Hymns to the Lords of Light
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The Guardians of the Light
Surya, Light and Seer
The Divine Dawn
Pushan the Increaser
Savitri the Creator
The Four Kings
Varuna
Mitra
Aryaman
Bhaga
Surya, Light and Seer
The Rig-veda rises out of the ancient Dawn with the sound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light. Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in the thought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darkness and Ignorance. The battle of the Vedic Gods and Titans is a perpetual conflict between Day and Night for the possession of the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for the liberation or bondage of the mind, life and body of the human being, his mortality or his immortality. It is waged by the Powers of a supreme Truth and Lords of a supreme Light against other dark Powers who struggle to maintain the foundation of this falsehood in which we dwell and the iron walls of these hundred fortified cities of the Ignorance.
This antinomy between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood has its roots in an original cosmic antinomy between the illumined Infinite and the darkened finite consciousness. Aditi the infinite, the undivided is the mother of the Gods, Diti or Danu, the division, the separative consciousness the mother of the Titans; therefore the gods in man move towards light, infinity and unity, the Titans dwell in their cave of the darkness and issue from it only to break up, make discordant, wounded, limited his knowledge, will, strength, joy and being. Aditi is originally the pure consciousness of infinite existence one and self-luminous; she is the Light that is Mother of all things. As the infinite she gives birth to Daksha, the discriminating and distributing Thought of the divine Mind, and is herself born to Daksha as the cosmic infinite, the mystic Cow whose udders feed all the worlds.
It is this divine daughter of Daksha who is the mother of the gods. In the cosmos Aditi is the undivided infinite unity of things, free from the duality, advaya, and has Diti the 
separative dualising consciousness for the obverse side of her cosmic creation,– her sister and a rival wife in the later myth. Here in the lower being where she is manifested as the earth-principle, her husband is the lower or inauspicious Father who is slain by their child Indra, the power of the divine Mind manifested in the inferior creation. Indra, says the hymn, slays his father, dragging him by the feet, and makes his mother a widow. In another image forcible and expressive though repugnant to the decorousness of our modern taste, Surya is said to be the lover of his sister Dawn and the second husband of his mother Aditi, and by a variation of the same image Aditi is hymned as the wife of the all-pervading Vishnu who is in the cosmic creation one of the sons of Aditi and the younger brother of Indra. These images which seem gross and confused when we lack the key to their mystic significance, become clear enough the moment that is recovered. Aditi is the infinite consciousness in the cosmos espoused and held by the lower creative power which works through the limited mind and body, but delivered from this subjection by the force of the divine or illumined Mind born of her in the mentality of man. It is this Indra who makes Surya the light of the Truth rise in heaven and dispel the darknesses and falsehoods and limited vision of the separative mentality. Vishnu is the vaster all-pervading existence which then takes possession of our liberated and unified consciousness, but he is born in us only after Indra has made his puissant and luminous appearance.
This Truth is the light, the body of Surya. It is described as the True, the Right, the Vast; as the luminous supramental heaven of Swar – “vast Swar, the great Truth” – concealed beyond our heaven and our earth; and as Surya, the Sun, “that Truth” which dwells lost in the darkness, withheld from us in the secret cave of the subconscient. This hidden Truth is the Vast because it dwells free and manifest only on the supramental plane where existence, will, knowledge, joy move in a rapturous and boundless infinity and are not limited and hedged as in this many-walled existence of the mind, life and body which form the lower being. That is the wideness of the higher being to which we have to ascend breaking beyond the two enclosing firmaments of the mental and physical; it is described as a divine 
existence free and large in its unbounded range; it is a wideness where there is no obstacle nor any siege of limitation; it is the fear-free pasture of the luminous herds of the Sun; it is the seat and house of the Truth, the own home of the Gods, the solar world, the true light where there is no fear for the soul, no possibility of any wound to the large and equal bliss of its existence.
This supramental vastness is also the fundamental truth of being, satyam, out of which its active truth wells out naturally and without strife of effort into a perfect and faultless movement because there is upon those heights no division, no gulf between consciousness and force, no divorce of knowledge and will, no disharmonising of our being and its action; everything there is the “straight” and there is no least possibility of crookedness. Therefore this supramental plane of vastness and true being is also ṛtam, the true activity of things; it is a supreme truth of movement, action, manifestation, an infallible truth of will and heart and knowledge, a perfect truth of thought and word and emotion; it is the spontaneous Right, the free Law, the original divine order of things untouched by the falsehoods of the divided and separative consciousness. It is the vast divine and self-luminous synthesis born of a fundamental unity, of which our petty existence is only the poor, partial, broken and perverted cutting up and analysis. Such was the Sun of the Vedic worship, the paradise of light to which the Fathers aspired, the world, the body of Surya, son of Aditi.
Aditi is the infinite Light of which the divine world is a formation and the gods, children of the infinite Light, born of her in the ṛtam, manifested in that active truth of her movement guard it against Chaos and Ignorance. It is they who maintain the invincible workings of the Truth in the universe, they who build its worlds into an image of the Truth. They, bounteous givers, loose out upon man its floods variously imaged by the mystic poets as the sevenfold solar waters, the rain of heaven, the streams of the Truth, the seven mighty Ones of heaven, the waters that have knowledge, the floods that breaking through the control of Vritra the Coverer ascend and overflow the mind. They, seers and revealers, make the light of the Truth to arise on the darkened sky of his mentality, fill with its luminous and honey-sweet satisfactions the atmosphere of his vital existence, transform into its vastness and plenitude by the power of the Sun the earth of his physical being, create everywhere the divine Dawn.
Then are established in man the seasons of the Truth, the divine workings, called sometimes the Aryan workings; the law of the Truth seizes and guides his action, the word of the Truth is heard in his thought. Then appear the straight undeviating paths of the Truth, the road and ford of Heaven, the way of going of the gods and of the fathers; for by this path where no violence is done to the divine workings, straight, thornless, happy, easy to tread once our feet are set upon it and the manifested divinities are our guard, the luminous fathers ascended by the power of the Word, by the power of the Wine, by the power of the Sacrifice into the fearless light and stood upon the wide and open levels of the supramental existence. So must man, their posterity, exchange the crooked movements of the separative consciousness for the straight things of the Truth-conscious mind.
For always the courses of the Sun, the gallopings of the divine horse Dadhikravan, the movement of the chariot-wheels of the gods travel on the straight path over wide and level ranges where all is open and the vision is not confined; but the ways of the lower being are crooked windings beset with pits and stumbling-blocks and they crawl unvisited by the divine impulsion over a rugged and uneven ground which screens in from men their goal, their road, their possible helpers, the dangers that await them, their ambushed enemies. Travelling on the path of the Truth with the straight and perfect leading of the gods the limitations of mind and body are at length transcended; we take possession of the three luminous worlds of the higher heaven, enjoy the beatific immortality, grow into the epiphany of the gods and build in our human existence the universal formations of the higher or divine creation. Man then possesses both the divine and the human birth; he is lord of the double movement, he holds Aditi and Diti together, realises the universal in the individual, becomes the Infinite in the finite.
