PIT - LORD OF THE SHOULDERS

The great sun gave birth to two twins, a brother and a sister. His brother's name was Yama, and his sister's name was Yami. They did not part for a moment from the moment of birth, and having reached adolescence they became husband and wife. And their marriage was indissoluble in the days of the creation of the world. Their happiness was immeasurable, and all the gods rejoiced seeing their love and inseparability.

But on these same days, when marriage became the high goal of the gods, and they created offspring similar to themselves in marriage, one of them suddenly abandoned the great deed of righteousness and acquired for this unkind name the Lawless-Adharma. And in his marriage he gave birth to sons who took from him sinful properties. These sons were - the Great Fear, that is, Horror, and Mrityu - Death, the Destroyer of all living things. Armed with an ax with a sharp blade, Mrityu prepared to destroy all who breathe and move.

And it so happened that Yama and Yami, although they were born from Surya, did not become gods like all others, that is, immortal forever. The father created the first people in their image, as well as in the image of his third son, named Manu, who became the progenitor of mankind.

And so Mrityu stole the life of Yama, the dear husband of the lovely Yami. He stole the life of the first of the people, showing them for thousands of generations the path of the obligatory cessation of human life. And Yama, who left the abode of the immortals forever, deprived humanity of the right to eternal life, contributing to the separation of the soul from the body at the appointed time.

Loving her brother-husband, Yami indulged in such longing that her bitter tears flooded the heavens. Sobbing, she went around all the spaces, but her search was in vain - immortality was taken away from this first man. Seeing the immense grief of Yami, all the gods consoled her, begging her to forget Yama, but she replied that after all, nothing around had changed with his death - all the same unquenchable light in the heavens, the deeds of the gods were being carried on incessantly, and there was nothing that could to distract her from the endless pain of her soul.

Then one of the gods, the brother of Dyaus, the god of heaven and heavenly light, thought that it was necessary to stop this radiance continuously pouring around them at least for a while in order to help Yami calm down. And he gave birth to the night, suppressing the glitter of the day. And the heartfelt grief of Yami, surprised by such an unprecedented phenomenon - the onset of darkness after each day, subsided.

Since then, night began to come to earth, calming mortals, diminishing their anxiety and granting them sleep until the new awakening of light.

Yama, on the other hand, regained immortality, but not in the heavenly abode, but in the depths underworld... He became king in this abode, where the souls of the dead go.

In this deep world, under the earthly firmament, Yama sits on a throne in his palace in the middle of Yamapura, the capital of death. The souls of the living, who reach the boundary of their lives, attracted to him either by old age, or by illness, or by a hot battle, have also become in his power.

All souls who had parted with the flesh began to meekly began to appear to him on an irrevocable road, and to be subjected to his judgment, which he administers, following their earthly affairs. And his assistant, the scribe Chitragupta, the Master of Cryptography, reads these deeds to him from the book of notes. Souls humbly clasped their palms before Yama, and he, the guardian of the law, chooses a measure of praise or punishment for them. Praise worthy take off in upper world, where forever remain as Pitris - the spirits of ancestors, revered by earthly descendants. Sinful souls are doomed by Yama to torment, endured by them in twenty-one limits. underworld this god. The subjects of Yama torment them, not knowing mercy - this is how unrighteous deeds committed during earthly life are punished.

Yama's assistants are constantly roaming the earth - four-eyed spotted dogs supervising people. With their wide nostrils, they catch the smell of sins and steal the lives of the unrighteous.

But Yama himself sweeps across the earth in a chariot, having his charioteers Mritya sowing death, holding in one hand a rod that spews out a destructive fire, and in the other a noose for capturing souls, given to him by Varuna, the owner of the same noose. Yama appears, on a black buffalo, frightening everyone with his red robe and fiery gaze of all-seeing eyes. And no one is given the opportunity to escape his noose, which without a miss embraces the soul doomed to death.

Yama is great and terrible, and therefore mortals try to appease him with many prayers and sacrifices. He is the only one who takes possession of the souls of those who are deprived of their lives. These are people, whose flesh Agni burns at funeral pyres, and those animals with which Agni feeds the gods and feeds himself, destroying them with the fire of funeral and sacrificial pyres.

These two gods became inseparable - Agni, the eater of flesh, and the guardian of the law Yama, the catcher and unswerving eater of souls.

