‘On it the wise, who had known Brahma, ascend to the dwellings of Svarga, when they have received their dismissal.’[99] So sings a poet.
Swarga is the Bright Land (_svar_, to shine), _i.e._ the Home of the Sun. The names of the two guardian dogs, too, are interesting. They are the sons of that Saramâ whom we have already seen sent by Indra to recover his lost cattle, whose name signifies the breeze of morning. Saramâ’s two sons, the dogs of Yama, being so closely connected with the god of the under-world--as Saramâ is with Indra the sun-god--might be guessed as the winds of evening or, more vaguely, the evening, as Saramâ is the morning. They are so; and by their name of Sârameyas, are even more closely related to Hermes than Saramâ was.[100] We now know why to Hermes was allotted the office of Psychopomp, or leader of the shades to the realm of Hades--or at least we partly know; for we see that he is the same with the two dogs of Yama in the Indian myth. But they are also connected by name with another much more infernal being, Cerberus. Their individual names were _Cerbura_[101] the spotted, and Syama the black. Thus the identity of nature is confirmed by the identity of name.
Death and Sleep are twin-brothers, and we need not be surprised to find the Sârameyas, or rather _a_ god Sârameyas, addressed as a sort of god of sleep, a divine hound, the protector of the sleeping household, as we do find in a very beautiful poem of the Rig-Vedas.[102]
‘Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house; oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend. Bay at the robber, Sârameyas, bay at the thief; why bayest thou at the singer of Indra? why art thou angry with me? sleep, Sârameyas. The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the dog sleeps, the clan-father[103] sleeps, the whole clan sleeps; sleep thou, Sârameyas. Those who sleep by the cattle, those who sleep by the wain, the women who lie on the couches, the sweet-scented ones, all these we bring to slumber.’
How these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early pastoral life! In their names, again, of ‘black’ and ‘spotted’ it is very probable that the dogs typified two appearances of night--black or starry.
And yet we must remember that Hermes is not a god of night, or sleep, but strictly and properly of the wind, and that his name, as that of Sârameyas, bears this meaning in its construction. The god who bore away the souls to the other world, however connected with the night, ‘the proper time for dying,’ must have been originally the wind. And in this we see an exquisite appropriateness. The soul is, in its original and literal meaning, the breath[104]--‘the spirit does but mean the breath.’ What more natural, therefore, than that the spirit should be carried away by the wind-god? This was peculiarly an Aryan idea. Yet let it not be laid to the Aryans’ charge, as though their theories of the soul and future life were less spiritual than those of other nations: quite the contrary was the case. So far as they abandoned the notion of the existence of the _body_ in another state and transferred the future to the soul, their ideas became higher, and their pictures of the other world more amplified. But how, it may be asked, did the Aryans pass to their more spiritual conception of the soul? The more external causes of this progress it is worth while briefly to trace.