It is this conception that Surya embodies. He is the light 
of the Truth rising on the human consciousness in the wake of the divine Dawn whom he pursues as a lover follows after his beloved and he treads the paths she has traced for him. For Dawn the daughter of Heaven, the face or power of Aditi, is the constant opening out of the divine light upon the human being; she is the coming of the spiritual riches, a light, a power, a new birth, the pouring out of the golden treasure of heaven into his earthly existence. Surya means the illumined or the luminous, as also the illumined thinker is called sūri; but the root means, besides, to create or, more literally, to loose, release, speed forth,– for in the Indian idea creation is a loosing forth of what is held back, a manifestation of what is hidden in the infinite Existence. Luminous vision and luminous creation are the two functions of Surya. He is Surya the creator and he is Surya the revealing vision, the all-seer.
What does he create? First the worlds; for everything is created out of the burning light and truth of the infinite Being, loosed out of the body of Surya who is the light of His infinite self-vision, formed by Agni, the seer-will, the omniscient creative force and flaming omnipotence of that self-vision. Secondly, into the night of man’s darkened consciousness this Father of things, this Seer of the truth manifests out of himself in place of the inauspicious and inferior creation, which he then looses away from us, the illimitable harmony of the divine worlds governed by the self-conscious supramental Truth and the living law of the manifested godhead. Still, the name Surya is seldom used when there is question of this creation; it is reserved for his passive aspects as the body of the infinite Light and the revelation. In his active power he is addressed by other names; then he is Savitri, from the same root as Surya, the Creator; or he is Twashtri the Fashioner of things; or he is Pushan, the Increaser,– appellations that are sometimes used as if identical with Surya, sometimes as if expressing other forms and even other personalities of this universal godhead. Savitri, again, manifests himself, especially in the formation of the Truth in man, through four great and active deities Mitra, Varuna, Bhaga and Aryaman, the Lords of pure Wideness, luminous Harmony, divine Enjoyment, exalted Power.
But if Surya is the creator, he who is, as the Veda says, the self of all that moves and all that is stable, and if this Surya is also the divine, “the wide-burning Truth that is lodged in the law which upholds heaven”, then all the worlds should manifest that law of the Truth and all of them should be so many heavens. Whence then comes this falsehood, sin, death, suffering of our mortal existence? We are told that there are eight sons of the cosmic Aditi who are born from her body; by seven she moves to the gods, but the eighth son is Martanda, of the mortal creation, whom she casts away from her; with the seven she moves to the supreme life, the original age of the gods, but Martanda is brought back out of the Inconscient into which he had been cast to preside over mortal birth and death.
This Martanda or eighth Surya is the black or dark, the lost, the hidden sun. The Titans have taken and concealed him in their cavern of darkness and thence he must be released into splendour and freedom by the gods and seers through the power of the sacrifice. In less figurative language the mortal life is governed by an oppressed, a hidden, a disguised Truth; just as Agni the divine seer-will works at first upon earth concealed or obscured by the smoke of human passion and self-will, so Surya the divine Knowledge lies concealed and unattainable in the night and darkness, is enveloped and contained in the ignorance and error of the ordinary human existence. The Seers by the power of truth in their thoughts discover this Sun lying in the darkness, they liberate this knowledge, this power of undivided and all-embracing vision, this eye of the gods concealed in our subconscient being; they release his radiances, they create the divine Dawn. Indra the divine Mind-power, Agni the Seer-Will, Brihaspati the Master of the inspired word, Soma the immortal Delight born in man aid them to shatter the strong places of the mountain, the artificial obstructions of the Titans are broken and this Sun soars up radiant into our heavens. Arisen he mounts to the supramental Truth. “He goes where the gods have made a path for him cleaving like an eagle to his goal;” he ascends with his seven shining horses to the utter luminous ocean of the higher existence; he is led over it by the seers in
a ship. Surya, the Sun, is himself perhaps the golden ship 
in which Pushan the Increaser leads men beyond evil and darkness and sin to the Truth and the Immortality.
This is the first aspect of Surya that he is the supreme Light of the truth attained by the human being after his liberation from the Ignorance. “Beholding a higher Light beyond this darkness we have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Surya divine in the divine Being” (1.50.10). This is the Vedic way of putting the idea which we find more openly expressed in the Upanishads, the fairest form of Surya in which man sees everywhere the one Purusha with the liberated vision “He am I”. The higher light of Surya is that by which vision rises on our darkness and moves towards the superconscient, the highest that other greater Truth-vision which, having attained, moves in the farthest supreme world of the Infinite.2
This brilliant Surya is made by the godward will of man; he is perfectly fashioned by the doers of divine works. For this light is the vision of the highest to which man arrives by the Yajna or Yoga of his being, by its union through a long labour of self-uplifting and self-giving to the powers of the concealed Truth. “O Sun, thou all-seeing Intelligence,” cries the Rishi, “may we, living creatures, behold thee bringing to us the great Light, blazing out on us for vision upon vision of the beatitude, ascending to the bliss in the vast mass of thy strength above!” (X.37.8) The Life-powers in us, the purifying storm-gods who battle for the knowledge, they who are created by the divine Mind Indra and taught by Varuna who is the divine Purity and Wideness, are to attain to their enjoyment by the light of this Surya.
The light of Surya is the form, the body of that divine vision. He is described as the pure and visioned force of the Truth which shines out in his rising like the gold of Heaven. He is the great godhead who is the vision of Mitra and Varuna; he is the large and invincible eye of that Wideness and that Harmony; the eye of Mitra and Varuna is the great ocean of vision of Surya. His is that large truth-vision which makes us give to its possessors the name of seer. Himself the “wide-seeing”, “the Sun, the Seer who knows the triple knowledge of these gods 
and their more eternal births”, he sees all that is in the gods and all that is in men; “beholding the straight things and the crooked in mortals he looks down upon their movements”. It is by this eye of light that Indra, who has made him arise in heaven for far vision, distinguishes the Aryan powers from the Dasyu, separating the children of light from the children of darkness so that he may destroy these but raise those to their perfection.
But seerhood brings with it not only the far vision but the far hearing. As the eyes of the sage are opened to the light, so is his ear unsealed to receive the vibrations of the Infinite; from all the regions of the Truth there comes thrilling into him its Word which becomes the form of his thoughts. It is when “the thought rises from the seat of the Truth” that Surya by his rays releases into the wideness the mystic Cow of Light. Surya himself is not only “the son of Heaven who is the far-seeing eye of knowledge born of the gods” (X.37.1), but he is the speaker also of the supreme word and the impeller of the illumined and illuminating thought. “The truth that thou rising free from sin, O Sun, speakest today to Mitra and Varuna, that may we speak and abide in the Godhead dear to thee, O Aditi, and thee, O Aryaman” (VII.60.1). And in the Gayatri, the chosen formula of the ancient Vedic religion, the supreme light of the godhead Surya Savitri is invoked as the object of our desire, the deity who shall give his luminous impulsion to all our thoughts.
