In China the dragon is the friend one hopes for. He is, the record insists, "not a power for evil" but a giver of rain and increase, and the register of his kinds reads like a roll of benefactors: the celestial dragon "who guards the mansions of the gods and supports" them so they do not fall, the earth-dragon who cuts the courses of rivers, the treasure-dragon who keeps watch over hidden wealth. When a failed graduate carries a letter to the Dragon-king of a lake, the debt is repaid in kind years later by the king's daughter, who tells him plainly, "It was you who saved me from" her misery, and rewards the rescue with her hand. Even the terrible brother, the god of rivers who once "caused a nine-years flood", is folded into the household as a force that finally serves. This is the dragon Thompson filed as a power of good.

Our witness is Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922), whose seventh chapter gathers the water-spirits into one benevolent ministry. The dragon there is a magistrate and a rescuer, quick to punish his own erring son, quick to restore a drowned servant and stolen gifts — a scaly reptile turned civil servant of the deep, whose default posture toward mankind is help rather than harm.

The same shape surfaces far to the west, in a very different idiom. A study and translation of the Trismegistic literature (the Greek magical and Hermetic texts, gathered and rendered in 1906) preserves invocations to the Agathodaimon — the Good Daimon, a serpent-power of Egyptian cult. He is hailed as "the mighty serpent, the chief of all the" gods, the one at whose laughter "the trees bear fruit" and at whose turning the animals bring forth; a hymn salutes him — there addressed as Lord Hermes, thou benefactor — as the god "who doest good to all the world". Here the good dragon is not one benefactor among many but the beneficent principle itself, coiled at the root of things. The apparatus reaches further still, to Icelandic and other Chinese authorities that wait unread. Where the serpent is so often the adversary, what does a culture gain by making it, instead, the guardian at the door — the coiled thing you thank rather than the coiled thing you fear?