God Was Made Dog

Wandering around the web, the Prophet found this post on a forum. He noticed at once that its author had been struck by very great Anubistic...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

Wandering around the web, the Prophet found this post on a forum.

He noticed at once that its author had been struck by very great Anubistic enlightenment.

He tried to track the author down and failed.

He asks the author, should he ever read these sacred scriptures, to get in touch, because the honorary title of Grand Master of Anubism awaits him.

“From childhood, the first great lesson I learnt was that man despises, and tends to destroy, everything beneath him.

In strength, in dignity and in morality.

I learnt that lesson watching a man and his son beat a dog.

It was a street stray, one of those dogs that have never hurt anyone and that think three times before coming near you even when you offer food and they haven't eaten for two days.

The man, if that is what we want to call him, had found the dog in his yard — it had clearly slipped through the bars of a gate — and was beating it savagely with a length of rubber hose.

The dog yelped and tried to get away, but could not dodge the man's blows.

Whenever it managed to put some distance between them, the man's son arrived and, with a coldness you would not expect from a twelve-year-old, kicked it back towards his father.

The dog curled up in a corner of the yard, trying to make itself small, very small, so small as to become insignificant, too small to be hit by a length of hose.

At that point the father opened the gate and kicked the dog out.

The dog did not even run. It walked slowly away.

Then it went to a puddle and drank water iridescent with diesel.

It moved a little further off, tongue lolling, staggering, and collapsed under a rubbish skip, laid its head on the ground panting, and then stopped breathing.

They say faithful as a dog, and so it is, because an intelligent dog will never bite the hand of its master.

And how does the master repay his friend?

Often by mistreating him, abandoning him, starving him, leaving him out in the cold even on stormy nights.

Man despises dogs culturally, and I learnt that when I was a little older.

I learnt that phrases existed like “alone as a dog”, noting that the most affectionate and faithful animal towards man has always been cast as a lonely animal, incomplete without somebody to care for it.

And I discovered that calling a person a dog, rather than being a compliment, praise for courage and devotion, was instead among the worst insults you could offer.

And I struggled to understand why being cynical, being dog-like, had to mean despising and mistrusting one another, when there is no animal more genuinely a friend than a dog.

And mondo cane, a dog of a world, was a curse flung urbi et orbi.

To lead a dog's life is to live in hardship, a woman of easy virtue is a bitch, and if we really want to blaspheme against God we need only say “Dog God” and he will grasp how much we hate him.

Man despises the dog. He despises the creature that loves him most.

And yet history and myth teach us that dogs have been capable of the most miraculous and beautiful acts we can recall.

One above all: Argos, who recognises Odysseus after waiting twenty years; recognises him despite the form of an old man, recognises his scent, and dies at his feet, happy to have waited far beyond the natural life of a dog.

Which man would do as much?

Which other animal?

Argos is a myth, but we believe a dog could really do it, we expect it, we know it.

And the dog does it.

Dog ought to be a compliment.

Terrible to his enemies and gentle with his friends.

Which other animal can tell them apart?

Which other animal cares to?

Among the less comprehensible insults, I also learnt of calling somebody a “guard dog” for warning others of danger coming.

As though the dog were useless; worse, as though this capacity of his were a flaw rather than a virtue.

Even tail-wagging is an insult.

You insult a lackey by pointing out the movement of a dog's tail in front of its master.

This is what I learnt about the dog, and I began to wonder whether the reputation was deserved.

But wherever I looked, wherever I dug, thought, reasoned, read, the dog was always loved and always ill-used.

A creature to be put in its place, to be told to get in its basket and to obey at once.

Not fouling the house and understanding human speech were great qualities in a dog, man never having made the slightest effort to understand the speech of the dog.

It was perhaps Shakespeare who said there is nothing a dog craves as a reward more than a whistle from its master, and he was right, because the dog asks for nothing.

The dog plays, demands brazenly when spoilt, but he is always the first to greet us when we come home, having learnt to pick out among millions the rhythm and the weight of our step, our scent under a thousand perfumes, our voice in the din of a thousand voices.

Perhaps it is the humility of this animal that draws the worst out of certain people.

Perhaps it is this endless giving and giving of the dog to man that makes man so contemptible.

Man, in the end, does not understand the dog.

He has always been at our side, he helped us hunt when we lived by hunting alone, he governed our flocks, he followed us to war when we fought, he guarded our sleep, he defended us from our enemies, he threw himself at animals far larger than himself, outmatching us in courage for all time.

And for what?

Not for food, not for warmth, not for privileges, but for the pleasure of our company, treating a stroke of the hand as a gift almost undeserved, such is the welcome he gives whoever stands beside him.

Diogenes made himself a dog because he saw no worth in men; he humiliated himself, despised himself, brought himself to feeding on rubbish, made himself the first cynic.

Diogenes despised dogs more than anyone, sentencing himself to their life as though, for a dog, a life without a man to stand beside were disgusting.

To him the lone dog was the most useless of creatures, and he made himself a dog in search of a man to wag his tail at and whose hand to lick.

Diogenes despised dogs by acting out their life.

