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 ÇABALĀU.
The two dogs of Yama derive their proper names from their color epithets. The passages above make it clear that Çyāma (rarely Çyāva), "the black," is the moon dog, and that Çabala, "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 Çabalāu. 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 mātarāu or pitarāu, literally, "the two mothers," and "the two fathers," each mean "the two parents."[18] From this we may conclude that Çabalāu means really Çabala and Çyāma, and not the two Çabalas, that is, "the two spotted ones."
IS ÇABALAS = Κέρβερος?
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 Purānas; 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 Çabala 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 Çabala with Greek Κέρβερος (rarely Κέρβελος), 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 Greeks— Απόλλων, Απέλλων, Αππέλλων, Απείλων, Απλουν[19]—to realize that it is useless to demand strict phonetic conservation of mythic proper names. The nominative Çabalas, translated sound for sound into Greek, yields Κεβερος, Κεβελος; vice versa, Κέβρερος? translated sound for sound into Vedic Sanskrit yields Çalbalas, or perhaps, dialectically, Çabbalas. It is a sober view that considers it rather surprising that the two languages have not manipulated their respective versions of the word so as to increase still further the phonetic distance between them. Certainly the burden is now to prove that the identification is to be rejected, and, I think, that the soundest linguistic science will refuse ultimately to consider the phonetic discrepancy between the two words as a matter of serious import.
But whether the names Çabalas and Kerberos are identical or not, the myth itself is the thing. The explanation which we have coaxed step by step from the texts of the Veda imparts to the myth a definite character: it is no longer a dark and uncertain touch in the troubled visions of hell, but an uncommonly lucid treatment of an important cosmic phenomenon. Sun and moon course across the sky: beyond is the abode of light and the blessed. The coursers are at one moment regarded as barring the way to heaven; at another as outposts who may guide the soul to heaven. In yet another mood, as they constantly, day by day, look down upon the race of men, dying day by day, they are regarded as picking daily candidates for the final journey. In due time Yama and his heaven are degraded to a mere Pluto and hell; then the terrible character of the two dogs is all that can be left to them. And the two dogs blend into a unit variously, either a four-eyed Parsi dog, or a two-headed—finally a plural-headed—Kerberos.
OTHER DOGS OF HELL.
The peace of mind of one or the other reader is likely to be disturbed by the appearance of a hell-dog here and there among peoples outside of the Indo-European (Aryan) family. So, e. g., I. G. Müller, in his Geschichte der Americanischen Urreligionen, second edition, p. 88, mentions a dog who threatens to swallow the souls in their passage of the river of hell. There was a custom among the Mordwines to put a club into the coffin with the corpse, to enable him to drive away the watch-dogs at the gate of the nether world.[20] The Mordwines, however, have borrowed much of their mythology from the Iranians. The Hurons and Iroquois told the early missionaries that after death the soul must cross a deep and swift river on a bridge formed by a single slender tree, where it had to defend itself against the attacks of a dog.[21] No sane ethnologist or philologer will insist that all these conceptions are related genetically, that there is nothing accidental in the repetition of the idea. The dog is prominent in animal mythology; one of his functions is to watch. It is quite possible, nay likely, that a dog, pure and simple, has strayed occasionally into this sphere of conceptions without any further organic meaning—simply as a baying, hostile watch-dog. But we cannot prove anything by an ignorant non possumus; the conception may, even if we cannot say must, after all in each case, have been derived from essentially the same source: the dead journeying upward to heaven interfered with by a coursing heavenly body, the sun or the moon, or both. Anyhow, the organic quality of the Indo-European, or at least the Hindu myth makes it guide and philosopher. From dual sun and moon coursing across the sky to the two hell-hounds, each step of development is no less clear than from Zeus pater, "Father Sky," to breezy Jove, the gentleman about town with his escapades and amours. To reverse the process, to imagine that the Hindus started with two visionary dogs and finally identified them with sun and moon—that is as easy and natural as it is for a river to flow up the hill back to its source.