I am currently reading this fine tome of knowledge and I stumbled upon an interesting passage that I thought to share with you all.
So I'm reading about the Dacian spirituality.
The Dacians, like many of the peoples of the Balkan and the Italic peninsulas, honored the spirit wolf.
The Greek Lycaon, the wolfish Zeus, and the Roman Apollo Lachaeus, along with the goddess Pharonia, the mother of wolves, were all part of a long-established worship of the wolf.
In Greece, philosophic gymnasia were dedicated to Leuceos, wolf god, hence the term Lyceum.
The Romans, as is well known, believed the infants Romulus and Remus were raised by Lupa, a she-wolf.
One of the most celebrated Roman holidays was Lubricalia, Wolf Day.
The Dacians likewise glorified the wolf, but at a higher spiritual level.
According to Strabo, the name Dacia comes from Dai and Daos, both of which are very close to the Celtic Gallic word Dawai, meaning wolf people.
Legends and traditions claim that the Dacians were nicknamed wolf people, and so their land came to be referred to as Dacia.
They considered the wolf to be the lord of animals.
In their religious beliefs, the wolf was the only effective power against evil, so it was also regarded as a guardian warrior.
Because wolves lived in packs and took good care of their offspring, the animals were models of family dynamics.
Dacians considered the relationship between man and wolf so close that they believed in the transformation of man into werewolf.
The military symbols of antiquity were often animals that inspired either horror or admiration.
The Egyptians were proud of their cobra, the Greeks had the minotaur, half man and half bull, the Celts loved the boar and the Romans sported the eagle on the standage.
The wolf was a standard of the Dacians.
Dacians considered themselves to be wolf warriors and adopted a battle flag that was named Drago or Draco.
It was the demonic representation of a portable deity with three meanings.
The wolf's head symbolized the conquest of the surface of the earth.
The snake body signified underwater domination, and the wings represented the vibration of life.
The elongated part could represent the tail of a comet, since the Dacians strongly believed that any luminous celestial display would destroy their enemies.
The Dakogitian flag looked terrifying to their enemies because it projected the image of something undefeatable.
It was carried on the tip of a lance, and the open jaws of the wolf produced an eerie sound when the winds passed through it.
It was, in essence, a flying deity, believed to have the power to keep away evil spirits and protect its bearers from harm.
A flying dragon unearthed at an archaeological site in Prahova in modern Romania provides evidence that the Dacians used this symbol since the 4th century BC.
More than ten versions of the standard were chiseled five centuries later on the column of Tradian in Rome.
Most likely each tribe had its own variation of the design.
200 years after the Roman Dacian wars were commemorated on the column, many cohorts dacorum, Dacian cohorts, serving in the Roman army still proudly bore the wolf-dragon standard in their travels throughout different parts of the world.
