Though Yama is not the sun in the Veda, it is possible that he was so regarded in the period preceding the Vedic theological construction, and in support of this view it may be said that the sun setting, descending into the depths, is a natural symbol of the close of man's life,[1280] and rising, represents the man's life in the beyond--thus the sun would be identified with man, and not unnaturally with the first man, the first to die. In support of the other view may be cited the great rôle ascribed by many peoples to the first man: in savage lore he is often the creator or arranger of the world,[1281] and he is sometimes, like Yama, the son of the sun.[1282] Such an one, entering the other world, might become its lord, and in process of time be divinized and made the son of the creator sun.[1283] The Hindu figure is often compared to the Avestan first man, Yima; but Yima, so far as appears, was never divinized, and is not religiously of great importance. Nor do the late Jewish legends and theosophical speculations bear on the point under consideration: in Paradise, it is said, Adam was waited on by angels, the angels were commanded by God to pay him homage (so also in the Koran), and he is described as being the light of the world; and Philo and others conceived of a first or heavenly man (Adam Kadmon), free from ordinary human weakness, and identical with the Logos or the Messiah--therefore a judge in the largest sense of the word.[1284] But, while these conceptions testify to the strong appeal made to the imagination by the figure of the mythical first man, they throw little light on the original form of Yama--the early constructions do not include the judge of the other world, and the later ones are too late to explain so early a figure as the Vedic king of that world. +736+. In the Rig-Veda Yama is specifically the overlord of the blessed dead--the pious who were thought worthy to dwell in heaven with the gods and to share to some extent their divinity; with the wicked he seems to have nothing to do. The general history of the conception of the future life suggests that in the earliest Indo-Iranian period there was a hades to which all the dead went.[1285] If there was a divine head of this hades (originally an underground deity, like Osiris, Allatu, and Ploutos) he would accompany the pious fathers when, in the later Hindu theologic construction, they were transported to heaven; and if the first ancestor occupied a distinguished place among the dead,[1286] he might be fused with the divine head into a sort of unity, and the result might be such a complex figure as Yama appears to be. However this may be, the Vedic Yama underwent a development in accordance with the changes in the religious ideas of the people, becoming at last an ethical judge of the dead.[1287]