Prince Rupert's Dog
During the English Civil War, the Royalist general Prince Rupert was in the habit of taking his large poodle dog named Boye into battle with him. Throughout the war the dog was greatly feared among the Parliamentarian forces and credited with supernatural powers. As noted by Morgan, the dog was apparently considered a kind of familiar. At the end of the war the dog was shot, allegedly with a silver bullet.
Read more about this topic: Familiar Spirit
Famous quotes containing the words prince and/or dog:
“Milton’s the prince of poets—so we say;
A little heavy, but no less divine:
An independent being in his day—”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)