The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s3.1

v2.c41.s3.1

J. Hertel⁷ claims that in India and Iran alike we find the conception of the heaven as a great stone building, filled with light, through whose doors, the sun and the stars, the light of heaven shines upon men. For this view is adduced the reference in the Rigveda to the palace of Varuṇa with a thousand doors, which is asserted to be none other than the heaven with its stars. For Iran there is the narrative in Vendīdād ii, which has long passed as the Iranian version of the legend of the flood, but in which we should rather see the account of Yama’s reign in the golden age and of the way in which he conveyed the first to die through the opening of the heaven, i.e. the sun, into the heaven of light. It is, however, true that this original legend of the Magian faith has been altered in the form in which we have it, since it could not, as it stood, be made consistent with the Zoroastrian doctrine of the fate of the dead. The Vara mentioned in the Vendīdād is to be compared with the Vedic Vala,⁸ which is none other than the closed firmament which the lord of the heaven of light, Bṛhaspati, or sometimes Indra, cleaves in order to set free the ruddy kine, i.e. the stars. Yet a further confirmation of the new interpretation of the Vendīdād is seen in an obscure verse of the Rigveda,⁹ which is made to yield the sense that Manu adorned with flames the door of the heaven of Indra. By yet another conjecture we are to see in Rigveda x. 14. 2 (‘Yama as the first hath found this way to the heaven for us, and this pastureland none can take from us’) the sole allusion to a legend of the gradual failure of the earth to support the number of those alive and the departure of Yama with the superfluous population, involving the introduction of death into the world.