Why is the Dragon archetype often portrayed as evil, especially in fundamentalist religion?
This is the result of a distortion imposed on the original legend of the Dragon by patriarchal theologians and their duality consciousness.
Before patriarchal theology and cosmology came along it was known that there are two parts to the Primal Dragon. These two parts are the Primal Dragon's spiritual and material aspects, which manifest as the creatures Divine Mind and its bodily matrix of Divine Force ( prana, chi). When the Primal Dragon created the universe out of its own bodily matrix, its Divine Mind determined the various shapes that its Divine Force would assume when it solidified into the crystallized forms of the physical cosmos.
During the rise of the duality consciousness that drove patriarchal cosmology and theology, the two parts of the Primal Dragon were eternally separated - the Divine Mind of the Primal Dragon was extracted from its body.. At first these two parts of the Dragon were represented as amiable twin snakes or Twin Boys who worked in tandem in the creation of the universe. But then, as they became more separate from each other, they took on completely divergent and opposing forms, the most popular of which was beneficent human male hero and the evil dragon he slays. Thus, following its extraction, the Divine Mind of the Primal Dragon became personified as a righteous and "spiritual" human male hero, while the Dragon's Divine Force matrix retained its original appearance as the Dragon. Spirit and matter had thus been separated and become inimical to each other- which is impossible. Those of us with evolved intellects now know that Spirit and matter are inseparably intertwined. But this erroneous legend of the good Hero and evil Dragon continues to persist in the minds and hearts of those brainwashed by very the out-dated dualistic propaganda perpetuated by patriarchal theology. .