When Women Were Dragons(6)

The earliest known documentation of spontaneous dragoning in recorded history can be found in the formerly lost writings of Timaeus of Tauromenium, written around 310 BC. These manuscripts were discovered originally during the excavation of the vast, underground libraries located in the heart of the Palace of Nestor, but remained unread and unstudied until recently, due to a misclassification of its storage vault. The Timaeus fragments, among other things, shed new light on the historical person of Queen Dido of Carthage: priestess of Astarte, swindler of kings, and trickster of the high seas. The accounts of her life in literature (from Cicero to Virgil to Plutarch and every insufferable boor in between) all vary wildly—each portraying various aspects of an undeniably complex, inscrutable, and fundamentally defiant woman. The accounts of her death, on the other hand, are fairly uniform. Specifically, that Dido—either because of grief, or rage, or revenge, or simply as an act of self-sacrifice to save the city that she founded and built and loved—calmly ascended her own funeral pyre and threw herself upon her husband’s sword, breathing her last as the flames engulfed her.

And perhaps that’s true.

But the Timaeus writings provide an alternate view. The fragments of Book 19, Book 24, and Book 49 of Timaeus’s Historiai provide both brief and casual references to a separate fate of Queen Dido, presented in a way that assumes the reader already knows and understands the story mentioned in the text. This casual referencing, one might argue, is significant, as it implies that the writer does not see the need to argue his view of the events—instead, he simply references a narrative to his contemporaneous audience in a way that suggests it is both accepted and acceptable. Timaeus describes how Queen Dido, flanked by her priestesses on either side, stood upon the shore and watched as the ocean turned dark with Trojan ships, hungry for Carthage’s harbor, and riches, and resources, and women. Timaeus describes Carthage as a flowing breast from which Aeneas and his entourage longed to feed, and how the whole city quaked before the terrible hunger of men.

The Timaeus fragments provide tantalizing clues. In Book 19, he describes that the queen and her priestesses opened their garments and let them fall to the ground. “They stepped out of their robes like nymphs, and they stepped out of their bodies like monsters,” Timaeus writes, adding that “the sea burned with a thousand pyres.” What sort of monsters? And whose pyres burned? Timaeus does not say. In Book 24, he writes, “Oh, Carthage! City of dragons! Woe to you for turning your back on your holy protectresses! Inside a generation, Dido’s noble city lay in waste upon the ground.” And in Book 49, describing Dido’s earlier swindle of King Pygmalion and her subsequent escape across the sea, Timaeus writes, “During her journey, the young Queen traveled to islands that did not appear on any map and bade her men wait for her in the ships as she swam to the land on her own. Each time she returned with women—to be both priestesses and wives, the men were told. The men shivered when they saw these women, and could not account for why. Oh, how their eyes glittered! Oh, how their robes rustled like wings! And oh, how a forcefulness burned in their bellies. They were strong like men, these priestesses. They sunned themselves like lizards upon the decks. The sailors agreed to give the women a wide berth. And those who forgot themselves, who reached lustfully where one should not, had often disappeared by the next morning, their names never spoken again.”

Did Dido dragon? Did her priestesses transform? We cannot know. But two things should give us ample reason to pay close attention to the Historiai. First, the Timaeus account is the earliest recording of these events, and therefore less likely to be tainted by the political pressures of revisionism. Men, after all, delight in nothing so much as to recast themselves in the center of the story. And second, throughout history, the occasional and seemingly spontaneous bouts of female dragoning (they are not, in truth, spontaneous, but we will get to that later in this paper) are almost universally followed by a collective refusal to accept incontrovertible facts, and a society-wide decision to forget verifiable events that are determined to be too alarming, too messy, too unsettling. This practice did not start with Queen Dido, and it did not end with her either.

I shall now explore twenty-five discrete historical examples of mass dragoning and their subsequent memory repression, ending, of course, with the astonishing events here in the United States in 1955. Our own Mass Dragoning, while admittedly unusual in terms of its numbers and scope, was not unique in the context of world history. Spontaneous dragoning, I intend to prove, is not a new phenomenon. But given the sheer number of transformations in 1955, it is imperative that we learn from history’s mistakes, and chart a different path. It is my thesis that every mass dragoning in history is followed by a phenomenon that I call a “mass forgetting.” And indeed, it is the forgetting, I argue, which proves to be far more damaging, and results in more scars on the psyche, and scars on the culture. Furthermore, it is my conclusion that the United States is, at present, in the midst of another such forgetting, with repercussions that are both trackable and quantifiable—and hopefully reversible if coordinated action is taken now.

—“A Brief History of Dragons” by Professor H. N. Gantz, MD, PhD, originally published in the Annals of Public Health Research, by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on February 3, 1956. It was redacted three days later and all copies, except this one, were destroyed.