Disputationes Iranologicae Vindobonenses, II.

The present book is dedicated to the origin of death and in particular to the reasons behind the primordial human choice in front of it, as developed in the framework of Indo-Iranian mythology. This subject still represents an unresolved problem among scholars of the field. In fact, both Vedic Yama and Avestan Yama must take some radical and definitive decisions that determine their own destiny and that of future humanity as well. Thus, the one chose martyr- “death” (according to Rig-Veda 10.13,4), the latter refused the meeting with the darn (according to Widēwdād 2.1-4). These different and apparently unrelated events result to be independent and later developments based on a common material, which was originally connected with an earlier mythological tópos concerning a primordial incest. The forefather of humanity is accompanied by a female-double (Yamī), who is apparently absent in Avesta but again present in the Pahlavi framework. This presence cannot be the fruit of a later addition, but it goes back to a common background. The appearance of these pairs of twins do not simply justify the mythic beginning of human reproduction, but this motif is strictly related to the fundamental meaning of death and afterlife in human history. Thus, this study tries to open a new path in the investigation of these items through the analysis of the “choice” in the context of the cycles of Yama and Yima, the problem of the damnation of Yima in the Avestan and Mazdaean traditions. In particular the subject of the refusal of the daēnā- as animical feminine-double is the object of a long critical discussion, in which the common opinion has been completely reversed and shown as impossible. Yima does not refuse his double because he is a worshipper of the demons, but because he has the duty of enlarging the earth, and cannot accept a premature beatification. The work analyses the Indo-European background of the myth of the incest, in particular in connection with couples of twins, and describes a high number of cases in the framework of Indo-Iranian, Classical and Germanic mythologies.