Aralez

The body was carried up to the high room and laid where the air came cold and thin off the mountains, and then the waiting began. If the old belief held, something was already on its way down, a shape with the warmth and weight of a large dog, unseen against the dark, drawn toward the wounds of a man who had died well. The Armenians called these spirits aralez, and they came for one purpose only, to lick a fallen hero back into breathing.

Their name carries that purpose inside it. By the popular reading it joins Ara, the name of the great dying hero, to lez, the root of lizel, to lick. So the aralez are the lickers of Ara, or the lappers of the brave, a title that is also a job description. They were never quite animals and never quite gods. They were imagined as invisible powers that took the form of dogs when they did their work, slipping down onto a battlefield where a worthy man lay open to the sky.

What they actually looked like is a question the earliest stories decline to answer, because a spirit that no living eye can see does not lend itself to portraiture. Later imagination filled the silence. The aralez took on the shape of the Armenian gampr, the huge shaggy livestock dog whose name means something close to large hairy beast, a breed that had guarded flocks and families across the highlands for as long as anyone could remember. The coat is rough under the hand, the build heavy, the bite famous enough that one old nickname for the gampr means wolf choker. Newer art gives the aralez wings, lifting the guardian dog of the pastures into a creature of the upper air. The wings are a recent flourish. The dog is ancient.

They belong to the oldest layer of Armenian belief, the part that runs underneath the later kings and saints. Scholars who have traced the figure back think Ara himself began as a god who died and returned with the turning year, a fertility power bound up with the death and renewal of the land, set beside Hayk the forefather and Aram the warrior in a older pattern of sovereignty, war, and growing things. The aralez are the machinery of that return. Where there is a god who must rise again, there are spirits whose task is to raise him.

The story that fixed them in memory is the story of Ara the Handsome. The Assyrian queen Shamiram, called Semiramis, had heard of his beauty for years and wanted him for herself. When persuasion failed she brought an army into Armenia with orders that Ara be taken alive. In the fighting her orders were not enough. Ara was killed. Rather than accept it, the queen had his corpse carried to an upper chamber of her palace and laid out for her gods, the aralez, to come down and lick him living again. The accounts split at exactly this point. In one telling the dogs descend and the miracle holds and Ara breathes once more. In the version set down by Movses Khorenatsi, a Christian writing long after, the spirits never come, and Semiramis, to quiet a restless people, dresses one of her lovers in the dead man’s place and lets the rumor spread that the gods had licked Ara back to life.

The same hope appears again in plainer light around the general Mushegh Mamikonian. After he was killed, his kinsmen sewed his severed head back to his body, carried him up onto the roof of a tower, and left him there. He was a brave man, they said, so the aralez would surely descend and set him on his feet. They watched the tower. He did not rise.

That is the shape of nearly every aralez tale: the body raised toward the sky, the family certain, the spirits expected and the spirits absent. When they did their work, the work was simple and strange. A warrior fell, the blood cooling and beginning to smell of iron, and out of the empty air came the press of a heavy body and the slow rasp of a tongue across the torn places, wound after wound, until the breath caught and the eyes opened. No incantation, no price named, no bargain struck. Only the patient labor of a dog over a dead man.

Their power was real but narrow. The aralez could undo death itself, but only the right death, the death of the brave and the betrayed, and only on their own terms. No one could conjure them. No ritual obliged them. A grieving house could lift a corpse onto a tower and wait, and waiting was all it could do. The spirits answered to courage, not to need, which is why the legends remember them so often through their refusals. And there was a longer defeat. As Christianity settled over Armenia, the old dog-gods were written down by men who no longer believed in them, set into the histories already half emptied of their force, made into a thing that used to happen rather than a thing that did. The invisible hounds did not die. They were simply left, more and more, on towers where no one came.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an aralez in Armenian mythology?

An aralez is an invisible spirit in the form of a dog from ancient Armenian belief, whose role was to resurrect fallen heroes. The aralez were thought to descend from the sky onto the bodies of brave warriors killed in battle or by treachery and lick their wounds until they returned to life.

How did the aralez bring people back to life?

The aralez resurrected the dead by licking their wounds. According to Armenian tradition, the spirits would come down onto a worthy fallen warrior, and through the simple act of lapping at the torn flesh, restore breath and life with no spell, payment, or bargain involved.

What does an aralez look like?

The earliest sources describe the aralez as invisible spirits that take canine form, so they have no fixed appearance in the oldest tradition. Later depictions imagine them as great shaggy hounds resembling the Armenian gampr, a massive guardian dog of the highlands, and modern art often gives them wings.

Did the aralez save Ara the Handsome?

The accounts disagree. After Ara the Handsome was killed in war against Queen Semiramis, she laid his body in an upper chamber for the aralez to revive; in some versions the spirits come and he lives again, but in the most famous telling by Movses Khorenatsi the aralez never appear and Semiramis disguises a lover to fake his return.

Are the aralez good or evil?

The aralez are benevolent spirits. They exist only to restore life to the courageous dead, never to harm, though they cannot be summoned or compelled and come only for those they judge worthy, which means many who hoped for their help waited in vain.

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