In the last chapter we have traced the character of two great gods of earth, the altar-fire and the personified kind of beer which was the Vedic poets’ chief drink till the end of this period.  With the discovery of sur[=a], humor ex hordeo (oryzaque; Weber, V[=a]japeya, p. 19), and the difficulty of obtaining the original soma-plant (for the plant used later for soma, the asclepias acida, or sarcostemma viminale, does not grow in the Punj[=a]b region, and cannot have been the original soma), the status of soma became changed.  While sur[=a] became the drink of the people, soma, despite the fact that it was not now so agreeable a liquor, became reserved, from its old associations, as the priests’ (gods’) drink, a sacrosanct beverage, not for the vulgar, and not esteemed by the priest, except as it kept up the rite.

It has been shown that these gods, earthly in habitation, absorbed the powers of the older and physically higher divinities.  The ideas that clustered about the latter were transferred to the former.  The altar-fire, Agni, is at once earth-fire, lightning, and sun.  The drink soma is identified with the heavenly drink that refreshes the earth, and from its color is taken at last to be the terrestrial form of its aqueous prototype, the moon, which is not only yellow, but even goes through cloud-meshes just as soma goes through the sieve, with all the other points of comparison that priestly ingenuity can devise.

Of different sort altogether from these gods is the ancient Indo-Iranian figure that now claims attention.  The older religion had at least one object of devotion very difficult to reduce to terms of a nature-religion.

YAMA

Exactly as the Hindu had a half-divine ancestor, Manu, who by the later priests is regarded as of solar origin, while more probably he is only the abstract Adam (man), the progenitor of the race; so in Yama the Hindu saw the primitive “first of mortals.”  While, however, Mitra, Dyaus, and other older nature-gods, pass into a state of negative or almost forgotten activity, Yama, even in the later epic period, still remains a potent sovereign—­the king of the dead.

In the Avesta Yima is the son of the ‘wide-gleaming’ Vivanghvant, the sun, and here it is the sun that first prepares the soma (haoma) for man.  And so, too, in the Rig Veda it is Yama the son of Vivasvant (X. 58. 1; 60. 10) who first “extends the web” of (soma) sacrifice (VII. 33. 9, 12).  The Vedic poet, not influenced by later methods of interpretation, saw in Yama neither sun nor moon, nor any other natural phenomenon, for thus he sings, differentiating Yama from them all:  “I praise with a song Agni, P[=u]shan, Sun and Moon, Yama in heaven, Trita, Wind, Dawn, the Ray of Light, the Twin Horsemen” (X. 64. 3); and again:  “Deserving of laudation are Heaven and Earth, the four-limbed Agni, Yama, Aditi,” etc. (X. 92. 11).