when the paradise desired is described, it is a place where earthly joys are prolonged and intensified.  Zimmer argues that a race which believes in good for the good hereafter must logically believe in punishment for the wicked, and Scherman, strangely enough, agrees with this pedantic opinion.[51] If either of these scholars had looked away from India to the western Indians he would have seen that, whereas almost all American Indians believe in a happy hereafter for good warriors, only a very few tribes have any belief in punishment for the bad.  At most a Niflheim awaits the coward.  Weber thinks the Aryans already believed in a personal immortality, and we agree with him.  Whitney’s belief that hell was not known before the Upanishad period (in his translations of the Katha Upanishad) is correct only if by hell torture is meant, and if the Atharvan is later than this Upanishad, which is improbable.

The good dead in the Rig Veda return with Yama to the sacrifice to enjoy the soma and viands prepared for them by their descendants.  Hence the whole belief in the necessity of a son in order to the obtaining of a joyful hereafter.  What the rite of burial was to the Greek, a son was to the Hindu, a means of bliss in heaven.  Roth apparently thinks that the Rig Veda’s heaven is one that can best be described in Dr. Watt’s hymn: 

  There is a land of pure delight
  Where saints immortal reign,
  Eternal day excludes the night,
  And pleasures banish pain;

and that especial stress should be laid on the word ‘pure.’  But there is very little teaching of personal purity in the Veda, and the poet who hopes for a heaven where he is to find ‘longing women,’ ’desire and its fulfillment’ has in mind, in all probability, purely impure delights.  It is not to be assumed that the earlier morality surpassed that of the later day, when, even in the epic, the hero’s really desired heaven is one of drunkenness and women ad libitum.  Of the ‘good man’ in the Rig Veda are demanded piety toward gods and manes and liberality to priests; truthfulness and courage; and in the end of the work there is a suggestion of ascetic ‘goodness’ by means of tapas, austerity.[52] Grassman cites one hymn as dedicated to

‘Mercy.’  It is really (not a hymn and) not on mercy, but a poem praising generosity.  This generosity, however (and in general this is true of the whole people), is not general generosity, but liberality to the priests.[53] The blessings asked for are wealth (cattle, horses, gold, etc.), virile power, male children (’heroic offspring’) and immortality, with its accompanying joys.  Once there is a tirade against the friend that is false to his friend (truth in act as well as in word);[54] once only, a poem on concord, which seems to partake of the nature of an incantation.

Incantations are rare in the Rig Veda, and appear to be looked upon as objectionable.  So in VII. 104 the charge of a ‘magician’ is furiously repudiated; yet do an incantation against a rival wife, a mocking hymn of exultation after subduing rivals, and a few other hymns of like sort show that magical practices were well known.[55]