Dogs and The Dead
"You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you they will be there long before any of us."
-Robert Louis Stevenson
I.
This morning a dream woke me up; one of those naturalistic dreams in which everything seems exactly like the waking world. My shirts hung on their hangers on the opposite wall, the sun flashed brightly from the window to my left, just like it always does.
But something was very different from the waking world: the huge, wolfish, gray-furred, mummified dog looking into my eyes. Like those ancient rumpled corpses preserved for millennia in Egyptian pyramids, or accidentally cured like leather by the tannins of a European bog, he was slightly shrunken by the absence of long-dessicated muscles and organs, and curiously flattened lengthwise like a silhouette, as if some weight had been laid on on his side after burial. This reshaping had exaggerated his long lupine skull, from which yellow canine teeth bristled in dry black gums.
A vicious, morbid vision; but for some reason I wasn't afraid, or even surprised to see him. In fact he was as benign as any housepet who rouses his master for want of food, exercise, or company. And while his body was lifeless as a taxidermist's model, his great gold and black eyes – now inches from mine (for he had drawn closer as I acknowledged him, just like a real dog) – were clearly alive and full of curiosity and maybe even kindness. "Oh, hello" I said, as if all this were perfectly normal, almost expecting him to lick my face, but instead he just slowly faded away into the long-shadowed morning sunlight. I stood up and checked my alarm; it was set to go off in four minutes. Good loyal dog, I thought, he even knows my schedule.
Dreams are a window onto the mind's deep end; they are, in Jung's words, the "utterances of the unconscious." At first this visitation confused me, but as my senses returned, I remembered that I'd been researching both dogs and death for weeks. To be specific, I've been wondering why the two are so frequently associated in classical mythology. Cultures tell a lot through their symbols and myths, and when those symbols crop up in different eras, and across cultural lines, they tell us a lot about humanity in general. What does the glut of myths connecting dogs to death actually say about us?
II.
The dog is universally conflated with myths of death and the afterlife: Cerberus, a vicious three-headed dog, guarded the entrance to Hades, the Greek underworld; the Cwn Annwn – a pack of spectral dogs whose barking foretold death – watched over the entrance to the Celtic paradise; Garmr, a fierce, blood-stained dog (whose name means "rags") stood outside the gates of the Norse underworld; Persian Zoroastrians believed that dogs should be brought to view the bodies of the recently deceased because their presence banished evil energy and guided the soul toward heaven. The Chinvat bridge, the etheric bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds of Persian myth, was also said to be guarded by two fearsome, immortal dogs.
But is any of this surprising? Guarding things is, after all, one of the main reasons our ancestors domesticated the first Gray Wolf pups fifteen thousand years ago. Considering that, one might imagine that dogs would guard all sorts of important mythological locales and celestial treasures, of which the portals to the various underworlds would be just one. In fact, when it comes to guarding things
not connected to death, dragons, giants, and other strange creatures are far more popular choices than the humble dog.
For example, when Hera, queen of the Greek pantheon, trapped the nymph Io (with whom Zeus had been two-timing her) she drafted Argus Panoptes, a hundred-eyed giant, to guard the prisoner. In order to seize the Golden Fleece, Jason had to face up to its guardian, a great dragon. To possess the great cedar forest of Akkadian myth, Gilgamesh first had to slay its guardian, a lion-headed, fire-breathing giant. In other instances we find bull-headed giants, women with snakes for hair, and all shapes and sizes of monsters guarding treasures, holy weapons, prisoners, magical objects and so on. But when it comes to keeping watch over the portal between life and death, dogs have a firm monopoly.
Africa and Mesoamerica also give compelling examples of the links between dogs and the afterlife. Anubis, jackal-headed Egyptian god of the dead, was associated with mummification, judging souls, and the underworld in general. His black coloration, very rare among actual jackals, symbolized both the putrescence of necrotic flesh, and the life-giving alluvial soil of the Nile. The Anubian cult was based in Hardai, called Cynopolis ("city of the dogs") by the Greeks, who were astounded by its enormous canine cemetery.
It's easy to imagine how Egyptians connected jackals with death. Desert scavengers, jackals live in an extremely deadly environment, and their willingness to unearth and eat poorly buried human corpses may have even partially motivated ancient Egypt's complex funerary practices. But despite the jackal's sinister behavior, Egyptians did not view their protector, Anubis, as evil; he was, naturally, the somber and frightening lord of the dead, but also the just and wise moral arbitrator who presided over the judging of souls.
