ill change into anything he liked. By order of
Yue Ti he subdued the Spirits of the Wind and Fire, the Blue Dragon,
the King of the Five Dragons, and the Spirit of the Five Hundred
Fire Ducks, all without injury to himself. For these and many other
enterprises he was rewarded by Yue Ti with various magic articles
and with the title of Generalissimo of the West, and is regarded as
so successful an interceder with Yue Ti that he is prayed to for all
sorts of benefits.

CHAPTER VII

Myths of the Waters

The Dragons

The dragons are spirits of the waters. "The dragon is a kind of being
whose miraculous changes are inscrutable." In a sense the dragon
is the type of a man, self-controlled, and with powers that verge
upon the supernatural. In China the dragon, except as noted below,
is not a power for evil, but a beneficent being producing rain and
representing the fecundating principle in nature. He is the essence
of the _yang_, or male, principle. "He controls the rain, and so
holds in his power prosperity and peace." The evil dragons are those
introduced by the Buddhists, who applied the current dragon legends
to the _nagas_ inhabiting the mountains. These mountain _nagas_, or
dragons (perhaps originally dreaded mountain tribes), are harmful,
those inhabiting lakes and rivers friendly and helpful. The dragon,
the "chief of the three hundred and sixty scaly reptiles," is most
generally represented as having the head of a horse and the tail of a
snake, with wings on its sides. It has four legs. The imperial dragon
has five claws on each foot, other dragons only four. The dragon is
also said to have nine 'resemblances': "its horns resemble those of
a deer, its head that of a camel, its eyes those of a devil, its neck
that of a snake, its abdomen that of a large cockle, its scales those
of a carp, its claws those of an eagle, the soles of its feet those of
a tiger, its ears those of an ox;" but some have no ears, the organ of
hearing being said to be in the horns, or the creature "hears through
its horns." These various properties are supposed to indicate the
"fossil remnants of primitive worship of many animals." The small
dragon is like the silk caterpillar. The large dragon fills the Heaven
and the earth. Before the dragon, sometimes suspended from his neck,
is a pearl. This represents the sun. There are azure, scaly, horned,
hornless, winged, etc., dragons, which apparently evolve one out
of the other: "a horned