THE MEXICAN ARTIST Frida Kahlo had plenty of pets, including monkeys, birds, and a tame fawn, but her self-confessed favorite was Señor Xolotl, a Mexican hairless dog. Endemic to Central America, these exotic and intelligent creatures date back to the time of the Aztecs; they’re associated with the doglike deity Xolotl, the twin brother of Quetzalcoatl. In Aztec mythology, Xolotl travels to the underworld to retrieve the bones of the dead, which are used to create new life. He’s also the god of sickness and physical deformity, and is often depicted in art as a dog-headed man with ragged ears and backward-facing feet. The ancient Aztecs regarded the Mexican hairless dog as malformed, owing to its bald skin, which is why they named it “the dog of Xolotl,” or Xoloitzcuintle (Xolo for short).
For Kahlo, who was proud of her Mesoamerican heritage, the Xolo had symbolic resonance. She also allied herself with the animal’s purported deformity since she had polio as a child, and as an adult was often confined to a wheelchair as a result of terrible injuries suffered in a traffic accident. Xolotl was not only the god of the malformed; he was also the god of fire—another reason why he appealed to Kahlo, who was known for her passionate nature. The Xolo is—quite literally—a hot dog, prized for the heat generated by its body, which, although no different in temperature from the bodies of other dogs, feels hot to the touch because of its baldness. The dog’s warmth means it makes a therapeutic sleeping companion for those who suffer from constant aches and pains. Kahlo often referred to Señor Xolotl as her “hot water bottle.”
Surprisingly, the Xolo’s importance in Aztec mythology didn’t prevent it from being used as meat. The dog was used as a convenient source of protein in pre-Hispanic Mexico, where Xolos were raised in large numbers much as cattle are raised today, with young dogs being castrated and fattened for market. The flesh, considered a delicacy, was also consumed in ritual ceremonies since it was believed to cure various ailments. In addition, people would often be buried with Xolos by their sides, freshly sacrificed, to help guide them to the underworld. Predictably, the breed became scarce, reaching a point of near extinction before it was restored to prominence.
Señor Xolotl wasn’t Kahlo’s only Xolo—she actually had six others, all of whom lived with Kahlo; her husband, Diego Rivera; and the rest of her menagerie in her home (Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico City). I’ve only ever had one dog at a time—as a matter of fact, I’ve only ever had one dog—so it’s difficult for me to imagine having seven, one of whom is my special favorite. It seems a little unfair to all the others, like a mother who loves one of her children more than the rest. On the other hand, while most mothers claim not to have favorites, perhaps they often do (most children seem to think so), and maybe the instinct shouldn’t be considered unnatural.
According to Kahlo, Señor Xolotl was the most beautiful and intelligent of her dogs, and barked the least, though he was also a rebel, like his mistress. He once urinated on a watercolor that Diego Rivera had just spread out on the floor to dry. Furious at the dog’s disregard for his masterpiece, Rivera chased the animal around the house with a machete, but when Señor Xolotl was cornered, he simply wagged his tail as if enjoying the game, and Rivera had to forgive him. Another time, when Kahlo’s lover Isamu Noguchi had to get dressed in a hurry to avoid running into Rivera, Señor Xolotl stole one of his socks. The delay led to an unpleasant encounter, with Rivera chasing Noguchi over the roof of Casa Azul; still, when all the fuss had died down, Señor Xolotl was permitted to keep the sock to chew on.
Clearly, there was a mythic dimension to Kahlo’s relationship with her favorite dog. Not only did Señor Xolotl stand in for the rest of the pack; he also represented the breed itself and its association with the Aztec underworld. He appears in a number of Kahlo’s paintings, including Itzcuintli Dog with Me (1938), Self-Portrait with Dog and Monkey (1945), and, most notably, The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego and Señor Xolotl (1949). In this painting, the artist, with her husband as a child in her arms, is embraced by both Cihuacoatl, the Aztec Earth Mother, and Xolotl, Lord of the Underworld.
