t Yima, so far as appears, was never
divinized, and is not religiously of great importance. Nor do the late
Jewish legends and theosophical speculations bear on the point under
consideration: in Paradise, it is said, Adam was waited on by angels,
the angels were commanded by God to pay him homage (so also in the
Koran), and he is described as being the light of the world; and Philo
and others conceived of a first or heavenly man (Adam Kadmon), free from
ordinary human weakness, and identical with the Logos or the
Messiah--therefore a judge in the largest sense of the word.[1284] But,
while these conceptions testify to the strong appeal made to the
imagination by the figure of the mythical first man, they throw little
light on the original form of Yama--the early constructions do not
include the judge of the other world, and the later ones are too late to
explain so early a figure as the Vedic king of that world.

+736+. In the Rig-Veda Yama is specifically the overlord of the blessed
dead--the pious who were thought worthy to dwell in heaven with the gods
and to share to some extent their divinity; with the wicked he seems to
have nothing to do. The general history of the conception of the future
life suggests that in the earliest Indo-Iranian period there was a hades
to which all the dead went.[1285] If there was a divine head of this
hades (originally an underground deity, like Osiris, Allatu, and
Ploutos) he would accompany the pious fathers when, in the later Hindu
theologic construction, they were transported to heaven; and if the
first ancestor occupied a distinguished place among the dead,[1286] he
might be fused with the divine head into a sort of unity, and the
result might be such a complex figure as Yama appears to be. However
this may be, the Vedic Yama underwent a development in accordance with
the changes in the religious ideas of the people, becoming at last an
ethical judge of the dead.[1287]

+737+. _Persia._ The Mazdean theistic system presents special
difficulties.[1288] The nature of its divine world is remarkable, almost
unique, and the literature that has come down to us was edited at a
comparatively late period, probably not before the middle of the third
century of our era, so that it is not always easy to distinguish the
earlier and the later elements of thought. It is generally regarded as
certain that the two branches of the Aryan race, the Indian and the
Persian, once dwelt together and form