Artic Home of the Aryans by Lokamanya Bal ... - Mandhata Global

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Sruto Airyênê vaêjahê, “famous in Airyana Vaêjo,” to receive the law
from Mazda; but Yima refused to become the bearer of the law and
he was, therefore, directed by Ahura Mazda to keep his people happy
and make them increase. Yima is accordingly represented as making
his men thrive and in. crease by keeping away death and disease
from them, and by thrice enlarging the boundaries of the country
which had become too narrow for its inhabitants. Whether this fact
represents a gradual expansion of the oldest Aryan settlements in the
Arctic home we need not stop to inquire. The second part of the
Fargard opens with a meeting of the celestial gods called by Ahura
Mazda, and “the fair Yima, the good shepherd of high renown in the
Airyana Vaêjo,” is said to have attended this meeting with all his
excellent mortals. It was at this meeting that Yima was distinctly
warned by Ahura Mazda that fatal winters were going to fall on the
happy land and destroy everything therein. To provide against this
calamity the Holy One advised Yima to make a Vara or enclosure,
and remove there the seeds of every kind of animals and plants for
preservation. Yima made the Vara accordingly, and the Fargard
informs us that in this Vara the sun, the moon and the stars “rose but
once a year,” and that “a year seemed only as a day” to the
inhabitants thereof. The Fargard then closes with the description of
the happy life led by the inhabitants of this Vara of which
Zarathushtra and his son Urvatadnara are said to be the masters or
overseers.
Yima’s Vara here described is something like Noah’s ark. But
there is this difference between the two that while the Biblical deluge
is of water and rain, the Avestic deluge is of snow and ice; and the
latter not only does not conflict with geological evidence but is, on the
contrary, fully and unexpectedly confirmed by it. Secondly, the
description that “a year seemed only as a day” to the inhabitants of
this Vara, and that the sun and stars “rose only once a year therein,”
serves, in an unmistakable manner, to fix the geographical position of
this Vara in the region round about the North Pole; for nowhere on
the surface of the earth can we have a year