Cerberus

“Beware of the Dog,” although he is “man’s best friend.” We seem to have an ambiguous relationship to this closest of all creatures. He is at once fierce and forbidding, and benevolent. He often appears in myth (as in real life) as a ‘gatekeeper.’

In one of Francisco Goya’s late paintings the half obscured form of a dog appears, as if descending or arising from an underground passageway. Is it an everyday scene or a reference to the canine guardian of the underworld, Cerberus, in Greek mythology?

In the painting here a wolflike dog crosses the travelers path as he winds down into a stony canyon, a simple occurrence, full of possible meaning.

In my years of living in East Tennessee I often took walks along a trail which winds along the western facing bluffs of Lookout Mountain, a place known as Sunset Rock. I had my own troubles to forget, and the place too had known violence. The Union and Confederate armies had clashed on these slopes in 1863. A thousand men died in “The Battle above the Clouds.” I often went there in late afternoon when the granite walls were bathed in a soft golden-rose light. The silence and solitude, the quality of the day’s last, muted blaze always had a calming effect. Sometimes an animal would scurry across the path ahead of me. I was reminded of those animal guardians of the spirit world. It seemed then not so much a place of death but of ‘crossing over.’ What rises out of the cavern is not the gloom of Hades, but light.