Death and the Dog - What the Dog Knows - page 15

The canister came with a burgundy velvet sack with a small rainbow bridge embroidered on
it. The canister still sits in my great-grandfather's oak secretary. I don't know what we're wait-
ing for. We should probably carry his ashes to a barren place.
• • •
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
—Homer, the Iliad
Westerners haven't been nearly as kind to canids as the Zoroastrians were, although we should
have been deeply grateful to the female wolf who fed and raised Romulus and Remus so they
could found Rome, our version of civilization. In the Western world, we balk at the notion
of including dogs in our religious life. We're genuinely repulsed by the idea of dogs eating
people. Homer used dogs' attraction to bodies to open the Iliad , the perfect frame for horror
and chaos.
The large, evil, and almost always dark dog lurks on the edge of Western civilization:
Hecate, the Helenic goddess of ghosts and witchcraft, had a black bitch familiar at her side.
Greeks used to sacrifice black puppies to Hecate; dogs were a favorite sacrifice in a number of
religions. Cerberus, the three-headed monster dog, let new spirits enter the realm of the dead,
though no one could leave. Gamr, a bloodstained watchdog of Norse mythology who looks
a lot like a German shepherd, guarded the gate to the underworld where evilgoers went. The
C ŵ n Annwn, Welsh spectral dogs, foretold death.
At least those polytheistic religions allowed dogs to play a variety of roles—they might
devour bodies, but they were guardians and guides, too. Homer may have opened the Iliad
with ravening dogs, but in the Odyssey , he used his hero's dying dog as a symbol of faithful-
ness: Argos was the only being to recognize Odysseus when he returned from his travels after
a twenty-year absence. Those diverse dog roles didn't carry over to monotheism. Historian
Sophia Menache of the University of Haifa posits that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim reli-
gions were threatened by dogs and the “warm ties” people had to them. Dogs had a central
role in agrarian life; they reminded monotheists of the ever-present competition of animal-
worshipping cults. So when we ask questions about organized religion and we ask, “Yes, but
was it good for the dogs?” the answer is no. The New Testament's thirty-two mentions of
dogs are mostly negative. Though the antipathies and insecurities of the three religions have