Cerberus

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 can be fierce and forbidding, but also 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 wolf-like dog crosses the traveler’s 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. A period of my life was coming to an end, and I had my own troubles to mull over. The place too had known violence. The Union and Confederate armies clashed on these escarpments in the autumn of 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 uncluttered 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 of which the three headed Cerberus was a specimen. In its dreamy afternoon silence, 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.