Cult of Gods

Yama

Hindu tradition. See the whole pantheon.

Domains
the first dead, king of the dead
Symbols and attributes
Buffalo; staff
Vishvarupa Vishnu, Kashmir or Himachal, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.
Vishvarupa Vishnu, Kashmir or Himachal, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.

Key myth

The first mortal to die and to find the way for the others, in the Rigveda. In later texts, Yama judges the dead. In the Katha Upanishad Yama teaches the boy Nachiketa about the self.

Primary sources

  • Rigveda 10.14
  • Katha Upanishad

All sources for the Hindu pantheon

Place in the family graph

Choose a deity to see where it comes from. Dashed lines are links the sources describe that are not parent and child.

Dyaus PitarPrithviIndraAgniVarunaSuryaYamaUshasVishnuLakshmiShivaParvatiSaraswatiGaneshaKartikeyaDurgaKrishna

More traditions

Odin rides to Hel, W. G. Collingwood, after the Poetic Edda.NorsePapyrus of Ani, British Museum (New Kingdom), a Book of the Dead.EgyptianA chaos monster and a sun god, drawn by L. Gruner for A. H. Layard's Monuments of Nineveh.MesopotamianFolio 309r of the Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin), c. 800.Celtic (Irish)

Elsewhere in the world

Deities in other traditions who share a theme with Yama: death and the underworld. This is overlap in one area only.

Norse

Odin

wisdom, poetry, war

Norse

Baldr

light, beauty, mercy

Norse

Hel

the dead who die of sickness or age

Norse

Freyja

love, desire, magic (seiðr)

Norse

Rán

drowning, the sea's net

Egyptian

Nut

sky, stars

Egyptian

Osiris

afterlife, resurrection, fertility of the flood

Egyptian

Isis

magic, protection, motherhood

Compare across cultures