In ancient times, after the gods created Time, human life lasted and should have lasted a long, long time, up to a hundred years. But Mritya overtook him inevitably, not only when he reached such a depth of age, but it could have happened before, and even in the days of his youth. And people buried some of the victims of Mritya, and others - to a funeral pyre. The kind-hearted gods allowed people to escort the bodies of their dead both to earthly shelters and to the possession of Agni.

The bodies of the departed were washed alive before burial with water or sour milk - the purest substance, for milk is sacred, it is the gift of a cow - the universal mother-nurse. They clothed these bodies in cloth and gave them jewelry and weapons, knowing that in the afterlife the departed will acquire the same flesh, and everything that is given to them with them will be dear and necessary to them.

Lowering the bodies into a dark earthly refuge, people sang hymns and prayers, addressing the great gods with a request to extend the years of those who remain alive, and they sprayed the earth with sacrificial oil and prayed for hospitality for the one whom they gave it:

“Make way, earth
Don't crush him!
Let him dive quickly and easily!
Cover it with the hem of your clothes
As a mother shelters her son. ”

Preparing the dead for laying on the fire, they liberally lubricated their bodies with fat, remembering that Agni would be grateful to lick it off as a substance pleasant to many of his languages, and would quickly separate the soul from the inanimate flesh.

This is how the living parted and are parting at the end of time with those whom the inexorable Yama summoned to his kingdom.

Pit

Pit- in Indian mythology, the god of death, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead and the judge over people. He is considered one of the 4 or 8 worldguards (lokapaias), along with the great gods, and. He is the guardian of the southern side of the world.

Son of the sun Vivasvat and brother of Manu, the only survivor of the great flood; his twin sister and companion, as well as the embodiment of his creative energy - Yami, who became the Yamuna River, were the first living beings who left this world and went to the kingdom of death, showing the way there to all living.

According to the most ancient concepts of the Hindus, in the kingdom of Yama, the deceased ancestors continue to lead the same life that they led on earth, eating food and using sensual pleasures. At a further stage in the development of religious thought, Yama is already a gloomy, fierce punishing god of death who walks on the earth and outlines his sacrifices, in this he is helped by a pair of huge dogs with four eyes and huge nostrils. Guarding the domain of the god of death, they wander among the living, grab those whose deadline has come, and drag them to court to the owner. His scribe-gatekeeper Chitragupta reads aloud his journal Agra-Sandhani, in which all earthly deeds and thoughts of a person. After the entry is read, Yama weighs good and evil deeds, and the soul of the deceased person either ascends to Heaven (Swarga), or descends into the hellish abode (Naraka) or returned to the land of the living, where she was to be reborn.

It is believed that four hours and forty minutes after the soul leaves the body, it appears before the Yama, and until that time the body of the deceased cannot be cremated.

According to one of the myths, the daughter of the king of madras Savitri asked Yama to return her husband Satyavana to her. God was moved and offered Savitri the fulfillment of any desire if she no longer asked for the revival of Satyavana. Savitri wished to have sons by her husband, and Yama returned Satyavana to her. In Buddhist mythology, Yama is the lord of hell, the former ruler of the city of Vaishali. Eight generals and 80,000 soldiers accompanied the king to the afterlife, where molten copper was poured into his throat three times a day. The punishment lasted until Yama atoned for all his sins. Having become the lord of hell, Yama sent sickness and old age to people.

Afterworld. Myths about the afterlife Petrukhin Vladimir Yakovlevich

The origin of death in Ancient India... Yama is the god of the dead

The great ancient Indian epic poem "Mahabharata" tells that when Brahma created the world, people were immortal - they lived in the Golden Age. Their countless generations multiplied on earth, and the earth, suffering under their weight, prayed to Brahma. Brahma heeded her plea, but could not figure out how to reduce the number of people living. Divine powerlessness led to the fact that the creator was angry, and his anger gave rise to a flame that could destroy the entire creation. Then the god Shiva turned to the creator with advice not to destroy all living things, but to make people die, but their family did not stop.

Brahma pacified the raging fire, but a woman with a wreath of lotuses on her head emerged from his body. She immediately headed south, because there, according to Indian ideas, was the kingdom of death - the underworld. Then Brahma ordered her to go and kill living entities. Death - her name was Mrityu (akin to Russian "death") - burst into tears, because she did not want to be cursed by all living beings. Brahma collected her tears, preventing them from shedding on the ground: he made it easier for Mritya's hard work, creating disease out of her tears - they deprived people of life.

