Cerberus, The Dog of Hades | Page 9

My late lamented
friend, Max Müller, the gifted writer who knew best of all men how to
rivet the attention of the cultivated public upon questions of this sort,
did me the honor to notice my proposition in an article in the London
Academy of August 13, 1892 (number 1058, page 134-5), entitled
"Professor Bloomfield's Contributions to the Interpretation of the
Veda." In this article he seems to try to establish a certain similarity
between his conception of the Kerberos 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 çarvara, from which is derived çarvar[=i], "night." To
quote his own words: "The germ of the idea ... must be discovered in
that nocturnal darkness, that ç[=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. Çabala, 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 ç[=a]rvaram tamas. The name
of the moon-dog, and, by transfer, the dog of the night, is Çy[=a]ma or
Çy[=a]va "black," not Çabala, nor Çarvara. 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
Çabal[=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 Archæology, 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 Çankara, 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 Böhtlingk, page 68 ff.