The Dragons of the Swiss Alps

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer - 'Itinera Alpina'

The early modern period was a time of revolution in intellectual thought which profoundly altered the European relationship with nature and human possibility. That’s certainly part of the story. It was also a time in which the Royal Society took seriously a plan for an expedition to the Alps to search for dragons, a scheme supported by Isaac Newton and prompted by the work of a Zurich based scientist called Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

In 1723 Scheuchzer, who was a correspondent of both Newton and Leibnitz, wrote a detailed study which detailed all the species of dragon which were known to exist in the Alps. He felt compelled to do this after having seen a ‘dragon stone’ in Lucerne, a type of rock which you can cut out a dragon’s head if you catch him sleeping. Scheuchzer had learnt that the technique for doing so was to first catch a dragon asleep, then scatter soporific herbs about him and cut the stone out of his head, all the while taking care not to wake him up since this will ruin the stone (luckily, in the case of the Lucerne stone a dragon had dropped it when flying past and it was picked up by a farmer called Stämpfli). This was said to cure a range of complaints including bubonic plague and nose bleeds. Having seen the empirical evidence, Scheuchzer felt that the existence of Dragons was not just common folklaw and could be logically inferred. He had reason to doubt the authenticity of the ‘dragon stone’ but decided it was genuine, firstly because a dishonest man would never have invented so simple a story, secondly because the finder was of good character, and thirdly because the stone could cure simple haemorrhages.

Scheuchzer set about collecting witness reports in the mountains, including that of one Johann Tinner of Frumsen, who had seen one of the beasts:

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

A Johann Bueler of Sennwald reported seeing " an enormous black beast," standing on four legs, and having a crest six inches long on its head. Another credible testimony came from Christopher Schorer, Prefect of Lucerne, who reported that:

‘In the year 1649, I was admiring the beauty of the sky by night, when I saw a bright and shining dragon issue from a large cave in the moutain commonly called Pilatus, and fly about with rapidly flapping wings. It was very big; it had a long tail ; its neck was outstretched ; its head ended with a serpent's serrated jaw. It threw out sparks as it flew, like the red-hot horse-shoe when the blacksmith hammers it. At first I imagined that what I saw was a meteor, but after observing it carefully, I perceived that it was a dragon from the nature of its movements and the structure of its limbs.’

Scheuchzer added these accounts to his detailed study in which he described several distinct subspecies of dragon. In writing this , Scheuchzer claimed that his sole objective was to create a ‘historical description of the dragons of Switzerland’. Some were ‘winged, windless, without feet and many footed’. There was also ‘one who had the body of a snake and the head of a cat’ (see the illustration on the right). Some of them had ‘bats wings’, elaborate crests and ‘two pronged tails’. One variety reached only two feet in maturity. Others were said to ‘breathe so hard as to draw in not merely air but the birds flying above them’. The best specimen, Scheuchzer reported was the ‘ginger tom’ which lived in Graubunden. 'This region' wrote Scheuchzer, 'is so rugged with so many caves that it would be strange not to find dragons there'. One of the questions puzzled over by Scheuchzer was whether the crest on the dragons was to be taken as a specific distinction or merely characteristic of the male. This curious work was printed in England in the 1690s and entitled 'Proof of the existence of dragons'. Members of the Royal Society in London paid the cost of publication.

In Scheuchzer’s defence, he is now considered one of the founders of paleobiology. While he believed in dragons he also spoke out vehemently against the practice of burning witches which was then very widespread. Witches and other minions of the devil were apparently all over the Alps, spreading plague, manipulating the wind and making the glaciers expand. A series of witch trials in Swiss cities were held and hundreds of suspects were tortured and executed. They were said to be spreading the plague using a potion ‘made of the flesh of a hanged person, the grease of the dead, cow’s blood, pigs’ blood and arsenic’.

These and other examples serve to remind us that the early modern period was as much a time of superstition and magic as the medieval period; in fact probably more so.

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