When the dead reached the underworld, Anubis led them to the scales of Ma'at (the goddess of truth) where their hearts would be weighed against a single feather. Ibis-headed Thoth, god of knowledge, recorded the outcome and announced the verdict. Anubis' pet, the Ammit (a horrible beast that looked like a cross between a crocodile, a hippo, and a lion) devoured the souls whose hearts were heavy with evil, but those whose hearts were lighter than a feather would be led to paradise by silent Anubis himself.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the dog also represented the afterlife. Numerous Mesoamerican cultures buried dogs with their dead, with notable examples at Teotihuacan, Kaminaljuyu, and the great Tarascan city at Huandacareo, where gravesites also included numerous dog figurines. Classic Period Maya pottery depicts dogs in the underworld, in some cases carrying torches in their mouths to guide souls on their way through the dark to the great beyond.
The name Xolotl sits at the center of a complex web of Pre-Columbian stories involving dogs and death. If much Mesoamerican myth seems contradictory, it's important to remember that the people we call "the Aztecs," were in fact a variety of different tribes who occupied roughly the same place and time. Most of the religious stories that weren't destroyed by the Mexican offices of the inquisition were transcriptions of oral storytelling: different storyteller from a different tribe, different details to the story. With that in mind, in some Aztec myths, Xolotl is a dog-headed god of lightning and death who helps usher the dead to Mictlan, the underworld. In other stories Xolotl was a huge dog so horrible and fierce that Death himself was hard pressed to kill him, though before his inevitable end Xolotl changed into maize and maguey, introducing staple crops that would later nourish the people of the world. He is also credited with reviving humanity by stealing the bones of man from grim Mictlantehcutli (the other lord of the dead, with whom Xolotl is sometimes conflated) and bringing them out of the underworld. Xolotl then, in an act of defiance and self-sacrifice worthy of prometheus, cut himself open and bled onto the skeleton of man, instantly resurrecting the vanished human race.
Xolotl is also, incedentally, the namesake of the Xoloitzcuintle, the Mexican Hairless Dog, or Perro Pelon, which figures in Latin American folk culture to this day, as a guide for the recently departed on their journey through the underworld. For his part, Mictlantecuhtli, (who was also sometimes depicted with a dog's head) was the astrological ruler of the Day Of The Dog, the tenth day of the Xiupohualli, the "20-day week" of the Aztec calendar.
IV.
All of this leads to the question: what is it about dogs? Why have people of so many cultures, separated by vast gulfs of time and space, chosen to represent the dog – and not the cat, horse, or dragonfly – as a guide and guardian of the afterlife? To answer this, we must first understand what both dogs and death "mean" to people, what they represent to us metaphorically.
No animal is more ubiquitous to human culture than
Canis Lupis Familiaris. For somewhere between fourteen and seventeen thousand years, "man's best friend" has hunted, herded, and made war alongside his master. He defended the home from predators and intruders, befriended and entertained the children, and even warmed the family bed. Loyalty, faith, and dependability are the dog's most beloved characteristics: as 19th Century humorist Josh Billings observed, "a dog is the only thing in the world that will love you more than you love yourself."
The benefits of symbiosis extend both ways too. Dogs are one of the planet's most successful apex predators, largely due to their cozy partnership with humanity. Compare the jaguar, whose global population is certainly less than 40 thousand (and declining) to the dog's likely 400 million. The relationship is so close that dog has literally been shaped by man more than probably any other living thing. Since the first Gray Wolf was domesticated in the late Stone Age, selective breeding by humans has made modern dogs
the most morphologically and behaviorally variant land mammal on earth. Who would guess that an Irish Wolfhound and a Chihuahua are genetically near-identical if we didn't call them both by the same name? In appearance and temperament, the dog is a literal product of the needs and aspirations of humanity. Our goals and values are physically written into their bodies. Long before modern gene-splicing, our ancestors were "playing god" too, engineering and shaping our old hunting rival, the Gray Wolf, into a living tool, servant, bodyguard, and companion. The domestication of dogs made Stone Age man a significantly more efficient hunter, which made the work of feeding a family far less difficult. With the wolf at his side, man was truly now the unquestioned king of the biosphere.
