Dog symbolism
In the Odyssey the dog is the faithful one: Odysseus's old hound Argos knows him after twenty years away. In the British folklore John Brand collected, a dog howling at night near a sick person foretold a death, and Cherokee storytellers say the Milky Way is the trail of meal a dog spilled as it ran.
Meaning
Dogs appear in the old sources as guardians, as mourners and as omens. In Homer's Odyssey the hound Argos knows his master after twenty years. Herodotus says an Egyptian household that lost a dog shaved “their whole body and also their head”. In English folklore a dog's howl at night was a death omen, and in Norse myth the hound Garm breaks loose at Ragnarok. The Cherokee name for the Milky Way, as James Mooney recorded it, means “Where the dog ran.”
Origin and history
Herodotus describes Egyptian mourning for dogs as deeper than for cats: for a cat the household shaved their eyebrows, for a dog “their whole body and also their head”, and each town buried its dogs “in sacred tombs”. Egypt's dog-headed god is a jackal, not a dog: E. A. Wallis Budge wrote that the Greek historian Diodorus “confounded the dog with the jackal”, and that the texts of every period show it was the jackal-god Anubis who served Osiris.
In Homer's Odyssey (Samuel Butler's translation, which calls the hero Ulysses) Odysseus comes home at last. His old dog Argos, which he bred before setting out for Troy, is lying neglected on a heap of dung; at the sight of his master he “dropped his ears and wagged his tail”, but could not get close to him, and “died as soon as he had recognised his master.”
In Norse myth Snorri Sturluson's Edda names Garm, a hound bound before the Gnipa cave, among the powers that break loose at Ragnarok: Garm and the god Tyr “kill each other.”
A dog howling at night
The dog's best-known omen in English folklore is its howl. John Brand's Popular Antiquities (1853 edition) records the belief that a dog howling at night near a house is “the presage of death to any that are sick in it”, and quotes the antiquary Grose: the howling of dogs “is a certain sign that some one of the family will very shortly die.” Brand himself offered an explanation, that dogs have been known to howl over the bodies of masters who died suddenly. Douce's notes add that dogs were once believed to see “the ghosts of deceased persons.”
Where the dog ran: the Cherokee Milky Way
In a Cherokee story James Mooney collected between 1887 and 1890, a dog stole cornmeal from a mill in the south night after night. When the people caught and whipped it, it ran howling to its home in the north with the meal falling from its mouth, leaving the white trail of the Milky Way, which the Cherokee still called “Where the dog ran.” Mooney noted that the dog, though part of daily life, hardly appears in Cherokee folklore otherwise; another story has the dog drive the Wolf symbolism from the house fire and take its place.
Dogs and wolves in the corn
In France, Germany and the Slavonic countries, James Frazer recorded, the wind moving through a field of grain was said to be a dog or wolf in the corn: “the mad Dog is in the corn”, “the big Dog is there”. Children were kept out of the fields with the warning that “the big Dog sits in the corn.”
The dog in tarot
On the Moon card of the Rider-Waite tarot, as A. E. Waite described it in 1910, “Two dogs, or alternatively a wolf and dog, are baying at the moon”. See The Moon.
Related animals
The Wolf symbolism and the dog share several of these stories, and the Cat symbolism shares the Egyptian mourning customs. The Fox symbolism and the hare are the dog's quarry in many of them.
See also
Cat symbolism, Wolf symbolism, The Moon, Michigan Dogman, Butterfly symbolism, Dragonfly symbolism.
Sources
- Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (John Brand, ed. Henry Ellis, 1853), John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, arranged and revised by Sir Henry Ellis, vol. 3 (London: Bohn, 1853), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), The Howling of Dogs, pp. 184–186
- The History of Herodotus, Volume 1 (Macaulay translation), Herodotus, trans. G. C. Macaulay (London: Macmillan, 1890), Book II, Project Gutenberg, Book II, chapters 66–67
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), vol. II, p. 366, the Dog and the Wolf
- The Odyssey (Samuel Butler translation), Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler (1900), Book XVII, Project Gutenberg, Book XVII
- The Younger Edda (Anderson translation), Snorri Sturluson, trans. Rasmus B. Anderson, 1880, Project Gutenberg, The Fooling of Gylfe: Ragnarok
- Myths of the Cherokee (James Mooney, 1900), James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, Project Gutenberg, I. Introduction; 11. The milky way; 15. The four-footed tribes
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major: The Moon
- The Golden Bough, abridged edition (James George Frazer, 1922), Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (New York: Macmillan, 1922), chapter LXIII, section 6, The Hallowe'en Fires, Internet Archive, chapter XLVIII, § 2, The Corn-spirit as a Wolf or a Dog
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research