Surya Savitri, the Creator; for the seer and the creator meet again in this apotheosis of the divine vision in man. The victory of that vision, the arising of this Light to “its own home of the Truth”, the outflooding of this great ocean of vision of Surya which is the eye of the infinite Wideness and the infinite Harmony, is in fact nothing else than the second or divine creation. For then Surya in us beholds with a comprehensive vision all the worlds, all the births as herds of the divine Light, bodies of the infinite Aditi; and this new-seeing of all things, this new-moulding of thought, act, feeling, will, consciousness in the terms of the Truth, the Bliss, the Right, the Infinity is a new creation. It is the coming into us of “that greater existence which is beyond on the other side of this smaller and which, even if it be also a dream of the Infinite, puts away from it the falsehood.”
To prepare that new birth and new creation for man by his illumination and upward voyaging is the function of Surya, the divine Light and Seer.
The Divine Dawn
As the Sun is image and godhead of the golden Light of the divine Truth, so Dawn is image and godhead of the opening out of the supreme illumination on the night of our human ignorance. Dawn daughter of Heaven and Night her sister are obverse and reverse sides of the same eternal Infinite. Utter Night out of which the worlds arise is the symbol of the Inconscient. That is the inconscient Ocean, that the darkness concealed within darkness out of which the One is born by the greatness of His energy. But in the world of our darkened mortal view of things there reigns the lesser Night of the Ignorance which envelops heaven and earth and the mid-region, our mental and physical consciousness and our vital being. It is here that Dawn the daughter of Heaven rises with the radiances of her Truth, with the bliss of her boons; putting off the darkness like a black woven robe, as a young maiden garbed in light, this bride of the luminous Lord of beatitude unveils the splendours of her bosom, reveals her shining limbs and makes the Sun ascend upon the upclimbing tier of the worlds.
This night of our darkness is not entirely Unillumined. If there be nothing else, if all is deep gloom, yet the divine flame of the seer-will Agni burns through the dense murk giving light to him who sits afar in its shadow; though not yet kindled, as it shall be at dawn, on a sacrificial altar, yet even so it fulfils on our earth as the lowest and greatest of the gods the will and works of the hidden Light in spite of all this enveloping smoke of passion and desire. And the stars shine out and the moon comes at night making manifest the invincible workings of the infinite King. Moreover, always Night holds hidden in her bosom her luminous sister; this life of our ignorance taught by the gods in their veiled human working prepares the birth of the divine Dawn so that, sped forth, she may manifest the supreme 
creation of the luminous Creator. For the divine Dawn is the force or face of Aditi; she is the mother of the gods; she gives them birth into our humanity in their true forms no longer compressed into our littleness and veiled to our vision.
But this great work is to be done according to the ordered gradations of the Truth, in its fixed seasons, by the twelve months of the sacrifice, by the divine years of Surya Savitri. Therefore there is a constant rhythm and alternation of night and dawn, illuminations of the Light and periods of exile from it, openings up of our darkness and its settling upon us once more, till the celestial Birth is accomplished and again till it is fulfilled in its greatness, knowledge, love and power. These later nights are other than those utter darknesses which are dreaded as the occasion of the enemy, the haunt of the demons of division who devour; these are rather the pleasant nights, the divine and blessed ones who equally labour for our growth. Night and Dawn are then of different forms but one mind and suckle alternately the same luminous Child. Then the revealing lustres of the brighter goddess are known in the pleasant nights even through the movements of the darkness. Therefore Kutsa hymns the two sisters, “Immortal, with a common lover, agreeing, they move over heaven and earth forming the hue of the Light; common is the path of the sisters, infinite; and they range it, the one and the other, taught by the gods; common they, though different their forms” (1.113.2,3). For one is the bright Mother of the herds, the other the dark Cow, the black Infinite, who can yet be made to yield us the shining milk of heaven.
Thus the Dawns come with a constant alternation, thrice ten – the mystic number of our mentality – making the month, till some day there shall break out upon us the wondrous experience of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity when the dawns succeeded each other without the intervention of any night, when they came to the Sun as to a lover and circled round him, not returning again and again in his front as a precursor of his periodical visitations. That shall be when the supramental consciousness shines out fulfilled in the mentality and we shall possess the year-long day enjoyed by the gods on the summit of the eternal mountain. Then shall be the dawning of the 
“best” or highest, most glorious Dawn, when “driving away the Enemy, guardian of the Truth, born in the Truth, full of the bliss, uttering the highest truths, fulfilled in all boons she brings the birth and manifestation of the godheads” (1.113.12). Meanwhile each dawn comes as the first of a long succession that shall follow and pursues the path and goal of those that have already gone forward; each in her coming impels the life upwards and awakens in us “some one who was dead” (1.113.8). “Mother of the gods, force of the Infinite, the vast vision that awakes from the sacrifice she creates expression for the thought of the soul” and gives us the universal birth in all that is born (1.113.19).
The Vedic Rishis, inspired poets penetrated with the beauty and glory of physical Nature, could not fail to make the most of the figures given to them by this splendid and attractive symbol of the earthly dawning, so that if we read carelessly or with too much attachment to the poetical figure we may miss or repel their deeper meaning. But in no hymn to their beautiful goddess do they forget to give us shining hints, illuminating epithets, profound mystical phrases which shall recall us to the divine sense of the symbol. Especially do they use that figure of the rays that are herds of shining cows around which they have woven the mystic parable of the Angirasa Rishis. Dawn is invoked to shine out on us as when she shone upon the seven-mouthed Angirasa, on the unity of the nine-rayed and the ten-rayed seers who by the utter thought of the soul, by the word that illumines broke open the fortified pens, “pens of the darkness” in which the Panis, misers and traffickers of the Night, had shut up the Sun’s radiant herds. Her rays are as loosings forth of these shining ones; the Dawns themselves are as if the released upward movements of those herded illuminations. Pure and purifying, they break open the doors of the pen. Dawn is the Truth-possessing mother of the herds; she is herself the shining Cow and her milk is the divine yield of heaven, the luminous milk which is mixed with the wine of the gods.
This Dawn illumines not only our earth but all the worlds. She brings out into expression the successive planes of our existence so that we may look upon all “the diverse lives” of which we are capable. She reveals them by the eye of the Sun and fronting “the worlds of the becoming she stands aloft over them all as the vision of immortality” (III.61.3). She is herself that which shines out widely as the Eye, and like her lover the Sun she gives not only the vision, but also the word; “she finds speech for every thinker”, she creates expression for the thought in the soul. To those who saw only a little she gives wide vision and brings out into expression for them all the worlds. For she is a godhead of thought, the “young and ancient goddess of many thoughts who moves according to the divine law” (III.61.1). She is the goddess of the perceptive knowledge who has the perfect truth; she is the supreme light of all lights and is born as a varied and all-embracing conscient vision. She is the light full of knowledge which rises up out of the darkness. “We have crossed through to the other shore of this darkness,” cries the Rishi, “Dawn is breaking forth and she creates and forms the births of knowledge” (1.92.6).
