For Zarathushtra Yima was a sinner, the first to distribute portions of the
cow for consumption (Y. 32. 8); in other words, the practice of cow-sacrifice
was mythically projected back to the first mortal king. In a later Iranian
account the killing of a primal ox and of a primal man (now called Gayo ̄mart,
‘Mortal Life’) go together, being both brought about by Ahriman. From the
ox’s organs and seed came all plants and animals, and from Gayo ̄mart’s
came minerals and Mahryaγ and Mahrya ̄naγ, the father and mother of
humankind. This pair grew from the earth in the form of a rhubarb plant,
joined together and identical –– another version of the primal hermaphro-
dite.^58 The bull sacrifice had a similar cosmogonic association in Roman
Mithraism, as the monuments indicate.^59
Some comparativists believe that it was already an integral part of the
Indo-European myth. They point out that there is a pre-cosmic cow in the
Norse story. She was called Auðhumla, she was formed from melting ice
like Ymir, and she fed him with her milk (Gylf. 6). But nothing is said of her
being sacrificed. It is possible that that was her original role, as Ymir’s sus-
tenance does not seem a sufficiently pressing mythological need to justify the
invention of a cow. But as it stands, the cosmogonic bovine sacrifice is attested
only in Iranian tradition, and there not in its earliest documents.
In the myth of ‘Twin’ there seems to be a merging of two distinct concepts.
On the one hand there is the primal hermaphrodite who generates the first
humans, and on the other the primal giant who is divided into two or more
parts to make the parts of the world. If we ask why the same figure should
play both roles, as both the Nordic Ymir and the Iranian Yima seem to do, the
answer may perhaps be that originally the bisexual being, rather than giving
birth to men and women, was divided in two, a male half and a female
half, like the primeval double creatures pictured by Aristophanes in Plato’s
Symposium (189d–193d). The prototype of this separation of the sexes
could be seen in the separation of Father Sky and Mother Earth; we are all
descended from that divine pair as well as from the first human couple.
It is not possible to reconstruct in detail the process by which the extant
versions developed from a better integrated archetype. But the shared features
in the Indic, Iranian, and Germanic accounts point to an Indo-European
(^58) Greater Bundahisˇn 4, 6, 14; text and translation of these sections, with parallel passages
from Za ̄tspram, in (R. Reitzenstein and) H. H. Schaeder, Studien zum antiken Synkretismus aus
Iran und Griechenland (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 7, Leipzig–Berlin 1926), 214–33. This
ninth-century Pahlavi work drew its cosmogonic material from the lost Da ̄mda ̄t Nask of the
Avesta. The Cow and Gaya-marətan- are associated in Y. 68. 22, Yt. 13. 86, Visprat 21. 2 as
venerable figures.
(^59) R. C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (London 1961), 128.
358 9. Cosmos and Canon