Go forth, go forth on the old paths where are gone our old fathers; thou shalt see both joyous kings, Yama and God Varuna.  Unite with the fathers, with Yama, with the satisfaction of desires, in highest heaven....  Yama will give a resting place to this spirit.  Run past, on a good path, the two dogs of Saram[=a], the four-eyed, spotted ones; go unto the fathers who rejoice with Yama.

Several things are here noteworthy.  In the first place, the Atharva Veda reads, “who first of mortals died[9],” and this is the meaning of the Rig Veda version, although, as was said above, the mere fact that Varuna is called a god and Yama a king proves nothing[10].  But it is clearly implied here that he who crossed the mountains and ’collected men,’ as does Yima in the Iranian legend, is an ancient king, as it is also implied that he led the way to heaven.  The dogs of Yama are described in such a way as to remind one of the dogs that guard the path the dead have to pass in the Iranian legend, and of Kerberus, with whose very name the adjective ‘spotted’ has been compared[11].  The dogs are elsewhere described as white and brown and as barking (VII. 55. 2), and in further verses of the hymn just quoted (X. 14) they are called “thy guardian dogs, O Yama, the four-eyed ones who guard the path, who look on men ... broad-nosed, dark messengers of Yama, who run among the people.”

These dogs are due to the same fantasy that creates a Kerberus, the Iranian dogs[12], or other guardians of the road that leads to heaven.  The description is too minute to make it probable that the Vedic poet understood them to be ‘sun and moon,’ as the later Brahmanical ingenuity explains them, and as they have been explained by modern scholarship.  It is not possible that the poet, had he had in mind any connection between the dogs and the sun and moon (or ’night and day’), would have described them as ‘barking’ or as ‘broad-nosed and dark’; and all interpretation of Yama’s dogs must rest on the interpretation of Yama himself[13].

Yama is not mentioned elsewhere[14] in the Rig Veda, except in the statement that ‘metres rest on Yama,’ and in the closing verses of the burial hymn:  “For Yama press the soma, for Yama pour oblation; the sacrifice goes to Yama; he shall extend for us a long life among the gods,” where the pun on Yama (yamad a), in the sense of ’stretch out,’ shows that as yet no thought of ‘restrainer’ was in the poet’s mind, although the sense of ‘twin’ is lost from the name.

In recent years Hillebrandt argues that because the Manes are connected with Soma (as the moon), and because Yama was the first to die, therefore Yama was the moon.  Ehni, on the other hand, together with Bergaigne and some other scholars, takes Yama to be the sun.  Mueller calls him the ‘setting-sun[15].’  The argument from the Manes applies better to the sun than to the moon, but it is not conclusive.  The Hindus in the Vedic age, as later, thought of the Manes living in stars, moon, sun, and air; and, if they were not good Manes but dead sinners, in the outer edge of the universe or under ground.  In short, they are located in every conceivable place[17].