spooky dogs

 

        To start: a collection of dog Halloween costumes provided to me by Google Images that I find almost as fascinating as this week's readings.

Anyways...

I actually thought this week's readings were some of the most interesting yet! While our previous readings forced me to think about things I already knew but took for granted. This week the readings taught me a lot of things I didn't know about how dogs have been regarded in European folklore/culture. It's easy to forget that the current cultural lens we view dogs through wasn't always around. 

    I think the modern perspective really ignores what Woods discusses in The Devil in Dog Form. Pop culture-wise, nowadays dogs are mostly seen as innocent or angelic (All Dogs Go to Heaven anyone?), but back in ye olden days dogs were often a more negative symbol, often representing (or just flat out being) the Devil. I found this particularly interesting because dogs were an important part of society then and now, especially working dogs. One can see a contrast in how a shepherd surely loved and appreciated his sheepdog, while dogs then were seen as a symbol of the underworld. I wonder to what extent the mythological connotations of dogs extended into common people's feelings about them? The examples Woods gives of large black dogs appearing as the Devil make me think that the negative connotations applied more to strange, unfamiliar dogs one would encounter, rather than one's own dogs. While I would say that the connections of black dogs with the devil have mostly died out in modern western culture, some of these stories still trickle though, like the Grim dog in Harry Potter. I wonder if the superstition of black cats existed at the same time as the black dog, and if not, when did the cat become more occult than the dog?

    But there wasn't just one symbolic view of dogs, Schweitzer-Vuellers tells stories of instances where dogs were venerated in The Holy Dog.  In the instance of this French Medieval baby-killing cult, the dog corpse was regarded as benevolent, and could help them nurse their child back to health. I think its an interesting thought of how this dog, St. Guinefort, was both viewed as holy (by the peasants), and demonic (by the church).  I like the point Rist brings up in the blog post on how the banning of this cult by the Church was not only a shutdown of an unorthodox cult but also a demonstration of how animals could not be saints. The whole anecdote of St. Guinefort makes me wonder about human tendencies to worship animals. It's far less common today, but in ancient times many pagan religions venerated animals. Is this something that humans naturally gravitate towards, but is condemned now under monotheistic religious authority? On that note, I'd really love to learn more about how dogs are viewed outside of the Western mythology. For example, what did dogs symbolize to the Aztec, or ancient China?