From Boys to Dogs...

If I were the Goddess, I would be VERY pissed off at whoever ritually killed one of my faithful companions!  However that may be, this article confirms prior research by others that I've written about in this blog that dogs were seen as symbols of death and the underworld, and were closely associated with the Great Mother Goddess who performed a myriad of roles in various cultures across the globe, including the role of the Death Goddess/Goddess of Rebirth.  Remember the ancient triad of goddesses: Virgin, Mother, Crone (or Old Woman).  An eternal cycle of birth, life, and death, and then again, rebirth, life, and death, and again and again.  So, if one believes in the "rebirth" part of this incredibly old belief system, any faithful canine companion killed could or would eventually be resurrected again -- maybe.  Where these ancient myths and beliefs get nebulous is in explaining the precise method for getting the hell out of Hell (okay, couldn't resist the pun) once you were there! 

As you know, some ancient board games' playing pieces included dogs or other canines, and in some ancient board games pieces were called "dogs."  Check out this exquisite surviving example of a dog gamine piece from ancient Abydos, Egypt (c. 2850 BCE), below.  Given it's age, I assume it was a gaming piece from a Mehen game.  Mehen was played on a circular board formed out of a coiled serpent, one of the ancient protectoress goddesses of Egypt.

Gives a whole new twist to "The Dogs of War."

See enlarged description below.

(From The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, USA)  This piece is an ivory dog which was probably intended as a gaming piece. It is prone, looking straight ahead and it's tail is curled over its right haunch. It has pendant ears and is depicted wearing a collar around its neck. This piece is well carved, and because of the precious material, was likely made for a noble person.

Period:  ca. 2850 BCE (Archaic)
Medium:  hippopotamus ivory    
Accesion Number: 71.622
Measurements:  1 3/16 x 2 9/16 x 13/16 in. (3 x 6.5 x 2.1 cm)
Place of Origin:  Abydos (present day El Balyana, Egypt)

 

The ancient Egyptians didn't believe in reincarnation; they believed, instead, in an entirely different existence after death that took place in the Land of the Dead, traditionally placed in the western Desert in the very early times and then later up in the sky somewhere.  So, a sort of parallel existence in this other realm, where the worthy souls who made it there (remember the weighing of the heart ceremony against the Feather of Justice of the Goddess Ma'at) also ate, slept, made love, hunted, fished, and generally lived a fantastic life.  I figure it had to be up in the "heavens" because how else could Horus be pooped out of Goddess Mut's body every morning to begin his journey across the sky all over again? 

Whatever the ancient Egyptians believed (and are we really sure we've got it right -- I have my doubts), other cultures were pretty darn blunt about believing in this cycle of life/death and - I think it is implied - actual physical reincarnation.  Just exactly how the process of being reincarnated worked, though, I've no idea, and I don't think they did either. 

This underlying belief in some kind of reincarnation, however, and however nebulous it was, may be a key to understanding what to most civilized people's way of thinking today was an inordinately cruel and vicious ritual!  Killing one's faithful and loving companion?  I'd as soon turn my knife on the killer of his own dog than kill my own!  Or kill myself instead.  But, I will try to keep this archaic belief system in mind while recording this research here:

The National Geographic

Boys Killed Pets to Become Warriors in Early Russia

In Russia, dismembered dogs point to ancient initiation rite.

 

Heather Pringle

for National Geographic

Published May 14, 2013

At first, archaeologists Dorcas Brown and David Anthony were deeply puzzled. While excavating the Bronze Age site of Krasnosamarkskoe in Russia's Volga region, they unearthed the bones of at least 51 dogs and 7 wolves. All the animals had died during the winter months, judging from the telltale banding pattern on their teeth, and all were subsequently skinned, dismembered, burned, and chopped with an ax.

Moreover, the butcher had worked in a precise, standardized way, chopping the dogs' snouts into three pieces and their skulls into geometrically shaped fragments just an inch or so in size. "It was very strange," says Anthony.

To him and Brown, both of whom teach at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, the skilled and standardized method of butchering the dogs pointed to some sort of ritual. Pam Crabtree, an archaeozoologist at New York University, who was not a member of the team, agrees. She notes that the butchery pattern was entirely different from those used in prehistoric Europe and other parts of the world for slicing off dog meat to eat.

