Author Mark Derr opens his book How The Dog Became The Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends with an intriguing suggestion from the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime: “the dog is what we would be if we were not what we are”. In a hyper-modern Western world otherwise willfully divorced from, if not outright hostile to, the idea of continuity between animals and humans, the dog is indeed exceptional for being allowed a say in human affairs, and a rare acknowledgement that greater rewards can be conferred by working with nature rather than against it. Agreement with sentiments like the Aboriginal one noted here, and a giddy romanticizing of this fact that we can “see something of ourselves” in these creatures, have spawned countless alluring gems of memetic silliness whose resilience is striking within a culture defined by its pathological attention deficits. It is thus worth wondering how much the cult of the dog is what that term might have referred to in antiquity, or the more pernicious type of cult we can find floating in the morasses of pop culture: that is to say, a fad. Put another way: is the dog an animal that has come to be revered for other-than-human qualities, or an animal that exists mainly as a confirmation of and projection of our very human desires?
From available evidence, the dog seems to oscillate between these two statuses, sometimes being both a simple object of amusement and as something to at least be contemplated as a deity, if not worshipped as such outright. I might posit something like William Wegman’s famous photography of humanized Weimaraners as one example of this duality; the portraits gain a lot of their staying power from their whimsy and wackiness, and yet there is something uncanny and arcane about this simple placement of canine heads onto human bodies. They even manage to call to mind the theriomorphic pantheons of gods visible in ancient artworks (e.g. falcon-headed Horus or cat-headed Bastet) that preceded the anthropomorphic pantheons of classical Greece and elsewhere. Elsewhere, for another strange hybridization of human and non-human, we can look to the iconic digital portrait of the skeptically-eyed shiba inu Kabosu, the “doge” whose given name has almost been entirely buried by the sands of time: her original portrait has now been Photoshopped into thousands of increasingly perplexing spin-off memes, with the “doge” in the arms of the Mona Lisa being one of the more amusing and instructive: the probing, sly “side-eye” of the former has taken on a speculative intensity within our visual culture that rivals and succeeds the enigmatic facial expression of Leonardo’s portrait subject. Yet it only manages to fully do so via an ineffable ability to inhabit two different worlds, with its humorous effect deriving from the fusion of the realm of the familiar (‘domestic’) with that of the novel and surprising (‘wild’).
Having said all this, I believe that the key contributing factor to the reverence of dogs is their status as either literal or figurative “guardians of the threshold”: a term that appears, in this exact phrasing, in an astonishingly diverse corpus of spiritual traditions and hermetic practices spanning the globe and stretching across millennia. This is less surprising when we come to understand some basic facts of the dog’s versatility in behavior and resilience in the face of challenges to survival. For example, though the Integrated Taxonomic Information System essentially gives the dog its name – canis lupus familiaris – purely on the basis of its having integrated into the “familiar” i.e. human society, this does deny quite a bit of agency or independence to the dog, which can in fact thrive outside of said societies. As Derr suggests, dogs are paradoxical creatures in that they “share our lives more intimately than any other creature, and […] have been bred over thousands of generations to pay attention to people,” yet “at the same time they dwell in a perceptual and physical universe far different from our own.”[1]
Taken from a purely evolutionary perspective, this exceptional fluidity of lifestyle likely has its roots in the dogs’ wolf ancestors, and their own finely honed development of a distinct hunting style for every type of prey that they pursued. When Derr claims that the “wolf as dog” is one of the “most successful colonizers of the animal kingdom – second only to humans in its ability to reach and occupy nearly every terrestrial ecosystem in the globe,”[2] he inadvertently suggests one clear reason why the dog was chosen for a particular world-straddling role in archaic belief systems. Early companions of the dog must have taken notice of its fluid adaptability, to the point where assumptions arose about the dog’s existence even in realms beyond the physical / material. Indeed, the world’s esoteric lore and spiritual teaching is rife with depictions of the dog as a guardian or as a watcher of spaces in between the earthly realm and any number of different conceptions of underworld or afterlife.
