With him the Blessed Fathers dwell for ever in happiness.  Mr. Max Muller, as we said, takes Yama to be ’a character suggested by the setting sun’—­a claim which is also put forward, as we have seen, for the Maori hero Maui.  It is Yama, according to the Rig Veda, who sends the birds—­a pigeon is one of his messengers (compare the White Bird of the Oxenhams)—­as warnings of approaching death.  Among the Iranian race, Yima appears to have been the counterpart of the Vedic Yama.  He is now King of the Blessed; originally he was the first of men over whom Death won his earliest victory.

Inferences

That Yama is mixed up with the sun, in the Rig Veda, seems certain enough.  Most phenomena, most gods, shade into each other in the Vedic hymns.  But it is plain that the conception of a ‘first man who died’ is as common to many races as it is natural.  Death was regarded as unnatural, yet here it is among us.  How did it come?  By somebody dying first, and establishing a bad precedent.  But need that somebody have been originally the sun, as Mr. Max Muller and Dr. Tylor think in the cases of Yama and Maui?  This is a point on which we may remain in doubt, for death in itself was certain to challenge inquiry among savage philosophers, and to be explained by a human rather than by a solar myth.  Human, too, rather than a result of ‘disease of language’ is, probably, the myth of the Fire-stealer.

The Stealing of Fire

The world-wide myth explaining how man first became possessed of fire—­namely, by stealing it—­might well serve as a touchstone of the philological and anthropological methods.  To Mr. Max Muller the interest of the story will certainly consist in discovering connections between Greek and Sanskrit names of fire-gods and of fire bringing heroes.  He will not compare the fire-myths of other races all over the world, nor will he even try to explain why—­in almost all of these myths we find a thief of fire, a Fire-stealer.  This does not seem satisfactory to the anthropologist, whose first curiosity is to know why fire is everywhere said to have been obtained for men by sly theft or ‘flat burglary.’  Of course it is obvious that a myth found in Australia and America cannot possibly be the result of disease of Aryan languages not spoken in those two continents.  The myth of fire-stealing must necessarily have some other origin.

‘Fire Totems’

Mr. Max Muller, after a treatise on Agni and other fire-gods, consecrates two pages to ‘Fire Totems.’  ’If we are assured that there are some dark points left, and that these might be illustrated and rendered more intelligible by what are called fire totems among the Red Indians of North America, let us have as much light as we can get’ (ii. 804).  Alas!  I never heard of fire totems before.  Probably some one has been writing about them, somewhere,