Constantly the idea of the Truth is associated with this luminous goddess Usha. She awakens full of the Truth by the illuminations of heaven; she comes uttering words of truth; her dawns are luminous in their entering in because they are true as being born from the Truth; it is from the seat of the Truth that the dawns awake. She is the shining leader of perfect truths who awakens in perception to things of varied light and opens all doors. Agni, the mighty one, enters into a great wideness of our heaven and earth receiving his impulsion in the foundation of the Truth which is the foundation of the Dawns; for the outshining of this Dawn is “the vast knowledge of Mitra and Varuna and like a thing of delight it orders the light everywhere in many forms” (III.61.7).
Moreover she gives the riches we seek and leads man on the divine path. She is the queen of all boons and the wealth she gives, expressed in the mystic symbols of the Cow and the Horse, is the bright abundance of the higher planes; Agni begs from her and attains in her luminous coming their delightful substance; she gives to the mortal inspired knowledge and plenitude and impelling force and vast energy. It is she who creates the Path for mortals by her light; she makes for them the good paths that are happy and easy of going. She moves man to his journey; “Thou,” says the Rishi, “art there for strength and knowledge and great impulsion, thou art our movement to the goal, thou makest us set forth on the journey.” Her path is a path of light and she moves on it with horses yoked by the Truth, herself possessed of the Truth and vast by its power. She follows effectively the path of the Truth and as one that knows she destroys not its directions. “Therefore,” runs the chant, “O Dawn divine, shine out on us immortal, in thy chariot of bliss, uttering the words of Truth; let horses bring thee that are well-governed, golden of hue, wide in their strength” (III.61.2).
Like all the leaders of the Path, she is a destroyer of enemies. While the Aryan wakes in the dawn, the Panis, misers of Life and Light, sleep unawakening in the heart of the darkness where there are not her varied rays of knowledge. Like an armed hero she drives away our enemies and dispels the darkness like a charging war-horse. The daughter of heaven comes with the light driving away the enemy and all darknesses. And this Light is the light of the world of Swar, the luminous world that Surya Savitri shall create for us. For because she is divine Dawn of the luminous paths, vast with the Truth and bringing to us its bright world, therefore the illumined adore her with their thoughts. Removing, as it were, a woven robe the bride of the Lord of beatitude by her perfect works and her perfect enjoyment creates Swar and spreads wide in her glory from the ends of heaven over all the earth; she attains to a high-uplifted strength in heaven establishing the honey of the sweetness and the three luminous regions of that world are made to shine out by the delightful vision of this great Dawn.
Therefore cries the Rishi, “Arise, life and force have come to us, the darkness has departed, the Light arrives; she has made empty the path for the journey of the Sun; thither let us go where the gods shall carry forward our being beyond these limits” (1.113.16).
Pushan the Increaser
Since the divine work in us cannot be suddenly accomplished, the godhead cannot be created all at once, but only by a luminous development and constant nurture through the succession of the dawns, through the periodic revisitings of the illumining Sun, Surya the Sun-Power manifests himself in another form as Pushan, the Increaser. The root of this name means to increase, foster, nourish. The spiritual wealth coveted by the Rishis is one that thus increases “day by day”, that is, in each return of this fostering Sun; increase or growth (puṣṭi) is a frequent object of their prayers. Pushan represents this aspect of the Surya-power. He is the “lord and master of plenitudes, lord of our growings, our comrade”. Pushan is the enricher of our sacrifice. Vast Pushan shall advance our chariot by his energy; he shall become for the increase of our plenitudes. Pushan is described as himself a stream of the divine riches and a lavish heap of its substance. He is lord of the vast treasure of its joy and companion of our felicity.
The return of the night of ignorance which intervenes between the successive dawns is imaged as the loss of the radiant herds of the Sun frequently stolen from the seer by the Panis and sometimes as the loss of the Sun itself hidden by them again in their tenebrous cavern of the subconscient. The increase which Pushan gives depends on the recovery of these disappearing illuminations of the Truth. Therefore this god is associated with Indra the Power of divine Mind, his brother, friend, ally in battle, in their forceful recovery. He perfects and accomplishes our host that seeks for the herds so that they conquer and possess. “Let Pushan pursue after our luminous herds, let Pushan guard our war-horses, let Pushan conquer for us the plenitude. O Pushan, go after our cows.... Let Pushan hold his right hand over us in front; let him drive back to us that which we have lost” (VI. 54.5,6,10). So also he brings back the lost Surya. “O shining Pushan, bring to us, as if our lost herd, the God of the varied fullness of flame who upholds our heavens. Pushan finds the shining King who was hidden from us and concealed in the cave” (1.23.13,14). And we are told of the luminous goad which this resplendent deity bears, the goad that urges the thoughts of the soul and is the means of accomplishment of the herd of the radiant illuminations. What he gives to us is secure; for because he has the knowledge, he loses not the herd and is the guardian of the world of our becoming. He has the variously ordaining and comprehensive no less than the complete unified vision of all our worlds and therefore he is our fosterer and increaser. He is the lord of our felicity who loses not our possession of knowledge and so long as we abide in the law of his workings we shall suffer no hurt nor diminution. The happy state of the soul that he gives removes from it all sin and evil and makes today and makes tomorrow for the building up of the whole godhead in our universal being.
Since Surya is the lord of the Knowledge, Pushan also is especially the knower and thinker and guardian of the shining thoughts of the seer – the keeper of the herds delighting in the thought who is immanent in the whole world and all-pervading fosters all the forms of creative knowledge. It is this Increaser who stirs and impels the minds of the illumined and is the means of accomplishment and perfection of their thoughts; he is the seer set in man the thinker, the comrade of his illumined mind who moves him upon the path. He manifests in us the thought which wins the Cow and the Horse and all the plenitude of the wealth. He is the friend of every thinker; he cherishes the thought in its increase as a lover cherishes his bride. The thoughts that seek the supreme felicity are the forces that the Increaser yokes to his car, they are the “unborn ones”3 who take upon them the yoke of his chariot.
The image of the chariot, of the journey, of the path occurs constantly in association with Pushan because this growth which he gives is a journey towards the fullness of the Truth that lies beyond. The Path in the Veda is always the path of this Truth. Thus the Rishi prays to Pushan to become for us the charioteer of the Truth and the idea of the Vedic thought and knowledge and the idea of the Path are frequently interwoven with each
other. Pushan is the lord of the Path whom we yoke as if a chariot for thought, for the winning of the plenitude; he distinguishes our paths so that the thoughts may be accomplished and perfected; he leads us on them by knowledge, forcefully teaching us, saying “thus it is and thus” so that we learn from him of the homes to which we travel; it is as the seer that he is the impeller of the horses of our chariots. Like Usha he makes for us happy paths of an easy going,– for he finds for us the will and strength,– and by his traversing of them rids us of evil. The wheel of his chariot comes not to harm, nor is there any trouble or suffering in its movement. There are indeed enemies on the way, but he shall slay these oppressors of our journey. “O Pushan, the wolf, the troubler of our bliss who teaches us evil, him smite from the Path. The adversary, the robber perverse of heart, drive him far from the road of our journeying. Set thy foot on the distressful force of whatsoever power of duality expresses evil in us” (1.42.2-4).
