Mitra (Vedic)

← Encyclopedia

When two parties swear an agreement, something comes into being between them that was not there before: a bond with a weight of its own, holding even when no one watches. The Vedic world gave that bond a name and a face and an unsleeping eye. It called the bond Mitra, and summoned it, by the one thing this god above all is for, to stand over the agreement and hold the parties to it. He is not a god who happens to govern oaths; he is the sworn word itself given a will, the third presence called into every covenant to see that it is kept. Of all the powers of the hymns, Mitra is the one most easily mistaken for a mere abstraction, and the one in whom the abstraction is exactly the point.

The name that is a noun

To name Mitra is to speak a common word. The grammarians trace it to a root for binding, with the suffix that turns a verb into the instrument of its action: that which causes the binding, the bond itself made into a power. In the oldest Sanskrit the noun mitrá means covenant, alliance, the sworn agreement between parties; in the later language it slid toward its softer and now usual sense, friend — the friendliness being only the other face of the bond, since those who have pledged together are friends, and the god who joins them is friendship raised to a power. In most of the modern languages of India the word mitr still means a friend. The deity and the noun were never fully separable. When the hymns address Mitra they address the contract itself, given a face and a will and a watching eye.

This is the first thing to hold steady about him, because it sets him apart from almost every other god of the Rigveda. Indra is addressed for victory, Agni carries the offering, Soma is pressed and drunk; their names are their own. Mitra’s name is a thing two people make between them when they swear. The Vedic mind did not regard the agreement as a human convenience the gods happened to bless. It regarded the bond — the invisible tie that survives the handshake and outlasts the witnesses — as one of the load-bearing beams of the world, and it gave that beam a name that was already in everyone’s mouth. A contract, in this seeing, is a kind of god, and the god is the unseen third party present whenever two parties come to terms.

A Rigveda manuscript page in Sanskrit, Devanagari script. The hymns were composed roughly 1500–1200 BCE and held in trained memory for many centuries before they were committed to script. — Ms Sarah Welch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

He belongs to a class. Mitra is an Aditya, one of the sons of the goddess Aditi whose name means the unbounded, the free — a family of luminous, sovereign gods concerned not with the storm or the fire but with rule, with law and limit and the keeping of order. The Adityas are the gods of governance, bright and exalted and watchful, and they cluster around the great theme of ṛta, the cosmic and moral order by which the year is a year and a promise a promise. Among them Mitra stands with the keepers of the oath. He is the daylit, social face of that order: the power under which strangers can deal with strangers, tribes can hold a truce, and a word once given carries weight a man cannot lightly set down.

The god who is almost never alone

The strangest fact in his record is a fact of grammar. In the entire Rigveda, across more than a thousand hymns, there is exactly one hymn addressed to Mitra by himself — the fifty-ninth of the third book. Everywhere else he comes paired, and not loosely paired but bound to a single partner in a grammatical form the Sanskrit keeps for things that go in twos: the dual compound, the dvandva, that names Varuna and Mitra in one breath as Mitrā-Varuṇā, two faces of one sovereignty. The hymns address them together, praise them together, ask of them together. To meet Mitra in the Veda is almost always to meet him as half of a pair that the tradition treats as halves of a thing that does not divide.

What the two divide between them is the whole law under which a community lives: the promise made and the promise enforced. Varuna is the deeper, more awful guarantee — the sovereign of the binding oath, the god of the great night vault who counts the deeds of men, holds the broken word as a debt, and snares the liar in his noose. Mitra is the bond gladly entered: the alliance sealed in the open, the agreement honored in daylight, the friend made fast. Where Varuna is the sanction that makes the word answerable, Mitra is the act of coming to terms itself. One is the bond that does not let go; the other is the bond freely made. The hymns can name them in a single dual because, to the Vedic seers, the contract freely struck and the oath terribly enforced were not two powers but one power seen from two sides.

