Yama: An Indo-European God From a Linguistic Perspective

Yama is one of the great Indo-European gods who represents a personification of the cattle which were slaughtered for food. In connection with a ritual of the slaughter of a cow (seen as reenacting the death of the "first cow"), there is a myth which has forms among all the Indo-European peoples and tells how the first cow was slaughtered by the first man, his brother, and dismembered and then from the body of the cow the world was made. This is known as the Primal Cow Creation Myth, and is the standard creation myth among the Indo-European-speaking people.

Calendar of festivals

The major annual festivals for the forms of the god Yama and for the Christian Saint James fall into three distinct groups, all related to the annual management of cattle.

Cattle are released from their winter enclosures traditionally on April 23rd or May 1st, when sufficient grass is available.

April 23 in the early Roman calendar is the Parilia which is also the celebration of the founding of the City of Rome, e.g. Urba de Roma. The feast day of Pope Urban (of Rome) is also April 23 sometimes reassigned to May 25? (It is actually written with a question mark in Catholic sources).

April 23rd is usually celebrated as the feast day of St. George in northern countries, always associated with the release of cattle to their summer pastures in folk custom.

April 30 and May 1st are feast days of St. Romaine and the Gargouille, in northern France.

May 1st is the feast day of St James (Jacob) And St. Phillip, in the Roman Catholic Church.

Cattle are slaughtered before the dry season begins in Mediterranean countries, around July 25.

Early July is the Bouphonia festival, ("the Murder of the Ox"), in ancient Greece. This fell on the 14th of the Skirophonorion, in the ancient Greek calendar which was based on actual lunar phases, so it changes each year.

July 5 and July 7, are festivals for Romulus and the Poplifugia in classical Roman religion, and the time of animal slaughter in Mediterranean countries. This may be the date of the very early festival of Rumilia in Rome.

July 25 is the feast day of Santiago de Compostela, and English St. James the Greater, (the feast day of Santiago has been moved to October 23 in the current Roman Catholic Calendar), also the feast day of St. Jacobi the Apostle in Greek and Russian orthodox churches.

Cattle are slaughtered before winter in northern countries, in late October, on the 23rd or 31st of the month.

October 31, Samain and Halloween, animal slaughter in northern countries.

Late October or early November, Yamuna River celebration in India. The Hindu religious calendar is based on actual lunar phases, so it changes each year.

October 23, and some other dates nearby, feast day of St. James, usually considered St. James Lesser, in Orthodox Christian calendar.

October 23, translation of relics of St. Romain in Rouen, France.

In many of the Indo-European language groups the festivals are continued according to the climate and culture, while the myth of the death of the first cow and the creation of the world from his body is widely told in similar stories.

Indian Tradition

Sanskrit sources refer to the myth of the death of the first cow. The earliest texts that we have are in Sanskrit (from approximately 2000 BCE), and include the Hymn to Yama, Rig Veda 10.13, which may be read at http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10013.htm . This text refers briefly to the death of Yama: "Yamá surrendered his dear body." A later text, the Atharva Veda, XVIII.3.13, tells that "Yama died as the first of mortals." These translations were published in Vedic Mythology.

An extension of the myth about the death of Yama is based on the view that when Yama had been killed he became the first mortal to welcome all mortals after they had died. In this way, he became the King of the Dead. This belief is widespread in the east and is encapsulated in a myth about the Savitri Mantra, which is sung to prevent death. The story of how this came about is told in the Mahabharata iii, 292 to 297, which tells how Savitri saved her husband's life by negotiating with Yama for it. The festival for this is especially commemorated in July at the Gauri Vrata, when women are particularly careful to say the mantra to protect the lives of their husbands.

In India, the Yamuna River (now called the Jumna river on maps) is celebrated at a special festival, called the Chhatra Puja that falls in late October or early November (it's moveable; the date was Nov. 14-16 in 2007). The song Yamuna Mata Ji Ki Aarti is sung in the evening prayers along the river. The Yamuna River is thought to have been formed from the body of Yama (or his sister Yami; rivers are always considered feminine in Indo-European religion, one of the very few gender-specific elements of this religion). Rivers are typically worshiped by Indo-Europeans with libations of milk (see the Rumilia further down) or water. Although rivers are worshiped at community-wide festivals at set times of the year, they can also be worshiped by individuals at any time, usually with a simpler form of the more organized ritual or vice versa.

Also in India, the Bhaidooj celebration occurs when a brother and sister receive absolution by bathing in the Yamuna river. It was celebrated on Oct. 30th, in 2008 (always two days after Diwali in the month of Kartika). More information about this can be found at http://www.bhaidooj.org, a website with information about many Hindu festivals. This site also gives slokas (traditional prayers) and recipes for the Bhaidooj festival.

