Lac caninum
Anhang 2
When Diogenes died a "dog" (symbol of
cynicism) was carved on his thombstone . The dog symbol has the
"positive" hilarious connotation of the koan of "the dog trying
to catch his own tail" (also symbolic of Diogenes
"enlightenment") ; and not the "negative" or
"pessimistic" one of "the angry dirty barking dogs" that
most neophytes adjudicate to the cynics because of Anthistenes attitude towards
life.
Sir Walter Scott, The lay of the
last minstrel, Canto VI, v.26.
Why is the death-hound of Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Hound of the Baskervilles such a vigorous archetypal beast? Conan Doyle's
inspiration was the folk tale of a phantom black dog on Dartmoor. Such beasts
recur throughout Britain, with almost every county having at least one example.
A typical reference appears in the Rev Worthington-Smith's book on the folklore
of Dunstable, published in 1910:
'Another belief is that there are ghostly black
dogs, the size of large retrievers, about the fields at night, that these dogs
are generally near gates and stiles, and are of such a forbidding aspect that
no one dare venture to pass
them, and that it means death to shout at them.
In some places the spectral dog is named "Shuck" and is said to be
headless.'
It is interesting that Worthington-Smith refers
to the name 'Shuck'. I doubt that this is a name normally used in Dunstable, as
this is normally associated with Norfolk, where the reference is more typically
to 'Old Shuck'.
In Suffolk the black dog becomes 'Old Shock'
(both these probably derive from the Old English scucca, meaning 'demon').
Myth
the mythology of dogs shows they have been not
only man's close companions for many millennia, but also providing a very
specific spiritual guardianship.
Guardian hounds occur widely in shamanic
Otherworldly lore. The Altaic shaman encounters a dog that guards the
underworld realm of Erlik Khan. When the Yukaghir shaman follows the road to
the kingdom of shadows,
he finds an old woman's house guarded by a
barking dog. In Koryak shamanism the entrance to the land of the dead is
guarded by dogs. A dog with bared teeth guards the entrance to the undersea
land of Takakapsaluk,
Mother of the Sea Beasts, in Eskimo shamanism. The
custom of burying a dog and the skin of a favourite reindeer with a dead man
was still current among Ugrian people of Siberia earlier this century.
The notion of dogs as spiritual guardians fits
the separate folklore of 'Church Grims'. These perhaps derive from the belief
that the first person to be buried in a churchyard would have to guard any
subsequent inhumed souls. Baring-Gould put forward the belief that it was the
custom to sacrifice a dog, specifically one without a single white hair, in the
foundations of the church - although direct evidence is lacking. In Scandinavia
a similar practice more commonly use a lamb, but the creature was still known
as the Kirkogrim.
The dog is the oldest domestic animal,
traceable to the paleolithic, since when dogs have enjoyed a peculiarly close
relationship with humans, sharing their hearths at night and guarding the home,
working during the day as sheepdogs or hunters. This close symbiotic
relationship with people is reflected in the early literature where dogs seem
to have clear connections with the Otherworld. But this is not unique to hounds
as many species from bulls, boars, to owls and cuckoos have clear associations
with deities which lead to ritual veneration. However, archaeological evidence
and mythology brings recurring examples of a very specific role for dogs. They
are the 'psycopomps', the guides on the paths to the Otherworld, the guardians
of the 'liminal' zone at the boundaries of the worlds.
A clear example from British archaeology is two
dogs found with an impressive alignment of wooden posts at the Flag Fen
neolithic/bronze age complex near Peterborough. These animals seem to have been
ritually killed to
serve as spirit-guardians, at a site which was
undoubtedly a major focus for funereal rituals over many centuries. At Caldicot
in Gwent another bronze age site provides evidence for a dog buried in a manner
which strongly suggests a role as ritual guardian.
During the bronze age few of the population
were buried. We can only speculate on the funerary rituals - did they involve
funeral fires by the side of major rivers, as with hindus today in India? Or
did they involve excarnation, such as the infamous 'Towers of Silence' of the
Parsis in India, that slowly-dying race who hark back to before all the major
religions of that continent? If excarnation was part of the bronze age death
rites, then it may have
been part of everyday life to see dogs and
other scavengers gnawing on human corpses, reducing most of the bones to small
fragments in the process. Such a grisly sight would reinforce the dog as the
species most suited to act
as psychopomp.
Bear in mind also that most pre-technological
cultures believe that the 'essence' of the food is absorbed by the person
eating it. So a dog eating a corpse would be considered to be takingin not only
the flesh but also the 'soul'.
