Article

Belief

Creed

Monsters

26 September 2024

5 min read

Which dragon does St Michael need to slay today?

Explore the cultural impact of the dragon killer.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A patch depicting a angel in armour, wielding a sword, on camoflague uniform.

Thomas Tucker on Unsplash.

St Michael is everywhere. But only if you have eyes to see him. He’s probably somewhere in your town. He may even be hiding in your wardrobe in one of your jumpers. Retailer Marks and Spencer trademarked the ‘St Michael’ brand in 1928. It was inspired by their best-selling hosiery brand – St Margaret. The name Michael came from the founder of M& S, Michael Marks. But the logo they used, a winged angel holding aloft a sword, was a reference to the archangel St Michael mentioned in the Bible.

Even in the pages of that book, however, St Michael is a little elusive, being named only a handful of times. Perhaps that was his mystique. Less is more. But whatever St Michael was doing worked really well in the Middle Ages. A tradition arose around him, culminating in a feast day known as Michaelmas on 29th September. This feast day had extra significance as it become a ‘Quarter Day’.

In days gone by, the year was divided into four, bookended by quarter days. Michaelmas was one, at least in England. The next is Christmas Day, followed by Lady Day (March 25), and Midsummer (June 24). Rents were traditionally due on quarters days. Legal and financial contracts were to be settled. Michaelmas was particularly associated with the domestic servants moving around. You will hear it referred to Michaelmas along those lines in Chapter One of Pride and Prejudice.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades.

Many schools called their autumn term ‘Michaelmas’. Mine did, although no-one ever explained what it meant. As schools began to dominate British life, the calendar year ceased to be broken into four but three. Now our lives are regulated by school holidays, ‘back to school’ days and half term, when it is traditional to double the cost of your holiday rental. Christmas remains. Lady Day morphed into the end of the tax year. (I’m sure the Virgin Mary would be thrilled). And Midsummer Day has vanished almost completely.

St Michael had a good run. He had been a wildly popular figure from Anglo-Saxon times and Michaelmas a firm fixture in the calendar. Many churches founded in that period were named after him. Over 800 of those churches dedicated to St Michael remain in England, scattered across the counties. (I walked around one on Sunday afternoon in East Coker, Somerset where the ashes of TS Eliot have been interred.) Only the Virgin Mary, St Peter and All Saints are more popular in the church dedication charts.

In short, St Michael was a big deal. Why? Because he was a dragon killer.

In fact, Michael was not just ‘a killer of dragons’ but ‘the killer of the dragon’. That dragon is the silver-tongued serpent, Satan himself. The final reference to Michael in the Bible reads thus – and yes, it sounds better in the King James Version:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

St Michael is the defeater of evil itself. This is a comforting figure when boatloads of Vikings could appear in your shire at any minute in order to destroy, steal, rape and pillage. The fact that these longboats had a dragonhead on the prow served only to reinforce this image that the enemy were representatives of Satan himself.

Dragon-slaying was a staple of heroic tales. Beowulf naturally fights a dragon. Merlin is mixed up with a dragon called Kilgharrah. There are also dozens of accounts in which dragons are slain, often presented in a prosaic and serious way, like a report of pest control. Not far from me in the woods near Wells, the Bishop Jocelyn killed a dragon in 1320s. The latest account like this is in 1614 , reporting a “strange and monstrous serpent” living in St Leonard’s Forest near Horsham in Sussex “to the great annoyance and diverse slaughters both of men and cattle, by his strong and violent poison”.

Dragon sightings may have declined sharply since the seventeenth century, but they have come roaring back in the last few decades. Dragons are everywhere. Our TV screens are constantly invaded by insatiable fire-breathing serpents. Bookshops bulge with titles about dragons.

When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping off their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts.

Has the time come for St Michael to return? Surprisingly not.

St Michael has not been summoned because he is a dragon killer, and we don’t want to kill dragons. Not anymore. We want to tame them. We want to understand them. We want to harness their power.

That’s what happens in Game of Thrones. Daenerys Targaryen wishes to assert her claim to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros using the dragons that she has hatched. But can she use those dragons to bring about justice or ‘the greater good’ without being consumed by them or becoming dragon-like herself? It is an eternal question, played out in the Cold War with nuclear weapons and in Middle Earth with a powerful ring.

We are seduced by the allure of the dragon all too easily. It’s there at the very beginning of Western Culture in the Bible: Eve is approached by a persuasive snake who tempts her to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She falls for it. But throughout the Bible, the one blamed for the sin is not Eve, but Adam.

But how is it Adam’s fault? Adam failed to give the serpent the Archangel Michael treatment. Adam should have killed the serpent or chased it out of the garden. He didn’t because, well, things were just starting to get interesting. And the rest is theology.

St Michael is the extinguisher of evil. But we don’t want to destroy evil. We just want to see it diminished. A bit. In fact, the talk of Good and Evil is rather embarrassing. We don’t do Good and Evil. We do ‘values’. We don’t condemn sins. We seek to re-educate those with ‘anti-social behaviours’.

We have the dubious luxury of speaking this way because we aren’t about to be attacked by Vikings any times soon. When you see those efficient, bloodthirsty killers jumping of their dragon-headed longboats, good and evil don’t seem like relative concepts. Evil is very real. That’s when you might need some clean pairs of Marks and Spencer’s famously excellent underwear.

Scroll the news and you will find that millions around the world live with the reality of Viking-like terror right now. For them the virtues of St Michael might be more apparent.

Explainer

Books

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.