Thus beyond all the obstacles that cling to our wheels Pushan, the divine and luminous increaser of man’s soul, shall lead us to the light and bliss which Surya Savitri creates. “The Life that is the life of all shall guard thee; Pushan shall guard thee in thy forward path in front, and where the doers of the good work are seated, where they have gone, there shall the divine Savitri set thee. Pushan knoweth all the regions and he shall lead us by the way which is freest from peril. Let the giver of felicity, the blazing god who has all the energies lead steadily in our front by his knowledge. Pushan has been born in thy forward travelling on the paths through earth and through heaven; for he moves in both the worlds which are made full of delight for us; here he ranges in his knowledge and he journeys beyond” (X. 17.4-6).
Savitri the Creator
The result of the procession of the shining dawns, of the divine returns of Surya, of the increasings of Pushan and his leading on the Path is summed up in the creation of Savitri the luminous Creator. It is the god Savitri who sets us there where the ancient doers of the Work have preceded us; that is the desirable flame and splendour of the divine Creator on which the seer has to meditate and towards which this god impels our thoughts, that the bliss of the creative godhead on the forms of which our soul must meditate as it journeys towards it. It is the supreme creation in which the goddess undivided and infinite speaks out her Word and the all-ruling kings Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman; to that consummation the power of all these godheads turns with a united acceptance.
That divine word is the word of the Truth; for a superconscient Truth lies concealed and is the basis of the infinite being which stands revealed on those higher altitudes of our ascension. What we now accept as life is the evil dream, the death that governs us because we live in a false knowledge, a limited and divided existence exposed to every devourer. That is not real life. For life we have to be able to look long upon the Sun; for life we have to be able to hold in our thought a knowledge and a word full of the consummate perception; we have to bring forward the Truth as an offering so that the luminous god with his golden hands full of the Light may rise high in our heavens and hear our word. We must choose and take into ourselves that supreme and vast state of this Mighty One who has the thought of the knowledge, he who creates for the gods the immortality and the highest enjoyment; we must widen out the cord of Savitri so that it shall release us into higher states of life made accessible to men and harmonised with their being. To hold that felicity we have to become free from sin and evil in the wideness and purity of Varuna, in the all-embracing harmony of Mitra, in the supreme creation of Savitri.
Then Savitri shall loose away from us, shall uncreate the suffering of the evil dream. For the seeker of the straightness he shall create an increasing wideness of his existence so that even with our incomplete knowledge we shall grow in our being towards the gods. By the godheads he will foster our knowledge and lead us towards the
universal formation of them in the undivided consciousness of the infinite Aditi which we have chosen as our goal. All that we have done in our ignorance, in our divided and oppressed discernment of things, in our mere mortal becoming and humanity, against gods or men, he shall uncreate and make us free from the sin. For he is the creator of the Right, he is the creator who creates the Truth.
That Truth he shall create in a great wideness and force of our physical being, in a rich abundance of our mental and by its undiminishable vastness he shall uphold all the worlds of our existence. Thus in the working of Savitri whose creation is the Truth and of Mitra and Varuna the gods shall uphold in us its substance of varied light, the felicity of its energies and illuminations till all existence is that godhead of Savitri behind us and before, below as well as above, till we possess the far-extended life and have built up the universal form of our being,– the universal form which he creates for us when with hands of golden light, with the tongue that tastes the wine of sweetness he moves in the triple knowledge of the highest heaven of Truth, attains in the gods to the divine rhythm which he creates for his accomplished Law and takes up his abode in that golden strength of his, the Seer robed in light who first stretched out his two arms of knowledge and power to create the world. He who as Twashtri the Fashioner of things attended always by the male godheads and their female energies, powers of Purusha and powers of Prakriti, made and makes all things, shall as Savitri create for man the thinker born in a body that Truth and Immortality.
The Four Kings
The creation of Surya Savitri starts from the repeated risings of the divine Dawn and grows by the constant nourishing of her spiritual gifts and possessions through the work in us of Surya Pushan. But the actual formation, the perfected fullness depend on the birth and growth in us of all the gods, the children of Aditi, the All-Gods (viśve deváḥ) and especially of the four great luminous Kings, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga, Aryaman. Indra and the Maruts and the Ribhus, Vayu, Agni, Soma and the Ashwins are indeed the principal agents; Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, the future mighty Triad, preside over the indispensable conditions,– for the one paces out the vast framework of the inner worlds in which our soul-action takes place, the other in his wrath and might and violent beneficence forces onward the great evolution and smites the opponent and the recusant and the ill-doer, and the third administers always the seed of the creative word from the profundities of the soul; so too Earth and Heaven and the divine Waters and the great goddesses and Twashtri the Fashioner of things on whom they attend, either provide the field or bring and shape the material; but over the utter creation, over its perfect vast space and pure texture, over the sweet and ordered harmony of its steps, over the illumined force and power of its fulfilment, over its rich, pure and abundant enjoyment and rapture the Sun-gods Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga cast the glory and protection of their divine gaze.
The sacred poems in which the All-Gods and the Adityas, the sons of the Infinite, and Aryaman, Mitra and Varuna are praised,– not the mere hymns of formal invocation to the sacrifice,– are among the most beautiful, solemn and profound that the imagination of man has conceived. The Adityas are described in formulas of an incomparable grandeur and sublimity. No mythic barbarian gods of cloud, sun and shower are these, no confused allegories of wonder-stricken savages, but the objects of worship to men far more inwardly civilised and profound in self-knowledge than ourselves. They may not have yoked the lightning to their chariots, nor weighed sun and star, nor materialised all the destructive forces in Nature to aid them in massacre and domination, but they had measured and fathomed all the heavens and earths within us, they had cast their plummet into the inconscient and the subconscient and the superconscient; they had read the riddle of death and found the secret of immortality; they had sought for and discovered the One and known and worshipped Him in the glories of His light and purity and wisdom and power. These were their gods, as great and deep conceptions as ever informed the esoteric doctrine of the Egyptians or inspired the men of an older primitive Greece, the fathers of knowledge who founded the mystic rites of Orpheus or the secret initiation of Eleusis. But over it all there was the “Aryan light”, a confidence and joy and a happy, equal friendliness with the Gods which the Aryan brought with him into the world, free from the sombre shadows that fell upon Egypt from contact with the older races, Sons of deep-brooding Earth. These claimed Heaven as their father and their seers had delivered his Sun out of our material darkness.
