The gate of the year

Icon of the XVII century representing St. Christopher, from Cerepovec, Russia, and now in the Kremlin Museum of Rostov Velikij, Russia.
In the hagiographical legends, St. Christopher is described as a man of giant stature and enormous physical strength, who embarked on a journey to find the “greatest king” on earth and putting himself as his servant. Disappointed by the sovereigns he had encountered, he was at last convinced by an hermit to put himself as servant of Christ, carrying out the task of ferrying the passersby through the dangerous waters of a river. One day, a child asked him to be transported, but the burden became so unbearable that it was extremely difficult for him to reach the opposite shore. The child revealed to be Christ himself, and since that day the ferryman took the name of “bringer of Christ”. In the Oriental churches, the saint is often represented with a dog’s head and depicted in the legends as a giant warrior who came from the Cyrenaica region. The crossing of a river and the dog’s head are both attributes of beings associated with the land of the dead, like the Egyptian god Anubi or the demon represented in some Etruscan reliefs. Thus, it seems that the Christian saint could have inherited some of the characteristics of an ancient divinity of the underworld, acting as “psychopomp”.
Another element favoring the Saint’s representation in cynocephalic form was the recurrence of his feast on July 25th, just during the period which was called by the Ancient Latins the Canicula, because it corresponded to the heliacal rising (that is, the rising on the horizon just before the sunrise) of the star Sirius, in the constellation of the Great Dog, which was known as the “Dog Star”.

[Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Christopher_-_Icon_from_ Cherepovets.jpg].




Human-Animal Transformation

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	Icon of the XVII century representing St. Christopher, from Cerepovec, Russia, and now in the Kremlin Museum of Rostov Velikij, Russia. In the hagiographical legends, St. Christopher is described as a man of giant stature and enormous physical strength, who embarked on a journey to find the “greatest king” on earth and putting himself as his servant. Disappointed by the sovereigns he had encountered, he was at last convinced by an hermit to put himself as servant of Christ, carrying out the task of ferrying the passersby through the dangerous waters of a river. One day, a child asked him to be transported, but the burden became so unbearable that it was extremely difficult for him to reach the opposite shore. The child revealed to be Christ himself, and since that day the ferryman took the name of “bringer of Christ”. In the Oriental churches, the saint is often represented with a dog’s head and depicted in the legends as a giant warrior who came from the Cyrenaica region. The crossing of a river and the dog’s head are both attributes of beings associated with the land of the dead, like the Egyptian god Anubi or the demon represented in some Etruscan reliefs. Thus, it seems that the Christian saint could have inherited some of the characteristics of an ancient divinity of the underworld, acting as “psychopomp”. Another element favoring the Saint’s representation in cynocephalic form was the recurrence of his feast on July 25th, just during the period which was called by the Ancient Latins the Canicula, because it corresponded to the heliacal rising (that is, the rising on the horizon just before the sunrise) of the star Sirius, in the constellation of the Great Dog, which was known as the “Dog Star”. [Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Christopher_-_Icon_from_ Cherepovets.jpg].