Follow the Dragon’s Line: Dragons, Eclipses and a Medieval British Mystery

Follow the Dragon’s Line

What do dragons have to do with eclipses, and why did following one particular thread lead me from Spain, across the sea and back into medieval Britain?

Yesterday I crossed the sea beneath a solar eclipse.

I was on the ferry travelling from England towards Spain as the eclipse took place, and since arriving here I have felt dragons everywhere.

In the mountains and rocks. In the clouds.

Sometimes their forms seem so clear that I reach for my phone to capture them, but almost as soon as I do, they shift and dissolve.

Perhaps it is simply the movement of the clouds, the changing light, the way our eyes find familiar forms within a landscape.

But I have learnt over the years not to dismiss the things that repeatedly catch my attention. I don’t necessarily have to decide what they mean. Sometimes I just become curious enough to follow them.

And last night my dreams were strong.

Amongst them came a very clear message:

Follow the line of dragon energy.

So I did.

Where I First Followed the Dragon

This wasn’t the first time I had followed a thread connecting dragons with the sky.

My own journey into this began years ago at Avebury.

I had been exploring the idea of Avebury as a great Dragon temple, the serpent or dragon laid across the landscape with what I came to understand as its egg sac, and the possibility that this Dragon upon the earth reflected Draco in the heavens above.

That fascinated me.

The Dragon below and the Dragon above.

And, as so often happens when I begin following one of these threads, one discovery led to another.

My interest in the celestial Dragon eventually led me to the lunar nodes.

Today we know these as the two points where the path of the Moon crosses the ecliptic, but historically they were known as Caput Draconis, the Head of the Dragon, and Cauda Draconis, the Tail of the Dragon.

And this is where the solar eclipse enters the story.

A solar eclipse can only occur at New Moon, when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun while close to one of these nodal crossing points.

The Dragon’s Head or the Dragon’s Tail.

From there, my research took me further east.

Dragons swallowing the Sun

I discovered the ancient stories of dragons and serpent beings consuming the Sun.

In China, there was a belief that during a solar eclipse a celestial dragon was devouring the Sun. People would beat drums and make noise to frighten the dragon away so the light would return.

In India we find another version of the story through Rahu and Ketu. Rahu drinks the nectar of immortality but is discovered by the Sun and Moon and beheaded. His immortal head continues to pursue them through the heavens, periodically swallowing the Sun or Moon and creating an eclipse.

So I already knew this part of the Dragon story.

Avebury had led me to Draco.

Draco had led me further into the celestial Dragon.

The Dragon’s Head and Tail had led me to eclipses.

And eclipses had taken me east, into stories of dragons swallowing the Sun.

But following the Dragon’s line this time took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

It took me back home.

The Dragon in Medieval Britain

I came across research from the University of Reading exploring medieval accounts of solar eclipses in Britain. 

One of these was the great eclipse of 1140, recorded by the English historian William of Malmesbury, when the darkness was said to be so deep that people went outside and could see the stars in the daytime.

But another account, from 1133, really caught my attention. The chronicler John of Worcester described darkness appearing across England.

He wrote that some believed it to be an eclipse of the Sun and explained it through the Head and Tail of the Dragon.

His description doesn’t quite correspond with what we understand about solar eclipses today, when the Sun and Moon appear together near the same lunar node. But it was the presence of the Dragon that caught my attention.

Here was a medieval British chronicler describing a solar eclipse through the celestial Dragon.

There it was again.

Not only in the stories I knew from China and India, but in medieval Britain too.

And this was the piece I hadn’t known.

The connection I had followed eastwards through dragons, lunar nodes and eclipses had a British thread too.

Following the Same Line

What made this discovery feel even more curious was the journey itself.

As I was travelling from Britain, across the sea and towards Spain, the Moon’s shadow was also moving across the northern hemisphere, through Greenland and Iceland, across the Atlantic and towards Spain.

We weren’t literally following the same path, but we were moving towards the same place.

And suddenly the words from my dream, follow the line of dragon energy, seemed to have taken me full circle.

A thread I had previously followed eastwards through the stories of China and India had now led me back into medieval Britain.

Perhaps that was what the Dragon was showing me.

That it isn’t contained within one land, one culture or one moment in time. The Dragon keeps appearing, in the landscape, in the heavens and in the stories we have carried with us for centuries.

And quietly beneath it all was the Moon.

It was the Moon passing between the Earth and Sun that created the solar eclipse in the first place. The Dragon’s Head and Tail mark the two points where the Moon’s path crosses the ecliptic. And it was through sensing, dreaming and following, rather than knowing where I was going, that I found my way back to this forgotten British story.

Perhaps that is the feminine thread running through this particular journey. Not another story to add to it, but the way the thread revealed itself.

I noticed.

I dreamed.

I followed.

And I discovered something I hadn’t known was there.

What eclipse stories do you know? And are there dragons or serpents hidden within the stories of your own land too?