The self-luminous One is the goal of the Aryan-minded;
therefore the seers worshipped him in the image of the Sun. One existent, him
have the seers called by various names, Indra, Agni, Yama, Matarishwan. The
phrases “That One”, “That Truth”,5 occur constantly in the Veda in connection with the Highest and with the image of His workings here, the Sun. In one sublime and mystic chant the refrain returns perpetually, “The vast mightiness of the Gods,– That One” (III.55.1). There is the goal of that journey of the Sun by the path of the Truth which we have seen to be also the journey of the awakened and illumined soul. “Concealed by this truth is that Truth of you,” of Mitra and Varuna, “where they unyoke the horses of the Sun. The ten hundreds meet there together,– That One, I have seen the supreme God of the embodied gods” (V.62.1). But in itself the One is timeless and our mind and being exist in Time. “It is neither today nor tomorrow; who knoweth That which is transcendent? When it is approached, it vanishes from us” (1.170.1). Therefore we have to grow towards it by giving birth to the gods in ourselves,6 increasing their strong and radiant forms, building up their divine bodies, and this new birth and self-building is the true nature of the sacrifice,– the sacrifice through which there is the awakening of our consciousness to immortality.7
The sons of the Infinite have a twofold birth. They are born above in the divine Truth as creators of the worlds and guardians of the divine Law; they are born also here in the world itself and in man as cosmic and human powers of the Divine. In the visible world they are the male and female powers and energies of the universe and it is this external aspect of them as gods of the Sun, Fire, Air, Waters, Earth, Ether, the conscious-forces ever present in material being which gives us the external or psycho-physical side of the Aryan worship. The antique view of the world as a psycho-physical and not merely a material reality is at the root of the ancient ideas about the efficacy of the mantra and the relation of the gods to the external life of man; hence the force of prayer, worship, sacrifice for material ends; hence the use of them for worldly life and in so-called magic rites which comes out prominently in the Atharva Veda and is behind much of the symbolism of the Brahmanas.8 But in man himself the gods are conscious psychological powers. “Will-powers, they do the works of will; they are the thinkings in our hearts; they are the lords of delight who take delight; they travel in all the directions of the thought.” Without them the soul of man cannot distinguish its right nor its left, what is in front of it nor what is behind, the things of foolishness or the things of wisdom; only if led by them can it reach and enjoy “the fearless Light”. For this reason Dawn is addressed “O thou who art human and divine” and the gods constantly described as the “Men” or human powers (manuṣaḥ, naraḥ); they are our “luminous seers”, “our heroes”, “our lords of plenitude”. They conduct the sacrifice in their human capacity (manuṣvat) as well as receive it in their high divine being. Agni is the priest of the oblation, Brihaspati the priest of the word. In this sense Agni is said to be born from the heart of man; all the gods are thus born by the sacrifice, grow and out of their human action assume their divine bodies. Soma, the wine of the world-delight, rushing through the mind which is its “luminous wide-extended” strainer of purification, cleansed there by the ten sisters, pours forth giving birth to the gods.
But the nature of these inner powers is always divine and therefore their tendency is upward to Light and immortality and infinity. They are “the Sons of the Infinite, one in their will and work, pure, purified in the streams, free from crookedness, free from defect, unhurt in their being. Wide, profound, unconquered, conquering, with many organs of vision, they behold within the crooked things and the perfect; all is near to the Kings, even the things that are highest. Sons of the Infinite, they dwell in the movement of the world and uphold it; gods, they are the guardians of all that becomes as universe; far-thoughted, full of the Truth, they guard the Might” (II.27.2-4). They are kings of the universe and of man and of all its peoples (nṛpati, viśpati), self-emperors, world-emperors, not as the Titans strive to be in the falsehood and the division, but because they are kings of the Truth. For their mother is Aditi “in whom there is no duality”, Aditi “the luminous undivided who upholds the divine habitation that is of the world of Light” and to her her sons “cleave ever waking”. They are “most straight” in their being, will, thought, delight, action, movement, they are “thinkers of the Truth whose law of nature is the law of the Truth”, they are “seers and hearers of the Truth”. They are “charioteers of the Truth, whose seat is in its mansions, purified in discernment, unconquerable, the Men wide-visioned”. They are the “Immortals who know the Truth”. Thus free from the falsehood and the crookedness, these inner divinities rise in us to their natural level, home, plane, world. “Of a double birth they are true in their being and lay hold on the Truth, very vast and one in the Light and are possessed of its luminous world.”
In this upward movement they cleave away from us the evil and the ignorance. These are they who “cross beyond into the sinlessness and the undivided existence”. Therefore they are “the gods who deliver”. For the enemy, the assailant, the doer of harm their knowledge becomes as if snares widespread, for to him light is a cause of blindness, the divine movement of good an occasion of evil and a stumbling-block; but the soul of the Aryan seer passes beyond these dangers like a mare hastening with a chariot. In the leading of the gods he avoids all stumblings into evil like so many pitfalls. Aditi, Mitra and Varuna forgive him whatever sin he may have committed against their vast oneness, purity, harmony so that he can hope to enjoy the wide and fearless Light and the long nights shall not come upon him. That the Vedic gods are no mere physical Nature-powers, but the psychic conscious forces behind and within all cosmic things, is made clear enough by the connection between their cosmic character and this deliverance from sin and falsehood, “Since ye are they who rule over the world by the power of their mind of knowledge, thinkers of all that is stable and mobile, therefore, O gods, carry us beyond the sin of that which we have done and that which we have not done to the felicity” (X.63.8).
There is always the image of the path and the journey, the Path of the Truth on which we are led forward by a divine leading. “O Sons of the Infinite, effect for us the fearless peace, make us good paths of an easy going to the felicity” (X.63.7). “Easy of going is your path, O Aryaman, O Mitra, it is thornless, O Varuna, and perfect” (II.27.6). “They whom the Sons of Infinity lead with good leadings pass beyond all sin and evil to the felicity” (X.63.13). Always that goal is the felicity, the wide bliss and peace, the unbroken Light, the vast Truth, the Immortality. “O ye gods, put far from us the hostile (dividing) force, give us wide peace for the felicity” (X.63.12). “The Sons of Infinity give us the imperishable Light.” “Create the Light, O ye minds of knowledge of our sacrifice.” “That increasing birth of you we would know today, O Sons of the Infinite, which creates, O Aryaman, even in this world of fear the beatitude.” For it is the “fearless Light” that is created, where there is no peril of death, sin, suffering, ignorance,– the light of the undivided, infinite, immortal, rapturous Soul of things. For “these are the rapturous lords of Immortality, even Aryaman and Mitra and Varuna all-pervading”.
Still, it is in the image of Swar, the world of the divine Truth that the goal is concretely figured. “Let us reach,” is the aspiration, “the Light that is of Swar, the Light which none can tear asunder.” Swar is the great, inviolable birth of Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman which is contained in the luminous heavens of the soul. The all-ruling Kings, because they grow perfectly and there is no crookedness in them, hold our habitation in heaven. That is the triple world in which the uplifted consciousness of man reflects the three divine principles of being, its infinite existence, its infinite conscious-force, its infinite bliss.9 “Three earths they hold, three heavens, three workings of these gods in the Knowledge within; by the Truth, O Sons of the Infinite
, great is that vastness of yours, O Aryaman, O Mitra, O Varuna, great and beautiful. Three heavenly worlds of light they hold, the gods golden-shining who are pure and purified in the streams; sleepless, unconquerable they close not their lids, they express the wideness to the mortal who is straight” (II.27.8,9). These all-purifying streams are those of the rain, the abundance, the rivers of the heaven of Truth. “Charioted in light are they, aggressive in knowledge, sinless and they clothe themselves in the rain and abundance of heaven for the felicity” (X.63.4). By the pouring out of that abundance they prepare our souls to ascend to its source, the higher ocean from which the luminous waters descend.
