The Typikon is silent on tails.

Orthodox Christians fast on most Wednesdays and Fridays, and through four long fasts: Great Lent before Pascha, the Apostles’ Fast in early summer, the Dormition Fast in August and the Nativity Fast before Christmas. A fast means no meat and no dairy, and on the strict days no fish, no wine and no oil.

Our tails contain no meat, no dairy, no fish, no wine and no oil. Your lube may. So here is every day of the year, by the common parish reading of the Typikon, with what it means for you.

Count it up on the calendar above: an Orthodox Christian who keeps every fast is, without ever using the word, vegan for something like half the year. Long before anyone printed it on a label, the Church had a calendar of days without animal products and an extraordinary cuisine to go with it.

Our tails are vegan every day of the year, including Pascha. You may wear one on a strict fast day without breaking anything at all.

On Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece, there have been no women since at least the typikon of 1045, and no female animals either: no cows, no ewes, no mares. The rule is called the avaton.

The famous exception is cats. The monasteries are old, the storerooms are full of grain, and the mice do not keep the avaton. So cats have been quietly tolerated for centuries, and Athos is full of them.

We do not recommend wearing anything of ours on the Holy Mountain. We only note that of our three tails, the cat is the one with precedent.

The Orthodox Church has a whole rank of saints, the fools for Christ (in Greek saloi, in Russian yurodivye), who did strange things in public on purpose, to show respectable people their own pride.

St. Symeon of Emesa, in the sixth century, entered the city for the first time dragging a dead dog behind him, tied to his belt. St. Basil of Moscow went naked through the Russian winter and shoplifted from dishonest merchants; the cathedral on Red Square with the onion domes is named after him.

We are not saying that wearing a tail makes you a holy fool. We are saying the Church already has a category for people who walk into town with an animal attached to them, and it puts them on icons.

In some Orthodox icons St. Christopher has the head of a dog. One tradition says he came from a people of dog-headed men, the kynokephaloi, and the painters took it literally: a saint in armor or robes, with a halo around a dog’s head.

In 1722 the Russian Synod banned these icons, and they became rare. But they were painted, and venerated, and some still hang in churches and museums.

So if you are a pup, you have an icon.

St. Gerasimos ran a monastery near the Jordan in the fifth century. One day a lion came limping to him with a thorn in its paw. He took it out, and the lion stayed: it ate bread and vegetables with the monks and guarded the monastery’s donkey. When Gerasimos died, the lion lay down on his grave and would not get up again.

The story is told in the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos. In the West it was later told of St. Jerome, probably because Gerasimus and Geronimus look alike in Latin. The Orthodox know whose lion it is.

The hesychasts of Mount Athos prayed the Jesus Prayer sitting low, chin on chest, eyes fixed on the middle of the body, breathing slowly. In the fourteenth century the monk Barlaam mocked them as omphalopsychoi, people with their souls in their navels. St. Gregory Palamas defended them, and the councils of Constantinople took Palamas’s side.

We draw no conclusions about anything lower down.

On weekdays in Great Lent, the Prayer of St. Ephrem is said with prostrations, forehead to the floor. Choose a size you can prostrate in.