Cerberus, The Dog of Hades | Page 7

Avesta, the bible of the ancient Iranians, has reduced the Cerberus myth to stunted rudiments. In Vendidad, xiii. 8. 9, the killing of dogs is forbidden, because the soul of the slayer "when passing to the other world, shall fly amid louder howling and fiercer pursuit than the sheep does when the wolf rushes upon it in the lofty forest. No soul will come and meet his departing soul and help it through the howls and pursuit in the other world; nor will the dogs that keep the Cinvad bridge (the bridge to paradise) help his departing soul through the howls and pursuit in the other world." The Avesta also conceives this dog to be four-eyed. When a man dies, as soon as the soul has parted from the body, the evil one, the corpse-devil (Druj Nasu), from the regions of hell, falls upon the dead. Whoever henceforth touches the corpse becomes unclean, and makes unclean whomsoever he touches. The devil is expelled from the dead by means of the "look of the dog": a "four-eyed dog" is brought near the body and is made to look at the dead; as soon as he has done so the devil flees back to hell (Vendidad, vii. 7; viii. 41). It is not easy to fetch from a mythological hell mythological monsters for casual purposes, especially as men are always engaged in dying upon the earth. Herakles is the only one who, one single time, performed this notable "stunt." So the Parsis, being at a loss to find four-eyed dogs, interpret the name as meaning a dog with two spots over the eyes. Curiously enough the Hindu scholiasts also regularly interpret the term "four-eyed" in exactly the same way, "with spots over the eyes." And the Vedic ritual in its turn has occasion to realize the mythological four-eyed dog in practice. The horse, at the horse-sacrifice, must take a bath for consecration to the holy end to which it is put. It must also be guarded against hostile influences. A low-caste man brings a four-eyed dog--here obviously the symbol of the hostile powers--kills him with a club, and afterwards places him under the feet of the horse. It is scarcely necessary to state that this is a dog with spots over his eyes, and that he is a symbol of Cerberus.[16]
THE TERM "FOUR-EYED."
The epithet "four-eyed" may possibly contain a tentative coagulation of the two dogs in one. The capacity of the two dogs to see both by day (the sun) and by night (the moon) may have given the myth a slight start into the direction of the two-headed Greek Cerberus. But there is the alternate possibility that four-eyed is but a figure of speech for "sharp-sighted," especially as I have shown elsewhere that the parallel expression "to run with four feet" is a Vedic figure of speech for "swift of foot."[17] Certainly the god Agni, "Fire," is once in the Rig-Veda (i. 31. 13) called "four-eyed," which can only mean "sharp-sighted."
THE DUAL ?ABAL[=A]U.
The two dogs of Yama derive their proper names from their color epithets. The passages above make it clear that ?y[=a]ma (rarely ?y[=a]va), "the black," is the moon dog, and that ?abala, "the spotted, or brindled," is the sun dog. In one early passage (Rig-Veda, x. 14. 10) both dogs are named in the dual as ?abal[=a]u. But for a certain Vedic usage one might think that "the two spotted ones" was their earliest designation. The usage referred to is the eliptic dual: a close or natural pair, each member of which suggests the other, may be expressed through the dual of one of them, as when either m[=a]tar[=a]u or pitar[=a]u, literally, "the two mothers," and "the two fathers," each mean "the two parents."[18] From this we may conclude that ?abal[=a]u means really ?abala and ?y[=a]ma, and not the two ?abalas, that is, "the two spotted ones."
IS ?ABALAS = [Greek: Kerberos]?
More than a hundred years ago the Anglo-Indian Wilford, in the Asiatick Researches, iii., page 409, wrote: "Yama, the regent of hell, has two dogs, according to the Pur[=a]nas; one of them named Cerbura, or varied; the other Syama, or black." He then compares Cerbura with Kerberos, of course. The form Cerbura he obtained from his consulting Pandit, who explained the name ?abala by the Sanskrit word karbura "variegated," a regular gloss of the Hindu scholiasts.
About fifty years later a number of distinguished scholars of the past generation, Max Müller, Albrecht Weber, and Theodor Benfey, compared the word ?abala with Greek [Greek: Kerberos] (rarely [Greek: Kerbelos]), but, since then, this identification has been assailed in numerous quarters with some degree of heat, because it suffers from a slight phonetic difficulty. One need but remember the swift changes which the name of Apollo passes through in the mouths of the