A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

In a wide geographical zone, and from a certain historical moment, the cosmogony (and, indeed, all other forms of “creation” and “foundation”) involved the victorious combat of a god or a mythical hero with a marine monster or a dragon (cf., for example, Indra-Vṛtra, Baal-Yam, Zeus-Typhon, etc.). It has been possible to show that a similar scenario existed among the Vedic Indians and in ancient Iran,35 though in this last case the sources are late and present the myth in strongly historicized form. And in fact the fight of the hero Thraētona against the dragon Aži Dahāka, to which the Avesta refers (Yašt 9. 145; 5. 34; 19. 92 ff.), is recounted by Firdausi as the struggle of King Farîdûn (< Frêtôn < Thraētona) against a foreign usurper, the dragon Aždâhâk, who had captured and married the two sisters of the legitimate sovereign, Jamšed (< Yima Xšaêta). Farîdûn—like Thraētona—emerges victorious, kills the dragon, and delivers (and in turn marries) the two captive princesses.