Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/122

 106 The Religion of the Veda 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 Képpepos, con- sidering 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-Eu- ropean 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. I cannot here afford the time that would be required to the full expo- sition 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 My- thology. 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 indepen- dently 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 {