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Rh gone who had not been cremated but buried in the earth. According to one account, they had gone aloft, but according to another, that could not be. So even the hymns of the Rig-Veda may be taken as indirectly proving in a variety of ways, that Yama did not originally dwell on high, though the view predominant in them, and mainly representative of the cremation period, transports him to the neighbourhood of Varuṇa. Before closing these remarks on Yama, I would revert for a moment to his double character of one of the dead, namely, their king, and of one actively engaged in adding to their number, whereby he assumes the part of Death—an association of ideas not unfamiliar to the Celts (p. 567), as, for example, when the Bretons give Death as one of his names that of arMaró, which literally means the Dead One. It is this double rôle of King of a Golden Age and of grim Death, that is to be regarded as the key to the incompatible attributes of Beli, of Fergus as the friend of Cúchulainn and the ally of Ailill with his Fir Bolg, of Niörᵭr as a benignant god and as a Wane hostile to the Anses, and of Cronus as ruler of the Happy Isles and as a cruel Titan of revolting voracity.

Sanskrit mythology is not content with one origin of the human race, for besides Yama and other offspring, Vivasvant, their father, had a son called Manu. He was the mythic legislator of the Hindus, and his name signifies Man: how he was the ancestor of men is explained by the story of a deluge occurring in his days. This was predicted to him by a fish whose life he spared on