The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c34.s2.22

v2.c34.s2.22

Yama it is whom, with Varuṇa, the new arrival in the realms of heaven sees. He is closely connected with Agni, and also with Mātariçvan: his is the third heaven, the other two being Savitṛ’s, and his is the highest,¹ the abode of the sun which he gives to men. He does so because he was the first of mortals who died, and who found out the way for many to the realm, where now he reigns rather than rules as king. In the later Saṁhitās² his connexion with death, which is his path already on the Rigveda,³ and with which he may even be identified there, is more and more emphasized: he is connected with Antaka, ‘the ender’, Mṛtyu, ‘death’, and Nirṛti, ‘dissolution’, and Mṛtyu is his messenger as well as his two, or more, dogs. But he is also the father of men with his sister Yamī, who bids him in a dialogue of much interest commit incest with her for the creation of the race, a view which Yama on moral grounds reprobates in the hymn.⁴ In the Avesta Yama is the king of a distant paradise on earth, the lord of a golden age where no heat or cold or defects exist. He has, though not in the Avesta, a sister Yimeh from whom with him men are sprung. It is tempting to see in him the king first of a golden age, and then of a realm of the spirits of the heroes of that age, the Ṛṣis mentioned with him as makers of the way to the world to come, as Oldenberg suggests, but the evidence hardly avails to establish this. For India and Iran, however, he is beyond doubt the first of mortals, and therefore also the first to die. The view that he is more than that, a faded divinity, whether Agni as held by Bergaigne,⁵ or the sun, as Barth⁶ thought, or, as Weber⁷ suggested, the parting day, Yamī being then night in whose gloom may be seen sorrow for Yama, or the setting sun and so the lord of the dead, as taken by Max Müller,⁸ is not necessary and is not supported by any decisive evidence: still less plausible is the effort of Hillebrandt⁹ to find in him the moon as the mortal child of the sun, even if as he holds this conception was indeed Indo-Iranian, but no longer a living belief in Vedic times. The effort¹⁰ to remove Yamī from the tradition and to see in Yama the *alter ego* of the living man, his soul, is clearly contrary to the whole of the Vedic and the Avestan evidence.