Other female surrealists also identified themselves with symbolic creatures that appeared in their work. Leonora Carrington’s totem animal was the horse; Remedios Varo had a special connection with the owl; Leonor Fini’s talisman was the cat. The painter and collage artist Dorothea Tanning, fourth wife of Max Ernst, felt a kinship with the Pekingese. Her own dog, Katchina, appeared in many of her paintings, often in giant form; in two collages from 1967, Tanning replaced human heads with the head of Katchina. Dorothea Tanning with Her Smart Dog shows a smiling girl sitting with her dog-headed companion on a swing, and Dorothea Tanning as a Dog depicts Tanning herself with Katchina’s head, reclining languidly on a couch.
Though not an exact equivalent, Xolotl is in some ways the counterpart of Anubis, the guardian of the Egyptian underworld. Always black, Anubis is sometimes depicted as a dog, sometimes as a jackal, and sometimes as a man with a dog’s or jackal’s head. To the ancient Egyptians, the dog was a guide to the hidden side of life—the place we enter in sleep and death. In the mythologies of many cultures, dogs are associated with the underworld, perhaps because they were seen roaming the battlefields, feeding on slain bodies. Their otherworldliness, moreover, relates to their double nature. Wild and domestic at the same time, they’re guardians of the way between, boundary crossers between man and animal.
The best-known canine gatekeeper is Cerberus, the three-headed dog who, in Greek and Roman mythology, guards the entrance to Hades, preventing the ghosts of the dead from returning to earth. Other cultures have their own versions of the dog posted at the underworld gate. In The Mabinogion, the founding text of Welsh mythology and folklore, white spectral hounds called the Cŵn Annwn guard these doors. In Norse mythology, a bloodstained watchdog named Garmr stands at the gates of hell. Mythological dogs aren’t always fierce and frightening. In most tarot decks, the dog appears as the companion of the Fool; in folklore, hounds make friends with jesters and idiots, and in fairy tales they often play the role of wise helpers, sometimes revealing themselves to be enchanted princes in disguise.
Deities like Anubis and Xolotl aren’t dogs exactly; they’re dog-headed men, or cynocephali. These creatures have been with us for a long time, and have appeared all over the world. Sightings of them go back to Greek antiquity, as David Gordon White explains in his fascinating book Myths of the Dog-Man. To some, the cynocephali are more than a myth; even today, people continue to meet them. In 1999, the Fortean Times, a British monthly magazine devoted to anomalous phenomena, published a letter from a woman who’d recently spotted a man with the head of a dog—“kind of like a basset hound with long floppy ears,” she wrote. This letter prompted other readers to write in with their own accounts of dog-headed men, which seem to be encountered mainly in the north of England. “In Yorkshire folklore,” wrote one correspondent, “they were called ‘leather-heads,’ due to the fact that from a distance they looked as if they were wearing leather flaps when it was actually their ears. They always caused a nuisance when they turned up. My grandfather used to tell me about them as a lad.”
Dogs that look or behave in mysterious ways could turn out to be cynocephali, but they might also be domestic spirits in canine form. Señor Xolotl was so intelligent that some Mexican locals believed he was Kahlo’s familiar—that is, the animal companion of a witch or sorcerer. The term was officially introduced into the language in the middle of the sixteenth century, when a series of new acts were passed in England imposing heavy penalties on anyone caught consulting, feeding, or rewarding an “evil wicked Spirit.” However, magical familiars had already been around for centuries. According to Christina Hole’s authoritative Witchcraft in England, in the Middle Ages, “the actual possession of any beast that might be supposed to be a familiar was a clear danger to anyone suspected of witchcraft, especially if he or she were known to treat it with affection.”
In European folklore, familiars usually take the form of cats; even today, the neighborhood cat lady can be a scary figure, often believed—albeit unconsciously—to be a crone, hag, or witch. Other animals can also be familiars, though, including birds, mice, rats, hares, rabbits, owls, snakes, hedgehogs, ferrets, weasels, and toads. Although they’re usually animals, familiars can also be imps or spirits that live in rings, lockets, or similar magical talismans (the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana wore a ring that was said to house his familiar); they can also emerge in the form of a genie from a lamp or bottle. Zulu familiars take the shape of resurrected corpses that have been magically reanimated—in other words, zombies.
