Episode 150 - The Sea Dragon That Punches Like The Sun

A Roman consul kills a monster outside the camp, sends its skin to the Senate, and someone calmly measures it at 120 feet. An Egyptian pharaoh decides he wants a dragon for the court at Alexandria, so hunters engineer a trap, haul the creature home, and tame it through controlled feeding. We follow these accounts not as throwaway myths, but as windows into how late antique and medieval writers thought about evidence, danger, and the place of “dragons” inside a Christ centred cosmic civilisation.

From there we get practical and surprisingly sharp: Albert the Great classifies serpent like creatures by how they relate to human life, especially how quickly their venom kills. That human centred taxonomy clashes with modern habits, and it also leaves room for strange reports such as cold inducing breath, sea dragons, and creatures that refuse to fit neat categories. Albert even pushes back on fire breathing dragons, offering a physical explanation that sounds like proto science fiction: heat, atmospheric entry, steam, and mistaken appearances.

Then we turn to a modern creature that makes the whole question feel urgent rather than academic: the peacock mantis shrimp. Its strike creates cavitation bubbles that collapse with flashes of light and temperatures near the surface of the sun, its armour fascinates aerospace engineers, and its eyes carry sixteen photoreceptor types that reach into ultraviolet and infrared. Sea dragon, fey creature, or a lesson in how little we notice when we assume the world must be ordinary? Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves dragons and science, and leave us a review with your best theory.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Welcome To Dragon Classification

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Well, welcome to the Christ Center Cosmic Civilization as we continue our series on the classification of creatures within the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. We have been preparing ourselves to listen to how Saint Albert the Great classifies dragons, but and we noticed that uh we'd almost overlooked some interesting features of John of Damascus, because he John of Damascus has uh an interesting story. He classifies really, if you remember, he says dragons are just animals,

Roman And Egyptian Dragon Capture Tales

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and he has a story about this Roman consul called Regulus who killed a dragon outside the the camp the Roman camp he was in, and it its skin was sent to the Roman Senate, and they measured it at 120 feet, the whole thing, presumably from the end of its tail, right the way along. So it's an enormous creature, but it's not the only story of capturing a dragon because PJ's still here from the Global Church History Project, and he reminded me that remember he told us about the pharaoh Ptolemy II, who was had a dragon that was with him ruling in Alexandria. Or whether it no, you told us about, was it the same pharaoh you told us about? Yeah, okay. It's the same one. And we've come across the account of how they captured this dragon and brought it to Alexandria. Because uh this pharaoh was uh Ptolemy II, a collector of the uh you know, he wanted a dragon. So a group of hunters set out to find one, and they tracked down a dragon at an oasis. It lived there, and it lived in a cave in the ground and fed on animals that came to the water to drink. And according to Diodorus, the snake was 30 cubits long. So that'd be like 45 feet long. So that's like a th maybe a third as big as the one that the Roman uh Regulus had caught, but maybe this was a young one and they got it at a younger stage, but even still, 45 feet long is is uh fairly bit fairly large. And it was very slender, they say. Now, at first, what the hunters tried to do is simply get ropes on it to capture it that way, as they might of a wild beast, but they couldn't do that because as soon as the noose was around the dragon's tail or anything, it hissed loudly. So this is I'm quoting now from the source. It hissed loudly, stood up so high that it towered over the men. So the hunter guy grabbed the uh no, the dragon grabbed one of the hunters and just ate him alive when they tried to do this. And then another man it got its tail around him and strangled him to death, almost like a boa constrictor kind of thing with its long tail. So the hunters withdrew and kind of had to come up with a better strategy, and they waited until the creature had come out of its hole, then they they filled in the entrance to its hole while it was away, made a new tunnel in which they lined it with a net. And then when the dragon returned, they made noise and threw stones at it and irritated it, so it went back and went down the wrong, you know, went down this new cave thing they created, and then they were able to tie up the net, and they got it inside a net, and they brought the dragon to Alexandria. And initially the people at the court were frightened, fascinated by this the size of the dragon and the nature of it. Ptolemy paid the hunters the presumably a lot of money for doing this, and then he managed to tame it by feeding it just a little bit of food, and perhaps initially keeping it quite hungry, but get giving it some food and building a relationship with it, and eventually it did kind of submit to him, and then he could have it as this kind of dragon ruler with him to impress those who came to Egypt. Well, that's the story. Now Albert the Great, how does he because we're talking about the classifying them and we've looked there? That sounds like a regular animal, like the the the dragon there. How does let's ask PJ to describe to us how Albert the Great classifies. Does he have three orders of them or something like that? How does he do it? So I think one thing that's quite interesting when we