As for death, "the way of all flesh," it is nothing less than the unavoidable end of biological life and the mechanisms of consciousness. Death is the great question mark at the end of life, and man has always feared it deeply as an unknowable abyss. Myths of an afterlife of pleasure, abundance, and oneness with the godhead abound in all corners of the globe, though whether these arise from some kind of universally intuited psychic knowledge of the great beyond, or from an anxious need to believe that the sufferings of this world will be repaid with joys in the next, cannot be known with any certainty. In contrast, myths of an afterlife of eternal suffering, of hell itself, also haunt human culture, usually deployed in tandem with the positive-afterlife myth, in a sort of stick-and-carrot technique to enforce proper social behavior. Also notable are underworlds, like the Greek Hades, that are neither enjoyable nor unpleasant, but simply drab and slightly melancholy. The materialist believes in no afterlife, for the nature of science is to examine and measure what can be examined and measured, and keep silent about what cannot. Theories about what lies on the other side of the threshold are limited only by the thinker's imagination.
The very unknown nature of death is perhaps what frightens most; a fixed and inevitable journey into the dark. "Death," wrote Dryden, "in itself, is nothing; but we fear / To be we know not what, we know not where."
This is where the dog enters the picture. Imagine the hunter, alone in the forbidding silence of the primeval forest, "heavy with threats" as Camus says. With ten thousand years of the agricultural lifestyle behind us, it's hard to picture ourselves hunting and gathering in the trackless wilds of planet earth, but this was the primary vocation of our human ancestors for the first hundred and ninety thousand years that genetically modern humans existed, to say nothing of the countless millennia before that when our pre-human ancestors stalked prey and searched for edible plants under the African sun.
The methods of modern-day hunter-gatherers, like the pygmies of central Africa, tell us that much hunting was a communal rather than solitary activity, but it's easy to imagine humans feeling themselves to be observers and outsiders in nature. Our intelligence, which conferred our only survival advantage, also allowed us to see that we were different from the dumb and mute creatures of the forest, and thus the hunter's journey into the lonely wastes was an exercise in alienation, even if he went with his fellow men. Somehow, even then, in that golden age when we imagine him to have been one with nature, he was still an intruder. Bipedal, intelligent, hairless, blunt of tooth and soft of claw, man was far too bright not to realize how different he was from other animals, and this was the source of his fear and alienation in those lonely ghost-haunted groves of the ancient world. He did not belong there, in that strange and unknown place.
But the wolf did. The wolf belonged to those archaic empty quarters of cypress and fern, in fact as an apex predator, the empty quarters belonged to him. In the unknown and unknowable lands man traversed on the long hunt, the wolf-dog was never lost, always vigilant, always prepared, and most importantly (now that the secret code of the wolf's alpha-dog pack-bonding had been deciphered) always loyal. That reliability comforted those early hunters, camped alone in the dangerous forests and hills and deserts of the immemorial night, without a sense of smell or sight or hearing keen enough to warn them of approaching danger. And when those two legged hunters grew gray of beard and long of tooth, and the light within them fluttered and dimmed, they must have prayed for something very much like a dog to lead them through the wilderness of death, just as dogs had led them through the wilderness of life. When faced with the greatest uncertain dark wilderness of them all, namely death, who would wish for, above all things, a selfless and loyal companion whose senses are keener, footsteps faster, teeth sharper, and well of bravery deeper than his own? The dog represented a tiny fraction of a cruel and unforgiving world that had turned, inexplicably but providently, in man's favor. A gift from the heavens. How could the wolf not alter man's mind, his beliefs and myths, just as man altered the dog's body, its form and shape? And the form this alteration took was eschatological: a lifetime of sleeping better, hunting better, eating better, and living better due to the fierce protection and companionship of the wolf had taught man to see in the canine form an otherworldly protector, a psychopomp, a mystical bodyguard, a blood-sworn friend whose loyalty extends beyond the bounds of mortality. Humans, whose ability to compose, tell, and remember stories, perhaps as a way to organize data or relieve tension in their unusually powerful brains, had learned to see in the dog a guardian whose vigilance extends beyond life, and a companion whose remit is beyond death. It was only natural that the dog would feature in these stories as wished-for companion on that lonesome and unavoidable final journey into the dark.
