The worship of a dog was perhaps bad enough, more blasphemous was that the locals had given him the name of a saint, making a mockery of the Church’s institutions. But far graver was what these peasants were doing in the name of this sainted dog: a woman with a sick child would take her or him to the spot in the woods where Guinefort’s body lay buried, and there she would leave her child, naked on a bed of straw, with candles burning on each side of the child’s head. The parent would not return until the candles had burned out, and, as Stephen was told, many children did not survive this ordeal of open flame and flammable straw: “Several people told us that while the candles were burning like this they burnt and killed several babies.” Other children, left defenseless in the forest, were instead devoured by wolves. If the child survived the night, the mother would then dunk it nine times in the river—only then, if the child was still alive, would she or he be pronounced cured.
If you don’t take your children to a mystical greyhound in the woods when it gets sick, perhaps today’s Roundtable will change your mind!