Albert’s Human Centred Dragon Orders

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think about modern taxonomy is it's based on things that seem very ephemeral and irrelevant to humanity. So things like a banana being a herb. Like we we never uh sprinkle bananas on you know our pasta or something. Or maybe some people do, but uh as a rule, we don't. So we don't use it as a herb, but they're like, oh no, it shares these features, so it is, or it's also a berry, and it's like oh, you don't really use it as a berry either in a crumble. Um, but that's it, you know, and there's so many things like that. That taxonomy very strange. Because I suppose we're trying to think about like irrelevant to humanity, if we're not thinking of ourselves at the center, is there something these things share? Then we end up finding with stuff that from a human perspective just seems absurd. So he's not like that. He's very much just like, look, we're not gonna try and do these sorts of categories where we end up just saying, Oh, it's this one thing, and then if things don't fit into it, we're like, it must not exist, or it must, you know. So we've thought about that other way of seeing things. So that's not just modern that I ideology, it goes back a while. But he's not like that at all. So he's all built around exactly how things relate to humanity, and so in particular, it's like whether or not this sort of thing is deadly. So it's basically anything that's like serpentine or snake-like, or even worms. So St. Albert and others at the time count millipedes and centipedes as like serpents or dragons or worms, you know, it's all just very small ones, yeah. So it's all the same sort of uh spectrum of things, and then so like from the human perspective, it's like is it like wriggly, whether or not it has like feet, or is it like long and wriggly? That's one sort of creature, and then the next thing you need to know, is it uh dangerous? And you know how dangerous. So his first order then of this huge so it's quite a broad category, but again, he's he's not wanting to pin things down, so then you end up discounting things wrongly, like we might do, or you end up with a definition that's not useful to human beings. He's trying to avoid those things, so he's got a very broad category, but it's like within that category, if you you're part of this first order, if you poison, or you're venomous, actually, not poisonous, sorry, if before someone correct you know, people love that one. Um it's venomous, not poisonous. If you're venomous, so much so that you can kill within one to three hours, and typically there's like no symptoms and stuff, it's just like boom, you're dead, sort of thing. That is the first order. They're the most deadly, because they can kill you subtly as well, and very effectively. Yeah. So that yeah, and then second order, they're still venomous, but it might take several hours. So that might give you time to find the sort of anti-venom to their, you know, it might take several hours. Sometimes I think things actually in that order can take like days. You you can uh battle venom for quite a long time. And I think I'd imagine you'd put that in the second order, and then you've got the third order where there basically isn't venom. If there is venom, it's not one that humans have to worry about. So if they're deadly to humans, it's only because they would have a strong bite or a Yeah, it's the physical damage done, isn't it, that it seems to be worried about. So he classifies them as like that, but then he also has this idea that some of them just have a physical bite, but he does acknowledge that there are some that have like a cold breath attack or something that they induce freezing. So it's not he does allow for dragons to have some kind of I don't want to call it a magical power, because he perhaps doesn't think of it as that, but he simply notes that, and he has names for all the different kinds. So the ones that just bite is what's that, ahidhismon or something, and then uh he has freezing ones, and then there's constrictor ones, which he calls the boa, and then he has sea dragons, yeah, and then he has this very strange category, the Draconocobedese or something, and that one has like a face of a young woman, but a hu uh like an old man's beard, and