Familiars arrive when the witch or sorcerer sends out a psychic call to summon the right spirit or animal, since familiars are sensitive to psychic vibrations. Sometimes, however, spirits are attracted to people with no interest in them, and these pesky imps will annoy their unwitting “owners” until they grow tired of the game and either leave of their own accord or are exorcised. In most cases, the familiar is sent out, usually at night, to perform the owner’s errands, which may include acts that are beneficial as well as destructive. In most cultures, familiars are believed to remain faithful until their owner dies, at which point they either disappear or pass along to the owner’s ancestors. They can exist independently of human beings, but if the familiar is wounded or killed, the same thing might happen to the owner, which is why it can be a risky business to send out your familiar to do battle on your behalf.
Owing to their natural loyalty, dogs were reputed to make excellent familiars. The German physician and occultist Cornelius Agrippa had a familiar in the form of a black poodle named Monsieur, who allegedly committed suicide by drowning himself in the River Saône after the death of his master. One of Agrippa’s followers was Georg Sabel of the Rhineland, an occultist who called himself Dr. Johannes Faustus, and was apparently followed by a black poodle who could transform himself into a servant (see MATHE). When the alchemist and swindler Marco Bragadino was tortured and beheaded in Munich in 1591 his two black dogs were shot because they were believed to be “fiendish servants in the form of beasts.” The thirteenth-century Irish sorceress Alice Kyteler was believed to have a dog familiar by the name of Robert or Robin Artisson, a “lesser demon” who was also her lover. The seventeenth-century Royalist general Prince Rupert of the Rhine was never seen without his large white poodle Boye, long rumored to be his familiar. Boye accompanied his master into battle during the English Civil War, and—at least according to Puritan propaganda—possessed supernatural powers. One source suggests the fortunes of war finally turned in the Roundheads’ favor when Boye was deliberately shot and killed by a silver bullet in 1644, during the Battle of Marston Moor.
I’d like to think of Grisby as my familiar, but opinions are mixed on whether familiars can be pets. Some believe that, to acknowledge their subservient role, familiars should never be pampered but always treated as lesser beings. According to historian Emma Wilby, however, familiars “were often given down-to-earth, and frequently affectionate, nicknames” (she mentions an endearing pair named Grizell and Gridigut), which suggests their relationship with their masters was not unlike that between humans and their pets.
Of course, in literal terms, I acquired Grisby through PuppyFind .com, but this doesn’t preclude the possibility that I unconsciously sent out psychic vibrations summoning an animal spirit. Did Grisby answer my call, knowing we’d make a perfect match? Or did I conjure him up myself, creating a living embodiment of my deepest desires? According to one source, a spirit that appears in the form of a bulldog is always accursed or accusatory, but anyone who believes this nonsense has obviously never met Grisby.
To work successfully as magical collaborators, familiars need to be closely attuned to their human partners, which is certainly true of Grisby and me. While familiars don’t have to resemble their owners, Grisby and I do have a certain physical similarity, though this is impressionistic rather than obvious (and I may be the only one who sees it, or who finds it flattering). We’re both broad-shouldered and big-boned; we both have wide mouths and large smiles, and while neither of us would be described as a classic beauty, we both have our admirers. Indeed, according to an article by Stanley Coren in Psychology Today, there are data suggesting people do prefer dogs that look similar to themselves—at least in terms of their facial characteristics, the shapes of their heads, and the way their hair hangs. We may look alike, but Grisby has a better temperament than I do and is more sociable; as a result, he has a lot more friends than I do.
I’d never describe Grisby as a shaman (though I sometimes think of him—in terms of the delightful misprint I found on a website translated from Russian—as a “French bullgod”), which is how the physician Renaldo Fischer describes his English bulldog, Faccia Bello. In his book The Shaman Bulldog: A Love Story, Fischer recounts how Faccia Bello became his comfort and spiritual guide after the collapse of his marriage, and helped him to understand his connection with the natural world. While I was touched by the suffering and death of Faccia Bello, Fischer’s New Age mindfulness grated on my nerves (he calls Faccia Bello “a wise animal, an elder who in his own clan would be very distinguished and honored”). The Shaman Bulldog made me realize that, in most cases, a dog is just a dog. Thankfully, Grisby is neither shaman nor guru nor archetype, but himself—my living, snorting companion. That’s magic enough for me.