Sanskrit Yama was absorbed into Mahayana Buddhism. In Mahayana Buddhism, Yama became not so much a King of the Dead, but a King of Hell, because some forms of Buddhism have an afterlife where people are tortured (a concept unknown to the Indo-European pagans). As the judge of the dead, and Buddhist king of hell, Yama was borrowed into Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, and translated or borrowed into the languages of those countries, with a name like "Yama" or one that means "King of the Dead." Buddhist iconography in Nepal shows him with the head of a bull, according to the Short Description of Gods, Goddesses, and Ritual Objects of Buddhism and Hinduism in Nepal, compiled by Jnan Bahadur Sakya, and published by Handicraft Association of Nepal, Kathmandu, 1989. Further east Yama looks like a government bureaucrat, according to Alice Getty, in The Gods of Northern Buddhism, Charles E. Tuttle, Co., Rutland, Vermont, 1914, 1962.

Avestan (Iranian) Tradition

Avestan is the ancient language used for the earliest writings of Zoroastrianism, and it is an ancestor of the modern language of Persia, called Farsi. In Zoroastrian scriptures there is a Yasht (hymn) for Yima Kshaeta, who is a form of the old Indo-European god Yama. In these sources it is told that Yima Kshaeta makes the world grow larger three times, but he does this while he is still alive, not after his death which is usual in this myth. Yima is the Avestan form of Sanskrit Yama and Kshaeta means 'shepherd' later 'shah, king.' This story is told in the Zend-Avesta, in the part called the Vendidad, Fargard II, and this was published in English in the Sacred Books of the East, Book 4, in a translation by James Darmesteter. Further references to Yima tell how he was butchered; for example there is a reference to "....Aži Dahâka and Spityura, he who sawed Yima in twain." According to the editor of the text (Darmesteter), Spityura was a brother of Yima. The original source for this is the Zend-Avesta, Zamyâd Yasht, VIII: 46, published in the Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 23.

In Pahlevi (Middle Persian), in texts which date to between 224 BCE and 664 CE, Yima Kshaeta appears under the name Gayomard. In this source Gayomard (older form Gaya Maratan 'mortal life') is killed by Ahriman. A cow and Gayomard are both killed. Out of the cow's body grows the world, and from Gayomard's body are born the first humans, his children Mâshya and Mâshyana (who are male and female) so once again the cow becomes the source of the world and he is the ancestor of everyone. The name Gayomard is not a good cognate with Yima Kshaeta, but Jaan Puhvel equates them on the basis of the similarity of the stories. The original source is the Bundahišn, Ch. 15, another Zoroastrian text. This was published in Vol. 5 of the Sacred Books of the East and translated by E.W. West.

Later texts in Persian, written at the time that the Persians had become Moslems show the same personages, but now "historicized" so that they appear as legendary kings in Persian history. In the Shah Namah written by Firdausi around 1100 CE, Jemshid is sawed in two by Zohak. Jemshid is the Persian form of earlier Yima Kshaeta, and Zohak is the Persian form of earlier Aži Dahâka. The Shah Namah is available on the internet in an abridged prose version, in a translation by Helen Zimmern, 1883, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/shahnama.txt with the title The Epic of Kings.

Syriac (or Aramaic) is not an Indo-European language, but it was the usual written and spoken language of educated people in the Persian empire in the centuries before and after the beginning of the Common Era. For this reason it became the language of many of the earliest Christians in the Middle East. In these early forms of Christianity, which are still followed among the Maronites in Iraq, St. James has various forms, some of whom are martyred by being sawn in half, hence the English name for him/them, St. James Sawn-Asunder. Under the names James of Nisibus, James the Persian and in Latin James (or Jacobus) Intercisus, whose feast day is November 27, there is a wretched tale in which he/they are tortured to death by being--cut into pieces, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Saints by Frederick George Holweck, B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis, MO, 1924. In the Syriac martyrologies, (the earliest martyrologies that we have, dated to 411 CE), one of the various Sts. James suffers the "nine deaths" in which his fingers and toes are cut off, etc., according to Saints Syriaques by Jean Maurice Fiey, ed. by Lawrence Conrad, The Darwin Press, Inc., Princeton, NJ, 2004. Nisibus is a city in Persia, and these saints are clearly christianized versions of Persian Jemshid, going back to the Indo-European deity Yima Kshaeta. Many Indo-European gods became saints in the Christian church, including quite a few Zoroastrian gods in the Syriac church. The Roman Catholic Church conceded the point in 1965 when it demoted 200 saints, including the patron saints of many countries. For example, Santiago de Compostela (of Spain), St. David of Wales, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. George of England, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Nicholas of Germany, Russia, and Holland, all lost their places in the official calendar of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the languages of the Caucasus Mountains, west of the Black Sea, forms of Yama or Yima appear in the Nart sagas, folktales and songs about the Narts who were superhuman beings who lived in the old days. The Nart sagas are common to several families of languages in this area, including Ossetic (an Indo-European language), and the languages of the Chechens & Ingush people; Circassians; Kartvelian-speaking people, Svans and the Georgians (which are not Indo-European languages). In Saga 7, Lady Setenaya and the Magic Apple, Yaminizh is seen as a personification of cholera, who destroys the magic apple tree which gave life and health to the Narts. In Saga 39, a ballad, the hero cannot rest until he avenges his father's death on Yamina, still thought of as cholera. The hero manages to do this, "he slew him in combat" (and marries his wife!). In these stories the name is equivalent to Yama, but the character of Yama is much different in the Circassian stories, according to the translator, John Colarusso, writing in the Nart Sagas from the Caucasus, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002.