Cold Breath Dragons And Fire Doubts

Rev Dr PRB 10:20

I don't remember what else he has other he has some other feature, like uh I'll see if I can bring it up, but yeah, he's got loads of these categories, so he's been thinking, as we thought, like so he he's part of a totally different school of thought, which we've covered before, where you're not like a neoplatonist, you're like he's always just trying to whittle things down till there's like nothing, till you everything's as bare as possible. He's just thinking, like, actually, he's kind of reactive, so he's not trying to prescribe on creation like actually everything's gotta be mundane and boring and fit into a few categories, and if they don't, they must actually, and we just keep drilling down. He's just like, actually, there's probably really crazy, almost too much stuff to handle. That's more his perspective. So he he just has loads and he just gathers, he's trying to create as full and as interesting, you know, because he does want to interest the root viewer, but also inform them and warn them about where these things are, what you need to watch out for with them. He's just trying to collect it all together. What is so he you know, you could imagine for other ones, a dragon, like with St. John and Damascus, a bit he is just like, oh no, it's basically just like a big snake sort of thing. Whereas this guy, uh St. Albert, he is a bit more like, oh no, there are some, like the Boa, that seems like a dragon because it's just so huge, and that's just in a sense like a big snake, but that's not all dragons are, you know, he's because this one that has the face of a virgin, the beard of a man, he says that was killed in a German forest. So he's like, I seen that one, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and that one's terrifying, and that one clearly seems to show that things don't fit into categories so much. As we thought, like John's big thing was like, no, no, everything you're human or angel or animal, and there's like no sort of middle ground, no sort of Venn diagram sort of looking stuff, everything's just neatly fits in, and then Albert's just a bit like oh I've seen as well. I've seen wacky stuff out there, yeah. And but he, for example, though, he is also got that kind of he's because some people would say, I probably just believed anything. But it's interesting that he doesn't believe in fire breathing dragons, because he dismisses them as what looked like fire breathing, he thinks, was probably atmospheric vapor phenomena. So he's not, it's a funny one because we'd say, oh, but you can't dismiss fire breathing dragons because they're in the Bible. But Eve's like, well, I don't know, you gotta you gotta think these things through. It could just be the appearance of steam or something, but it doesn't so it's an interesting one that he's uh quite sort of skeptical when it comes to the fire breathing elements, but cold inducing, he's like, Well, no, obviously that, but uh it it and it maybe he's used to cold as a physical phenomena in the German forests or something, yeah. Whereas having something that can generate fire, he's like, Whoa, that's too unbelievable. I don't know, but it was interesting that he kind of is a critical thinker, but as we would think uh he's he's just got this kind of open-mindedness about what's out there, and he seems to have had direct testimony and experience of seeing things that are dragons, he goes into more detail in the whole uh uh so we've got like a summary of him, we've got the whole things because we can't read the whole thing out, but this probably is quite interesting because he mentions in the book of meteors, so for that he's just looking at anything that would fall from the second heaven to earth. And so he says, like, if you've got a dragon that's flying from the the outside our upper stratosphere and it goes in, then it's super hot because medieval's not gonna be. Oh, yes, they knew go on, sorry, yeah. They knew that things trying to enter our atmosphere would heat up incredibly quickly. So when they were designing spaceships and whether or not they ever got to use it, who knows? But they did actually design that, didn't they? They said this is what the kind of vehicle that would be required to leave Earth and come back to Earth, and they sorry, go on, carry on, yeah. So he's pointing that. And they made them for the per they they knew you had to have enormous heat shielding properties. Yeah. So he's aware of all that, and so he's thinking, all right, all right, given what we know about rocket science, and they do actually know it, that's the incredible thing. Medieval are incredible thinkers. So he's like, given that, if you've got a dragon that was out in space, for example, a space dragon, yeah. Oh, that is so cool, and it goes flying to the earth, and then it lands in water, it will of course be boiling like a red hot iron or more than boiling, you know, incredibly hot, and then it will create a hissing sound and it'll create steam and everything, and people might think that's smoke, and they'll, you know. That's it. So that's what he thinks. So it's quite interesting. He's he's just thinking, like, all right, if people are seeing fire around dragons, but they're coming from out of space down into, you know, maybe it's this instead. He doesn't actually totally write it off. He says, for me, it seems impossible. So he admits it's like loads of people say that, and I'm not writing them off totally, but for me, it seems impossible that they breathe fire. I think it's actually more like this. And he's so he's saying it's simply that the space dragons as they fly down through the atmosphere to get j become extremely hot and would look fiery even on entry, and then as they get into the water to cool off, people will go, Oh, look, it's smoke and fire and things, and they'd be like, Well, you know, if you're scientifically minded like me, you might see that it's not technically producing its own fire. But uh, who says the medieval aren't interesting? They're the so interesting, and their understanding of the universe is incredible. So, what is there anything else we want to say about Albert the Great's view of dragons before we move on to a like because if you notice, what we've been noticing is that John of Damascus and then Albert, would they classify dragons as fay creatures? Possibly, because it with that idea of them, like John of Damascus, no, he'd be like, no, it's not a fee creature, it's a totally earthly creature. I think Albert seems to be completely open-minded about everything, and he's like, could be? I don't know. And then when he has the space dragon flying in and stuff, you're like, oh wow, you know, he's really open to all possibilities. But he probably classifies it, he's like, Well, I don't know. He he seems to classify it probably as a not a fade creature in general, but we're gonna deal there is a creature that is in the world. Are we is there anything else we you want to because you PJ he has loads of stuff about from Albert about dragons and their classification and properties and how huge they are, and whether because some claim that there's a precious stone produced from the brain of a dragon.