With Central Asia widely assumed to be the birthplace of canis lupus familiaris, it should not be at all surprising that the dog features heavily in the region’s archaic traditions. Shamanism, particularly the Central and North Asian varieties surveyed by Mircea Eliade, frequently assigns the dog to such a “threshold guardian” role. For example, in the Koryak tradition, the underworld is guarded by dogs (in a somewhat unique conception of post-mortem “splitting”, the Koryak underworld is the residence of the “shadow” and actual human remains, while the sky is the destination of the soul). Dogs play very much the same role in geographically distant regions, namely the Americas, where similar fundamental aspects of shamanism were put into play via intense séances that repelled the incursions of evil spirits (these being either “nature spirits angered by the violation of taboos, or the souls of some of the dead”).[3] The Eskimo shaman, tasked with undergoing the ordeals that would counter this evil influence, would “dive” via trance state into the sea to confront Takánakapsâluk, the Mother of the Sea Beasts, herself acting as the “matrix of all life, upon whose good will the existences of the tribe depends.”[4] Curiously, once this arduous journey to meet Takánakapsâluk had succeeded, her sub-aquatic home was found not to be guarded by some gargantuan squid or flesh-rending shark, but by a “dog with bared teeth”. That a terrestrial creature would do the honors here, rather than an aquatic one, seems to point towards a heightened reverence for the dog’s aforementioned adaptability and persistence.
Indo-European tradition also has no shortage of dogs lurking on the liminal spaces of life and death, with behavioral profiles appropriate to living in this strange habitat. One of the most notable examples here is the death king Yama’s pair of brindle dogs described in the Rig Veda: having been the first “son of the sun” and then the first mortal, Yama now watches over his domain in the company of two beasts descended from Indra’s own dog Sarama. Though the dogs are portrayed in the Sanskrit hymn in menacing terms (i.e. “the two dark messengers of Yama with flaring nostrils wander among men, thirsting for the breath of life”), they nevertheless remain respected as the “four-eyed keepers of the path…who watch over men” rather than as embodiments of pure malevolence. This canine oversight of the afterworld seems to have been ported over to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well: Yama Dharmaraja, again appearing in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, also counts a dog-headed demon among his retinue of demon judges assigning spirits of the dead to one of the eight hot or eight cold hells.
Also within the same tradition, the Chöd practice developed by the sage Phadampa Sangye (otherwise known for founding the lesser known Shijed or “Pacifying Pain” school), contained some shamanistic elements within the larger framework of Tibetan Buddhism, and essentially demanded some of the most extreme forms of spiritual self-exposure imaginable. Specifically, the master ascetic advised aspirants to “leave studying behind you” and “go to the charnel grounds and the mountains,” in which unhospitable environments they would ritually throw open the doors of their psyche and allow demons to rip apart and devour their egos. Through such trials, these demons were initially to be treated “as if” real, then eventually to be realized as emanations of the mind and therefore empty of self-nature; not existing apart from emptiness [Śūnyatā]. Though not taking a leading role among these demonic emanations, a dog-headed goddess is often represented among the 28 theriomorphic dakinis who, during this and other similar ordeals, “appear from the ‘four directions’ of one’s own head, in order to affect a final catharsis of all false identifications.”[5] Perhaps somewhat related to all this is a ritual to avert death that involves canine remains alongside some more unpleasant elements: here the supplicant must face westwards towards the setting sun, place a dog’s tail beneath himself or herself along with a pile of excrement, then consume the latter while barking like a dog (oh, and be sure to “repeat three times”). If I should be found dead by the time this goes to print, maybe we can attribute it to my failure to warm up to this particular ritual.