"The bone was chopped into small bits, and it was not the way you would do it if you were looking at getting the major muscle groups," Crabtree says.

So how to account for the mysterious remains at Krasnosamarskoe? Why did someone apparently sacrifice these animals?

Ancient Rite of Passage

In search of clues, Anthony and Brown combed the mythology, songs, and scriptures in Eurasia's early and closely related Indo-European languages. Many ancient Indo-European speakers associated dogs with death and the underworld. Reading through prayers composed by tribes in India possibly as early as 1400 B.C., the researchers found a description of secret initiation rites for boys destined to become roving warriors.

At the age of eight, the boys were sent to ritualists, who bathed them, shaved their heads, and gave them animal skins to wear. Eight years later, the initiates underwent a midwinter ceremony in which they ritually died and journeyed to the underworld. After this, the boys left their homes and families, painted their bodies black, donned a dog-skin cloak, and joined a band of warriors.

Brown and Anthony think that similar rites may have taken place at Krasnosamarskoe at the onset of the raiding season, which ran from the winter solstice to the summer solstice. And they speculate that part of the ceremony required the boys to kill their own dogs. The dead canines ranged in age from 7 to 12 years, suggesting that they were longtime companions—possibly even hounds raised with the boys from birth.

"That makes a lot of sense," concludes Brown. To take on the mantle of a warrior, an innocent boy had to become a killer.

Recent research conducted by military psychologists, moreover, suggests that the transition from civilian to soldier can be very difficult. In other words, "you have to train people to kill," says Brown.
For the Bronze Age boys at Krasnosamarskoe, this training may have included killing one of their childhood companions—their faithful dog.

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Not all cultures taught their children to be so monstrous, however.  There are many examples of surviving dog burials where it was apparent, given the care with which the canine was entombed, that the dog was treated with great respect, dignity, and love - yeah, love. 

One can only wonder how many boys ran away with their dogs before their "numbers came up" for the ceremony/test?  How many of them died in the wilderness trying to escape?  Were they allowed to just leave and never be seen again?  How many boys balked when it came to killing their dogs, and what were the consequences for doing so?  Besides this "butchering" process that took place - which the researchers assume the boy had to do (OHMYGODDES!) was there a ritual cooking and eating of the sacrificed dog's flesh?  What happened to the heart of any boy who "chose" to kill his dog because of cultural pressure to do so?  What would that boy feel, and think, about his elders, and the "rules" that made him do such a thing? 

Catacombs for Upwards of Eight Million Dogs

Dogs, millions of them, sometimes only hours old, were ritually killed and then carefully mummified and buried inside wooden coffins in a labyrinth of tunnels lying underneath the sacred ground of Saqqara in Egypt.  Dating mostly to the Late Period (after pollution of Egyptian religious concepts by Greek and Roman practices, which tended more toward the barbarian), archaeologists claim the site is a testament to the enduring legacy of using an "intermediary" between man and gods - in this case, "dog" headed Anubis.  Hmmmm, I wonder if anyone bothered to check with Anubis to see what He thought about this slaughter of innocent canine flesh...

Story at Past Horizons
April 4, 2011
[Excerpted]

An elaborate labyrinth of sacred tunnels, containing the mummified remains of millions of dogs, has been excavated under the Egyptian desert. The Catacombs of Anubis project, led by Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University, is examining the tunnels beneath the desert at Saqqara, which make up the catacomb for the burial of animals sacred to the dog or jackal-headed god Anubis.

The Dog Catacomb has been known since the 19th Century but has never been properly excavated before. The excavation team’s latest estimate is that some 8,000,000 animals – most of them dogs or jackals – were buried there. Work on the animal bones suggests that they were only hours or days old when they were killed and mummified. It is likely the dogs were bred in their thousands in special puppy farms around the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.

Dr Paul Nicholson, of Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: “Our findings indicate a rather different view of the relationship between people and the animals they worshipped than that normally associated with the ancient Egyptians, since many animals were killed and mummified when only a matter of hours or days old. These animals were not strictly ‘sacrificial’. Rather, the dedication of an animal mummy was regarded as a pious act, with the animal acting as intermediary between the donor and the gods.”

