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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
Dragons exist. Let us begin with the effort of imagination necessary to make that assertion plausible. Let us entertain the idea that never having seen a dragon may reflect only narrowness of experience. Others have, if not encountered the beast, at least come close to doing so. Here is the opening of a paper by the anthropologist Dan Sperber, appropriately entitled ‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’. It takes the form of a quotation from his field diary:
[Dorze, Southern Ethiopia]
Sunday 24 viii 69
Saturday morning old Filate came to see me in a state of great excitement: ‘Three times I came to see you, and you weren't there!…Do you want to do something?…If you do it, God will be pleased, the Government will be pleased. So?’
‘Well, if it is a good thing and I can do it, I shall do it.’
‘I have talked to no one about it: will you kill it?’
‘Kill? Kill what?’
‘Its heart is made of gold, it has one horn on the nape of its neck.
It is golden all over. It does not live far, two days' walk at most. If you kill it, you will become a great man!’
And so on…It turns out Filate wants me to kill a dragon. He is to come back this afternoon with someone who has seen it, and they will tell me more…
Filate did not return – to the anthropologist's embarrassed relief.
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