While we are still considering all things unappetizing, the aforementioned environmental resilience of dogs is very likely a function of their ability to feed off of scraps and waste. This was a habit which caused humans to respect the creatures not only as custodians of good hygiene, but also – owing to their peregrinations into graveyards to feed – earned them per William Burroughs in his apocalyptic novel The Western Lands, “crossers of the threshold [italics in the original]” rather than mere “guardians” of it.[6] As with the above examples of threshold watchers, the dog as psychopomp is not at all an isolated occurrence in globally dispersed traditions, as the ancient Egyptian lore called upon by Burroughs is worlds away from, say, the esoteric Shingon [“True Word”] path blazed in Japan by the poet-monk Kōbō Daishi. In the 14th century records of Kōbō Daishi’s words and deeds carried out some six centuries earlier, his voyage to the sacred Mount Kōya is described as being accompanied by both a white and a black dog. This seems to be a minor detail at first glance, but gains more significance when we consider how the dogs’ alternating colors herald the mountain’s status as a representation of two intertwined metaphysical realms (i.e. the “diamond” and “womb” realms). Tales of supernatural dogs are scattered throughout other classics of medieval Japanese literature, sometimes with a sense of Buddhist didacticism attached and sometimes without: the Uji Shūi Monogatari collection, for example, features a white “trans-boundary” dog using his uncanny powers to save the “Chancellor of the Buddha Hall.”
In spite of all these ennobling examples, I will be the first to admit that dogs can be over-sentimentalized by their human companions to an absurd degree, with proof enough in the swelling consumer market for accelerators of anthropomorphic qualities. These take the form of, according to Bêtes de Style [Animals with Style] exhibition curators Chantal Prod’hom and Magali Moulinier, “a copious amount of improbable objects created for them, yet contrary to their needs…from famous-label cardigans to films for dogs, and to the benefit of new professional figures who are just as questionable; from the pet psychoanalyst to the canine beauty salon.”[7] Yet it is not a totally arbitrary thing that, as Aleister Crowley noticed, “[men] hear of the destruction of a city of a few thousand inhabitants with entire callousness, but then […] hear of a dog having hurt its paw [and] they feel Weltschmerz acutely.”[8] The proliferation of pointless “clothing” for dogs already well-equipped for harsh weather, and their assignment as psychopomps and familiars, both spring from the same emotional obligation to reciprocate what seems like an otherworldly devotion towards us. That devotion often seems to manifest in actions carried out without any expectation of reward, none of these more vivid and enduring to me personally than the vigils my German Shepherd dogs kept over dying family members: surely these dogs recognized that my terminally ill grandmother and brother, respectively, were not reliable sources of food, play or other stimulation, and yet they maintained an unbroken bedside presence that most humans would not maintain without the stated promise of compensation. This adoption of ritual steadfastness without anticipation of rewards has been a long-standing component of esoteric teachings; from meditation to sigilization, wherein the focus upon end result diminishes the potency of the processes that would otherwise help to realize it.
This, then, is where we find something closer to an actual deific quality being bestowed upon modern canids. Chūken Hachikō [lit. ‘faithful dog Hachiko’], the celebrated Akita dog that waited for nine years at Tokyo’s Shibuya train station for his departed master to return (he did not), and in the process taught generations of Japanese citizenry that a dog could match the most intense human displays of filial piety, deserves the designation of a heroic “threshold dweller” as much as any. If not officially accorded status as a minor deity, the “-ko” suffix in the dog’s name is in fact an honorific proclaiming him a duke, and the commemorative Hachiko statue outside of Shibuya station remains one of the most heavily trafficked meeting places in all of Japan. Unlike the dogs of Hades or Yama, the folk hero Hachiko is no longer a judge of humans’ moral progress but rather a projector of moral attributes, and thus may reflect changing attitudes towards the dog from antiquity to the industrial age, during which humans’ immense capacity for self-destruction truly comes to the fore and requires non-human sentient beings to adequately critique it. The final available photograph of the deceased Hachiko being prayed over by his extended Shibuya “family” is at once heartbreaking and uplifting, suggesting something atavistic and transcendent.
