Cerberus, The Dog of Hades | Page 9

myth and my own. This similarity seems to me to be entirely illusory. Professor Müller's own last words on the subject in the Preface of his Contributions to the Science of Mythology (p. xvi.), will make clear the difference between our views. He identifies, as he always has identified, Kerberos with the Vedic stem ?arvara, from which is derived ?arvar[=i], "night." To quote his own words: "The germ of the idea ... must be discovered in that nocturnal darkness, that ?[=a]rvaram tamas, which native mythologists in India had not yet quite forgotten in post-Vedic times." With such a view my own has not the least point of contact. ?abala, the name of one of the dogs, means "spotted, bright"; it is the name of the sun-dog; it is quite the opposite of the ?[=a]rvaram tamas. The name of the moon-dog, and, by transfer, the dog of the night, is ?y[=a]ma or ?y[=a]va "black," not ?abala, nor ?arvara. The association of the two dogs with day and night is the association of sun and moon with their respective diurnal divisions, and nothing more. Of Cimmerian gloom there can be nothing in the myth primarily, because it deals at the beginning with heaven, and not with hell; with an auspicious, and not a gloomy, vision of life after death.
CERBERUS AND COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY.
In conclusion I would draw the attention of those scholars, writers, and publicists that have declared bankruptcy against the methods and results of Comparative Mythology to the present attempt to establish an Indo-European naturalistic myth. I would ask them to consider, in the light of the Veda, that it is probable that the early notions of future life turn to the visible heaven with its sun and moon, rather than to the topographically unstable and elusive caves and gullies that lead to a wide-gated Hades. In heaven, therefore, and not in hell, is the likely breeding spot of the Cerberus myth. On the way to heaven there is but one pair that can have shaped itself reasonably in the minds of primitive observers into a pair of Cerberi. Sun and moon, the Veda declares, are the Cerberi. In due time, and by gradual stages, the heaven myth became a hell myth. The Vedic seers had no Pluto, no Hades, no Styx, and no Charon; yet they had the pair of dogs. Now when Yama and his heaven become Pluto and hell, then, and only then, Yama's dogs are on a plane with the three-headed, or two-headed, Greek Kerberos. Is it not likely that the chthonic hell visions of the Greeks were also preceded by heavenly visions, and that Kerberos originally sprang from heaven? Consider, too, the breadth and the persistence of these ideas, their simple background, and their natural transition from one feature to another in the myth of Cerberus; that is, the notions of sun and moon (day and night) in their relation to the precarious life of man upon the earth, his death, and his future life. For my part, I do not believe that the honest critics of the methods and results of Comparative Mythology, though they have been made justly suspicious by the many failures in this field, will ever successfully "run past, straightway, the two four-eyed dogs, the spotted and the dark, the ?abal[=a]u, the brood of Saram[=a]."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Iliad viii. 368; Odyssey xi. 623.
[2] Theogony, 311 ff.; cf. also 769 ff.
[3] Republic, 588 C.
[4] Baumeister, volume I., page 620 (figure 690).
[5] Baumeister, volume I., page 379 (figure 415).
[6] Baumeister, volume I., page 653 (figure 721).
[7] Baumeister, volume I., page 663 (figure 730). See the Frontispiece and its explanation.
[8] American Journal of Arch?ology, volume XI., page 14 (figure 12, page 15).
[9] Custos opaci pervigil regni canis. Seneca.
[10] Inferno, Canto vi., 13 ff.
[11] See p. 99 of the Teubner edition of his writings.
[12] Fulgentius, Liber I., Fabula VI., de Tricerbero, p. 20 of the Teubner edition.
[13] Both ?ankara, the great Hindu theologian and commentator of the Upanishads, as well as all modern interpreters of the Upanishads, have failed to see the sense of this passage.
[14] Cf. the notion of the sun as the "highest death" in T[=a]ittir[=i]va Br[=a]hmana, i. 8. 4.
[15] See Ernst Kuhn, Festgruss an Otto von B?htlingk, page 68 ff.
[16] Similar notions in Russia and Russian Asia are reported by Wsevolod Miller, Atti del iv. Congresso Internazionale degli Orientalisti, vol. ii. p. 43; and by Casartelli, Babylonian and Oriental Record, iv. 266 ff. They are most likely derived from Iranian sources.
[17] See American Journal of Philology, vol. XI., p. 355.
[18] Similarly in Greek [Greek: Aiante] means Ajax and Teukros; see Delbrück, Vergleichende Syntax, i. 137.
[19] See Usener, G?tternamen, p. 303 ff.
[20] Max Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, p. 240.
[21] Brinton, The Myths of the New World. Second Edition, p. 265.
[22] Presented to the American