The jeu d’esprit of the “eight characters” is followed by what appears to be a serious statement of how to treat the dog which misconducts himself. There is no capital punishment, nothing like the stoning of the ox which gores a man or woman, in the Bible. If a dog attacks man or cattle he is to lose an ear; if he does it a third time his foot is to be cut off, or, as Bleeck humanely suggests, he is to be rendered so far lame that it is easy to escape from him. The “dumb dog” of vicious disposition is to be tied up. If a dog is no longer sane in his mind and has become dangerous on that account, you are to try and cure him as you would a man, but if this fails, you must chain him up and muzzle him, using a sort of wooden pillory which prevents him from biting. This passage is curious, because, while it seems to allude plainly to hydrophobia, it contains no hint of the worser consequences to man than a simple bite.
We find that there were four if not more breeds of dogs, each of which was carefully trained for its work. The house-dog, the personal dog (which may have been a blood-hound), sheep and herd-dogs are all mentioned, but there is no mention of sporting-dogs or of sport in the Avesta. The dogs must have been powerful, as they were required to be a match for the wolf, “the growing, the flattering, the deadly wolf,” which was the dread of every homestead in Iran. There were also “wolves with claws” (tigers), but they were comparatively few. The kinship of wolf and dog was recognised, and there was an impression that the most murderous wolf was the half-breed of a wolf and a bitch. Perhaps the wolf of dog-descent came more boldly to the dwelling of man, having no instinctive fear of him. It is said, too, that the deadliest kind of dog was the dog that had a wolf-mother. Possibly such cross-breeding was tried experimentally in the hope of obtaining dogs which could best resist the wolf.
If the dog is never represented as a creature of faultless perfection, it yet remains an established truth that “dwellings would not stand fast on the earth created by Ahura Mazda were there not dogs which pertain to the cattle and to the village.” It is the Lord of Creation who says: “The dog I have made, O Zarathustra, with his own clothing and his own shoes; with keen scent and sharp teeth, faithful to men, as a protector to the folds. For I have made the dog, I who am Ahura Mazda!” To attack the dog was like an attack on the police. Slitting the ear of the house or sheep-dog out of malice, or cutting off his foot, or belabouring him so that thieves got at the sheep, were not unfrequent crimes and they are dealt with no more severely than they deserve. Who killed a house-dog outright, or a sheep-dog or personal dog or well-trained dog, was warned that in the next world his soul would go howling worse than a wolf in the depths of the forest; shunned by all other souls, growled at by the dogs that guard the bridge Chinvat. Eight hundred blows with a horse-goad are adjudged to the wretch who so injures a dog that it die. To strike or chase a bitch with young brings a dreadful curse. Much is said about the proper care of the mother and the puppies. To give a dog too hot food or too hard bones is as bad as turning apostate. His right food is milk and fat and lean meat. “Of all known creatures that which ages soonest is the dog left foodless among people who eat—who seeks here and there his food and finds it not.”
As a rule unnamed wild animals may be supposed to have been protected. The fox was considered a powerful daeva-scarer, which shows that not only in China did the fox seem an “uncanny” beast. In Iran his supernatural services made him highly esteemed. There seem to have been no cats though so many mice. The later Iran was destined to be a great admirer of cats, witness the praise of them by Persian poets, but it is not easy to fix the date when they were introduced. Monkeys were known and were attributed by a post-Avestic superstition to the union of human women and daevas. Vultures were sacred because they devoured good Mazdeans. On the whole, not much attention was paid to wild nature, with one striking exception: the extraordinary respect for the water-dog, beaver or otter. Suddenly the solid utilitarian basis of Zoroastrian zoology gives way and we behold a fabric of dreams. We might understand it better could we know the early animistic beliefs of Iran, though the trend of the Avesta apparently ran counter to old popular credences far more than with them. It should be remembered that water was only a little less sacred than fire in the Zoroastrian system; the defilement of rivers was strictly forbidden. The Udra, or beaver, became the “luck” of the rivers: to destroy it would provoke a drought. If it was found roaming on the land, the Mazdean was bound to carry it to the nearest stream. In later legend, the Udra, even more than the fox, was a daeva-foe. But by far its most important characteristic is its mythical connexion with the dog. To the question: “What becomes of the aged dog when his strength fails him and he dies?” follows the answer: “He goes to the dwelling in the water, where he is met by two water-dogs.” These are his conductors to the dogs’ paradise. A fair sward beneath the waters, cool and fresh in the summer heat, is at least a pleasant idea, but when the two water-dogs are described as consisting of one thousand male and one thousand female dogs, the myth seems to lose its balance which no proper myth ought to do. Myths have the habit of proceeding rationally enough in their own orbit. Later commentators reject this fantastic interpretation and suppose the verse to mean that the dog-soul is received, not by two, but by two thousand water-dogs, which in Oriental hyperbole would mean merely “a great many.”