Just as we despise dogs that act out the figures of men, in certain absurdist paintings or stage productions, and feel absurdity and unease.

Who does not hate Parini's sacred lapdog?

Whose favourite character is Spike, the bulldog who bites Tom the cat who chases Jerry the mouse?

Disney's Goofy is a humanised dog and for that reason he serves the original sin of having presumed to be better, living a life that is clumsy, gangling, simple, stupid.

Far better Pluto, who is a real dog, always daft, but a dog on four legs.

Who stays in his place.

All of us hold prejudices about dogs, even those among us who genuinely love them.

Let the gentlemen try an experiment.

Take the image of a famous painting exalting the beauty of a man or a woman, a painting by Botticelli, Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, Michelangelo, Goya… and now lay over the perfect faces of the men and women on those canvases, those frescoes, the faces of dogs.

You will feel disgust, you will feel in your heart that an offence has been done to that beauty, corrupted by a face giving you, precisely, a hangdog look.

You will feel far less unease using the face of a beautiful cat.

To be fair, there are exceptions.

Who doesn't like Snoopy?

Who doesn't like the 101 Dalmatians?

Who doesn't admire the intelligence of certain film dogs, if truth be told a little too perfect to be likeable?

Why can man not love the dog?

Perhaps because he mistrusts him.

Perhaps he cannot understand, being the truly cynical one, why anyone should have all this strength and love to give and give and give without ever asking anything back.

Perhaps man does not trust so much trust, so much blind devotion, so much simple unconditional love.

What does the dog want from us, he seems to ask. What does he get out of it? The answer does not satisfy: nothing, or a stroke of the hand, is far too little. Even love, for man, has a price.

Perhaps man forgets that he too becomes a dog for a brief period of his life. Sometimes not even that brief. Man becomes a dog as a teenager, when he wags his tail around the girl with the plaits, so pretty it is embarrassing to look at her.

She smiles and rubs up against him like a cat, vain and glassy, soft and moody. The man, meanwhile, is a dog. Faithful, obsessed with staying near her, accommodating. He swallows bitter mouthfuls of humiliation without blinking, tongue lolling, waiting for a stroke or a whistle.

And so he skips, he paws, he whines, he yaps, he squirms with the delight of being noticed. Man makes himself a dog and then, savaged by disappointments, makes himself a cynic and stops wagging his tail.

Some sooner, some later. The dog never. The dog always wags his tail. The dog does not turn cynic over a man who mistreats him, does not hoard the trauma, and gives himself body and soul to any other master who appreciates him.

The dog never becomes cynical. And perhaps that is what makes us hate him, his being eternally adolescent, while we grow old and die disillusioned, disappointed, sad. We envy the dog, we envy him his genuineness. That is why we hate him.

And if I were a believer, a true Christian, not the sort who preaches poverty and then wallows in gold, I would believe that God is truly among us, that God is here in the form of a dog.

And then truly, Dog God.

Better than man.”

There would be plenty to argue about in that reading of Diogenes, but it is a very illuminating piece all the same. Written by the user “Jonny Wolf”, hereby Grand Master Jonny ad honorem: untraceable in person, the title is conferred in absentia.

Also from the web, another Enlightened one wrote the following passage, going deeper into the story of Argos:

“Have you ever heard of Odysseus?

Did you know that the Odyssey contains one of the most beautiful and moving love scenes in all of literature?

And no, I am not talking about Penelope.

I know it is fashionable these days to call Homer the founding father of “toxic masculinity”, and yet this author left us one of the most moving love scenes ever written.

You see, the story of Odysseus is a story of journeys, of adventures, but above all the story of a man who wants one thing above all others: to get home.

And at last, after twenty years, Odysseus returns to his beloved Ithaca.

This is one of the most intense moments in the whole Odyssey: Odysseus sees his city, he sees his son Telemachus, by now grown into a man.

And in that instant a wave of longing takes him, because he realises how fast the time has flown. But Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar so as not to be recognised by the Suitors who had usurped his throne.

And what happens? Nobody recognises him.

Not his son, not his wife, not his people. All they see are his torn clothes and his unkempt hair, and they take him for an “old beggar”. Only one, out of all the people of Ithaca, knows him: Argos, his dog.

You see, to a dog you can be a prince, a king or a beggar; a dog loves you regardless. Argos cares nothing for how Odysseus looks, nothing for what he is wearing or how he appears; hearing his voice is enough for him to know him.

And immediately afterwards he dies. I remember being moved the first time I read that scene. Argos had kept his last breath for Odysseus. And yes, in an age of disposable relationships, they will tell you there is nothing so extraordinary about it.

Because things like friendship, loyalty and love that survives distance are unintelligible to a society that has made the absence of bonds a fashion.

Which is why, in a world as cynical as this one, I wish you somebody who loves you not for what you are but for who you are, and who looks you in the eye with the same devotion Argos had for Odysseus.”

Our Enlightened one has simplified here — somebody else does recognise Odysseus — but enlightenment counts for more than philology. Unfortunately we do not even know the writer's username: the “title” awaits him.