Varuna, the punisher and forgiver of sins.

The poet thinks back with rapture of a time when he was high in Varuna’s favor; he describes a glorious vision he once had, when it was given him to behold the god face to face; he was taken on board Varuna’s own ship, and together they glided over the celestial waters, with gently rocking motion ; and there in that ship, on that day of blessedness, the god gave him the wondrous power of song, to be his Rishi so long as days and dawns follow one another. But there has been a change : in some way, unknown to himself, Vasishtha has angered his divine friend, who has heaped woes on him, and sent sickness to chastise him, and from the depth of his misery he sends forth his moan “ What has become of our friendship, when we used to commune so harmlessly together ? when I was allowed access to thy house of the thousand gates ?—If thy friend, O Varuna, who was dear to thee, if thy companion has offended thee, do not, O holy one, punish us according to our guilt, but be thou the poet’s shelter.”  “ I speak unto myself : when shall I be once more united with Varuna? Will he again accept my offering without displeasure? When shall I, consoled at heart, behold him reconciled?—I ask, wishing to know my sin ; I go to ask the wise. They all tell me the same in sooth : ‘ King Varuna it is who is wroth with thee.’—What, O Varuna, was that worst of misdeeds for which thou smitest thy worshipper and friend? . . . Absolve us from the sins of our fathers, and forgive those which we committed ourselves. Release Vasishtha like a calf from the rope.—It was not our own will—it was seduction, an intoxicating drink, passion, dice, thoughtlessness. The stronger perverts the weaker ; even sleep brings on unrighteousness.” “ Let me not yet, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay. Have mercy, almighty, have mercy !

If I go along, trembling like a cloud driven by the wind, have mercy, almighty, have mercy.—Through want of strength, thou pure one, have I gone astray : have mercy, almighty, have mercy !—Thirst came upon the worshipper, though he stood in the midst of the waters : have mercy, almighty, have mercy —Whenever we, being but men, O Varuna, commit an offence before the heavenly host, whenever we break thy law through thoughtlessness, have mercy, almighty, have mercy ! ”  These hymns of Vasishtha’s form a cycle, a whole more complete and personal than is usual in the Rig- Veda, yet will bear supplementing with a few more short passages of particular significance, from other, scattered hymns, like the following of men, O Varuna, do not deliver us unto death, nor to the blow of the furious, nor to the wrath of the spiteful. My songs flee to the .....as birds to their nest . . . as kine to the pastures . . .  Take from me my own misdeeds, nor let me pay, O King, for others’ guilt. . . . That I may live, take from me the upper rope, loose the middle, and remove the lowest.

Mitra and Varuna.

Later aspects of Varuna.

A peculiarity of the worship of Varuna in the Rig-Veda is that he is invoked, more often than alone, jointly with his brother, MlTRA (“the Friend ”), who represents sometimes the sun itself, and sometimes Light generally, or again the Power who rules the sun and brings him forth to shine on the world at the proper time. In this mild, wholly beneficent deity we recognize the Mithra of the Eranians, with whom the Avesta makes us so intimately acquainted—only he has paled somewhat and become more impersonal, although he has retained all the qualities which distinguished him before the separation of the two races, especially that of the all-seeing and truth-loving god.3 But somehow he has lost his individuality (only one single hymn—III., 59—is addressed to him personally and separately), and has almost merged it with that of Varuna, all of whose attributions, functions, and honors he shares. The sun is said to be “ the eye of Mitra and Varuna,” as well as Vdruna’s alone, and Light is the chariot on which both gods, inseparably, ride through space on their appointed path, and of which it is once said that it is golden at break of day, while its poles take the color of a gray metal at the setting of the sun. They are joint keepers of the Rita, avengers, but also forgivers, of sin—in short, there is not a thing said of Varuna that is not repeated of both, not a thing asked of Varuna that is not requested of both, only perhaps not quite so emphatically, with not quite the same wealth of striking imagery. Then it is Mitra’s own particular business to wake men and call them to the duties of a new day. Hence in time he somehow comes to be associated with the phenomena of light, and Varuna to be considered as more especially the nocturnal sky, although originally there is no such distinction, and he is proved by a hundred passages to have been the lord of both day and night. But it took root, and the commentators already assert it positively. This was the beginning of a curious transformation which made of the Varuna of the later, Brahmanic, pantheon a being entirely different from the sublime Sky-god of the Rishis, although the change can be traced, step by step, back to theVedic presentation. Thus, in the later mythology, Varuna is merely—a Water-god : stripped of all his celestial attributions, nothing is remembered but his association with the waters—the atmospheric sea and rain-rivers,—and this watery realm is transferred to the surface of the earth. Then again, of his moral nature only the sterner, the forbidding, side is retained ; he is the punisher only, and the persistent use of the conventional expressions : “ fetters,” “ ropes,” “ nooses,” suggests a certain cruelty and malignancy utterly foreign to the majestic and just, but also merciful, King of Heaven, who is expressly said to “ take pity even on the sinner.” 

Aditi and the Adityas.