As a slight digression, pigs and boars are also
notable consumers of carrion - could this be why the boar is the sacred animal
of Freya, who also has strong associations with the battle-slain dead? It might
also explain the 'Tombs
of the eagles' in Orkney, so-called because the
human remains were accompanied by the bones of large raptors - especially those
species most given to scavenging. If burial in a chamber tomb was reserved for
the lite, and the common funereal customs involved excarnation, then it would
be normal belief to see the body and soul of the dead being consumed and
carried skyward by sea eagles.
In north African countries the dog is less
prevalent as scavenger than the jackal. In ancient Egypt the dog- or
jackal-headed Anubis is both psychopomp and divine embalmer. His cult is older
than that of Osiris, and can be traced
to the Sumerian goddess Bau who was also
dog-headed. Her name may well be onomatopoeic, little removed from 'bow-wow'. Anubis
himself, written in early heiroglyphs as 'An-pu', may be a direct continuation
of Bau's father, the Sumerian god An.
In the early stages of Egyptian religion, at least,
Anubis was linked with the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, known in
most mythologies throughout the world as the 'Dog Star' and the central
consideration of the
Egyptian calendar - although Sirius was later
most closely linked with Isis, of course. Incidentally, this is where our
expression 'dog days' originated: the hot, parched season that followed the
heliacal rising of Sirius coinciding with the Nile's annual inundation of the
valley.
When Anubis mythology travelled to pre-Classical
Greece, where there are no jackals, the wolf fitted the role just as well. A
wolf-headed man, the prototype of the werewolves of subsequent folk belief, was
begot. I can do no
more here than draw attention to Nigel
Jackson's treatment of this theme in a recent issue of The ley hunter and to
Angela Carter's treatment of this perennial Gothik horror in her short story
which was transformed into the
film Company of wolves. Temples to Lycian
Apollo, that is 'wolfish Apollo', were not rare in Classical Greece. Indeed,
Aristotle's famous school was in the grounds of the Lycian Apollo's temple in
Athens.
Our word 'Lyceum' has its origins, therefore,
with this lupine god. More academically, Apollo bore the epithet 'Lykegenes',
meaning 'born from the she-wolf' and it was said that his mother Leto had been
escorted from the Hyperboreans (that is, a distinctly Otherworldy race) by
wolves at the time of her labour. It was as a wolf that Apollo abducted the
maiden Cyrene, although a further epithet was 'Lykoktones', meaning 'one who
slew the wolf'. Undoubtedly, the wolf was Apollo's special animal and a fitting
sacrificial victim in his worship.
Dogs were closely linked with the Greek goddess
Hecate (along with lions and horses). Indeed, at times she was depicted as
dog-headed and was certainly linked to the Dog Star, Sirius. Her pet was the
dog Cerberus (= Kerberos) who is the watchdog at the entrance to Hades. Usually
depicted as triple-headed (a common trait to denote especial importance) he was
originally 50-headed, a topic which I shall return to. The Dorian Greeks
explicitly
associated Cerebos with Anubis in his role as
psychopomp and Robert Graves (The Greek myths) writes that Cerebos '. . . seems
to have been originally the Death-goddess Hecate . . .'
A dog as companion on the road to the
Otherworld occurs explicitly in one of the tales in that vast hindu epic the
Mahabharata. Yudhishthira, the King of Pandavas, with his five brothers, their
joint wife and a dog set off on a rambling journey which took them to the
sacred 'omphalos' of the hindus, Mount Meru. The companions die one-by-one of
exhaustion but Yudhishthira survives and 'enters heaven in his mortal body, not
having tasted death'.
The dog too comes with him, and is revealed to
be Dharma (the Law) in disguise.
A very similar tale survives from Iran,
although the only significant difference is that the dog is replaced by the
angel Surush. It seems clear that both these tales hark back to a common
ancestor which must be very ancient
indeed. Further parallels can be detected in
the Book of Enoch and in the New World legends of Quetzalcoutl, which suggest
an exceptionally early origin (although it has to be said that the dog
companion does not feature in
these two versions). A very degraded version of
the legend survives in an Albanian fairy tale (it would be too long-winded to
specify the just-detectable links). In it we can recognise the Dharma Dog. A
king's daughter offers
to go to war in her father's place and asks his
blessing. 'The king procured three male suits and gave her his blessing, and
this blessing changed into a little dog and went with the princess.' Going to
war may not be the
same as going directly to the Otherworld, but
the gender-bending surrogate has curiously shamanic overtones.
