“Bernardin de Saint Pierre, in his ‘Études de la Nature’ gives it as his opinion that to eat dog’s-flesh is the first step towards cannibalism, and certainly, when I enumerate to myself the peoples whom I visited who actually, more or less, devoured human flesh, and find that among them dogs were invariably considered a delicacy, I cannot but believe that there is some truth in the hypothesis.” (Schweinfurth, “Heart of Africa,” London, 1872, vol. i. p. 191.) The Clallums, no doubt, in their frenzies, tore dogs to pieces as a substitute for the human victim of an earlier period in their culture.
Bancroft describes like orgies among the Chimsyans, of British North America. (See in “Native Races of the Pacific Slope,” vol. i. p. 171.) While the Nootkas medicine men are said to have an orgy in which “live dogs and dead human bodies are seized and torn by their teeth; but, at least in later times, they seem not to attack the living, and their performances are somewhat less horrible and bloody than the wild orgies of the Northern tribes.”—(Idem, vol. i. p. 202.)
The Haidahs, of the same coast, indulge in an orgy in which the performer “snatches up the first dog he can find, kills him, and tearing pieces of his flesh, eats them.”—(Dall, quoting Dawson, in “Masks and Labrets,” Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C., 1886.)
In describing the six secret soldier societies or bands of the Mandans, Maximilian, of Wied, calls attention to the three leaders of one band, who were called dogs, who are “obliged, if any one throws a piece of meat into the ashes or on the ground, saying, ‘There, dog, eat,’ to fall upon it and devour it raw, like dogs or beasts of prey.”—(Maximilian, Prince of Wied, “Travels,” &c., London, 1843, pp. 356, 446.)
A further multiplication of references is unnecessary. The above would appear to be enough to establish the existence of almost identical orgies in Europe, America, and Asia—orgies in which were perpetuated the ritualistic use of foods no longer employed by the populace, and possibly commemorating a former condition of cannibalism.
THE SACRIFICE OF THE DOG A SUBSTITUTION FOR HUMAN SACRIFICE.
It would add much to the bulk of this chapter to show that the dog has almost invariably been employed as a substitute for man in sacrifice. Other animals have performed the same vicarious office, but none to the same extent, especially among the more savage races. To the American Indians and other peoples of a corresponding stage of development, the substitution presents no logical incongruity. Their religious conceptions are so strongly tinged with _zoolatry_ that the assignment of animals to the _rôle_ of deities or of victims is the most natural thing in the world; but their belief is not limited to the idea that the animal is sacred; it comprehends, additionally, a settled appreciation of the fact that _lycanthropy_ is possible, and that the medicine-men possess the power of transforming men into animals or animals into men. Such a belief was expressed to the writer in the most forcible way, in the village of Zuñi, in 1881. The Indians were engaged in some one of their countless dances and ceremonies (and possibly not very far from the time of the urine dance), when the dancers seized a small dog and tore it limb from limb, venting upon it every torture that savage spite and malignity could devise. The explanation given was that the hapless cur was a “Navajo,” a tribe to which the Zuñis have been spasmodically hostile for generations, and from whose ranks the fortunes of war must have enabled them to drag an occasional captive to be put to the torture and sacrificed.