Dip

Also Known As: plural dips; Catalan, the second element of the place name Pratdip in the Baix Camp
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Catalan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A devil-ridden black dog that hunts only after dark and takes blood rather than meat, leaving the animal standing and drained.
Role in Mythos: It is the beast of one small stretch of the serra de Llaberia, the thing that came down on Pratdip’s flocks at night and ended up on the village’s coat of arms.
Relation to Humans: Herders and carters feared it enough that nobody would put a hand on one, and the village told the story as a reason not to walk home late from the taverns. It never became a demon of the whole language, only of the people who lived under that particular ridge.

The flock came down off the hill at first light smelling of warm wool and dust, and the man counting them found one ewe standing wrong. The skin under the fleece had gone cold. There were punctures at the throat, already closing. Nothing had been carried off and nothing had been eaten, which is what made it worse: a wolf leaves a mess, and whatever had come down from the ridge in the night had wanted one thing only.

That was a dip, and it belonged to the country around Pratdip, a village of a few hundred people on a hill above the barranc de la Dòvia, in the broken limestone of the Baix Camp under the serra de Llaberia. The tellings describe them as small dogs, dark, more wolf than dog when they were frightening and more dog than wolf when they were merely there. They kept to the high ground. They came out only at night, showing themselves as a shape on the skyline or as a pair of eyes holding steady in the dark, and they went for livestock. The village never counted them as one creature with a name and a history. There were several, they were a local population, and they were understood the way you understand a predator that lives on your land.

One detail survived every retelling and every redrawing, which is unusual for folklore of this kind. The dip is lame. The traditional seals and arms of Pratdip all carry a legendary dog gone lame in one paw, and when the Generalitat approved the modern municipal coat of arms in October 2005 it kept the animal: a gold field with a black chief, taken from the arms of the Entença barons who held the castle, and on it a black dog walking with a forepaw raised. The heraldic file traces the dog on a Pratdip seal back to 1700. The two scholars who catalogued every place name in the parish, Josep M. Coll Casadó and Ramon Amigó i Anglès, were less certain and said only that the shield with the animal on it seems to predate 1840. That kind of disagreement is normal for a village emblem and it is worth noticing rather than smoothing over.

Older than either is the painted evidence. The dips appear in the retaule of Santa Marina, dated 1602, a Renaissance altarpiece from the hermitage out along the ravine, since moved into a side chapel of the parish church. They turn up again in a second altarpiece of 1730, and there they are unmistakable: the black silhouette cut against the gold ground, tail lifted, the red tongue out. Whoever carved that had stopped thinking of a dog and started thinking of a devil.

The name is where the whole thing gets interesting, because it almost certainly runs the other way round from how the village tells it. Local etymology takes the syllable dip in Pratdip and says the meadow was named for the dogs. The philology does not cooperate. Joan Coromines put Pratdip among the pre-Roman names of Catalonia, grouping Prat-d’Ip with Tivissa, Tibi and Ibi, and returned to that reading in 1965 and again in 1972. Pere Balañà Abadia proposed instead a Latin pratu with the Arabic dib, wolf. Twelfth-century documents write Prato de Ip, with a second element nobody can pin down, and in 1174 a lord promised the king the castle de Ippo. Whichever of those is right, the syllable was there long before anyone painted a dog on an altar. The likelier story is that a village found itself living with a name it could no longer read, and grew a beast to explain it.

Late on a winter night a man walking the road up from the taverns would have had the ridge above him on one side and a drop into the barranc on the other. That is the scene the story was built for. The version people in Pratdip still offer is that the dips were there to keep men off the wine and moving briskly homeward, and looking at the road, it would have worked.

No source says where the dips came from. There is no first dip, no curse, no bargain struck with anything, no account of what one wanted beyond the blood it took. Nobody ever caught one. The carters and the villagers were afraid enough of them that catching one was never attempted, so the record contains no body, no description from close quarters, and no ending except that at some point in the nineteenth century they were said to have stopped coming.

The dip’s afterlife is unusually well documented for a creature of a single parish. Joan Perucho built his 1960 novel Les històries naturals out of it, keeping chapters titled Teoria del dip and Pratdip and turning the beast into Onofre de Dip, a knight of King Jaume who comes back from the east as a vampire able to wear other shapes. That book carried the word out of the Baix Camp. Today there is a monument to the dip at one of the entrances to the village, sculpted with a face so amiable it could be somebody’s pet, and a marked trail through the streets for finding the others.

What the dip could do was narrow and it was enough. It moved at night, it was quiet, it could open a vein without waking a fold, and it was frightening enough to stop grown men from laying hands on it. Everything else about it is limitation. It could not work in daylight. It never left its own few square miles of hillside, so it stayed a Pratdip problem and never became a Catalan one. It was lame, which is the mark the imagery insisted on keeping even after the beast had been promoted to heraldry. And in the end it simply stopped, without a hero, without a hunt, and without anyone recording the last one. The dog on the shield is still walking with that paw off the ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a dip in Catalan folklore?

A dip is a black, demon-ridden dog from the folklore of Pratdip, in the Baix Camp region of Catalonia, that came out at night to drink the blood of livestock. The tellings describe them as small and dark, more wolf than dog, living on the ridges of the serra de Llaberia. They are usually described as lame in one paw.

Why is the dip on the coat of arms of Pratdip?

The traditional seals and shields of Pratdip have always carried a legendary local dog lame in one paw, and the modern arms approved by the Generalitat de Catalunya in October 2005 kept it: a black dog on a gold field with a black chief. The black chief comes from the arms of the Entença barons, who held the castle of Pratdip. The heraldic file traces the dog on a village seal back to 1700.

Does the name Pratdip really come from the dips?

Probably not. That is the local etymology, but Joan Coromines classed Pratdip among Catalonia’s pre-Roman place names, grouping it with Tivissa, Tibi and Ibi, while Pere Balañà Abadia proposed a Latin pratu plus the Arabic dib, meaning wolf. Twelfth-century documents already write Prato de Ip, so the syllable is far older than any painted dog.

Where can you see the dips depicted?

The oldest known image is in the retaule of Santa Marina of 1602, an altarpiece from the hermitage that now stands in a side chapel of the parish church at Pratdip. A second altarpiece of 1730 shows them more fiercely, cut in black against a gold ground with the tail raised and a red tongue out. There is also a modern monument to the dip at one of the entrances to the village.

What happened to the dips?

According to the tradition they disappeared at some point during the nineteenth century, without any hunt, hero or final encounter being recorded. No source describes a dip being caught or killed, because the herders and carters who feared them never dared try. The story survives in the village name, the altarpieces, the coat of arms and Joan Perucho’s 1960 novel Les històries naturals.