Avicenna And Cross Cultural Dragon Lore

Rev Dr PRB 17:38

Yeah, things like that. Yeah, and what well let's just double check which particular, because he's always particular about the species, isn't it? So this is the one oh, this is a true dragon. So there's different yeah, because you often get that where you'll have like a true crab, and then you'll get things that are like crabs, but they're not in different ways. Whereas like the this sort of your basic archetypal and this is Avicenna, the specific. So it's not just Albert the Great, so it's uh it's someone, it's a it's it's another medieval thinker, but an Islamic thinker, who also deal classifies. Do you want to say anything about him? Yeah, so you've got like at very interesting thing with um Al Endelus or Andolithia at that time that you do have loads of Eastern Christian works making their way in, and that's partly because you've got these Mozarabic Christians who are like Visigoths who have ended up speaking Arabic, and as they're wanting to sort of tackle Islam, they often take on board a lot of either Maiaphazite or Nestorian text from the east, and then sort of use those arguments themselves, but then also as they're looking for polemics in particular, they just pick up any any stuff. So you've got Sir Semar Samuraion, we've got a Sumerian, who's actually this so they often refer to him that way as the book has moved from east to west, it's like changed a lot, but he's actually called something else, which escapes me at the moment. But he yeah, do we have it? We it was a complicated ah yeah, here we go. Came from Samirun, which is a Arabic version of Ibn Sarabi. Well, Ibn Sarabi's Arabic as well, but it's like a variant on it. Also known as Serapian the Younger, a Christian botanist, right? There we go. So as they're taking Eastern Christian stuff west, the these Christians, they introduce that, and so then Muslims also then, so you get that where Christians are like bringing in other Christian material, then Muslims respond to it, and Jews respond to it, so then it becomes a big sort of mountain part. It's not as uh a friendly, so sometimes people have that idea of the sort of um big friendly, everyone's just uh getting on during Al Andalus. That's not really true, but they are at least talking, and so you end up with some very fascinating sort of engagement between cultures if there's a lot of violence going on as well in the background. There are these moments of genuine dialogue, but that there are sort of wherever you get these people together, they don't fight all the time. So that's yeah, one of the things I suppose he he is this Avathenna guy is in engaging with Christian and Jewish and all sorts of different things in the middle of it. So yeah, he's quite enjoying that, and then we also think about this uh Serapi and the younger guy. He St. Albert quotes both of these people quite a lot. Because he's so he's getting information effectively from Asia and Africa via Avethenna is getting it from Asia and Africa, and then Albert's getting it from that, so that it's kind of like quite a global w set of witnesses that are all being gathered. But what I found interesting about these accounts from Avitchenna, Avithenna and the the other guy, is they come up with quite detailed physical descriptions of dragons together with properties that of them and things like that. And and how the ones in India are bigger, the biggest ones are from India, and the things about what kind of legs and feet they have, and how Ethiopians have even eaten dragon flesh and things like that. All the and then also and the use of them in magic and things like that. Fascinating stuff. I mean, we probably shouldn't go into it too much, and like how to get very rare precious stones from the brains of true dragons and things. And you also have uh Socoptra has a lot of dragon history to it, and there's the trees they call dragon blood trees, so you can basically get dragon blood out of a tree these days, and you used to have to get it out of uh dragon. But I think they say stuff like um like a dragon was killed, and as its blood sort of falls into the ground, then the trees, you know, and then it just has so much vitality in it, like it just like keeps producing, it becomes like a sort of form of life. So that's not in this particular compendium, but I do know that's something that also gets talked about. Yeah, so okay, look, we m we've gotta because the the once we get into these medieval descriptions of dragons, they're so fascinating and get so detailed. But I want us to turn in for the rest of this episode to look at a modern fee creature that to me, there's no question about this, like. If w some creatures seem to be like the dragon, you could argue is a terrestrial, an earthly animal, but maybe it's fei. But but almost certainly isn't a celestial creature. But something this creature that we're gonna think about now is a creature that is known easily visitable in the world as it is today,

