the Dragon Motif in this video I've already discussed these in biologies of Dragons video alongside how phylogenetics was used to reach its conclusions and so please watch that after these videos if you haven't seen them to understand where this myth comes from and how it evolved but what we can say that there is if from the resulting data from the analysis it came to the following inclusion about the beliefs of the Dragon estate pathologies in Europe in the Paleolithic period and that is that a majority of myths showed that Paleolithic people believed that the course of a river follows a snake's path the snake would pluck a bird's tail feathers in Revenge for the bird-eating mosquitoes the snake has immortality through shedding skin the snake causes the first person's death the snake becomes Immortal the snake can fly and produce some rain the snake is a giant animal a giant snake the snake has horns the snake possesses a valuable item which man must take the snake forms a bridge over a river the snake forms a rainbow and a snake gives access to wall to an exchange for valuable items the snake also fights a giant bird the snake can resurrect itself and a small being can become gigantic after eating and finally in these myths a woman is forced to marry a snake now these motifs are different to those discussing the dragon Origins video due to the focus of this work on Paleolithic Europe has obviously traits such as the horn Serpent and immortality become more significant at least a 50 chance of appearing in myths traits we don't see globally and so we can use this to reconstruct protophlore and so give valuable information on understanding The Remains discovered in the caves which will help us understand any ritual Act you know first the Paleolithic Europeans would have used a real creature to symbolically represent a mythological creature second that the snakes link with water in the case could be explained by a connection of dragons and water such that the dragons of myths retain or produce water which makes them the mediator between water and men and finally that the decapitation of the animal will be explained within statistical reconstruction in the myth and in doing so would confirm how dangerous the snake was perceived to be now to conclude the mythological part of this study two European proto-mythologies can be reconstructed and these are of course not identical which is normal as they were built using two different databases however they are very similar and so let me tell you these two Proto myths and then I'll also tell alongside this two supporting mythologies and then from here we can make a decision on where we feel this myth is appropriate to the ritual so the first myth goes the dragon guards the Springs large scaly with human hair on its head and it flies into the sky when both the sun is out and it is raining and when this happens the dragon forms a rainbow but if attacked to Make It Rain the dragon will become angry and will produce winds storms and even thunder and lightning and then when it returns to the ground it would have gained immortality and then it would unleash the floods to destroy the land now the other myth this the second one we recreated goes as follows the dragon is a giant snake possessing many heads one of which is human and allows it to speak and understand us its body is snake-like and covered with scales and you'll often find it living in the water although it will venture way from there when searching for food or treasure when it leaves the water you will find it in caves or under the ground but you should not approach it for it is dangerous and aggressive it needs human sacrifices to keep you to peace and the only way to defeat this dragon is to trickery and then when the time is right to chop off his heads these myths are corroborated by another reconstruction based on another Corpus which is built around the heroes fight against the Dragon at the time of this Miss emergence probably in the upper Paleolithic from Southwest Asia this story would have taken this form the Dragon lives in the sea and is gigantic and snake-like it is the wind and the storm the flood and the drought the plague and the famine it steals it kills and wages warn those around it ravaging the country of all its vegetation the god of the storms or of the sky must come to fight him using his favorite and most awesome weapon and with this he shoots down the Dragon the fight is hard and the God is almost beaten but the enemy is finally defeated and punished sometimes he is imprisoned in the world below or under a mountain sometimes his body is mutilated and exposed for all to see and I'll finish off these myths with a later version of The Myth very much focused on European motifs and this would have probably been told just after the last ice age uniform that is as such a gigantic Dragon vicious and dangerous with multiple heads arms and legs prevent us from accessing water blocking Rivers containing the Seas he also asks for a human sacrifice preferably a woman a hero using his best weapon shoots down the enemy the fight is difficult because the enemy is so large and Powerful but the hero is helped in his fight by his wife who comes to his side the death of the Dragon in shoes and the heroes are celebrated by everyone men and gods through great festivities so these myths show a dragon must be defeated to excess water and to protect the people and thus the Paleolithic headless snakes