Greek Tradition

The Bouphonia, or "the Murder of the Ox" is an elaborate ceremony celebrated in Athens and elsewhere in ancient Greece and described in great detail in the Golden Bough by James Frazer, Vol. 8, pages 4-8. This is probably the ceremony that included the decoration of ox skulls with garlands as is depicted on many ancient bas reliefs, and many modern buildings, see bucrania. No myth is told that is particularly associated with this ceremony, but Jaan Puhvel has connected the festival with the general Indo-European myth based on the elements of the ritual. The Bouphonia is also discussed in the Festivals of the Athenians by H. W. Parke, Cornell University Press, NY, 1977.

Roman Tradition

The festival and myth of the death of the ox was either native to the Romans in Rome, or they borrowed it from Greek sources (probably both; the Romans continually accepted influence from Greek religious practices). A very old ceremony called the Rumilia is mentioned by Varro and Plutarch in which it is said that the goddess Rumina was worshiped with libations of milk at the edge of the Tiber river in Rome. This is probably the goddess after whom the city of Rome is named, since cows were the essential domestic animal of the early Romans, and rumina(nt) is the standard Latin word for a cow.

There are almost no mythological tales of Rome, but the early "history" of Rome is recognized as an historicized version of various old myths. Romulus and Remus were twin brothers, and they both have stories in which they are killed. Remus is killed by his brother Romulus at the foundation of Rome; and Romulus is dismembered by the senators, "...there were some who secretly hinted that he had been torn limb from limb by the senators..." There is no world-making here, but Romulus is the eponymous ancestor of the Romans, and the founder of Rome. One of the original sources for the stories of Romulus and Remus is Livy's Ab Urbe condita, or History of Rome Vol. 1, parts iv-vii and xvi. Gemini is the Latin word for 'twins' and these have also been connected with Romulus and Remus though the name Gemini usually applies to Castor and Pollux, one of the constellations in the Zodiac. The Gemini were worshiped all over the Roman world with votive altars with inscriptions, which remained after the Romans were gone. This may be the source of some names which appear in early Christian myths, for example the common personal names in western European countries such as Ximenez, Jaime, James, and Gemmy. Both the Gemini and St. James, where he replaced them, remained the special protectors of sailors and travelers, and they were invoked with expressions like "by jiminy!" even in English.

In classical Latin, Cato gives the Ista Pista Sista Charm, meant to heal broken bones, in De Agri Cultura, Ch. 70, which is published in Roman Farm Management, translated and edited by Fairfax Harison. This has its correspondent in the Latin Christian rite of Extreme Unction or Viaticum (some of the phrases are identical). The Latin and English texts of Extreme Unction are given in Traditional Latin Prayers, at http://www.traditio.com/office/extreme.htm. The church teaching on this is that the practice of using sacred oil to cure people when they are dying is based on the Epistle of James, Chapter 5, verses 14-15. Originally Extreme Unction was expected to save the lives of people who were dying but later the Church became more realistic and only promised that it would save people from the supernatural consequences of their sins.

