The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c8.10

Language: English

c8.10.1

The Vedic texts look upon this pair of dogs in a variety of ways. First, the soul of man has to get past them in order to get to heaven. This is the familiar Cerberus idea. Secondly, the two dogs of Yama pick out daily candidates for death. Thirdly, the dogs are entrusted with the care of the souls of the dead on their way to join Yama in heaven. Now we might almost ask with the riddle: "What is it?" I wonder whether there is not present in this audience some ingenious man or woman who can guess what real pair in nature on the way to heaven, coursing like dogs across the heaven, can harmonise these discrepant points of view. But we are not left to guess. The Vedic texts tell us in plain language that they are the sun and the moon, or as they are called, with a very ancient poetic touch, the speckled and the dark. Now the word for speckled is *çabalas*; it fits in well enough with Greek Κέρβερος, considering the susceptibility of mythic proper names to the kind of modulation, or sophistication, which we call popular etymology. But we may disregard the verbal etymology altogether. Other Indo-European peoples have more or less definite notions about one or two dogs. It is more than probable that the early notions of future life turned to the visible heaven with its sun and moon, rather than the topographically unstable and elusive caves and gullies that lead, in the unquestionably late Greek fancy, to a wide-gated Hades.

c8.10.2

I cannot here afford the time that would be required to the full exposition of this myth, and would refer you to my little book, *Cerberus, the Dog of Hades: The History of an Idea*, published in 1905, which I regard as my program of method in the study of Comparative Mythology. Now, to be sure, we find that other peoples, not Indo-European, here and there, own a dog who gets in the way of the soul on its way to heaven. Obviously, the conception may have arisen independently in the same way: the dead journeying upward to heaven, but interfered with by a coursing heavenly body, the sun or the moon, or both. But grant that somewhere or other a dog, pure and simple, has strayed into this sphere of conceptions without any organic mythological meaning, simply as a baying, hostile, watchdog in heaven or hell. We cannot therefore ignore the wonderful yet simple Indo-European myth which is begotten of high reason and keen appreciation of myth-making opportunity. Plainly, this myth requires no further explanation from the usually vague and half-understood analogies that may be found on the broad ground of universal Ethnology and Folk-lore. Far be it from me to suggest that mythological evidence, whencesoever obtainable, should be excluded from these deliberations: all I want to prevent is the importation of bad coal into Newcastle.

c8.10.3

Since the Indo-Europeans are one people, let us first study their own minds in their own literature or archeological remains, before turning to the Iroquois, the Papuas, or the inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands for sporadic reports that, more often than not, reach our ear out of their proper connection, or with their point bent. When the smoke shall have cleared there will be—of this I am certain—less airy reliance on ethnological quantities irrational in Indo-European mathematics. But there will be left a goodly stock of Indo-European divinities and simple myths, profoundly interesting, not only with the interest of hoary antiquity, but even more so because they determine and explain the main lines along which move the mythologies of the Indo-European peoples of historical times. The main substance, though by no means the entire substance, of the mythologies and religions of these peoples—this is as true to-day as it was in the days of Benfey, Kuhn and Müller—is the nature myth. If we count Brahmanical theosophy and Buddhism as the two great yields of the study of Hinduism, we may safely add Comparative Mythology as the third great field of religious history that has been opened out by the study of India. Had we but fuller records of ancient Indo-European history and literature, these fuller records would reveal more common myths and religious ideas. The added facts would fill in the necessarily sketchy picture, but it would still be the same picture.