Him who along the mighty heights departed, Him who searched and spied the path for many, Son of Vivasvat, gatherer of the people, Yama the king, with sacrifices worship. _Rigveda_, x, 14. 1. Yama and his sister Yamí, the first human pair, are identical with the Persian Yima and Yimeh of Avestan literature; they are the primeval “twins”, the children of Vivasvat, or Vivasvant, in the _Rigveda_ and of Vivahvant in the _Avesta_. _Yama_ signifies twin, and Dr. Rendel Harris, in his researches on the Greek Dioscuri cult, shows that among early peoples the belief obtained widely that one of each pair of twins was believed to be a child of the sky. “This conjecture is borne out by the name of Yama's father (Vivasvant), which may well be a cult-epithet of the bright sky, ‘shining abroad’ (from the root _vas_, ‘to shine’)”.... In the _Avesta_ ‘Yima, the bright’ is referred to: he is the Jamshid of Fitzgerald's Omar.[101] [101] _Early Religious Poetry of Persia_, Professor J. H. Moulton, p. 42. [Illustration: THE KAILASA TEMPLE OF SHIVA, ELLORA 10] Yima, the Iranian ruler of Paradise, is also identical with Mitra (Mithra), whose cult “obtained from 200-400 A.D. a world-wide diffusion in the Roman Empire, and came nearer to monotheism than the cult of any other god in paganism”.[102] [102] _A History of Sanskrit Literature_, Professor Macdonell, p. 68. Professor Moulton wonders if the Yama myth “owed anything to Babylon?” It is possible that the worshippers of Agni represented early Iranian beliefs, and that the worshippers of Mitra, Varuna, and the twins (Yama and Yima and the twin Aswins) were influenced by Babylonian mythology as a result of contact, and that these opposing sects were rivals in India in early Vedic times. In one of the hymns[103] Yami is the wooer of her brother Yama. She declares that they were at the beginning intended by the gods to be husband and wife, but Yama replies: [103] _Rigveda_, x, 10. “Who has sure knowledge of that earliest day? Who has seen it with his eyes and can tell of it? Lofty is the law of Mitra and Varuna; how canst thou dare to speak as a temptress?” _Arnold's translation._ In the Vedic “land of the fathers”, the shining Paradise, the two kings Varuna and Yama sit below a tree. Yama, a form of Mitra, plays on a flute and drinks Soma with the Celestials, because Soma gives immortality. He gathers his people to him as a shepherd gathers his flock: indeed he is called the “Noble Shepherd”. He gives to the faithful the draught of Soma; apparently unbelievers were destroyed or committed to a hell called Put. Yama's messengers were the pigeon and the owl; he had also two brindled watch-dogs, each with four eyes. The dead who had faithfully fulfilled religious ordinances were addressed: