the only dog in hell
the Church spent 700 years trying to get the French to stop worshipping a dog and they just would not
In the thirteenth century the Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon discovered that the French were venerating a dog named Guinefort. The legend of his (the dog’s) martyrdom was tragic: a lord returned one day to find his infant son’s cradle upturned, the boy missing, and his nearby greyhound covered in blood: the obvious culprit. In grief and horror he slew the dog — then found the baby, sleeping peacefully, with a dead snake beside him. The serpent had slithered in and moved to attack the child; the dog had killed it, then faithfully waited by the overturned cradle to guard the baby. He had been loyal to the end.
This assuredly did not happen, not least because it’s a variant of a Sanskrit tale about a mongoose that probably dates to at least 200 BC. I’m not sure how that story ended up in thirteenth century Lyon. It could be an ancient Indo-European tale type resurfacing, or it might have just been imported, like the story of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, which is a Christianization of the life of the Buddha.
Regardless, the French began worshipping the dog.* The cult seems to have been focused on a well in which “Saint” Guinefort was believed to have been interred, unsurprising given the importance of holy wells and springs in medieval Christianity (and probably pre-Christian Celtic religions). Given his origin story as a protector of a vulnerable infant, the greyhound naturally became a patron of sickly babies:
They [women with sick or weak children] would go and seek out an old woman in a fortified town a league distant … and she led them to the place. When they arrived, they would make offerings of salt and other things; they would hang their babies’ swaddling-clothes on the bushes roundabout; they would drive nails into the trees which had grown in this palce; they would pass the naked babies between the trunks of two trees — the mother, on one side, held the baby and threw it nine times to the old woman, who was on the other side.
Stephen of Bourbon, who wrote this account, is clear that this is not proper Christian practice: a dog cannot be a saint and these people are, albeit mistakenly, invoking demons. From his report, it sounds like those who engaged in this practice may have believed the faeries were involved:
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