“unborn part” is carried “to the world of the righteous,” after having been burned and heated by the funeral fire.  All these parts are restored to the soul, however, and Agni and Soma return to it what has been injured.  With this Muir compares a passage in the Atharva Veda where it is said that the Manes in heaven rejoice with all their limbs.[43] We dissent, therefore, wholly from Barth, who declares that the dead are conceived of as “resting forever in the tomb, the narrow house of clay.”  The only passage cited to prove this is X. 18. 10-13, where are the words (addressed to the dead man at the burial):  “Go now to mother earth ... she shall guard thee from destruction’s lap ...  Open wide, O earth, be easy of access; as a mother her son cover this man, O earth,” etc.  Ending with the verse quoted above:  “May the Fathers hold the pillar and Yama there build thee a seat."[44] The following is also found in the Rig Veda bearing on this point:  the prayer that one may meet his parents after death; the statement that a generous man goes to the gods; and a suggestion of the later belief that one wins immortality by means of a son.[45]

The joys of paradise are those of earth; and heaven is thus described, albeit in a late hymn:[46] “Where is light inexhaustible; in the world where is placed the shining sky; set me in this immortal, unending world, O thou that purifiest thyself (Soma); where is king (Yama), the son of Vivasvant, and the paradise of the sky;[47] where are the flowing waters; there make me immortal.  Where one can go as he will; in the third heaven, the third vault of the sky; where are worlds full of light, there make me immortal; where are wishes and desires and the red (sun)’s highest place; where one can follow his own habits [48] and have satisfaction; there make me immortal; where exist delight, joy, rejoicing, and joyance; where wishes are obtained, there make me immortal."[49] Here, as above, the saints join the Fathers, ‘who guard the sun.’

There is a ‘bottomless darkness’ occasionally referred to as a place where evil spirits are to be sent by the gods; and a ‘deep place’ is mentioned as the portion of ‘evil, false, untruthful men’; while Soma casts into ‘a hole’ (abyss) those that are irreligious.[50]

As darkness is hell to the Hindu, and as in all later time the demons are spirits of darkness, it is rather forced not to see in these allusions a misty hell, without torture indeed, but a place for the bad either ‘far away,’ as it is sometimes said (par[=a]vati), or ‘deep down,’ ‘under three earths,’ exactly as the Greek has a hell below and one on the edge of the earth.  Ordinarily, however, the gods are requested simply to annihilate offenders.  It is plain, as Zimmer says, from the office of Yama’s dogs, that they kept out of paradise unworthy souls; so that the annihilation cannot have been imagined to be purely corporeal.  But heaven is not often described, and hell never, in this period.  Yet,