Myths of the Dog-Man

by David Gordon White, Wendy Doniger (Foreword)

"An impressive and important cross-cultural study that has vast implications for history, religion, anthropology, folklore, and other fields.
... Remarkably wide-ranging and extremely well-documented, it covers (among much else) the following: medieval Christian legends such as the 14th-century Ethiopian Gadla Hawaryat (Contendings of the Apostles) that had their roots in Parthian Gnosticism and Manichaeism; dog-stars (especially Sirius), dog-days, and canine psychopomps in the ancient and Hellenistic world; the cynocephalic hordes of the ancient geographers; the legend of Prester John; Visvamitra and the Svapacas ("Dog-Cookers"); the Dog Rong ("warlike barbarians") during the Xia, Shang, and Zhou periods; the nochoy ghajar (Mongolian for "Dog Country") of the Khitans; the Panju myth of the Southern Man and Yao "barbarians" from chapter 116 of the History of the Latter Han and variants in a series of later texts; and the importance of dogs in ancient Chinese burial rites.
... Extremely well-researched and highly significant." —Victor H. Mair, Asian Folklore Studies

Genres: Mythology, Folklore, Nonfiction, Religion, Monsters, History

334 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 1991

About the author

David Gordon White received his Ph.D. (with Honors) from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1988. He also studied Hinduism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France, between 1977-1980 and 1985-1986. A specialist of South Asian religions, he is the J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been teaching since 1996. Prior to coming to Santa Barbara, he taught at the University of Virginia between 1986 and 1996. There, he founded the University of Virginia Study Abroad Program in Jodhpur, India in 1994. White is the sole foreign scholar to have ever been admitted to the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud in Paris, France, where he has been an active Research Fellow since 1992.

He is the author of five monographs, four published by the University of Chicago Press: Myths of the Dog-Man (1991); The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (1996); Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts (2003) and Sinister Yogis (2009). He also edited Tantra in Practice (Princeton University Press, 2000): his introduction to that volume is considered to be the most comprehensive definition of the multi-faceted tradition known as Tantra published to date. Myths of the Dog-Man was listed as one of the “Books of the Year” in the 1991 Times Literary Supplement’s end-of-year edition; Kiss of the Yoginī was on the cover of the same journal’s May 20, 2004 edition. Sinister Yogis received an honorable mention at the 2009 PROSE awards and was listed as a book of note by CHOICE in 2011. A Japanese edition of Myths of the Dog-Man was brought out by Kousakusha in 2001; Italian (Edizioni Mediteranee) and Indian (Munshiram Manoharlal) editions of The Alchemical Body appeared in 2004. His two most recent books are published with Princeton University Press: Yoga in Practice (November 2011) and The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A Biography (2013).

White has been the recipient of several research fellowships and grants, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007-2008) and three Fulbright Research Fellowships for India and Nepal. A panel to honor his scholarship was part of the program of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, held at Chicago on November 1, 2008.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very detailed and deals with the phenomenon of dog people (also called Kynocephali) in Europe and Asia, with the author limiting the topic to Europe, China and India.
His comments and conclusions make perfect sense, and the interested reader finds something in this book.
That the author is limited to the areas listed is unfortunate in my eyes, because the phenomenon of dog-headed people occurs globally. Nevertheless, you will learn a lot from the myths of China and India. You will learn about Christian legends that hardly anyone here knows, and some legends of the founding father of Hindu beliefs and legends.
However, the book is written very scientific and is probably more something for people from the area of faculty than for the average reader.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent repository for myth and its meaning but based on some incredibly flawed historical scholarship. The focus is on point when its there but often meanders. A very mixed bag but one worth having at least as a reference in monster-lore.

[RedDagger · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dry, meandering discourse on barbarians vs civilisation. It's not a terrible work, as something you can dip into for (somewhat dated, I'll admit) discussion on some of the mythologies it explores, but reading through it is a confusing journey of constantly shifting focus; cynocephaly, amazons, Central Asia as a source of barbarian mythology in Europe, India and China; barbarians as a construct use to support societies...there's no specific thesis it builds to, which lends itself to a frustrating read where points are built up and then dropped. This seems to be due to the somewhat sparse material the book is working with - there's not enough to fill a book on Cynocephaly, or Svapacas, or Hsiung-nu, or P'an Hu, so instead we get a book where the author labours over each subject for a few chapters then hops to the next while barely tying it together into something coherent.