The peace of mind of one or the other reader is likely to be disturbed
by the appearance of a hell-dog here and there among peoples outside of
the Indo-European (Aryan) family. So, e. g., I. G. Müller, in his
_Geschichte der Americanischen Urreligionen_, second edition, p. 88,
mentions a dog who threatens to swallow the souls in their passage of
the river of hell. There was a custom among the Mordwines to put a club
into the coffin with the corpse, to enable him to drive away the
watch-dogs at the gate of the nether world.[20] The Mordwines, however,
have borrowed much of their mythology from the Iranians. The Hurons and
Iroquois told the early missionaries that after death the soul must
cross a deep and swift river on a bridge formed by a single slender
tree, where it had to defend itself against the attacks of a dog.[21] No
sane ethnologist or philologer will insist that all these conceptions
are related _genetically_, that there is nothing accidental in the
repetition of the idea. The dog is prominent in animal mythology; one of
his functions is to watch. It is quite possible, nay likely, that a
dog, pure and simple, has strayed occasionally into this sphere of
conceptions without any further organic meaning--simply as a baying,
hostile watch-dog. But we cannot prove anything by an ignorant _non
possumus_; the conception _may_, even if we cannot say _must_, after all
in each case, have been derived from essentially the same source: the
dead journeying upward to heaven interfered with by a coursing heavenly
body, the sun or the moon, or both. Anyhow, the organic quality of the
Indo-European, or at least the Hindu myth makes it guide and
philosopher. From dual sun and moon coursing across the sky to the two
hell-hounds, each step of development is no less clear than from Zeus
pater, "Father Sky," to breezy Jove, the gentleman about town with his
escapades and amours. To reverse the process, to imagine that the Hindus
started with two visionary dogs and finally identified them with sun and
moon--that is as easy and natural as it is for a river to flow up the
hill back to its source.