The team is hoping that the geological work on the catacomb will help the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, who have generously permitted the work, in monitoring the site for its long term preservation.

Dog Sacrifice in Medieval Hungary

After the rise of christianity, the church fathers were gradually successful in "demonizing" dogs for the most part, that faithful canine companion of the Goddess from earliest times. It is surprising to the discovering archaeologists, then, to find that what appears to be a sort of hybrid propitiatory sacrifice both to the Goddess and to the God Jesus Christ, was rather commonplace in a town called Kana, a 10th-13th century CE town on the outskirts of modern-day Budapest. Could there possibly be a connection of KANA to CANINE? An interesting "coincidence," heh? Was something else going on - something which we don't understand at all? Story from the National Geographic News Dog Sacrifices Found in Medieval Hungarian Village Charles Q. Choifor National Geographic News April 6, 2009 A medieval Hungarian town full of ritually sacrificed dogs could shed light on mysterious pagan customs not found in written records from the era, a new study suggests. Roughly 1,300 bones from about 25 dogs were recently discovered in the 10th- to 13th-century town of Kana, which had been accidentally unearthed in 2003 during the construction of residential buildings on the outskirts of Budapest. Researchers found ten dogs buried in pits and four puppy skeletons in pots buried upside down. These sacrifices probably served much like amulets to ward against evil—for instance, to protect against witchcraft or the evil eye, said study leader Márta Daróczi-Szabó, an archaeozoologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. [No explanation given for why she believes this to be so]. About a dozen other canines were found buried under house foundations. These animals likely served as "construction sacrifices," Daróczi-Szabó said. During the Middle Ages it was customary in Hungary to lock sacrificial animals inside new houses or to slaughter the beasts as people moved in. Sometimes dogs were beaten to death on the doorsteps or a chicken's throat was slit. [And which Goddess or God was being honored by such particularly gruesomely rendered sacrifices? Sacrificing an animal by slitting it's throat for a quick and relatively painless death is one thing; sacrificing an animal by beating it to death is ridiculously cruel - how could this be pleasing to any deity?] Dogs were popular sacrificial animals in medieval Hungary, Daróczi-Szabó said. They were seen two different ways: They symbolized loyalty, but they also stood for the deadly sin of envy. "There was a very big difference between the hunting dogs of the nobility and the scavenging pariah dogs of everyday life," she said. [Which dogs were used as sacrifices? Was one type of dog preferred over another? Were the "noble" dogs spared and the "pariah" dogs beaten to death?] Surprisingly Widespread Previous evidence of animal sacrifices—seen even under churches, in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary—had been mostly isolated cases, Daróczi-Szabó noted. But the new findings, described this month in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, show that "sacrifices were not a rare phenomenon, as one may have thought from isolated finds," she said. "It was practiced regularly in a Christian village." ["Christian" in the same sense that the Spanish "Conversos" were "Christian?" Could there by any possible linkage between this evidence of wide-spread dog and puppy sacrifice in Kana and the puppy sacrifice that took place in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years earlier?] The fact that pagan customs such as animal sacrifice persisted for centuries side-by-side with the church is surprising, noted University of Edinburgh archaeozoologist László Bartosiewicz. Christianity came to dominate the region after the first king of Hungary, Stephen I, began his rule in A.D. 1000. Under his reign, pagan rituals such as animal sacrifices were explicitly banned. "One wouldn't expect these practices in Christian times," said Bartosiewicz, who did not participate in the new study. "It's exciting to see what was sacred and profane back then. "The great number of sacrifices we see [in Kana] will significantly improve our chances of interpreting what their meaning was," he added. "It's probably the find of a lifetime. I can't imagine lucking upon anything else of this scope."

**************************************************************************** If archaeologists are surprised by "pagan" customs persisting hundreds of years after the advent of "christianity," what do they think about the fact that around the world people still serve hot-cross buns served at Easter? Hot-cross buns, for those who are not aware, are descended from an ancient devotional offering to the Goddess during the Spring Equinox and pre-date christianity by thousands of years! What about the Easter Bunny - another ancient pagan symbol of fertility, and Easter eggs, another pagan fertility symbol?