Dog-Gone by James Elliott

Author:James, Elliott [James, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2014-02-17T23:00:00+00:00

This is what I couldn’t tell Bob in five minutes: death hounds are something of a sensitive topic in the supernatural world.

That whole hellhound thing, for example? Total crap. The Bible doesn’t mention them. The Greek god of the underworld had a three-headed dog, but there was only one of them and the word Hell wasn’t in the Greeks’ vocabulary. The path to the Norse underworld, Hel, was guarded by a giant black dog, but Garm was a Fenris wolf. A blues singer named Tommy Johnson claimed he saw a black dog at the crossroads, but he also claimed he saw a black bull and a black bird, and you don’t hear the term hellbull or hellcrow do you? It was Robert Johnson who later made that story so popular in the songs “Cross Road Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail,” made the story so popular that people still confuse which Johnson did what.

The word hellhound is basically like the phrase reality television. A lot of people believe in it, but there’s no such thing and never has been.

This is the real story.

A long, long time ago, some cunning man or woman messing around with necromancy figured out a way to train and raise a guard dog, then sacrifice the animal so that its spirit would linger on, anchored to some physical object. The necromancer would then bury the magical anchor in the place that the necromancer wanted the dog’s spirit to guard. These were almost always cemeteries and crypts and tombs and pyramids because ancients used to bury fabulous wealth with their dead. It also had something to do with the way magic works. Like calls to like, and having the dead guard the dead made the spell more effective.

The creation of death hounds became a fairly common practice and spread from ancient Greece and Egypt to the Vikings, Romans, Celts, Normans, Gauls, and Britons. This is why stories of big, black supernatural dogs are far more common than stories of vampires or zombies in the old tales.

The Black Shuck. Gwyligi. The Dog of Darkness. The Black Dog of Winchester. The Demon of Tedworth. Mauthe Dhoog. The Aufhocker. The Kludde. The Coinn Iotair. The Galley-Trot. Ptoophagos. The Barghest. The Gytrash. The Saidthe Suaraighe. The Rizos. The Grim. The Rongeur D’Os. The Hounds of Rage. The Arctophonos. Church Grims. The Black Dogs of Bungay. I really could go on, but there’s not going to be a quiz later. Suffice it to say, all of these and more are stories about big, black, demonic dogs roaming around forests and swamps and moors long after the places they were guarding became abandoned ruins.

If you think of the supernatural world in terms of recycling, death hounds are like plastic bags. They’re useful for a short time, but then they just hang around for centuries causing problems and are almost impossible to get rid of.

This is why the creation of death hounds became a taboo practice; it was more out of practicality than morality.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.