nd meet his departing soul and help it through the howls and
pursuit in the other world; nor will the dogs that keep the Cinvad
bridge (the bridge to paradise) help his departing soul through the
howls and pursuit in the other world." The _Avesta_ also conceives this
dog to be four-eyed. When a man dies, as soon as the soul has parted
from the body, the evil one, the corpse-devil (Druj Nasu), from the
regions of hell, falls upon the dead. Whoever henceforth touches the
corpse becomes unclean, and makes unclean whomsoever he touches. The
devil is expelled from the dead by means of the "look of the dog": a
"four-eyed dog" is brought near the body and is made to look at the
dead; as soon as he has done so the devil flees back to hell
(_Vendidad_, vii. 7; viii. 41). It is not easy to fetch from a
mythological hell mythological monsters for casual purposes, especially
as men are always engaged in dying upon the earth. Herakles is the only
one who, one single time, performed this notable "stunt." So the
Parsis, being at a loss to find four-eyed dogs, interpret the name as
meaning a dog with two spots over the eyes. Curiously enough the Hindu
scholiasts also regularly interpret the term "four-eyed" in exactly the
same way, "with spots over the eyes." And the Vedic ritual in its turn
has occasion to realize the mythological four-eyed dog in practice. The
horse, at the horse-sacrifice, must take a bath for consecration to the
holy end to which it is put. It must also be guarded against hostile
influences. A low-caste man brings a four-eyed dog--here obviously the
symbol of the hostile powers--kills him with a club, and afterwards
places him under the feet of the horse. It is scarcely necessary to
state that this is a dog with spots over his eyes, and that he is a
symbol of Cerberus.[16]

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
"shar