Varuna and Mitra are both Adityas. That means Sons of ADITI. Aditi, in consequence, is habitually entitled “ Mother of the Gods,” and is, undoubtedly, herself a divine person, or, as we would say, a goddess. But the goddess of what ? Or what does she represent in the order of natural objects or phenomena in which all mythical conceptions have at some time, originally, had their roots ? To decide this question is the more difficult that aditi originally is merely an adjective, and used as such quite as frequently as in the other way, so that the interpreter is frequently confronted by a doubt as to the proper manner of rendering the word in a given passage. On the other hand, as is usually the case with such ambiguous expressions, the literal meaning of the common adjective gives us a very helpful clue towards the solution of the problem presented by the name. “ Aditi ” means “ not bound, not limited,” but it is difficult to determine by what the being thus described is “ not bound.” Sometimes it manifestly refers to unboundedness in space, so in this verse, partly quoted already, of a hymn to Mitra-Varuna : “ Mitra and Vanina, you mount your chariot, which is golden when the dawn bursts forth, and has iron poles at the setting of the sun ; from thence you see what is boundless [aditi, space], and what is limited [diti,- the earth], what is yonder and what is here.” At other times the boundlessness of time—eternity or immortality—is suggested by the context, and the bonds, freedom from which is expressed, are those of death.

This is clearly indicated by the following beautiful passage, supposed to be spoken by a living man musing on his own coming death. “ Who will give me back to the great Aditi, that I may see again father and mother? Agni [fire], the first of immortal gods, he will give me back to the great Aditi, that I may see again father and mother.” This alludes to the custom of cremation and it accepted religious meaning. Fire, while consuming the body, conveys the spirit to the boundless—and bondless—world, where it is reunited to those who went before. In another, and very quaint passage, a horse about to be sacrificed is to become aditi (adjective)— a phrase which becomes intelligible when weknow that animals offered in sacrifice were supposed, literally, to go to the gods, there to lead forever a sort of beatified existence. It will be noticed that Aditi (as a person or divine being), whether representing boundlessness in space or in time, or generally freedom from bonds of any kind, always seems to mean not only that, but something more, tending always higher and deeper into pure abstraction, until in the following passage, it is broadened into the most abstruse metaphysical symbolism “ Aditi is the sky. Aditi is the intermediate region \antariksha— the atmosphere] ; Aditi is father and mother and son ; Aditi is all the gods and the five tribes ; Aditi is whatever has been born ; Aditi is whatever shall be born.”  This remarkable effort at an exhaustive definition describes not only boundless space, eternity, and immortality,but universal, all-embracing, all-producing nature itself, or—to grasp the last and highest metaphysical abstraction—Infinity, TlIE INFINITE. Such is the final meaning, which has been abstracted and condensed from the name and conception of Aditi, by the most philosophical students, out of all the passages directly referring to or bearing on this creation of the contemplative Indian mind. Of all who have treated this ofttimes puzzling subject, no one has used more beautiful language or more convincing argument than Professor Max Muller. “ Aditi,” he says, “ is now and then invoked in the Veda as the Beyond—as what is beyond the earth, and the sky, and the sun, and the dawn.” This gives the gist of the question, which then is developed in one of the master’s most exquisite and brilliant pages : “ Aditi is in reality the earliest name invented to express the Infinite, not the Infinite as the result of a long process of abstract reasoning, but the visible Infinite, visible by the naked eye, the endless expanse beyond the earth, beyond the clouds, beyond the sky. . . The idea of the Infinite was revealed, was most powerfully impressed on the awakening mind by the East. It is impossible to enter fully into all the thoughts and feelings that passed through the minds of the early poets when they found names for that far, far East from whence even the early dawn, the sun, the day, their own life seemed to spring. . . . Aditi is a name for that distant East ; but Aditi is more than the dawn. Aditi is beyond the dawn, and in one place the dawn is called ‘ the face of Aditi.’ That silent aspect awakened in the human mind, the conception of the Infinite, the Immortal, the Divine. . . . Aditi is not a prominent deity in the Veda, nevertheless hers is a familiar name, that lives on in that of the Adityas — the sons of Aditi. . . .” Varuna and Mitra then are Adityas. We know now what is the far from literal meaning of such terms as “Sons of Aditi” : Sons of Eternity,—Sons of Immortality,—Sons of boundless Time and Space, —there is nothing but what is metaphorical, appropriate, and poetically beautiful in all these names for the deified impersonations of Sky and Light.

They are shared by several more divine beings, who seem but paling reflections of their great brothers. Of these only one, Aryaman, is frequently addressed with words of praise and homage, though never alone, but jointly with Mitraand Varuna. A fourth, BHAGA, quite impersonal and only occasionally mentioned along with the others, is of great interest to us because of his name, which, in a very slightly modified form, BOGH, has been adopted by the entire Slavic branch of the Indo-European family of nations as that of God—the one God of Christian monotheism. The Adityas are said to be seven ; yet only two more are named occasionally in the hymns ; the seventh remains in a shadow of uncertainty, while now and then an eighth is spoken of ; once or twice the Fire-god would seem to be that eighth. But all this is very vague and misty. One thing, however, is evident from the hymns to all the Adityas, which are quite numerous : they all share,—and so does Aditi herself—in the special attributions so characteristic of Mitra and Varuna ; they are all keepers of the Rita and its innumerable ordinances, they all are guardians of purity and truth ; avengers—and also forgivers—of sins, healers and givers of health, and the prayer “to be held or made guiltless before the face of Aditi and the Adityas” is a familiar and of trepeated one.