With this, we come full circle to the ”threshold” between undomesticated wilderness and the man-made, built environment. This division, perhaps more than any other we face as a species, precedes and informs our common struggle with ambiguities, “grey areas” and all phenomena resistant to categorization. It also attests vividly to the catastrophic results which arise from denying, if not actively working against, a state in which something other than Aristotleian “either-or” logic can be a bearer of truth. Millenia worth of esoteric traditions and artistic explorations have attempted to understand the interpenetration of all phenomena, or of seemingly implausible connections to be formed between different states of matter (or indeed different species). Yet, despite what has been noted above, the human species can be notoriously indifferent to any belief system which makes serious intellectual or spiritual demands without producing an immediate tangible reward in return, and this is where the dog again steps in, offering us an immediately intuited manifestation of what can happen when we dare to trust in something totally alien. And on that particular score, we must remember that there are profoundly different aspects of the dog’s Umwelt [lifeworld] relative to our own; their olfactory and auditory apparatus alone are far more powerful than what we are accustomed to and there are otherwise too many phenomenological differences between us to understand what dogs would say if they could speak.
It is appropriate, then, that the philosophy responsible for one of the most unequivocal refusals of modern ills is literally named after dogs. The “kynicism” attributed to Diogenes of Sinope (roughly 412-323 BCE), itself deriving from the Greek κυνικός (“doglike”), saw the loose formalization of a lifestyle based upon an idealized conception of the dog as both ardently faithful and shameless – this time standing on a “threshold” between two very different temperaments and uniting them in a rebuke against sterile utilitarian logic. To wit, kynicism was a worldview that “privileged satirical laughter, sensuality, the politics of the body, and a pleasure-oriented life as forms of resistance to the master narratives of Platonic idealism, the values of the polis, and the imperial claims of Alexander the Great.”[9] This is already a too-polite sketch of kynicism, though: it cannot be thoroughly distinguished from other philosophical schools without alighting on such provocative thoughts as Diogenes’ flippant remarks on masturbation (wishing that his hunger could be satiated by “rubbing his belly”), and similar attitudes that seem the direct antecedents of our observations that dogs publicly lick their genitalia “because they can.”
Throughout Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason, there is a recurring sentiment that such behavior is not indicative of a cognitive defect, but rather an advanced propensity for seeing things as they truly are: a commitment to a stripped-down, essentialist and deception-free life code that prioritizes dog-like freedoms of movement and exploratory ability, and shrugs at the societal insistence that we be judged mainly on our productive capacity and ability to conspicuously consume. While not denying material luxury and social status outright, the kynic nevertheless refuses them when he can be “made a fool of by so-called needs” (to wit: “Diogenes taught that the wise man too eats cake, but only if he just as well do without it”). [10] As such, it is not too much of a stretch to consider the most influential modern counter-cultures as ones infused by kynicism, and “dog-ness” by extension. Greater numbers of the disillusioned have realized that a rigidly compartmentalized and managed world, with no greater purpose than its own perpetuation, is not a conduit to happiness and freedom. To look beyond it, it would seem, requires emulating the ways of creatures who we have always assumed to have knowledge of what lies beyond. To avoid succumbing to profound spiritual sickness, we could do far worse than to stand on the threshold of man and dog.
[1] Derr, M. (2013). How The Dog Became The Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends. London: Duckworth Overlook.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton / Oxford: Princeton University Press.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Lauf, D.I. (1989). Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead. Trans. Graham Parkes. Boston / Shaftesbury: Shambhala.
[6] Burroughs, W. (1987). The Western Lands. New York: Penguin Books.
[7] Prod’hom, Chantal and Moulinier, M. (2006). Bêtes de Style / Animals with Style. Lausanne: Mudac.
[8] Crowley, A. (1976). Magick in Theory and Practice. New York: Dover.
[9] Sloterdijk, P.(1987). Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[10] Ibid.