Be this as it may, Udra-murder was a frightful sin, and frightful were the penalties attached to it. Besides undergoing the usual blows with a horse-goad (to be self inflicted?) the murderer must kill ten thousand each of some half-dozen insects and reptiles: this, at least, is how it looks, but as a matter of fact the long lists of penalties in the Vendîdâd must be taken not as cumulative, but as alternative. This is evident, though it is never stated, and it explains many things. A large number of the alternative punishments for beaver-killing take the form of offerings to the priests. Arms, whips, grindstones, handmills, house-matting, wine and food, a team of oxen, cattle both small and large, a suitable wife—the young sister of the sinner—these are among the specified offerings. The culprit may also build a bridge, or breed fourteen dogs as an act of expiation; in short, he may do any kind of meritorious deed, but something he must do, or it will be the worse for him in the world to come.
The Vendîdâd was not a code of criminal law enforced by the civil power, but an adjugation of penances for the atonement of sin. This was not understood at first, which caused the selection of punishments to appear more extravagant than it really is. For the most part the penances were active good works or things which were reckoned as such. Charity and alms-giving were always contemplated among the means of grace, and if they were not dwelt upon more continually, it was because there existed nothing comparable to modern destitution. Moreover, it was understood better than in other parts of the East that not every beggar was a saint: too often he was a lazy fellow who had shirked the common obligation of labour. The repetition of certain prayers was another practice recommended to the repentant sinner. But no good work or pious exercise was of any avail unless accompanied by sincere sorrow for having done wrong. The Law opened the door of grace, but to obtain it the heart must have become changed. God forgives those who truly desire His forgiveness. It is impossible to doubt that the spurious Mazdeism which got into Europe, distorted though it was, yet took with it the two great Mazdean doctrines of repentance and the remission of sin. Great ideas conquer, and it was by these two doctrines that Mithraism so nearly conquered the Western world—not by its unlovely rites.
On one or two points the human eschatology of Zoroastrianism is associated with dogs. A dog is brought into the presence of the dying man. This has been explained by reference to the dogs of Yama, the Vedic lord of death, and the European superstition about the howling of a dog being a death-portent is explained in the same way, but in both instances the immediate cause seems nearer at hand. An Indian officer once remarked to me that any one who had heard the true “death-howl” of a dog would never need any recondite reason for the uncomfortable feeling which it arouses. As regards the Zoroastrian dog, the immediate cause of the belief that he drives away evil spirits lies in the fact that he drives away thieves and prowlers in the night. Death being a pollution as the work of Ahriman, evil spirits beset the dying, but they flee at the sight of the dog, created by Ahura Mazda to protect man. The dead wander for three days near the tenantless body: then they go to the bridge Chinvat, where the division takes place between the good and the wicked. The bridge is guarded by dogs, who drive away all things evil from the path of the righteous, but do nothing to prevent bad spirits from tripping up sinners so that they fall into the pit.
The good go into light, sinners into darkness, where Ahriman, “whose religion is evil,” mocks them, saying: “Why did you eat the bread of Ahura Mazda and do my work? and thought not of your own Creator but practised my will?” Nothing is told of the punishment of Ahriman—the doom of Evil is to be Evil—but in the end he will be utterly extinguished. Through time, but not through eternity the wicked remain in his power. In the Khordah Avesta it is said that God, after purifying all the obedient, will purify the wicked out of hell. In the words of a living Parsi writer: “The reign of terror, at the end of the stipulated time, vanishes into oblivion, and its chief factor, Ahriman, goes to meet his doom of total extinction, whilst Ahura Mazda, the Omnipotent Victor, remains the Great All in All.”
The Zoroastrian was as free as Socrates himself from the materialism which looks upon the body after death as if it were still the being that tenanted it. Some kind of renewed body the dead will have: meanwhile, this is not they! The hope of immortality was so firm that it was thought an actual sin to give way to excessive mourning: the wailing and keening of the Jews seem to be here condemned, though they are not mentioned, there being no direct allusion to the religions of other peoples in the Avesta. There is a river of human tears which hinders souls on their way to beatitude: the dead would fain that the living check their tears which swell the river and make it hard to cross over in safety. The same idea is to be found in one of the most beautiful of Scandinavian folk-songs.
The small work known as the Book of Ardâ Vîrâf is a document of priceless worth to the student of Mazdean eschatology, and it is also of the greatest interest in its relation to ideas about animals. If printed in a convenient form, every humane person would carry it in his pocket. Like the vision of the Seer of Patmos this work is purely religious; it attempts no criticism of life and man such as that embodied in the “Divina Commedia,” but in spite of this difference in aim, there is an astonishing resemblance between its general plan and that of the poem of Dante. Without going into this subject, I may say that I cannot feel convinced that with the geographical, astronomical, and other knowledge of the East which is believed to have reached Dante by means of conversations with merchants, pilgrims and perhaps craftsmen (for that Italian artists worked in India at an early date the Madonna-like groups in many a remote Hindu temple bear almost certain testimony), there did not come to him also some report of the travels of the Persian visitant to the next world.