The goddess Aditi, who embodied the infinity of the world, at the beginning of time gave birth to many gods, but her eighth descendant Vivasvat looked ugly - he had neither arms nor legs (which brought his image closer to a snake), his height was equal to the thickness ... The elder brothers are the gods Mithra , Varuna and Bhaga decided to complete his image and cut off all unnecessary: ​​this is how the first man turned out, the creation of divine hands. The elephant emerged from the extra parts. God Tvashtar gave his daughter Saranyuya for this creation, and she bore him the twins Yama and Yami. But the goddess remembered that Vivasvat was no match for her: she created her own likeness, she herself left her husband. He did not notice the substitution, and the imaginary wife bore him other children, including the son of Manu - he created the first laws, all mortal people descended from him. But the stepmother betrayed herself: she treated her own children and the children of the goddess unevenly, which led to her quarrel with Yama. He almost committed violence against his stepmother, and the stepmother cursed him, so that one leg of the Yama withered (one-legged betrays a chthonic character associated with the earth and the underworld).

Yama became the first to die, his death was mourned by his sister Yami, and the cry could last forever, because then the day was not yet replaced by night. The gods created the night for Yami to stop wailing. After his death, Yama went south, where he reigned in the kingdom of death and became a lokapala - the guardian of one of the cardinal points. Previously, Agni, the deity of fire, reigned there, but he gave up his place to Yama, but he himself became a priest of the gods - he delivers sacrifices to them. Yami became the goddess of the sacred river Yamuni.

The kingdom of the dead was separated from the world of the living by another sacred river - Vaitarani. A person can overcome Vaitarani only by holding on to the tail of a cow, which he gave to a brahmana during his lifetime. The pit was accompanied by assistants - two four-eyed dogs with huge nostrils, they sniffed out and looked out for those who were to go to the kingdom of death. The god himself in a red robe riding on a black buffalo rode the earth with a club and a noose, with which he took out the souls of the doomed.

His kingdom - the underworld, consisted of several hellish abodes: in the lower of three (or twenty-one) abodes in his capital Yamaputra and sat on the throne of Yama, the soul of every deceased was brought to him, and the afterlife scribe Chitragupta reported to God about all the deeds of the deceased on earth ... Yama, as a judge of the dead, decided his afterlife fate: will he be honored with the paradise of the Pitars, will he dwell in one of the hells, or will he have to be reborn on earth in the form of a person or an animal. The hypostases of Yama are Kala, the god of time, Antaka, who kills, and Mrityu - death itself. The connection of the deity of death with time is natural: Yama was also considered the embodiment of the annual cycle - the regular rebirth of the cosmos. Indeed, his path to the next world, the path of the first deceased, united all spheres of the universe and was like a cosmogonic act.

The path of the deceased was shown by the smoke of a funeral pyre, with it he got to the pitars, became an ancestor - "father". Cremation was a kind of sacrifice through which the deceased was prepared to become an ancestor. Ritual and memorial food - pinda, a mixture of rice and various cult dishes, reminiscent of Slavic kutya, was associated with primordial matter - the seed from which the whole world arose, as well as with the sperm from which human conception occurs. This connection between funeral and memorial rituals with cosmogony and rebirth naturally led to the idea of ​​the rebirth of an ancestor in descendants.

The collection of ritual texts "Brihadaranyaka Upanishad" links the posthumous path of a person with the idea of ​​rebirth.

The dead “go into the smoke [of the funeral pyre], from the smoke into the night, from the night into the dark half of the month, from the dark half of the month into six months, when the sun moves south, from these months into the world of the ancestors, from the world of the ancestors. - to the moon. When they reach the moon, they become food. There the gods partake of them, just as they partake of King Soma (the drink of immortality), saying: "Increase, decrease." When this happens with them, then people fall into space, from space - into the wind, from the wind - into rain, from rain - into the ground. When they reach the ground, they become food. Again, their offering is performed on the fire of a man, and then they are born on the fire of a woman. " The path begins with a funeral pyre and ends in the fire of the hearth, in order to enter the womb of a woman with food and prepare for a new life cycle.

We understand the role of the stove and hearth in the worship of ancestors among the Slavs, and even the Baba Yaga stove, in which she roasts those who seek to get into another world. It is understandable why the ancestors were asked for rain: the rain seeding the earth, which provides food for new births.

