Eggcorn Forum

Here’s a riddle. What two beasts guard the gates of Heaven?

First hint: They work in shifts.

Second hint: They are the two faces that judge the dead, one shining, dappled, variegated, benign, the other black and terrific.

Third and final hint: In the tenth book of the Rig-Veda, we learn that the first mortal, Yama, who dwells on high (or dwelt, in those days, before being consigned to Hades by the Greeks), sends out daily his two dogs to scour the earth looking for souls worthy to join the feast in his rich meadows. One is dark and the other spotted. Sometimes their pups go with them.

OK, you got it, day and night, the sun and the moon. The Lord of souls owns two dogs: Çarbara, the spotted, who also has the moniker “Triçira,” three-headed, and Çyama, the Black One. The Romans and Greeks called the dog Cerberus (pronounced /ˈsÉœrbÉ™rÉ™s/),or Kerberos, (Greek form: Κέρβερος). Petronius waggishly defined Cerberus as the lawyer of Hades, because of its three jaws. The Roman mythologer Fulgentius put it poetically, that Cerberus means carnivore (“Creaboros”), and that his three heads were infancy, youth and old age. In fact, the number of heads that Cerberus possesses can vary from 1 to 50, though most of the latter were serpents growing from the neck or back, by a kind of mythological squash with that other terrible guardian, the Gorgon.

Where else might that redundancy of heads come from? Suggestions include, first, the possibility that his two pups (the sun dogs) go everywhere with him, and someone in their terror and confusion took them to be one beast. Second, through an eggcorn mechanism, according to the mythographer Palaephatos, who proposed that he picked up the nickname Trikarênos, or three-headed, from sniffing around in the city of Trikarenos in the northeastern Peloponnese. The Sanskrit scholar Maurice Bloomfield found evidence to suggest that it was a confusion developing from the dog’s exquisitely keen and discriminatory eyesight: it was four-eyed. The latter, I like, for its clash with the current meaning of four-eyed as “ocularly challenged”.

All those crania may be behind the reformulation of the dog’s name as Cerebrus. I’ve placed this post here under slips, because it only takes one little digital misstep to switch the letters of Cerberus around, so, who knows. In particular, the first example comes from the admirable Word Detective site, where I first came across it. The authors there admitted that they weren’t in their right minds that day, post 9-11.

Word Detective Her siblings were none other than Cerebrus (the three-headed hound who eventually found work guarding the gates of Hell), Hydra (a nine-headed aquatic monster) and Orthrus ( the runt of the litter, a prosaic two-headed dog).

Teacher Did Odysseus encounter Cerebrus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates to the underworld, while on his journey home?

Book review of the cerebral Gene Wolfe Latro, Cerebrus, Suns New, Long and Short
Cave Canem is a website devoted to the first Wolfe novel I read: The Fifth Head of Cerebrus

This post is a mixmatch of freely reinterpreted accounts in the entertaining writings of Maurice Bloomfield (1905) and Charles W. King (1887).