Celtic canines
Coming closer to home, both geographically and
temporally: 'Faunal remains, iconography (mainly of the Romano-Celtic period)
and vernacular Celtic literature all indicate that there were many different
types of Celtic dog,
from the deer-hound so splendidly represented
at the Lydney sanctuary to small terriers and lapdogs. . . . Greyhounds are
specifically mentioned in the early Welsh literature: they formed some of the
many gifts presented to
Pwyll by Arawn, lord of the Otherworld, in the
First Branch of the Mabinogi. Two greyhounds accompany Culhwch, when he sets
out in all his splendour to visit his cousin Arthur, in 'Culhwch and Olwen.'
The guardianship aspect of dogs in Celtic life
is amply illustrated by one of the stories of the early life of C Chulainn. In
early Ireland the prefix 'Cu' (Hound of) was frequently used in Celtic names of
heroes, to denote warrior status. But the most famous so named - Cu Chulainn,
the Hound of Culann - had a very special and close relationship with dogs. As a
young boy, he is called Stanta, but he kills the huge guard dog of Culann the
smith and, as a penance, he takes the dog's place and also his name. This
affinity with dogs recurs in the adult life of Cu Chulainn: he has a geis (a
bond or taboo) on him that he must never eat hound-flesh. But he is offered
dogmeat at a feast,
and there is another geis on him never to
refuse hospitality. He breaks the first rule and eats the meat; this act
weakens the hero's supernatural strength and leads ultimately to his death. The
episode is interesting, since it implies that dog meat was a traditional food
for the early Celts; this is borne out by the archaeology of Iron Age Europe,
where dog remains are part of food refuse on settlement sites. But at the same
time, dog ritual was very prominent
in Britain and Gaul, and there is evidence that
dogs fulfilled a special role in Celtic religion.
There is evidence that dogs were eaten, both on
habitation sites and as part of ritual feasting, as at the sanctuary of Gournay
(Oise, northern France). Dog pelts were also frequently utilised as the Roman
writer Diodorus Siculus remarks of the Celts: 'When dining, they sit not on
chairs but on the earth, strewing beneath them the skins of wolves or dogs'. More
macabrely still, the ninth century commentator Cormac comments on a divination
rite known
as Imbas Forosnai, which involved foretelling
the future by chewing on the flesh of pigs, dogs or cats - a custom which,
presumably, dates back to well before the Anglo-Saxon era.
In the Roman period the remains of dogs seem to
be found frequently in association with wells. At the Romano-British town of
Caerwent, the tribal capital of the Silures, five dog skulls were placed in a
well. Numerous dogs
were cast into a deep well associated with the
shrine of the first century CE at Muntham Court (Sussex). The remains of
sixteen dogs, together with a complete Samian bowl, were placed in a
second-century well at Staines
near London. 'It is very probable that dogs
were linked with some chthonic or underworld ritual.'
As scavengers and carrion-eaters, dogs came to
be associated with death, in both the classical and Celtic religious
traditions. Some of the ritual treatment of dogs in Gaul and Britain may point
to this aspect of their symbolism.
The rich iconography of the Gundestrop cauldron
also shows a a dog underneath the cauldron in which a man or child is being
immersed head-first - usually considered to be a sacrificial act.
Hunting hounds
There is a strong hint in the Irish and Welsh
vernacular literature of a close correlation between hunter/hunted and the
divine world. Dogs used in the hunt and this may have been the origin of their
symbolic link with death.
Hunted animals were sometimes perceived as
messengers of the Otherworld powers, the means of bringing living humans,
either directly or indirectly, to the underworld. The hunted creature itself
may be enchanted or possess magical qualities: it may be a transformed human or
a god in zoomorphic form.
In 'Pwyll', Arawn, king of the underworld, has
a pack of shining white, red-eared dogs, their colouring proclaiming their
Otherworld origins. The Cwn Annwn or Hounds of Annwn were death omens,
described in an early Welsh poem as small, speckled and greyish-red, chained
and led by a black-horned figure. These were ghost dogs which appeared only at
night to foretell death, sent from Annwn to seek out corpses and human souls.
In the Welsh 'Tale of Culhwch and Olwen',
Culhwych's quest for the hand of Olwen is associated with a number of tasks
connected with supernatural dogs: one of his 'labours' is to seek the two
whelps of a great bitch called Rhymni, who is in the shape of a she-wolf and
extraordinarily swift. (Perhaps it is worth noting that Pliny refers to
cross-breeding wolves with dogs to obtain exceptionally fierce war dogs. Could
such hybrids be occurring in
the wild and giving rise to reports of
menacing, oversize hounds?)