Peacock Mantis Shrimp As Sea Dragon

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but it is unquestionably a fey creature, and maybe I've begun to think, I wonder if it has celestial elements to it, but it's no, I don't think anybody would seriously classify it as an entirely earthly creature. And that creature is, of course, we're gonna look at several in this series, but this one is called the Peacock Mantis Shrimp. Now that is a poor modern title for it, and it has much better titles in history. Uh that I've found some wonderful titles for this creature from other sources. But if you simply search for the peacock mantis shrimp and get a high definition image of this, you are looking at a sea dragon. There's no question about it. When you look at it, you will assume that is not a real creature at all, not even Faye or Celestial. You'll assume it's some kind of computer-generated image from a game or something, and even then you'll say they've gone too far. That is too bizarre, too weird, too impossible. Like that whoever's designed this fictional creature has gone too far. It's not it's not even believable. The range of colours, the size of its eyes, it's the number of its limbs, everything about it is obviously unbelievable. And yet it exists. There it is. There's many images of it. And its appearance, let's not easily get past it. Its appearance is in part is just unbelievably strange. But that isn't the reason that we know it's a fay creature. It has this ability to produce like clash together these clubs kind of in its itself. And the it's dactile clubs that is technically known. And in doing this, it kind of it produces such a strong force. It has this hammer-like appendage, that's it, which will strike so hard, and it's like impossibly, impossibly strong force is produced. So that it's it's measured at twenty three meters per second with ten thousand G acceleration. It's the fastest punch in of any animal or anything, and it is so fast, so extreme is this ability to hit that it causes cavitation bubbles that collapse at temperatures near to the surface of the sun. So think of that. So powerful is this force it produces. It produces temperatures close to the surface of the sun and produces flashes of light every blow that it produces. So, in that sense of it being fire breathing, it's way beyond fire breathing. It's like fire is too cool, is too cool an effect for this to produce. It produces something far, far hotter than even fire. Even far hotter than fire. So, in terms of uh, you know, like a dragon can only produce fire, whereas this creature can produce something that nothing on earth is as hot as this. It's like close to something in the sun. And it's it's a relatively small creature, certainly in the forms we have it today. I imagine its ancestors were much larger, but it's with this kind of punch thing it produces, it's a force of approximately 1,500 newtons. Now, to put that into context, that would be like 150 kilograms impacting you. 150 kilograms. Well, for me, I boil everything down to sacks of potatoes because I used to carry those around when I was a kid. So that's like six sacks of potatoes impacting you. Six sacks of potatoes to impact you. That would be like enough to break your bones, and so much so that when people try to keep the peacock mantis shrimp in an aquarium, the the problem is it can just punch through the glass. Like its force is so great that even thick aquarium glass is not cannot withstand the force of this creature's like super like Fey powered supernatural attack. That's one thing about it. Its armor structure is so efficient that like going back to the idea of producing a way of producing a material that is strong enough to withstand the interface between the earth and the heavens and to go through the atmosphere, and we, you know, it's a constant problem with spacecraft and rockets and things to to have a coating that is sufficiently strong that it can withstand the force of leaving

