r, did not really begin to develop until an
ageing king refused to be slain, and called upon the Great Mother, as
the giver of life, to rejuvenate him. Her only elixir was human blood;
and to obtain it she was compelled to make a human sacrifice. Her
murderous act led to her being compared with and ultimately identified
with a man-slaying lioness or a cobra. The story of the slaying of the
dragon is a much distorted rumour of this incident; and in the process
of elaboration the incidents were subjected to every kind of
interpretation and also confusion with the legendary account of the
conflict between Horus and Set.

When a substitute was obtained to replace the blood the slaying of a
human victim was no longer logically necessary: but an explanation had
to be found for the persistence of this incident in the story. Mankind
(no longer a mere individual human sacrifice) had become sinful and
rebellious (the act of rebellion being complaints that the king or god
was growing old) and had to be destroyed as a punishment for this
treason. The Great Mother continued to act as the avenger of the king or
god. But the enemies of the god were also punished by Horus in the
legend of Horus and Set. The two stories hence became confused the one
with the other. The king Horus took the place of the Great Mother as the
avenger of the gods. As she was identified with the moon, he became the
Sun-god, and assumed many of the Great Mother's attributes, and also
became her son. In the further development of the myth, when the Sun-god
had completely usurped his mother's place, the infamy of her deeds of
destruction seems to have led to her being confused with the rebellious
men who were now called the followers of Set, Horus's enemy. Thus an
evil dragon emerged from this blend of the attributes of the Great
Mother and Set. This is the Babylonian Tiamat. From the amazingly
complex jumble of this tissue of confusion all the incidents of the
dragon-myth were derived.

When attributes of the Water-god or his enemy became assimilated with
those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with
which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and
collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the
cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent,
the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the
life-destroying powers of water, and composite monsters o