was curling up from his pyre. There is even a curious analogy between the words for _smoke_ and _soul_ in the Aryan languages, showing how closely the two ideas were once allied. From a primitive root _dhu_, which means to shake or blow, we get both the Sanskrit root _dhuma_, smoke, and the Greek θυμός, the immaterial part of man, his thought or soul. Θυμός is not a mere abstraction like our word mind, but that which could live when the body was killed or wasted to death by disease.[30] Evidently, therefore, even the inanimate things, the weapons and treasures which are burnt with the dead, survive in a land of essences for the use of the liberated soul. To the question, Where does man's essence go to when it rises from the funeral fire? the answer, if the wish alone urged the thought, would be "To the gods." But with the majority of burying people the belief in future union with the gods was not strongly insisted upon. The islands of the blest are certainly not to be confounded with Olympus; although the Phæaceans claim to live very near the gods.[31] Yet with the use of burning, and among the Aryan people, the hope gains a measure of strength. The gods of the Aryan were, before everything, gods of the air. As the soul and the smoke mounted upwards, "curled to the clouds," the belief of its having gone to join the gods--chief god, Dyâus, the air--was impressed more vividly upon his mind. And as the notion of the western journey to the home of the sun was not abandoned, a natural compromise would be to send the soul upwards to the path of the sun, and make its voyage a voyage in heaven, led by the sun or by the wind. But his path still lay westward; the home of the dead ancestors lay beyond the western boundary; there was still an Oceanus to be crossed, and a dark Cimmerian land to be passed through.