Serpent Brides and Dragon Kings

Melusine

The great serpent bride of Europe is Melusine, whose legend was written down in French at the end of the fourteenth century for the lords of Lusignan in Poitou. A young nobleman named Raymondin, having killed his lord by accident in a boar hunt, wanders in despair through a forest and meets a beautiful lady at a spring. She promises to make him great if he will marry her, on one condition: he must never seek to see her on a Saturday.

He agrees, and she keeps her word. She builds castles and towns, Lusignan first among them, and bears him ten sons, nearly all marked with something strange: a lion's paw on the cheek, a boar's tusk, a single eye. Years later, goaded by his brother's gossip, he peers through a hole in the door of her bath one Saturday and sees that below the waist she is a great serpent. He keeps silent, and she forgives him. But later, in grief and rage, he calls her a serpent before his court. She becomes a winged serpent, circles the castle with a terrible cry, and flies away through a window. Afterward she returns only by night, unseen, to tend her youngest children.

Her own mother, a fairy, had married a king on a similar condition and left him when he broke it, and Melusine, having punished her father for it, was cursed to become a serpent each Saturday until she found a husband who would never look.

An ancestress for a noble house

Melusine's story was a family legend. The house of Lusignan produced crusader kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus and rulers in Armenia, and to descend from a fairy who built castles was a kind of glory. Her cry, it was said, was heard from the tower of Lusignan whenever one of its lords was about to die. A twelfth-century churchman told of a similar ancestress of the counts of Anjou, who could never stay in church for the holiest moment of the Mass, and flew out of a window when her husband had her held there. Other animal ancestors have a page of their own.

The White Snake

China's best-loved serpent bride is Bai Suzhen, Lady White, heroine of the Legend of the White Snake. A white snake who has spent many centuries perfecting herself takes a woman's form and, with her companion, a green snake, comes to West Lake at Hangzhou. On a rainy day by a bridge she meets a gentle young man named Xu Xian, borrows his umbrella, and soon marries him. Together they keep a medicine shop and do much good.

A stern monk sets out to expose her. At the Dragon Boat Festival her husband persuades her to drink realgar wine, which was believed to drive off snakes and evil things, and she returns to her true shape. (Realgar is an arsenic mineral and genuinely poisonous.) He dies of fright at the sight of her, and she risks her life to fetch a magic herb from a mountain of the immortals to revive him. In the end the monk imprisons her beneath a pagoda by the lake.

The earliest full written version, from the seventeenth century, treats her as a danger and the monk as a hero. Over the following centuries opera and storytelling turned her into a faithful, wronged wife and the monk into the villain, and in later versions her son grows up to free her.

Lamia

Greek myth has a darker serpent woman. Lamia, in the oldest stories, was a queen of Libya loved by the king of the gods. His jealous wife destroyed her children, and Lamia, mad with grief, became a monster who stole and devoured the children of others. Greek nurses used her name to frighten children into good behavior. Ancient accounts of her shape vary, and later art usually gave her a serpent's body below the waist. In time lamia became the name of a kind of creature. A Greek writer of the Roman period tells how a philosopher, at the wedding of a young student, recognized the lovely bride as a lamia who meant to devour him, and how at his words her house and its golden furnishings vanished like smoke.

The naga

Across South and Southeast Asia, in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions, the nagas are serpent beings, often pictured as cobras, who dwell beneath the earth and the waters, guard springs and treasures, and can take human form. They are not monsters. They are honored at shrines and in sacred stories still told in worship, and are best spoken of briefly and with respect.

A naga king is said to have spread his hoods over the Buddha to shelter him from a storm as he sat in meditation. A Buddhist monastic text tells of a naga who took human shape to become a monk, and was found out when he fell asleep and returned to his own form; ever since, it is said, those seeking ordination are asked whether they are human. In Cambodia the kingdom's beginning is traced to the marriage of a prince from overseas and a naga princess, and the memory is kept at traditional weddings, where the groom holds a fold of the bride's sash.

Dragon kings and the palace under the sea

In Chinese belief every sea has its dragon king, and so, in popular religion, do many rivers, lakes and wells. The dragon kings rule from crystal palaces beneath the water, with fish, crabs and shrimp for courtiers and soldiers, and they bring the rain, which is why farmers once prayed at their temples in drought. They move easily between shapes, and often walk among people as old men, scholars or beautiful women.

A tale of the Tang dynasty tells of a young scholar who carries a letter from a dragon king's daughter, cruelly treated by her husband, to her father's palace beneath a great lake, knocking on a tree by the shore to be let in. Her fierce uncle flies off in fury and devours the faithless husband, and in the end the scholar marries the princess in human form. In the great sixteenth-century novel of the Monkey King, a dragon king's son is turned into a white horse and carries a pilgrim monk all the way to India.

Japan has its own palace of the sea. In a tale told since at least the eighth century, a fisherman named Urashima is carried to a palace beneath the waves by a turtle, which in the oldest versions is the sea princess herself. After what seems a short time he longs for home, and she gives him a box he must never open. At home he finds that centuries have passed. He opens the box, a white mist rises, and he is an old man in an instant.

Snake husbands

Europe also tells the story from the other side. The Lithuanian tale of Egle, Queen of Serpents, begins when a girl finds a grass snake in her sleeve after bathing and must promise to marry him before he will leave. He is a serpent prince of the sea, and she lives happily with him beneath the waves and bears four children. On a visit home her brothers force from the children the words that call him from the water, and kill him. In her grief Egle turns her children into trees, oak, ash, birch and trembling aspen, the last for the daughter who gave the secret away, and herself into a spruce, the tree whose name she bears.

A Scandinavian tale tells of a prince born as a lindworm, a great serpent who devours his brides until a shepherd's daughter, wearing many shifts, agrees to take one off each time he sheds a skin, and so brings him to his human shape. In the Latin tale of Cupid and Psyche, an oracle declares that Psyche will wed a dreadful serpent-like monster, and her husband visits only in the dark and forbids her to look at him. When at last she holds up a lamp, she sees the god of love, and a drop of hot oil wakes him, and he flees.

The forbidden look

Almost every story on this page turns on one command: do not look. Melusine must not be seen on Saturdays, nor her mother in childbed. In Japan's oldest chronicles a daughter of the sea god asks her husband not to watch while she gives birth, and when he does he sees a great sea creature, and she returns to the sea forever. In an ancient Indian story the heavenly nymph Urvashi lives with a king on condition she never sees him unclothed, and when a flash of lightning breaks the condition, she is gone. Psyche's lamp, the crane wife at her loom on the page of selkies and swan maidens, and the fox wife whose tail slips out all belong to the same family.

What the stories say about the look is not simple. It is a breach of trust, and the one who looks always loses. But it also shows a marriage resting on something that could not last: a partner from another world who asks to be loved without being wholly known, and a human partner who cannot manage it. Many modern readers find in that a story about privacy, and about loving someone whose nature one does not fully share.

Some dragonkin hold these stories dear. The legends themselves describe beings of story, not people.