could be left in caves to keep track of ancient rituals and so too master the water and perhaps there was the fighting of a mythical snake in the ritual and this hypothesis fits well with the probable existence of source rights rights to water during the European upper Paleolithic period especially as we see numerous caves located in the immediate vicinity where these snakes were found these caves had Springs some thermal and others mineral and most of which contain ornate decoration in the form of paintings and other art forms and this all means that the snake remains allude to paleothic mythological reconstruction taking place in ritual but we now need to ask ourselves if the archaeological evidence could provide further evidence for this myth and The Proven of the ritual well as I mentioned earlier within the cave Atlas took the Audubon there are a number of cave paintings and here around 30 percent of the Bison represented on the walls of the cave are headless and 17 of them are shown with arrow markings or angular signs suggesting they were being killed by arrows there is only one lion picture in the cave and that is represented as a headless animal and this also has an angular sign on the chest representative of the arrow and conversely no horse or Ibex picture has been associated with either decapitation or being shot by arrows it seems like the animals shot by arrows or headless are both rarely Hunted but Oprah also probably particularly dangerous to hunt and so to combat these specific traits the ritual acts of decapitation could have been used to try and prevent those species of animals from being so aggressive or to inflict harm to all of them or maybe a more primitive thought of just making one creature inanimate May have made or rendered all of those creatures around it indeed a headless creature is a dead creature and so having seen paintings and Clay depictions of animals in this state then the application of this ritual to the snake could have been done to cause a similar effect to neutralize the animal he must also be a good knowledge though that the cave paint is also reflected decapitation within the mythology now there's been an important archaeological find in a cave in Madeleine in the dildoing region of France and it is a perforated stick made of reindeer antler and dated to the middle magdalenian which is about 17 to 12 000 years ago and here we see a sketch depicted a man or woman without clothing walking and carrying a stick it is taken from an allegorial group where we see this traveler followed by a snake or Conga while symbolic Horseheads seem to be coming to meet him and there are two Buffalo heads are also represented but on the other side of the stick uh without overlapping onto the snake scene and so we can exclude these from this scene's analysis now Andre Leroy gerhen notes that the tailored serpent on this ends with barbs which is interpreted as a male character symbol but it could also be considered as an appendage of a mythical animal but what we also know about this is that this stick was once colored with Hawker a red coloring which implies it contained mythical qualities but to support our analysis about mythology that we made earlier we should also construct analysis of this image to try and find meaning it now there is a contemporary tale called the dragon slayer which is believed to come from a prehistoric time and this story tells of how a poor young man gets to the city accompanied by three dogs and on this day the King's Daughter is to be devoured by a many-headed dragon and this boy is sort of hero to be fights the monster and cuts off his head and takes evidence of this um normally these the tongues or the dragons are taken and then goes off to a venture gain but not without promising the princess that he will return to marry her after a period of time maybe and yeah now during his time away an imposter tries to take credit for the hero's exploits and is about to marry the princess instead but he is a mask by the hero just before the Maricela ramoni and everybody lives Happy Ever After except for the Imposter and the Dragon who would probably die now in light of these stories the perfect stick from the Maybelline could represent the fight between a mythical snake and a man yes the snake only has one head here however multi-headed snake is found on another perfetti stick discovered in the Maggie's shelter where we see three and Twine snakes with three distinct heads and such a configuration of snakes can mean multiple heads with one body and so enforce the mythological existence of such a multi-headed snake in the upper Paleolithic period but if we go back to the original image we also see that the man has a stick on his shoulder which could look like a weapon and he is turned away from the snake which is on its back and so we could assume that the snake here has just been killed and this implies the snake has been struck with the stick which is analogous to the storm God striking the dragon with lightning much research has been carried out on this analogy and must support suggests that it is like industrike in vitra and the imagery itself could have well developed from the image of a man using a stick to kill to drag him now elsewhere in the folklore the hero is often helped by wild animals to kill the dragon and versions of story such as the best retake any number 10 and best version number 31 alongside a similar story in a different part of the Anna