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‘A Dwelling Place for Dragons’: Wild Places in Mythology and Folklore

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The Psychology of Religion and Place

Abstract

This Chapter will examine the concept of the Wilderness as a cross-cultural milieu traditionally associated with supernatural encounters. ‘Wilderness’ covers a range of settings across both natural and human environments. Despite ecological variability, a unifying feature of Wilderness is its alterity, concretized in its portrayal as the domain of powerful and ambiguous otherworldly forces. Drawing on mythology, folklore and ethnographic sources, I will explore the character of the Wilderness as a liminal and unstable physical landscape and a spatial reality both potentially transformative and threatening.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Xuanzang’s account was the basis for the sixteenth-century Folklore compendium ‘Journey to the West’ by Wu Ch’êng-ên, later immortalized in the 1970s TV series ‘Monkey’.

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  1. University College London, London, UK

    Nell Aubrey

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  1. Nell Aubrey
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  1. School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Victor Counted

  2. School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Fraser Watts

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Aubrey, N. (2019). ‘A Dwelling Place for Dragons’: Wild Places in Mythology and Folklore. In: Counted, V., Watts, F. (eds) The Psychology of Religion and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28848-8_8

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