The hymn that does address Mitra alone draws the daylit side of him in full. It opens with a line that fixes his office in a single breath — Mitra, when speaking, stirreth men to labor; Mitra sustaineth both the earth and heaven; Mitra beholdeth men with eyes that close not — and the three clauses are the whole god. He calls people to their work; he holds the world together; he watches without sleep. The hymn goes on to say that the man who brings Mitra his due, who serves him rightly, prospers and is sustained; that Mitra settles the peoples and the nations in their places; that he, established by law, supports the wide earth and the sky. The verbs are verbs of holding-in-place. Mitra is the power that brings people together, settles them, and keeps them settled — the social order rendered as a god who arranges the tribes and surveys them with an unwinking eye.

That unsleeping watch is the same logic as his Iranian twin’s thousand eyes, and it follows from what he is. A contract holds at night as in the day, in the dark of a tent as on the open road; a god of the contract who could be eluded would be no guarantor at all. So Mitra does not blink. He is bound up with the morning and the daylight not because he is the sun but because the light is what exposes — the illumination by which a hidden breach is laid bare and no false dealing can stay hidden. In the later Vedic texts the division with his partner hardened into a division of the day itself: Mitra came to belong to the dawn and the morning, the near and conciliating light that calls men to their tasks, while Varuna drew toward the evening and the night, the remote and dread expanse. The morning that belongs to Mitra is the hour when work begins and the world becomes visible — the hour of the god who surveys the tribes and finds nothing hidden.

A medieval stone Surya, the sun-god, framed in his radiant disk. Mitra is reckoned among the Adityas, the luminous sovereign gods of the Veda, and shares with Surya the daylit, all-seeing aspect — the god whose light nothing escapes. — ScribblingGeek, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What the two faces are for

The reading that gives this pairing its sharpest shape belongs to the comparative study of the religions of the wider Indo-European family, and it should be marked as a scholarly interpretation rather than a thing the hymns themselves say. The French scholar Georges Dumézil, building a theory of the inherited structure of sovereignty, read Mitra and Varuna as the two halves of kingship itself. Varuna, in this account, is the magical sovereignty — the dread, remote, binding power that rules by māyā, the sovereign’s measuring craft, and by the awful sanction of the oath. Mitra is the juridical sovereignty — the near, daylit, contractual power that rules by agreement and conciliation, by the bond people enter rather than the bond that seizes them. The one is the king as terrible guarantor; the other is the king as keeper of the covenant. Later students of the Rigveda, among them Joel Brereton, have refined the picture: Mitra is the god of alliance and the harmonizing of human relations, the power that joins and settles, set against Varuna’s more forbidding command. The framework is contested in its details, and some scholars doubt how cleanly the two gods can be split. But it names something the hymns do show — that Mitra is the conciliating, gathering, daylit face of the order, and his partner the binding, exacting, nocturnal one.

The order they keep between them is ṛta, and ṛta is worth taking on its own terms, because it is the ground on which Mitra stands. It is not a decree the gods issue but a structure they keep — the way things truly are, the deep regularity that makes the seasons turn, the rivers run, the sun cross the sky, and a promise bind. Cosmic order and moral order are not two things here but one continuous fabric. The sun moves along ṛta; the honest formula is spoken along ṛta; and the man who breaks his pledged word cuts against it, letting disorder into the structure that holds society up. Mitra’s whole office is the human end of that fabric: he is the power by which an agreement becomes real and stays real, the unseen presence to every oath, the god in whom two parties’ word is made to hold. To deal falsely with a man one has sworn to is not merely to wrong him. It is to tear the order of the world at the one seam Mitra was set to guard.

The god two peoples carried

Mitra is one of the surest bridges between the religions of two peoples born of one. The same divine word the Vedic seers used — mitrá — appears on the Iranian side as miθra, and the two are the same word, carried out of a single homeland by two branches of one ancestral people who parted and would never meet again. Before either branch had scripture, before the Gangetic plain and the Iranian plateau had been settled and named, their shared ancestors worshipped a being called by this word, and the word meant contract. When the two peoples separated, each kept him. The eastern branch held him as a sovereign of the bond, paired with Varuna over ṛta; the western branch kept Mithra as the sleepless guardian of the sworn word, the watcher who rises over the holy mountain before the sun and the dreadful enemy of the man who lies to a covenant. Set the one hymn to Mitra beside the great Iranian hymn to Mithra and the kinship is unmistakable: the same unsleeping eye, the same office of the bond, the same morning light. He is among the very few gods the two traditions kept under almost the same name.