Near one of the forts at Cashlie in the
Highlands is a large standing stone which resembles the head of a dog. It is
known as Bhacain (Gaelic for 'dog stake') and locals say it is the stake where
Fionn MacCummail's warriors
tethered their hunting dogs when they returned
from the chase. Fionn was a hero god-king of the Dark Ages who occurs in both
Scottish and Irish lore.
Finnish
canines
The Finnish epics known as the Kalevala contain
their own dog-lore. Bear in mind that the Finno-Ugaric cultures are,
originally, quite separate from Indo-European ones (although no doubt by the
medieval period at least some intermingling of ideas had taken place in the
border areas, such as Scandinavia.
Runo XLVI (lines 81-94) of the Kalevala tells
how Louhi, the Crone of the northern wasteland that has more than a passing
resemblance to the realm of the dead, awakens the bear (known by such nicknames
as Small-eye,
Broad-nose, Otso) from hibernation to ravage V
inminen's herds. In response, Vinminen gets his brother, the smith Ilmarinen,
to forge him a spear. He asks the goddess Mielikki, the mistress of the
forests, to bind her dogs
securely and keep her whelps in order. In the
context, this is understood to be a request for protection from the wolves.
Then Vinminen:
Heard his dog barking loudly,
And the hound was fiercely baying
Just beside the Small-eye's dwelling,
In the pathway of the Broad-nose;
And he spoke the words which follow:
'First I thought it was a cuckoo,
Thought I heard a love-bird singing;
But no cuckoo there is calling,
and no love-bird there is singing,
But it is my dog that's baying,
Here my faithful hound awaits me,
At the door of Otso's dwelling,
At the handsome hero's homestead!
One assumes it reads much less like doggerel in
the original Finnish. Vinminen then kills the bear and sings its praises in a
manner typical of Finno-Ugarian bear rites. While this may, superficially, seem
a digression, it should
be emphasised that the Great Bear of these
legends is inextricably woven into the World Tree mythos and should be seen,
among other things, as the stellar constellation of the Bear (the Plough)
circling about the Pole Star
(stellar pivot of the axis mundi). I suspect
the confusion with the cuckoo, another supremely 'Otherworldly' creature in
folklore, is intended to emphasise the mythical importance of the events.
Furthermore, the same bear hunting rituals link
in closely with 'ritual' pathways.
A Finnish bear-hunting song goes:
Go pointing the path
and blazing the trail
marking the sides of the path
straightening planks over swamps;
carve notches along the lands
slash a trail upon the slopes
that this fool may feel the way
this utter stranger may know!
The significance
of this will be brought into focus later.
Although the Kalevala derives from traditions
quite separate to Celtic Scandinavia and Europe, it is interesting that one of
the mischievous protagonists, Kullervo, is sent to the house of Ilmarinen, the
divine smith. In one
variant of the tale is is said that he was
'sent to Estonia to bark under the fence . . . three years he barked at the
smith'. This, of course, has curious parallels with the life of C Chulainn,
described above.
In another episode, Kullervo returns home after
a long absence and unknowingly seduces his sister. She drowns herself but
Kullervo is persuaded to go off to war. After much derring-do he comes back
home again but finds
all his family have died. He weeps over the
grave of his mother.
Her voice is heard:
And beneath the mound made answer:
'Still there lives the black dog, Musti,
Go with him into the forest,
At thy side let him attend thee.'
Kullervo takes the dog into the forest but,
when he comes to the place where he dishonoured his sister, despair overcomes
him and he throws himself on his own sword. The presence of the dog in this
episode seems quite
incidental - unless we look upon him as a
guardian of the road to the dead.
Friar Tuck's 50 hounds
As Alby Stone has discussed in his article on
hellhounds in this issue, in the Old English Passion of St Christopher the
saint is described thus: 'He was of the race of mankind who are half hound'. The
OE Martyrology says
he was of 'The nation where men have the head
of a dog and from the country where men devour each other'. In this work St
Christopher himself is portrayed in this way: 'He had the head of a hound, and
his locks were
extremely long, and his eyes shone as bright as
the morning star, and his teeth were as sharp as a boar's tusks.' This version
of the story is peculiarly English, needless to say.
If this sounds decidedly odd then moving on a
few centuries to the Robin Hood legend associated with Fountain Dale,
Nottinghamshire and Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire provides an intriguing parallel.