It will be seen how largely the great triad, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman figure in the hymns to the All-Gods and to the Sons of the Infinite Mother. With Bhaga as a consummating fourth they dominate the thought of the Rishis in their culminant aspiration to the mass and apex of the perfect truth and infinity. This preeminence they owe to their particular character and functions which appear, not often indeed with any great prominence, but as a background to their common action, their united nature of light, their undifferentiated achievement. For they have one light, one work, they perfect in us one indivisible Truth; and it is this union of all the godheads in our consenting universality11 that is the objective of the Vedic thought in these Aditya hymns. Still the union comes about by a combination of their powers and therefore each has in it his own proper nature and function. That of the Four is to build up the whole divine state into its perfection by the natural interaction of its four essential elements. The Divine is existence all-embracing, infinite and pure; Varuna brings to us the infinite oceanic space of the divine soul and its ethereal, elemental purity. The Divine is boundless consciousness, perfect in knowledge, pure and therefore luminously right in its discernment of things, perfectly harmonious and happy in its concordance of their law and nature; Mitra brings us this light and harmony, this right distinction and relation and friendly concord, the happy laws of the liberated soul concordant with itself and the Truth in all its rich thought, shining actions and thousandfold enjoyment. The Divine is in its own being pure and perfect power and in us the eternal upward tendency in things to their source and truth; Aryaman brings to us this mighty strength and perfectly-guided happy inner upsurging. The Divine is the pure, the faultless, the all-embracing, the untroubled ecstasy that enjoys its own infinite being and enjoys equally all that it creates within itself; Bhaga gives us sovereignly that ecstasy of the liberated soul, its free and unfallen possession of itself and the world.
This quaternary is practically the later essential trinity of Sachchidananda,– Existence, Consciousness, Bliss with self-awareness and self-force, Chit and Tapas, for double terms of Consciousness; but it is here translated into its cosmic terms and equivalents. Varuna the King has his foundation in the all-pervading purity of Sat; Mitra the Happy and the Mighty, most beloved of the Gods, in the all-uniting light of Chit; many-charioted Aryaman in the movement and all-discerning force of Tapas; Bhaga in the all-embracing joy of Ananda. Yet as all these things form one in the realised godhead, as each element of the trinity contains the others in itself and none of them can exist separately from the rest, therefore each of the Four also possesses by force of his own essential quality every general attribute of his brothers. For this reason if we do not read the Veda as carefully as it was written, we shall miss its distinctions and see only the indistinguishable common functions of these luminous Kings,– as indeed throughout the hymns the unity in difference of all the gods makes it difficult for the mind not accustomed to the subtleties of psychological truth to find in the Vedic divinities anything but a confused mass of common or interchangeable attributes. But the distinctions are there and have as great a force and importance as in the Greek and Egyptian symbolism. Each god contains in himself all the others, but remains still himself in his peculiar function.
This nature of the difference between the Four explains their varying prominence in the Veda. Varuna is easily the first and most considerable of them all, for realisation of infinite existence is the basis of the Vedic perfection: the wideness and purity of the divine being once attained, all the rest comes inevitably contained in it as possession and power and attribute. Mitra is seldom hymned except in union with Varuna or else as a name and form of the other gods,– oftenest of the cosmic worker Agni,– when arriving in their action to the harmony and the light they reveal in themselves the divine Friend. To the twin-power Mitra-Varuna the greater number of the hymns to the luminous Kings are addressed, a certain number to Varuna separately or to Varuna-Indra, one to Mitra, two or three to Bhaga, none at all to Aryaman. For the infinite wideness and purity being founded, the luminous harmony of the workings of the gods by the correlated laws of the different planes of our being from the spiritual to the material has to be realised in that continent and on that foundation; and this is the combination Mitra-Varuna. The power of Aryaman is hardly viewed as an independent principle,– just as force in the world is only a manifestation, movement or dynamic value of existence, is only a working out, a liberation of consciousness, of knowledge, of the inherent Truth of things into stuff of energy and form of effect, or is only the effective term of the self-discovering and self-seizing movement by which Being and Consciousness realise themselves as Bliss. Therefore Aryaman is invoked always in conjunction with Aditi or Varuna or Mitra or in the great realising Triad or in the realised quaternary or in the general invocation of the All-Gods and the Adityas.
Bhaga on the other hand is the crown of our movement to the possession of the hidden divine Truth of our existence; for the essence of that Truth is beatitude. Bhaga is Savitri himself; the All-Enjoyer is the Creator fulfilled in the divine purpose of his creation. Therefore he is the result more than the agent, or else the last agent of all, the possessor more than the giver of our spiritual plenitude.
*
The hymn of the Rishi Vamadeva to the All-Gods shows with a clear lucidity the high-aspiring hope which these Vedic deities were invoked to favour and bring to a happy culmination:
“Who of you is our deliverer? who our defender? O Earth and Heaven, free from division, deliver us; rescue, O Mitra, O Varuna, from the mortality that is too strong for us! Who of you, O gods, confirms for us the supreme good in the march of the sacrifice? They who illumine our high original seats, they who limitless in knowledge dawn out putting away our darkness, it is they, imperishable all-ordainers, who order them for us; thinkers out of the Truth, they shine forth in light, achievers. I seek for my companion by the words illumining the flowing river Aditi, she who is the divine felicity. O Night and Dawn unconquerable, so do ye make it that both the Days shall utterly protect us. Aryaman and Varuna distinguish the Path, and Agni lord of the impulsion, the path of the happy goal. O Indra and Vishnu, affirmed, extend to us perfectly the peace in which are the Powers, the mighty protection. I embrace the increasings of Parvata and of the Maruts and of Bhaga, our divine deliverer. May the master of things protect us from the sin of the world and Mitra keep us far from the sin against Mitra. Now shall one affirm the goddesses Earth and Heaven with the Dragon of the foundation by all the things desired that we must obtain; as if to possess that Ocean by their wide ranging they have uncovered the (hidden) rivers that are voiceful with the burning Light. May goddess Aditi with the gods protect us, may the divine Deliverer deliver us, unremitting; let us not diminish the foundation of Mitra and Varuna and the high level of Agni. Agni is the lord of that vast substance of riches and perfected enjoyment; he lavishes on us those abundances. O Dawn, voice of the Truth, queen of plenitude, bring to us the many desirable boons, thou who hast in thee all their plenty. To that goal may Savitri, Bhaga, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Indra, move aright for us with riches of our felicity” (IV.55).
Varuna
We have the word Varuna from a root which means to surround, cover or pervade. From these significances of the name there emerged before the poetic eye of the ancient mystics the images that are our nearest concrete representation of the Infinite. They saw God as a highest covering Heaven, felt divine existence like an encompassing ocean, lived in its boundless presence as in a pure and pervading ether. Varuna is this highest heaven, this soul-surrounding ocean, this ethereal possession and infinite pervasion.
The same root had given them an appellation for the dark Coverer, the adversary Vritra; for to obstruct and resist, screen or hedge, besiege and hem in are also some of its many kindred senses. But dark Vritra is the thick cloud and the enveloping shadow. His knowledge – for he too has a knowledge, a Maya,– is the sense of limited being and the hiding away in subconscient Night all the rest of the rich and vast existence that should be ours, and for this negation and contrary power of creative knowledge he stands up stiffly against the Gods,– his undivine right against the divine right of God and man. Varuna by his wide being and ample vision rolls back these limits; surrounding us with light his possession reveals what dark Vritra’s obsession had withheld and obscured. His godhead is the form or spiritual image of an embracing and illuminating Infinity.
