![]() Like many people of my age, my first awareness of Cerberus - the fearsome three-headed canine guardian of the gates of Hades - came via an erroneous surrogate, albeit a wonderfully thrilling one. Humanity at the moment seems to me to be convulsed with a peculiar form of unpleasant insanity, so it was pleasant to be taken out of myself for a while to a consideration of this ancient myth – especially when it was found to be a much more cheerful myth, in origin, than I had supposed. In the Norse mythos, Odin’s two wolves Geri and Freki, it is suggested, may be echoes of the old Aryan Vedic myth.Ĭerberus was never unfriendly to those trying to enter the underworld – only to those who, having gone in, tried to get out again. Far from being a terrifying two or three headed hell hound, the original canine pair were sent abroad to seek out those lucky souls who were worthy of being conducted to bliss in the afterworld. This delightful but all too brief study (really just an essay) is an elegant discussion of the Cerberus story in all its aspects, and suggests that the origin of the myth is to be found in ancient India, with the two hounds of Yama in Vedic mythology representing the sun/day and the moon/night. So how many heads does Cerberus actually have – is it two, or three? Or maybe even just the one, as Heraclitus has it – because he has two sons, so what appears to be three heads are just the silhouettes of Big Dog and the two pups.
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