varam tamas_. The name of the moon-dog,
and, by transfer, the dog of the night, is Cy[=a]ma or Cy[=a]va "black,"
not Cabala, nor Carvara. 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 Cabal[=a]u, the
brood of Saram[=a]."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Iliad_ vii