At one point Friar Tuck agrees to carry Robin Hood across a moat to an island
(i.e. act as psychopomp to the Otherworld) on the understanding that Robin will
return the favour on the return journey. However, Robin dumps Friar Tuck in the
water
half-way back. A fight ensues, and Robin Hood
starts to get the better of his adversary who blows his horn which summons 50
hounds. Robin Hood blows his horn, in response to which 50 bowmen appear and
shoot the dogs.
In the introduction to the tale, Friar Tuck is
introduced as Master of the Hounds.
St Christopher, of course, lived by a ford and
made a name for himself by carrying an incognito JC across a river. The
overlaps are clear, especially the Old English variants where St Christopher is
also linked to dogs.
The emphasis on crossing a watery boundary with
the Otherworld confirms the 'liminality' of the symbolism and make the -
apparently unexpected - connections with canines seem quite predictable.
But why 50 hounds? Consider that the earliest
written story in the world, the Saga of Gilgamesh, makes frequent references to
the king-priest Gilgamesh wearing armour that weights 50 minas and having 50
companions. Slightly later Sumerian legends talk of '50 great gods' (and give
Marduk, the greatest of their gods, 50 different names, to emphasise his
importance), a symbolic mace with 50 heads and 50 heroes in a boat. The early
Greek legends of the Argonauts sailing off also
feature a crew of 50.
In later Greek myths, the goddess Artemis sets
the hounds of hell upon Actaeon. After this little digression on numerology,
perhaps it will not surprise you that there were 50 of these beasts. As
mentioned briefly above,
Cerebos, the hellhound with guardianship of
Hades itself, started his mythical life with 50 heads. Clearly, 50 was a
'magical' number in early middle eastern myth, gradually losing its importance
in the Classical Greek legends.
But why should this carry through to medieval
Sherwood Forest? Well, it is possible that the tales of Artemis and Acteon were
known to a medieval storyteller and were 'borrowed'. Interesting, nevertheless,
that the psychopompic symbolism remains intact.
The hounds of northern mythology
Back to our 'local' Anglo-Saxons . In Beowulf
the monster Grendel and his mother are variously described as werhdo,
heorowearh, brimwulf and grundwyrgenne, all of which imply a lupine nature. Grendel
is also called a scucca ('demon') which is the source of the second part of the
folklore name for phantom black dogs, Black Shuck. The general idea is that the
Grendel family represent canine or lupine demons who haunt fenland and marshes;
but they also have a human aspect, which connects them to the old Germanic idea
of outlawry, and to the werewolf.
Behind the northern myths of Otherworldly dogs
there are numerous mythological reference 'hellhounds' in Greek, Indic, Celtic,
Germanic, Latin, Armenian and Iranian sources. These all suggest that there was
a pair of Otherworldly dogs, 'one being the dog of life and the other the dog
of death, serving to carry off one about to die, while the former can restore
him or her to life' [18]. In the Armenian this is most clear as one hound is
named Spitak, 'the White', and the other the hound of death, Siaw, 'the Black'.
Hellhounds almost abound in the northern myths
- such dogs are mentioned in Baldrs Draumar, Voluspa, Gylfaginning, Grimnismal,
Skirnismal and Fjolsvinnsmal. The last-named poem tells of Odin's two hounds
who keep ceaseless watch - one sleeps by day and the other by night - outside
the Otherworldly fortress-hall Lyfjaberg ('mount of healing') of Mengloth,
thought by some to be another name for Freyja (although she could be Hel
herself,
in a beneficent aspect, or a minor goddess of
the dead).
In Fjolsvinnsmal these hounds are named:
Tell me Fjolsvithr
this I want to ask
and I wish to know:
how the dogs are named,
who greedily roam
before the grounds [i.e. of Mengloth's hall]
One is called Gifr,
and the other Geri,
if you want to know that;
very ancient guards
and they keep guard
until the gods are torn apart.
The names of these hounds, Gifr and Geri, are
closely linked to words meaning 'greedy', understood to mean hungry for the
flesh of the dead. In various Indo-European texts (Iliad; Vedevdat) there are
references to dogs
devouring corpses (no doubt harking to a period
when excarnation was a preliminary funerary process). There is a formulaic
curse in the Old Norse sagas which translates: 'Dogs shall gnaw you in Hel.'
In the poem Baldrs Draumar the god Baldr has
bad dreams, so Odin rides down to Hiflhel on old Sleipnir, to find out what
they mean.
Up rose Odin, the ancient gautr,
and on Sleipnir laid the saddle.
