Sea Serpents
Sea serpents or dragons have been a feature of mythology since the Mesopotamian era. In Mesopotamian belief, Tiamat is the goddess of the sea, often depicted as a sea serpent. In Ancient Greece, we have Scylla of The Odyssey and the multiple-headed Hydra that Heracles (Hercules) slays. The Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament also refer to sea serpents, such as the Tannin (Genesis 1:21) and the sea monster mentioned in Amos 9:3. Despite their differing cultural meanings and allegorical resonances, at their core, all of these sea serpents reveal a deeper anxiety about the dangers of the deep.
Man, of course, cannot naturally breathe underwater. For the ancient world, in which most trade was carried out across the great seas and oceans of the world, this was a significant danger to sailors crossing expanses of water only seldom with the aid of an inaccurate map. The sea today is still one of the last frontiers for scientific discoveries, so one can only imagine how terrifying it was to sail across it with an even more limited understanding of its nature. Those who fell overboard were rarely saved, adding to rumors of ferocious beasts lurking below the surface.
It is not hard to understand how a fleeting glimpse of whales or big fish could produce legends of sea monsters. In terms of sea serpents, specifically, creatures such as the giant oarfish must have nurtured tales of the mythological dangers of the deep. People often see what they expect to see or have heard tell of – one has only to think of the continuing sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, appearances of which are often no more than a branch or an otter swimming across the Loch – to understand how powerful the brain’s interpretive short cuts can be.
Specific sea monsters outside of the world of religion and myth are recorded as far back as Aristotle’s Historia Animalium. Strabo’s Geography also reports a dead sea serpent seen by the appropriately-named Poseidonius: ‘the fallen dragon, the corpse of which was about a plethrum [100 feet] in length, and so bulky that horsemen standing by it on either side could not see one another; and its jaws were large enough to admit a man on horseback, and each flake of its horny scales exceeded an oblong shield in length’. Sightings have continued ever since, suggesting man’s innate fear of seas.
So, beyond serving as a warning to men of the dangers of seafaring, what do the sea serpents actually tell us? In the medieval period, a boat sailing across the sea provided a powerful allegory. Chiefly, the boat represented the soul of fallen man being steered across the turbulent water (equating to the troubles of the earthly plain) to a safe harbor, representing heaven. The evils of the deep were the temptation to sin caused by the devil, and thus the monsters of the deep were seen as beasts of Satan. Take care to reach heaven safely, in other words.