The English researcher of ancient culture Richard Onians told in his book "On the Knees of the Gods" about the funeral custom, the meaning of which remained unclear to specialists. Homer told that the Greeks did not complete the ritual of cremation of the corpse - the body was only partially burned, but everywhere: in the Mycenaean stone tombs (tholos), Scythian wooden burial chambers - archaeologists find traces of fire that do not indicate the destruction of corpses. The Slavs had a widespread custom to “warm the dead” - to kindle funeral fires in order to convey warmth to their ancestors. Indeed, after the baptism of Russia, before burying the deceased according to the Christian rite, a fire was made. Onians connects the ancient custom with the removal of the moist substance of the soul, psyche, from the corpse and compares it with the most archaic methods of cooking (before the discovery of cooking methods in dishes). The soul was freed from the corpse and prepared for the afterlife. But even behind the coffin, a life-giving source is needed for life - a liquid, so Homer tells how wine is poured into an urn with the bones of Patroclus and Achilles, and vessels with water are placed in the graves and bones collected from the funeral pyre washed with water or wine are placed. At the commemoration, libations are made: the living and dead water of Russian fairy tales and numerous myths about the sources and drinks of immortality are associated with these ideas about the reviving power of moisture .

In India, monthly for a year, it was necessary to bring to the ancestors memorial sacrifices from pinda and water: the first ten offerings contributed to the restoration of the new body of the deceased - preta, but the deceased did not yet become a pitar. From the first offering arose the head, from the second - the neck and throat, then - the heart, back, navel, belt and loins, legs, finally, knees and feet. This is how the first man Purusha was described in religious hymns, from whom the whole world was created during the sacrifice. On the tenth day after death, a memorial offering of pinda with meat was laid, for it was believed that the new body of the deceased was experiencing extraordinary hunger. The annual memorial ceremony ended with four pindas and vessels with water, the sacrifices were intended for three generations - father, grandfather and great-grandfather, while the deceased himself was now turning from preta into pitara.

The kingdom of Yama was considered the underworld. Below the earth are seven tiers of the underworld - patala, where demonic beings daityas, danavas, nagas, etc. live. Below patala is naraka - hell or a set of hells. The "underground house", in which demons torment sinners, is first mentioned in the "Atharva Veda". According to later concepts ("Laws of Manu"), naraka consists of seven (or 21, 28, 50) circles. On the upper border of naraka is the capital of the kingdom of Yama - Yamapura, where the fate of the deceased is determined. In accordance with the seven-membered division of naraki, the first circle (put) is reserved for childless, the second (avichi) - for souls awaiting a new incarnation; in the third (samhata) and fourth (tamisra), relatively minor offenses are punished, and the last three circles, immersed in eternal darkness, are intended for malicious criminals. In the fifth circle (ridgeishe) they are constantly tormented by snakes, poisonous insects, wild animals and birds, as if embodying reproaches of conscience. In the sixth circle - the sources of the underground river Vaitarani, full of blood and impurities, in which sinners suffocate: bathing in it is one of the torments for sinners. Even below is the seventh circle - the bottomless kakola, or actually naraka. Here in the pitch darkness only one flaming abyss glows, in it the criminals burn and cannot burn to the end, nearby demons tear them apart with red-hot tongs, throw them onto pointed trees, boil in oil, etc. The torture is especially painful because of this. that all the feelings of sinners are extremely heightened. At the same time, unlike those who dwell in the six upper circles and after a certain period of torment will receive a new birth on earth, the inhabitants of the seventh circle must suffer until the end of the world period - kalpa, that is, until the universe perishes.

The first deceased in many mythologies became the god of death and the ruler of the underworld.

Among the Bantu-speaking people of the Luba, the land of the dead is called Kalunga. Kalunga is the first ancestor who created the world and the first people. As a deified ancestor, he is associated with underworld ancestors (in the case of someone's death they said: "Kalunga took him"), he is the father and lord of the ancestors and with their help rules the world. The border of the underworld is a wide river. A boatman is ferrying across the river, for whose payment they put several beads in the mouth of the deceased (among the Greeks, they put a coin in Charon's mouth to pay). In Kalunga, the deceased lives in the village, but can always return to help the living, or, conversely, to pursue them.

Harappan culture of ancient India The culture of India is very original, because it went its own ways. It has the uniqueness and originality that distinguishes Indian culture from the cultures of other countries. The origins of Indian culture go far, in the third millennium before new era,