Celtic Tradition

In Celtic mythology, the bull who is sacrificed to form the world appears at the end of the Tain Bo Cualnge, an early Irish text which was written down between the 11th-14th centuries CE. In this myth a bull is killed and dismembered by another bull and the parts of his body are distributed around Ireland, which explains the names of many features of the landscape, though not the cause of their existence. "It was not long before the men of Erin (Ireland), as they were there in the company of Ailill and Madb early on the morrow, saw coming over Cruachan from the west, the Brown Bull of Cúalnge with the Whitehorned Bull of Ai in torn fragments hanging about his ears and horns." An example of the process of distributing parts of the animal and naming features of the landscape includes this one: "Then he raised his head, and the shoulder-blades of the Whitehorned fell from him in that place. Hence, Sruthair Finnlethe ('Stream of the White Shoulder-blade') is the name given to it." The original source is the last chapter of the Táin Bó Cúalnge, usually called in English, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. This story is told in The Ancient Irish Epic Tale, Táin Bó Cúalnge, translated by Joseph Dunn, and published by David Nutt, London, 1914.

The French festival of St. Romain and the Gargouille is set to May 1st, although the saint's feast day is actually October 23rd, the usual feast day of one of the Apostles James. It commemorates the first gargouille, with a saint's tale that explains why there are gargouilles (bucrania) on the walls of the cathedral in Rouen, with a procession described in the Golden Bough, Vol. 2, p. 165ff and Vol. 2, p. 314ff. Gargoyles of course are found on churches all over medieval Europe in the form of waterspouts and while they serve the purpose of throwing water away from the walls of the building, they probably exist as an architectural memory of the older pagan practice of hanging the skulls of domestic animals on the walls of the sanctuaries. It is amusing to walk around any town in the United States and observe the heads, human and animal, which appear as decorations on government buildings.

The Samhain celebrations, set to the evening of October 31 are ongoing and are also seen in the English traditional holiday called Halloween ("hallowed evening"). Originally they would have taken place on the dark of the moon on the last day of the month before winter began. The reason this festival is so grim is because this is the time of year when extra livestock which could not be kept alive through winter in northern countries was slaughtered. This was a necessary though unpleasant part of life, and people probably dealt with their discomfort with a bit of grim humor. On the other hand, it was a time when there was plenty of food available, so people celebrated by feasting and sharing with each other. In this vein is the practice of trick-or-treat or going from house to house asking for treats. In England this is called going Souling or Soul-Caking and the typical English song for this is the Soul-Cake Song, collected in the 1800 and 1900's as a folk tradition in several versions, and still sung.

This is also the time when people remember the dead with visits to graves, a practice which the Christian church managed to tolerate much better than it tolerated people dressing up in the skulls and skins of animals and scaring the bejeepers out of each other. In Slavic-speaking areas there is a festival which includes songs for the Day of the Dead, called dziady. In Baltic countries dainas (ritual songs) were sung for the festival of Ezagulis, which was also a feast in memory of the dead and the time set aside for the slaughter of domestic animals before winter, and was hardly christianized at all. In many Spanish-speaking areas in the new world, a festival for remembering the dead is celebrated at this time called Dia de los Muertos.

Germanic Tradition

In the Germanic languages, information about the old mythology and religion goes back to the first millennium and includes a telling of the myth of Ymir. In Old Norse texts written down in the 13th century but composed earlier, Ymir is a giant dismembered by Odin and Odin's brother gods to make the World with the formula:
"Of Ymir's flesh the earth was fashioned,
And of his sweat the sea;
Crags of his bones, trees of his hair,
And of his skull the sky.
Then of his brows, the blithe gods made
Midgard for sons of men;
And of his brain, the bitter-mooded
Clouds were all created."
Although Ymir is not said to be a cow, he is in the company of one called Audhumla--there is always a cow in Indo-European creation myths. The original source for the poem of Ymir is the Grimnismal, verses 40-41, part of the Poetic Edda by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, Oxford University Press, London, 1923.

In Christian England, St. James (or Seamus, the name in Gaelic and in Celtic-speaking areas) remained associated with trauma and so became the patron saint of trauma victims. So many infirmaries in England are named after St. James that it was the usual name for a trauma center (hospital) in any town. The herb ragwort is called in Latin Senecio Jacobaea, and in old herbals it is said to be a cure for broken bones, apparently because it blooms at the time of the feast day of St. James in July.

In Baltic lands the story of the creation of the world from the body of a cow is told in a folk tale collected in the 1800's. This Lithuanian folktale tells of a bull and three cows which are beheaded by Aušrinė, (the morning star) and then the land appears. The very end of the story reads: "The maiden upon returning released her bull. The bull knelt down and spoke in a man's voice: 'Chop off my head!' The maiden did not want to chop it off, but she had to. She chopped the head off--a fourth of the seas disappeared, became land. Her brother emerged from the bull. She cut off the heads of all three cows, who were her sisters. [Presumably they emerged from their cows, too!] All the seas disappeared, turned to land. The earth sprang to life." The original source for this is a folktale called Saulė and Vejų Motina ("The Sun and the Mother of the Winds"), pp. 309-13, of M. Davainis-Silvestraitis' Collection, Pasakos, Sakmės, Oracijos ("Tales, Legends and Orations") published in Vilnius, 1973. The English version is from p. 67 Of Gods and Men by Algirdas J. Greimas, translated by Milda Newman, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1992. The name given to the bull in this story is Joseph, but it probably should be Jumis.

