The peerless one to whom alone is turned the path which all must tread is Yama, the first man to die and so the lord of the dead. The Atharvan funeral fragment compresses what the Rig Veda elaborates in X.14-18 and what the Atharvan funeral hymn in XII.2 will fill out. Yama is the road-tester, the first ancestor; the path to him is the universal road. Read alongside Hebrews 9:27 (it is appointed unto men once to die), the same human fact is acknowledged, but the Vedic tradition makes the first dying man the host who receives later arrivals.