Sun Hot Punches And Unworldly Sight

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the Earth's atmosphere and re-entering it. But it's interesting that aerospace engineers study the armor of the peacock mantis shrimp because its properties are strong enough to withstand such an environment. So it's designed, it has within it design that is strong enough to weather the interface of leaving the Earth's atmosphere and re-entering it, which of course, you know, fits with Albert the Great. It's like, of course, like a little dragon would have such a thing because its ancestors possibly did make that journey. That's an interesting thing, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. As you're thinking, there must have been bigger versions of these, as we see quite quickly within a few generations, dragons will get so much smaller. Uh that this one will have done. So maybe it wasn't even all that long ago. I don't know how far records go back of, you know, if we could approximate when this particular draconic ancestor first crew. Because Albert's talking about sea dragons in his time. Yeah. And he's aware that dragons may have had to have skin that could weather the interface of leaving and re-entering the atmosphere. And this thing has that those properties. The other thing about it, and we'll have to leave we we we're running out of time, but I wanted to look uh say some its eyes are extraordinary. If you've looked up an image of it, you will see it's got these unbelievably large eyes. And in those of us who study creatures in the Christ center cosmic civilization, the size of eyes is immensely important to the proportion of an animal that is their eyes. So that the those heavenly angels called the watchers, the tetraforms or whatever, they're called watches because they're filled with eyes. Like some there are high-level uh celestial beings that are filled with eyes, but also we think about like the octopus or the squid. The squid, especially, can have is the largest proportion of eye-to-body ratio, enormous eyes ratio, and this eight eight tentacled features or six tentacles and so on, all immensely significant. But this creature has enormous size in proportion to its body, the peacock mangestry, and the capacity of sight is vastly beyond any other creature. To help it see like the Fey Wilds as it has to presumably navigate both at the same time. Yeah, because it just to explain that the interface, that the capacity to see like the because we uh the Feyworld is adjacent to our own, and we don't see it normally, but we could if we had sufficient eyesight capacities, and uh yeah and we see that in in the Bible when uh what's the name of Elisha's server? Gahazi. Yeah, he he's allowed, so he has that terrible sin before it he gets cursed for it. But then when the Lord sort of lifted him up again in a sense a bit after, he lets him see angels and he gives him this sort of vision to see beyond the mundane, which is I suppose exactly what he needed given his earlier failings that so he gives him that ability. So a human eye should actually be capable of it. But it's interesting to see animals even today, or Fay even today being able to see this, you know, see a huge, much, much, much, much larger range of things. And this creature has six like a human eye has three types of photoreceptor, three types of that enable us to see red, green, blue, is it? Red, green, red, green, blue, and also this receptors, some of them are better at seeing movement rather than colour and shape and things like that. Whereas, just in your mind now, imagine think how many do you think the peacock mantis shrimp has? Human eye has three types. Do you think it might have six or nine or twelve? The answer is it has sixteen types of photoreceptor. So its capacity of sight is, you know, absolutely incomprehensible to a human who, you know, we have trouble processing visual information, and sometimes we get overwhelmed and we're like, oh, close my eyes, I just need to sort of get a bit of space. There's too much colour, there's too much to see, and we'll talk about a scene or a picture being too busy, meaning there are too many things to see in it, and I can't cope with that amount of input. And that's us with just three types of photoreceptor. Whereas the peacock uh mantis has 16 types of photoreceptor, it sees into ultraviolet, it sees into infrared, and it because and that's all that we are aware of, the capacities. Like we can sort of say, oh, we it we think it can see this kind of light, and it can see this kind of light, but it can probably obviously seize light that we can't, we're not like aware of how to even categorize things that it can see. It perceives light entirely beyond human experience or even comprehension. Like, why does it, why does this creature have the capacity to see so much, like like ridiculously beyond what we humans can see? Why is the why this creature now to me this creature is obviously a fey creature? It does obviously doesn't belong to the non-fei category. But what is it doing, this creature on a it can punch ridiculously beyond like so powerfully that it can generate temperatures as hot as the sun, and it can like you it can't really be contained, it can punch its way out of aquaria if it can if it can be and it produces flashes of light, so powerful are its punches, and it can see a ray, you know, uh uh levels of reality beyond what we can comprehend, and its body is made for space travel. What is this creature? Why is it here? What is it doing? What is its mission on Earth at the moment? I don't know, but this is that's this is the first of our purrs. We've had the dragon and we've had this sea dragon that is still around today. For it you can go and see such a creature. There are ways of containing them actually, and we'll we'll talk but you look you can look them up. Look them up. There's many pictures of them, but that's where we'll end this episode. We'll there'll be plenty more.