The Precepts of Anubis, the Dog God

Anubis, the one true Dog God, as is by now well known minds his own business, and has never once dreamt of telling insignificant human animals how...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

Anubis, the one true Dog God, as is by now well known minds his own business, and has never once dreamt of telling insignificant human animals how to behave.

Look, though, at any statue where Anubis is shown as a Dog God, and you will notice that he sits calm and silent but with his great big ears upright.

The Enlightened one catches the Anubistic message straight away: stay calm, don't bust anyone's balls, don't bark pointlessly, but listen carefully.

And since he is a God who does not punish, we must also register a message of Anubistic tolerance.

From the above we can work out that the precepts of the good Anubist ought to be the following.

First: Worship his Dog God

Anubis is not our God: Anubis is the true God, so let us not get confused. The “his” is a liturgical flourish: it conveys the idea, but don't go getting notions of ownership.

Not that we cannot worship other gods, Anubis doesn't give a fuck either way, but only the worship of Anubis both enlightens and raises the ears.

Second: Do not bust anyone's balls

The more noise we make, the more we shout, the more we bust our neighbour's balls, the more we needlessly increase the universal ballbusting, which is already infinite on its own.

Unfortunately there are nearly eight billion inhabitants on Earth, and if all of them took to busting balls the barking would be audible from the Moon and some alien world would end up reporting us to the Federation of Planets for harassment.

The good Anubist understands that he will not be the one to change the lives of another eight billion people through prohibitions and obligations.

If he really wants to do his bit, the good Anubist worships Anubis and concentrates on reaching his own enlightenment, carrying “the Word” only to those who ask.

Only when every human is enlightened will anything really change.

Third: Listen

Only by listening do we understand, and only by understanding do we grow.

Only by growing can we hope to become “enlightened”.

Even by listening to rubbish, we understand.

When the good Anubist finds himself thinking “Dog God, but how ignorant is this one?” (in urgent cases a single “but” will do) he will have understood that human ignorance is infinite.

Careful, though, because we are all of us always ignorant, so it is better not to judge.

One simply has to tolerate, because it is statistically certain that somebody else will have to tolerate our own ignorance.

Fourth: Shun ignorance

By now it is clear that the good Anubist fears ignorance, works to reduce it as far as possible and calls on the Anubistic Divine Trinity in pursuit of the Great Anubistic Wisdom.

Beyond an unavoidable ignorance in the technical sense, the Anubist avoids displaying what we shall call “relational ignorance”.

By ignorance we normally mean “not knowing”.

Let us set that meaning aside for a moment, not least because if ignorance means a lack of knowledge, we are all technically ignorant.

It follows that, at the limit, ignorance is a relative concept, and so requires something to measure it against.

Sometimes I hear people who, not having studied, call themselves ignorant, and that is not right.

The ignorant man is not the one who does not know “in itself”.

Given that knowledge is infinite, it is mathematically sound to say that the chances of anyone knowing everything are zero.

We are all ignorant or, to be more precise, everyone's ignorance tends towards infinity.

The ignorant man is the one who displays his not knowing, because he “does not know that he does not know”.

It is no accident that “I know that I know nothing” was a motto dear to old Socrates. It is the display of ignorance that busts balls, that grates.

Indeed, we can call “ignorant” people who are very well read, and certainly not Anubists, simply because in the middle of a conversation they shout, they talk over everyone, they lose their temper and they turn verbally aggressive.

We can call ignorant people who are arrogant and rude, even if technically they are relatively well educated.

Because “relational ignorance” is, in short, the “display” of ignorance: an inability to relate properly, which very often sets off from a mistaken sense of where one stands in relation to everyone else.

A child throwing a tantrum is a child; an adult throwing a tantrum is an ignorant man, because he does not know he is an adult and is no longer excused for playing the child.

Whoever shouts to win an argument can be ignorant four times over: he does not know he is being a nuisance; he does not know he might be wrong; he does not know that relating to others ought to be a pleasure; and he does not know, which is the worst of it, that we do not communicate in order to be right or wrong but to increase our wisdom, working through new information and points of view unlike our own.

Hating everyone, tolerating nothing, complaining about everything are other typical displays of this “ignorance”, which is in short the absolute proof that the human is born with a dick for a head.

If a man, worshipping Anubis, grasped that he has no more rights than anyone else, or rather that he has none at all, he would understand that in hating everyone he hates himself, in tolerating nothing he does not tolerate himself, in complaining about everything he complains about himself.

Indeed, “the others” he calls “a pack of arseholes” are the ones who push him out of social life.

In substance this social ignorance could be defined, to a decent approximation, as a lack of wisdom; social ignorance is the first display of a lack of wisdom, which is itself a firm display of the absence of Anubis.

N.B.: should somebody, after a fierce argument, turn out to be right, he can at least be certain of being ignorant anyway.

”Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.” B. Spinoza.

This is why the Dog God proposes silence and meditation, summed up in the saying: “Oh shut up, Dog God!”.