ABSTRACT
Yama 1 The prospect of paradise is indeed marred by the conception of hell. An idea of retribution is detected from the start, for to Yama's abode only the good are assigned. It was a common belief that the things sacrificed and given to the priests wait in the highest heaven for the faithful. But what a different fate awaits the oppressors of the Brahmans! They sit in a pool of blood chewing hair. 1 "The tears which did roll from the eyes of the oppressed lamenting Brahmana, these very ones, Oh oppressor of Brahmans, the gods did assign to thee as thy share of water". In an early version of hell the sage Bhrigu observes some yellow men who are being cut up by other men who cry: "So they have done to us in the yonder world, so we do to them in return in this world". 2 The Hindu is always perturbed about the thought of a possible death in the other world. One text pictures a limited immortality of one hundred years. Since there is an end of our good deeds death anew must be inevitable. "There is only one Death in the other world, even Hunger". 3 In the Brahmana we read of many rites to insure permanent immortality. 4 The sacrifice to departed ancestors has also this end in view. Bloomfield says that although this death "anew" is a characteristic idea, it is not as yet transmigration of souls. "As long as its scene is located entirely in the other world, and as long as it is thought possible to avoid or cure it by the ordinary expedients of sacrifice, so long the essential character of this belief is not present". I)
world. Most of his ideas about existence after death are found in the funeral hymns of the last book. Here we have a suggestion that the real personality is immortal, whereas the body only is destroyed. The soul is not only separated from the body after death, but even during unconsciousness. l
Although the Atharva-Veda shows a belief in future punishment' the most, Macdonell says, that can be gathered from the Rig-Vedic literature is the idea that non-believers are consigned to underground darkness after death. 7 So scanty is our evidence upon this subject that Roth conceived the total destruction of the wicked to be the belief of the very early Hindus,8* but their ideas about future punishment so developed,
as Roth would have us believe. Vedic Index, Vol. II (1900), p. 176.
