#get it. 'cause the early bird get the worm/wyrm

[brushstrokes-art]

i'd like to introduce you to my fun au where ghost summons the grimm troupe like, super duper early, featuring a less-explored stage of my ghost interpretation's development: the Undomesticated Wasteland Creature.

[dragon-discourse]

Vermin, Serpents, and the Wug Radical: A look at the intersection between dragons, snakes, and invertebrates.

I have spoken before on this blog about how dragons as we know them ultimately descend from snakes, with the earliest dragons being serpentine gods, monsters, and demons, and their modern depictions being the result of millennia of symbolic and cultural evolution.

I have also touched on before that when it comes to looking at, studying, and classifying dragons, I personally tend to branch out slightly from only looking at snakes, which is why I often describe dragons as fantastical serpents rather than fantastical snakes. Ancient peoples did not have a modern sense of taxonomy, and while they would often group animals together, the way they would group them together is different than how we understand modern clades.

Learning that dragons are snakes would cause many modern readers to branch out to the animals we know today to be related to snakes (reptiles, and perhaps through them then dinosaurs and birds), but it's important to keep in mind what animals the early inventors of dragons would have seen as "related" to snakes, and that takes us in a different direction. The direction of reptiles, yes, but also to amphibians and invertebrates.

I intend to go through three different categories of creatures to show how this connection has existed historically.

The first categories I would like to look at are worms and vermin. First, if we look at the words, we can connect worm to wurm and wyrm, two words which have been used historically as regional terms for dragons. Vermin traces itself back to the Latin vermis, which itself shares an etymological origin with worm. Both ultimately trace back to a PIE term, derived from the verb "to turn" that refers to creatures which crawl upon the earth, a category which includes snakes and lizards, invertebrates, and amphibians such as frogs, toads, and newts.

When people began to classify animals, worm and vermes were used most often to describe invertebrates, with Isidore of Seville giving the following categories of worms:

Worms of the Earth, including scorpions, snails, millipedes, and beetles.

Worms of the Air, which included spiders.

Worms of the Water, such as the leech.

Worms of Flesh, which accounts for the numerous bodily parasites.

Worms of Clothing, accounting for moths.Worms of Wood and Leaves, with termites filling in the former role while caterpillars and silkworms.

Additionally, bestiaries such as these would often classify worms, and all these creatures included therein, within the serpent category, a category that included creatures not necessarily because they were limbless or scaled, but because they were seen as crawling and venomous. Alternatively, worm was classed within reptiles, which was used for an assortment of egg laying creatures, including true reptiles but also frogs and newts.

As we continue with classification, we run into the Vermes class as defined by Carl Linnaeus. Here we lose the arthropods, which are all lumped into Insecta, and are left with a system used to define many soft bodied creatures, ranging from earth worms to snails to corals.

Worm and Vermin, which started out as general terms to describe crawling creatures, over time became more specific, until it mostly only included soft bodied invertebrates.

The next category I would like to look at is the Serpent, which can be traced back to the PIE verb for "to creep, crawl." Like with Worm, we're immediately drawn to an association with crawling upon the earth. This word would also become the Greek herpeton, from which we get Herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpeton itself meant "reptile" or, more specifically, "crawling creature."

Serpent was often used to describe snakes both real and imagined, with the dragon being categorized as the greatest of all serpents. But snakes aren’t the only thing this grouping included.

Already, as we saw with worm, we are seeing a term that originates as a designation for crawling things. While it would seem that Vermis and Worm became specific for invertebrates and Serpent was specific for vertebrates, we must keep in mind what I mentioned earlier, about how worms themselves were classified into the serpent category, as were venomous things in general.

Linnaeus initially classified reptiles and amphibians together within Amphibia, but it is noteworthy that within this clade he had Reptiles (turtles, lizards [which itself included salamanders and crocodiles], and frogs), Serpentes (including snakes as well as caecilians and worm lizards), and Nantes, which was a clade including lampreys, sharks and skates, sturgeons, and anglerfish. In fact, the Nantes category brings to mind the post I made [found here] about the various cultures which have connected sharks to their dragon mythology.

Finally, I am going to talk about Radical 142, or as I've seen it designated, the Wug Radical (wug being a portmanteau of Worm and Bug). The radical is depicted as 虫, and is derived from a pictogram depicting a venomous snake. The pictograms are as follows:

While the name would suggest a purely invertebrate use, the wug radical is used to generate a wide range of words relating to crawling animals, including insects, reptiles, amphibians, and shellfish.

蛇, for example, translates to "snake."

So here we have a symbol which started out as a depiction of a snake being adapted for use in crawling animals as a whole.

In Chinese, there are classifications of dragons which use this character either in place of, or in addition to, more conventional draconic characters. Dragons in Chinese are often said to be connected to scaled or armored creatures, either with dragons ruling over them, or them being considered the same "sort" of creature as the dragon.

I started this post with the intention of exploring what earlier modes of classification meant for how we see dragons today, and why it colors what animals I view as draconic. If the Dragon is the greatest of the Worms, Serpents, and Wugs, what does that mean for the crawling creatures which are not snakes?