The Bible

The seven-headed red dragon and the Beast, here in the flames of Hell, are according to the Book of Revelation the harbingers of the End of Times. The Bible associates reptiles with an intrinsically evil image, from Genesis, which makes the serpent an evil partner, to the Apocalypse. If the dragon has so long been the perfect embodiment of the enemy, a true force of evil, it is because of the biblical tradition: to defeat it is to triumph over the Devil, in the world or within oneself (like Eustace, changed into a dragon before repenting, in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Trafficker).