668 DOGS AND SAVAGES. 



sentinel at the mouth, of hell, and Dante represents him as keeping 

 watch at the entrance to the third circle, where he torments the souls. 

 "The Aztecs held the belief that the Techichi acted as a guide through 

 the dark regions after death." 1 Luther asserts, iu his " Table talk,'' 

 that dogs also go to heaven. He firmly believed that he would again 

 see his own little dog in the other world, and Klopstock's Messias 

 (XVI, 260-333) has Elisama's dog enter heaven. The Countess Eliza- 

 beth Charlotte von Orleans said: "lam much pleased with what he 

 (Leibnitz) has stated, that animals do not wholly perish. It comforts 

 me very much about my dear little dog." 2 In Germau mythology the 

 dog is the messenger of death, :! and iu Formosa wheu a dog howls the 

 people have the priest come, for some member of the family is about to 

 die. 4 Bastian 5 gives another view: God created the dog aud assigned 

 to him the duty of keeping watch against the serpent who betrays 

 man. This is, therefore, the reason why, when one is about to die, the 

 dog howls. In Borneo it is believed that he who laughs when a dog or 

 a serpent crosses the path will be turned to stone. 6 



Black is recognized as a fateful color; black dogs are held to be the 

 familiars of sorcerers; the evil one himself takes the form of a black 

 dog (in Goethe's Faust). In the folk-tale of the wise Odin the black 

 dog is the offspring of the devil; a great fear of the traveler on the 

 Swedish heaths is that of meeting the Bestless One with a couple of 

 black, fire-spitting dogs. The heathen Samoyeds of the neighborhood 

 of the Mezen offer to the devil either a reindeer or a black dog, who is 

 drowned after sunset. The head is turned toward the west. These 

 animals are offered also to the Tadepzii and Chechi, and the head of the 

 victim is then thrown to its relatives; all the flesh is torn off from it, 

 and the gnawed skull is placed on a pole opposite the idol. 7 The Lapps 

 abuse their dogs, so necessary to them, with kicks, because they are 

 held to be " the degenerate offspring of the wolf, ,? who has intruded 

 among men to work them harm. On this account, Avhen these close rel- 

 atives to the wolf have grown old they do not kill them, but fasten 

 them to a tree until they have starved to death. For the same reason 

 a dog must never be present at a marriage. 8 Iu the year 1702 the 

 French soldiers who were defending Landau were firmly convinced that 

 the black dog of their general was a familiar spirit of the devil, who 



1 Fr. A. Ober, Travels in Mexico, p. 320. The old inhabitants of the Cordilleras 

 thought differently. Andree Bresson says (Bolivia, p. 128): "In the burials of Arica, 

 we find with the mummies the artificial eyes which the ancient Peruvians, actuated 

 by a religious sentiment, placed near their dead to conduct them in the journey to 

 the underworld; provisions for the route are also not forgotten." 



2 Zeitschr. des hist. Ver. f. Niedersachsen, 1884, 3. 



3 Zeitschr. f. Ethn., 1886, 82. 



4 Geogr. Proc. London, 1889, 233. 



5 Die Welt in ihren Spiegelungen, etc., p. 365. 



6 John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, p. 228. 

 ? Zeitschr. f. allg. Erdk., N. F., VII, 62. 



8 Hogguer, Reise nach Lappland, p. 94. 