Thompson who's the index known as rain number seven often have horses and occasionally a horse that offers himself as a steed or even fights alongside the human and contributes to the decapitation of one of the dragon's heads now this wire horse Motif is surprising in this mythological context as dogs would seem to fulfill this role of helping against the Beast a lot better than a horse but this could be explained by the role of horses in this area the age of this Motif is particularly corroborated by the attributes of the Gaelic God or Celtic god taranis a storm God where he tries over an aquiped and in this myth oh and this is usually featured as a Horseman however we do see an unusual situation where the angry ped is crushed by two horses led by the god riding in a chariot and the ancient scene is shown from the time of King Philip II of Macedon where you can clearly see on the reverse of one of his coins taranis Steed rested his foot on the head of a cathodian monster this reflects a couple of passages of the rig voters as well where the injury is said to drive such a chariot pulled by two horses that helped him over the throw Butcher and so like the motif of the past snake that of the Warriors seems to be very old we even see an example in Ireland in the account of cuckalane's death from the book detainware has aspects of Indo-European Craig Smith within it so we know these are stories based on some very old mythology but it also shows one of the horses in his Chariot the Drey of masser actively fighting against the enemies of his master and we see Within These tales that Colonel kernach has a fighting horse as well and so if we pour all this together and look at this stick from Madeleine it is possible to propose the existence of a mythological story going back to the upper Paleolithic where a hero would confront using horses a mythical snake sometimes perhaps a multi-headed snake and to strike it to kill it and then to decapitate it the painting of the monster is is a must certainly if we look at the folk tales we've talked about it's always in there and similarly when vitra is killed ninja ask a carpenter who is passing to cut off the head of vitra however the snake of the Magdalene is not always headless unlike skeletons found at the bottom of the cage we've been talking about and so perhaps this is representing the event after the death but before the decapitation and now another feature of the mythology across Europe and indeed Eurasia is the retention of Water by the dragon this belief seems to have existed in the Paleolithic period and indeed on the stick found in the mega shelter there are three birds identified as swans and swans can be considered makers of the Aquatic environment and we also see indications on some of these pictures that the snake is close to water with some concerning that some of the markings can be interpreted as images of fish and so do we have a myth here from the upper Paleolithic period of a story where a man manages to kill and decapitate a dragon with the help of forces to gain access to water well what we can do is answer what the snake skeletons in montespan and let's talk the other bird caves represent is it a story of a fight against a gigantic mythical dangerous snake and gaining access to alter well we have shown a number of ways this conclusion could be reconstructed first through statistical tools and phylogenetics based on mythology and then through the observation of archaeological remains because certainly compared with Covenant mythology now the creatures whose remains were discovered in montespan and let's took the other Burr do lend themselves well to the mythology the snake The Pimps which may refer to a mythical serpent the archaeological context the presence of snakes near an underground river this again lends itself to the mythology as well we have shown empirically and statistically that the snake as an imaginary creature had every chance to be linked to water but additionally to this we have shown that the men at the time considered it a dangerous animal and not just because it was a snake but because of what it represented the presence of a headless serpent in the depths of the Earth where water is born can be explained if he was considered to be the guardian of the source of the water that would explain the choice of the two caves from which the rivers flow the position of the head of snakes would then be a remnant of a ritual for the liberation of the waters what we have in these caves then is the remains of a dragon slaying ritual and the memory of this ritual which can be reconstructed even today 17 000 years later and I would like to thank my patrons for their support in making this video possible please check out the origin of the Dragon myth if you haven't seen it yet and please ask questions in the comments below and I hope you really enjoyed that and so to all of you please stay safe and stay well and this was krakenfold

Channel: Crecganford

Views: 200,265

Keywords: mythology, dragon, tuc d'audoubert cave bison sculpture, tuc d'audoubert cave, tuc d'audoubert bison, tuc d'audoubert snake, paleloithic, paleolithic ritual, dragon ritual, snake skeleton, mythology explained, montespan, montespan cave, dragon slayer, dragon mythology, myth, history, mythology unleashed, dragons, ancient history, heroes, monsters, history channel

Id: vQHXuIiu6pY

Length: 32min 41sec (1961 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022