Semitic language traditions

The Semitic languages are not thought to be related to the Indo-European languages, however some have connected myths about Yama/St. James to myths in Semitic languages. Among the Phoenicians, a sea-faring people, Yam is a god of the sea. In a Canaanite myth, translated from Ugaritic cuneiform of the Ras Shamra tablets which date from the 14th to the 12th centuries BCE, the god Baal kills Yam and scatters his body, though it doesn't specifically say that the world was made from it, according to J.C.L. Gibson Canaanite Myths and Legends T & T Clark Ltd., Edinburgh, 1977.

The Phoenician story has a similar structure to the Babylonian Creation myth Enuma Elis which may be dated to circa 1100 BCE, and is known in both Akkadian and Assyrian forms. In this story, Marduk kills Tiamat and then splits her body into two parts "like two halves of a flatfish" to make the sky from one part and the world, with mountains, rivers (the Tigris and Euphrates are named) and hills from the other part. This is translated on pp. 66-67, of the Larousse World Mythology, by Pierre Grimal, Prometheus Press, NY, 1965. This clearly shows the creation of the world from her body. The relationship of the names is not clear, although "there is no doubt that Yam-Nahar was the chief Ugaritic counterpart of the Babylonian Tiamat" according to Gibson, p. 7. A Sumerian source has been offered for the name Tiamat.

In the Hebrew Bible, the word yam appears as a word for the sea many times, for example, "you stirred up the sea in your might", Psalm 74:13. Christians interpret this as a victory of Yahweh over the sea which is supposed to represent forces of chaos, see for example the footnote on verses 12-17, in the St. Joseph Edition of the Bible The New American Bible, Catholic Book Publishing Co., NY, c. 1970. However in Hebrew the word "yam" simply means a body of water, and appears in the names of various lakes and seas such as Yam Suph "Reed Sea" (usually called in English the Red Sea), while the concept of a combat between Yahweh and the sea in the Old Testament/Tanakh is rejected by van der Toorn, p. 869 Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible ed. by Karel van der Toorn, et al., William B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999. A story in which Yahweh does have power over a sea monster is the story of Jonah and the whale, traditionally told at Yom Kippur. However, in this story, no harm comes to the whale, it just spews Jonah up, and there is no world making, according to the Book of Jonah in the Old Testament of the Bible.

Correspondences like these, including entire pantheons, between the Indo-European religion and other religions and other non-Indo-European languages are so widespread that they cannot be explained as coincidences. The pattern of borrowings with the Nart sagas, the Mahayana Buddhist elements, and Christian saints, myths and rituals are fairly well understood historically, however the relationship between the Indo-European languages and the Semitic and Sumerian languages is not at all clear. Since these families of languages are not thought to be related, we shouldn't expect to see cognates.

Traditionally it had been assumed, partly because people believed that the Bible was historically accurate, that any similarities between the religions of people speaking Semitic (properly, Afro-Asiatic) languages and those speaking Indo-European languages could be explained by borrowings from the Semitic (and Sumerian) languages into the Indo-European languages. However since many Indo-European gods and myths, including Yama and the myths about him, show cognate forms across the Indo-European languages, the Indo-European gods can be reconstructed as being known in the Proto-Indo-European language at least as early as approximately 4000 BCE. That means that if they were borrowed, they would have to have been borrowed by 4000 BCE, the time of the beginning of the break up of the Indo-European languages. None of the great Mesopotamian or other Semitic-speaking cultures had developed into politically or militarily dominant states that early, so it's difficult to see why another culture would borrow entire pantheons from them. This appears to be the case with the Indo-European god Yama who can be reconstructed to the time before the break up of the Indo-European languages not more recently than 4000 BCE on the basis of the myths about him, the festival dates assigned to him, his special identification with cattle, and his name with its cognate forms connected by historical phonology.

As it is, there are still anomalies in the timelines and problems with the geographic distribution of the names and myths of Yama. In any case the difficulties remain unresolved and the subject is a sensitive one, since it concerns the supposed history of several different religions.

References

Puhvel, Jaan, Analecta Indoeuropaea, (a collection of articles), publ. by Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft, Innsbruck, 1981.

Encyclopedia Britannica, Complete Home Library, Newsweek Edition, 2004