The Yama, ‘who collects people,’ has been rightly compared with the Yima, who ‘made a gathering of the people,’ but it is doubtful whether one should see in this an Aryan trait; for [Greek:  Aidaes Agaesilaos] is not early and popular, but late (Aeschylean), and the expression may easily have arisen independently in the mind of the Greek poet.  From a comparative point of view, in the reconstruction of Yama there is no conclusive evidence which will permit one to identify his original character either with sun or moon.  Much rather he appears to be as he is in the Rig Veda, a primitive king, not historically so, but poetically, the first man, fathered of the sun, to whom he returns, and in whose abode he collects his offspring after their inevitable death on earth.  In fact, in Yama there is the ideal side of ancestor-worship.  He is a poetic image, the first of all fathers, and hence their type and king.  Yama’s name is unknown outside of the Indo-Iranian circle, and though Ehni seeks to find traces of him in Greece and elsewhere,[18] this scholar’s identifications fail, because he fails to note that similar ideas in myths are no proof of their common origin.

It has been suggested that in the paradise of Yama over the mountains there is a companion-piece to the hyperboreans, whose felicity is described by Pindar.  The nations that came from the north still kept in legend a recollection of the land from whence they came.  This suggestion cannot, of course, be proved, but it is the most probable explanation yet given of the first paradise to which the dead revert.  In the late Vedic period, when the souls of the dead were not supposed to linger on earth with such pleasure as in the sky, Yama’s abode is raised to heaven.  Later still, when to the Hindu the south was the land of death, Yama’s hall of judgment is again brought down to earth and transferred to the ‘southern district.’

The careful investigation of Scherman[19] leads essentially to the same conception of Yama as that we have advocated.  Scherman believes that Yama was first a human figure, and was then elevated to, if not identified with, the sun.  Scherman’s only error is in disputing the generally-received opinion, one that is on the whole correct, that Yama in the early period is a kindly sovereign, and in later times becomes the dread king of horrible hells.  Despite some testimony to the contrary, part of which is late interpolation in the epic, this is the antithesis which exists in the works of the respective periods.

The most important gods of the era of the Rig Veda we now have reviewed.  But before passing on to the next period it should be noticed that no small number of beings remains who are of the air, devilish, or of the earth, earthy.  Like the demons that injure man by restraining the rain in the clouds, so there are bh[=u]ts, ghosts, spooks, and other lower powers, some malevolent, some good-natured, who inhabit earth; whence demonology.  There is,