and one even finds the doctrine that one obtains ‘union with Brahm[=a],’ which is quite in the strain of the Upanishads; but here such a saying can refer only to the upper castes, for “the gods talk only to the upper castes” (Cal.  Br.. xi. 4. 4. 1; iii. 1. 1. 8-10).  The dead man is elsewhere represented as going to heaven ‘with his whole body,’ and, according to one passage, when he gets to the next world his good and evil are weighed in a balance.  There are, then, quite diverse views in regard to the fate of a man after death, and not less various are the opinions in regard to his reward and punishment.  According to the common belief the dead, on leaving this world, pass between two fires, agnicikhe raging on either side of his path.  These fires burn the one that ought to be burned (the wicked), and let the good pass by.  Then the spirit (or the man himself in body) is represented as going up on one of two paths.  Either he goes to the Manes on a path which, according to later teaching, passes southeast through the moon, or he goes northeast (the gods’ direction) to the sun, which is his ’course and stay.’  In the same chapter one is informed that the rays of the sun are the good (dead), and that every brightest light is the Father-god.  The general conception here is that the sun or the stars are the destination of the pious.  On the other hand it is said that one will enjoy the fruit of his acts here on earth, in a new birth; or that he will ‘go to the next world’; or that he will suffer for his sins in hell.  The last is told in legendary form, and appears to us to be not an early view retained in folk-lore, but a late modification of an old legend.  Varuna sends his son Bhrigu to hell to find out what happens after death, and he finds people suffering torture, and, again, avenging themselves on those that have wronged them.  But, despite the resemblance between this and Grecian myth, the fact that in the whole compass of the Rik (in the Atharvan perhaps in v. 19) there is not the slightest allusion to torture in hell, precludes, to our mind, the possibility of this phase having been an ancient inherited belief.[59]

Annihilation or a life in under darkness is the first (Rik) hell.  The general antithesis of light (as good) and darkness (as bad) is here plainly revealed again.  Sometimes a little variation occurs.  Thus, according to Cat.  Br. vi. 5. 4. 8, the stars are women-souls, perhaps, as elsewhere, men also.  The converse notion that darkness is the abode of evil appears at a very early date:  “Indra brought down the heathen, dasyus, into the lowest darkness,” it is said in the Atharva Veda (ix. 2. 17).[60]

In the later part of the great ‘Br[=a]hmana of the hundred paths’ there seems to be a more modern view inculcated in regard to the fate of the dead.  Thus, in vi. 1. 2. 36, the opinion of ‘some,’ that the fire on the altar is to bear the worshipper to the sky, is objected to, and it is explained that he becomes immortal; which antithesis is in purely Upanishadic style, as will be seen below.