Varuna

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Varuna is one of the oldest gods of the Vedic pantheon: the guardian of ṛta, the cosmic and moral order by which the seasons turn, the rivers run, and human dealings are bound to truth. In the hymns of the Rigveda he is a sovereign figure, sky-lord and upholder of law, who keeps watch over what people do and holds the lie against them. He is the god one swears by, and the god who punishes the broken oath.

The texts give him a particular and unusual character. Where most of the Vedic gods are addressed for strength, cattle, or victory, Varuna is addressed for forgiveness. The hymns to him are among the few in the collection that read like confession: the worshipper acknowledges a fault, names the bond of sin that Varuna’s anger has drawn tight, and asks to be loosed from it. His instrument is the noose, the pāśa, with which he snares the wrongdoer; his power is māyā, the measuring craft by which the world is held in its proper measure. He is most often invoked alongside Mitra, the god of contract and the daylit social bond, the two together overseeing the order that binds gods and men. As an Āditya — a son of the goddess Aditi — he belongs to a class of luminous sovereign deities concerned less with force than with rule.

Scholarship has long noted that this moral and sovereign cast sets Varuna apart, and has tied him by name and function to the Iranian Ahura Mazda and, more loosely, to a wider Indo-European pattern of a sky-father who guarantees the oath. The reconstruction is debated in its details; what the comparison rests on is firm enough — a god whose business is order, truth, and the consequences of the lie. The waters with which he is associated are, in the early hymns, less the sea than the cosmic waters and the heavenly order they figure.

Over the long history of the tradition Varuna’s standing changed. The sovereignty that the Rigveda gives him passed in later Hinduism to other gods, and Varuna narrowed into a more specialised role: the deity of the ocean and the waters, lord of the sea, set among the guardians of the directions in the west, riding the sea-monster makara. The god who had once watched over the moral fabric of the world became, in the later imagination, chiefly the god of the deep. The trajectory is itself a record of how a pantheon reorders itself — the keeper of the law receding as the powers around him rose.

→ Related: Anu