“St. George’s Dragon, which figures so promiscuously in the grandest cathedrals of the Christians, is not a whit handsomer than the Kings of Snakes, the Buddhist Nammadanam-naraya, the great Dragon. If the planetary Demon Rawho, is believed, in the popular superstition of the Cingalese, to endeavor to destroy the moon by swallowing it; and if in China and Tartary the rabble is allowed, without rebuke, to beat gongs and make fearful noises to drive the monster away from its prey during the eclipses, why should the Catholic clergy find fault, or call this superstition? Do not the country clergy in Southern France do the same, occasionally, at the appearance of comets, eclipses, and other celestial phenomena?
In 1456, when Halley’s comet made its appearance, “so tremendous was its apparition”, writes Draper, “that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III., and did not venture back for seventy-five years!”
We never heard of any Christian clergyman or Pope trying to disabuse ignorant minds of the belief that the Devil had anything to do with eclipses and comets; but we do find a Buddhist chief priest saying to an official who twitted him with this superstition: “Our Cingalese religious books teach that the eclipses of the sun and moon denote an attack of Rahu (one of the nine planets), not by a devil.”
The origin of the “Dragon” myth so prominent in the Apocalypse and Golden Legend, and of the fable about Simeon Stylites converting the Dragon, is undeniably Buddhistic and even pre-Buddhistic. It was Gautama’s pure doctrines which reclaimed to Buddhism the Cashmerians whose primitive worship was the Ophite or Serpent worship. Frankincense and flowers replaced the human sacrifices and belief in personal demons. It became the turn of Christianity to inherit the degrading superstition about devils invested with pestilential and murderous powers. The Mahavansa, oldest of the Ceylonese books, relates the story of King Covercapal (cobra-de-capello), the snake-god, who was converted to Buddhism by a holy Rahat; and it is earlier, by all odds, than the Golden Legend which tells the same of Simeon the Stylite and his Dragon.
The Logos triumphs once more over the great Dragon; Michael, the luminous archangel, chief of the Aeons, conquers Satan. It is a fact worthy of remark, that so long as the initiate kept silent “on what he knew”, he was perfectly safe. So was it in days of old, and so it is now. As soon as the Christian God, emanating forth from Silence, manifested himself as the Word or Logos, the latter became the cause of his death.
The serpent is the symbol of wisdom and eloquence, but it is likewise the symbol of destruction. “To dare, to know, to will, and be silent”, are the cardinal axioms of the kabalist. Like Apollo and other gods, Jesus is killed by his Logos; he rises again, kills him in his turn, and becomes his master. Can it be that this old symbol has, like the rest of ancient philosophical conceptions, more than one allegorical and never-suspected meaning? The coincidences are too strange to be results of mere chance.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 