l and ethical aspect of the dragon's
character was also emerging.

Now that we have realized the fact of the dragon's homology with the
moon-god it is important to remember that one of the primary functions
of this deity, which later became specialized in the Egyptian god
Thoth, was the measuring of time and the keeping of records. The moon,
in fact, was the controller of accuracy, of truth, and order, and
therefore the enemy of falsehood and chaos. The identification of the
moon with Osiris, who from a dead king eventually developed into a king
of the dead, conferred upon the great Father of Waters the power to
exact from men respect for truth and order. For even if at first these
ideas were only vaguely adumbrated and not expressed in set phrases, it
must have been an incentive to good discipline when men remembered that
the record-keeper and the guardian of law and order was also the deity
upon whose tender mercies they would have to rely in the life after
death. Set, the enemy of Osiris, who is the real prototype of the evil
dragon, was the antithesis of the god of justice: he was the father of
falsehood and the symbol of chaos. He was the prototype of Satan, as
Osiris was the first definite representative of the Deity of which any
record has been preserved.

The history of the evil dragon is not merely the evolution of the devil,
but it also affords the explanation of his traditional peculiarities,
his bird-like features, his horns, his red colour, his wings and cloven
hoofs, and his tail. They are all of them the dragon's distinctive
features; and from time to time in the history of past ages we catch
glimpses of the reality of these identifications. In one of the earliest
woodcuts (Fig. 17) found in a printed book Satan is depicted as a monk
with the bird's feet of the dragon. A most interesting intermediate
phase is seen in a Chinese water-colour in the John Rylands Library, in
which the thunder-dragon is represented in a form almost exactly
reproducing that of the devil of European tradition (Fig. 16).

[Illustration: Fig. 16.--The God Of Thunder.

(From a Chinese drawing (? 17th Century) in the John Rylands Library)]

[Illustration: Fig. 17.--From Joannes de Turrecremata's "Meditationes
seu Contemplationes". _Romae: Ulrich Hau_. 1467]

Early in the Christian era, when ancient beliefs in Egypt became
disguised under a thin veneer of Christianity, the story of the conflict
between Horus and Set was convert