The framework that links them — the descent of both from a single Indo-Iranian Mitra, itself part of a still older inheritance — is a reconstruction, built from the kinship of the languages and the match of the functions, and it should be held as such. The languages of the oldest Vedic hymns and the oldest Iranian scripture, the Avesta, stand close enough that the two religions are read as branches of one Indo-Iranian stock; the Vedic ṛta and the Avestan aša are the same inherited word and the same idea, Truth set against the Lie. Within that wider kinship the contract-god is one of the firmest links, named on both sides, doing the same work. The question that came with the Indo-Aryans into India — the route and manner of their arrival, the very use of the word ārya — is a debated and politically charged one, and the comparison rests on language and function rather than on any settled history of peoples. What the comparison rests on is firm enough: one god of the bond, attested east and west, carried by two peoples out of a shared past.

The oldest dated trace of him sits outside India entirely. A clay tablet from a Hittite archive in Anatolia, sealing a treaty between two kings in the fourteenth century BCE, calls four powers to witness the sworn word in an order any reader of the Veda knows at once: Mi-it-ra, Aru-na, In-da-ra, and the two Na-sa-at-tya — the gods of an Indo-Aryan ruling stratum among the Mitanni, far west of where their kin would settle. It is fitting that the earliest record of the contract-god outside his own scripture should itself be a contract.

The splitting of the inheritance

The afterlives of the two halves diverged as sharply as anything in the history of religion. In Iran the contract-god rose with the dynasties, for a god of the sworn word is a god kings need: his name entered the royal inscriptions, the kings of half the Iranian world were named Mithradates, given by Mithra, and his feast, Mehregān, ranks in the Iranian year second only to the spring new year. The day of Mihr is observed still among the Parsis and the Zoroastrians of Iran; the seventh month of the modern Iranian calendar bears his name; the Persian mehr still means both love and the contract, the language keeping what the theology kept. And from the Iranian world, by a route scholars argue over, the name traveled to the Roman Empire, where men gathered in cave-like chambers to worship a bull-slaying god they called Mithras — the Roman mysteries that became one of the great rival cults of the late ancient world. The western branch raised the contract-god to the center of a mystery; the eastern kept him a sovereign of the bond.

In India the road ran the other way. As the religion that grew from the Veda moved toward the classical age, the sovereign Adityas receded. The warrior Indra came forward, then Vishnu and Shiva gathered the old supremacy to themselves, and the gods of the daylit law gave way to the gods of cosmic might and grace. Varuna narrowed into a lord of the waters and a guardian of the western quarter; Mitra, never strong enough to stand alone in the first place, faded furthest of all. He survives in later India mostly in the one place his name had always lived — as the ordinary word for a friend, and as a name still given to the sun among the Adityas, the dawn-disk that calls the day’s work into being. The god of the covenant did not die in his homeland. He dissolved back into the language he had always been, the everyday noun for the bond between persons, so that anyone who speaks of a friend still speaks, without knowing it, the name of the god who first made the friendship hold.

The Mitanni tablet and the Roman cave mark the two far ends of his journey — a god summoned to seal a treaty in Bronze Age Anatolia, and a god slaying a bull in an underground chamber beneath an imperial capital a millennium and a half later, with the one hymn of the third book and the great Iranian hymn lying between them as the proof that it was, at the root, the same god. The bond between persons was old enough to have a name before either people had a country, and durable enough that the name outlived the god on the eastern side and the homeland on the western. The contract, it turns out, is among the most travel-worthy things a religion can carry.

→ Related: Varuna · Mithra · Rigveda · The Indo Aryans · The Rishis · Surya God · Indra · Agni · Ushas · Soma · Yama · Rudra · The Ashvins · Historical Vedic Religion · Hinduism · Brahman · Ahura Mazda · The Amesha Spentas · Avesta · Mithraic Mysteries · Indus Valley Civilization