Downward he rode to Nifhel;
he met a hound that came from Hel.
It was bloody about the breast,
and at the Father of Spells
he howled long. Forward rode Odin,
the earth-way thundered,
at last he came to the house of Hel.
In the tenth century Scandinavian poems Eirksml
and Hakonarmal a dead king is described as entering the hall of Odin after his
last battle. When he arrives at Valhalla he is welcomed by valkyries, one of
whom greets the newcomer with a horn of ale. Such scenes are depicted on
several stone sculptures, one of which from Alskog (Gotland) appears to show a
stylised hall, which bears some resemblance to a burial mound and a dog which
'could be the dog mentioned in mythological
poems as guarding the road to the land of the dead.'
Is this the hound which is the precursor of the
phantom guardians of gates and stiles which abound in our country's folklore?
The idea of entering into the earth on an
Otherworldly journey also occurs in British folklore and the various tales of
Piper's Holes. Here a man, usually a piper but sometimes a fiddler, enters an
underground passage way.
Those above ground follow his progress by
listening for his music but suddenly all goes quite. Intriguingly, in the tales
the man seems to invariably be accompanied by a dog. The dog emerges from the
entrance, desperately frightened (or badly burned, in some versions) but the
man is never seen again. Although never explicitly tied to a 'hollow hill'
legend, this folk tale motif seems to have much in common with the even-more
common notions
of barrows being hollow and of underground
tunnels of improbable length.
Going walkies in the liminal lands
From the Poetic Edda we get the impression of
the Otherworld divided into separate realms, but with plenty of opportunity to
pass from one to the other, and the world of humankind only one among nine. We
are led to think
of roads, tracks and waterways occupied by many
travellers, moving in ships, on horseback, by wagons and sledges, or on foot. Such
a picture, incidentally, is borne out by many travelling figures on foot or in
vehicles shown
on a ninth century tapestry recovered from the
Oseberg ship burial in southern Norway, which appears to show supernatural
characters in the restored section [23].
This insistence on the roads and rivers of the
Otherworld might imply that it was important for men as well as the gods to
possess knowledge of entry, and of routes to take when travelling to the land
of the dead or down into
the underworld in search of wisdom.
Quite why the Norse literature considers
journeying to the underworld to be important is never explicitly stated. It is
a theme which recurs in various sagas, as Davidson had revealed in an early
work, The road to Hel. Clearly,
the origins of these supernatural tracks are
linked with the interior journeys of shaman in earlier times. '. . . in certain
accounts the emphasis on supernatural wisdom, through which the journey may be
made, and on the
immaterial gifts to be gained through it, is
marked.' Furthermore, 'we are faced with a way which is not trod by the dead
alone, but which the living also may follow. The land of the dead according to
Norse heathen thought
is not a wholly undiscovered country, and from
it the traveller who has learned the old wisdom aright may return to the world
of men.'
Elsewhere in The road to Hel we are told that
dog guardians are one of several characteristic features of the journey. Analogously,
'The watchman on the mound, too, is a familiar figure; can it be because the
figure sitting on
the howe symbolises communication between the
living and the dead . . . ?' As we have seen, it might be better to see the dog
as the better guardian and symbol of the liminal status of the barrow.
The essence of the hellhound is his
intermediary position - at the border of this world and next, between life and
death, hope and fear, and also (given its pairing with the dog of life) between
good and evil. For this role, the dog
is perfectly suited, being the domestic species
par excellence, the tamed carnivore who stands midway between animal and human,
savagery and civilization, nature and culture.
'The growl of the hellhound is yet another
expression of this liminal position, for the growl is a halfway station between
articulate speech and silence. It is a speech filled with emotion and power,
but utterly lacking in reason.
Like death itself, the hellhound speaks, but
does not listen; acts, but never reflects or reconsiders. Driven by hunger and
greed, he is insatiable and his growl is eternal in duration. In the last
analysis, the hellhound is the
moment of death, the great crossing over, the
ultimate turning point.'
Which takes us straight back to the folklore of
sable curs and - as detailed in my 'Black dogs in folklore' article elsewhere
in this issue - confirms their close association with stiles and gateways such
as the Rev Worthington-Smith's perceptive remarks of 1910 state and Theo
Brown's assertions about their natural tendency to be seen on roads, plus Janet
and Colin Bord's research into phantom dogs on leys.
Few myths have such world-wide parallels. We
are left with the distinct impression that dogs have been protecting the ways
to the Otherworld back into the origins of human beliefs.