For this reason the physical figure of Varuna is much less definite than the burning Fire or the radiant Sun or the luminous Dawn. The old commentators thought strangely enough that he was the God of Night. In the Puranas he is the deity of the waters and his noose, which in the Veda never pretends to be anything more than a psychological metaphor, has become the violent lasso of the ocean-god. European scholars have identified him with the Greek Uranus and perceiving something of his original ethereal nature have supposed a conceptual transference, a sort of fall or even a deposition from azure above to azure below. Indra, perhaps, becoming master of the skies and king of the gods, Varuna the original King had to be satisfied with the dominion of the waters. If we understand the symbolic method of the mystics, we shall see that these suppositions are unnecessary. Their method is to combine various ideas and images contained together in a general conception which gives all the links. So, Varuna of the Veda is at once King,– not of the heavens as such, for that is Dyaushpita, nor of the heavens of light, for that is Indra,– but of the highest covering ether and all oceans. All expanses are Varuna’s; every infinity is his property and estate.
Ether and ocean meet together and become one in the mystic conception; and the origin of this unity is not far to seek. The ancient concept of creation, held all over the world from the Himalayas to the Andes, conceived of the stuff of things as a formless expanse of waters covered over in the beginning by darkness out of which day and night and heaven and earth and all worlds have emerged. “Darkness,” says the Hebrew Genesis, “was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved on the waters.” By the word he divided the waters with Heaven, the firmament; so that now there are two waters, one earthly below the firmament, the other heavenly above. The mystics seized on this universal belief or this universal image and crowded into it their opulent psychological values. Instead of one firmament they saw two, the earthly and the celestial; instead of two oceans, three spread out before their unsealed vision.
What they saw, was what man will ever see when he changes the physical for the psychical vision of Nature and the world. Below them they looked down on an unfathomable night and surging obscurity, darkness hidden within darkness, the inconscient waters from which by the mighty energy of the One their existence had arisen. Above them they beheld a remote ocean of light and sweetness, a highest ether, the supreme step of all-blissful Vishnu to which their attracted being must ascend. One of these was the dense dark ether, an unformed material inconscient Non-existence; the other a luminous ethereal All-conscient and the absolute of existence. These two were the dark and the shining extension of the One.
Between these two unknown infinities, infinite potential zero and infinite plenary x, they saw around them, before their eyes, below, above, a third sea of ever-developing conscious being, a sort of boundless wave, which they spoke of by a hardy metaphor as climbing up or flowing up beyond heaven to the supreme seas. It is this perilous ocean which we have to navigate. There Bhujyu, the seeker of enjoyment, son of King Tugra the Forceful-Hastening, was about to sink, cast in by his false companions, souls of an evil movement; but the marvellous chariot-ship of the Ashwins came hastening to his succour. Varuna must teach with his vast Right and Truth our limited will and judgment, if we would escape such perils: we must embark in no human galley, but “ascend the divine ship, the blameless and well-oared vessel that sinketh not, by which may we voyage safe beyond sin and evil”. Into this intermediate ocean, above our earth, we have seen the sun of Knowledge rise out of the inconscient cave and voyage led by the seers. For this too is an ocean-ether. Or, let us say, it is a tier of ethers. To follow the Vedic imagery we must suppose ocean superimposed upon ocean. This world is a series of heights that are depths and a mutual involution and evolution of vastnesses that have no ending: ether below rises to ever more luminous ether above, every stratum of consciousness rests upon many inferior and aspires to many higher strata.
But beyond our farthest skies in the supreme ocean of light and expanse of the highest superconscient ether our heaven
awaits us in a Truth hidden by lesser truth, even as in the inconscient Night darkness is enwrapped and protected by an ever greater darkness. That is the truth of King Varuna. Thither the Dawns shining arise, the rivers travel and the Sun unyokes there the horses of his chariot. And Varuna contains, sees, governs all this in his vast being and by his illimitable knowledge. All these oceans are his, even to the Inconscient and its nights so opposite in their seeming to his nature which is that of the extended radiance of one eternal, vast sun of happy light and truth. Day and Night, light and darkness are symbols in his infinity. “Luminous Varuna has embraced the nights; he holds the Dawns within him by his creative knowledge; visioned, he is around every object.”
From this idea of the oceans arose naturally the psychological concept of the Vedic rivers. These rivers are everywhere. They are the waters which flow down from the mountain and ascend the mind ranging through and illuminating with their flow the dark subconscient secrets of Vritra; they are the mighty ones of Heaven whom Indra brings down on the Earth; they are the streams of the Truth; they are the rain from its luminous heavens; they are the seven eternal sisters and companions; they are the divine waters who have knowledge. They descend upon the earth, they rise from the ocean, they flow to the ocean, they break out from the doors of the Panis, they ascend to the supreme seas.
Oceanic Varuna is king of all these waters. “In the uprising of the rivers,” it is said, “he is a brother of seven sisters, he is in their middle” (VIII.41.2). And another Rishi has sung, “In the rivers Varuna is seated upholding the law of his works, perfect in will for empire” (1.25.10). Vasishtha speaks with a more explicit crowding of psychological suggestions, of “the divine, pure and purifying waters, honey-pouring, in the midst of whom King Varuna marches looking down on the truth and the falsehood in creatures” (VII.49.3). Varuna too, like Indra with whom he is often associated, releases the waters; sped from his mighty hands they too, like him, become all-pervading and flow to a limitless goal. “The Son of Infinity the wide upholder, has loosed them forth everywhere; the rivers journey to the truth of Varuna” (II.28.4).
Not only the goal, the march too is his. “Varuna of the puissance and the thousandfold vision beholds the goal of these rivers; he is the king of the kingdoms, he is the form of the rivers, for him is a strength supreme and universal.” His oceanic movement envelops all the kingdoms of being and ascends to the Paradise of the heaven of heavens. “He is the hidden ocean,” it is said, “and he climbs passing beyond heaven; when he has set the sacrificial word in these dawns, then with his luminous foot he tramples asunder illusions and ascends to Paradise” (VIII.41.8). Varuna, we see, is the oceanic surge of the hidden Divine as he rises, progressively manifested, to his own infinite wideness and ecstasy in the soul of the god-liberated seer.
The illusions which he shatters with his tread are the false formations of the Lords of Evil. Varuna, because he is this ether of divine Truth and ocean of divine being, is what no personified physical sea or sky could ever become, the pure and majestic King who strikes down evil and delivers from sin. Sin is a violation of the purity of the divine Right and Truth; its reaction is the wrath of the Pure and Puissant. Against those who like the Sons of Darkness serve self-will and ignorance, the king of the divine Law hurls his weapons; the cord descends upon them; they fall into the snare of Varuna. But those who seek after the Truth with sacrifice are delivered from bondage to sin like a calf released from the rope or a victim set free from the slaying-post. The Rishis deprecate frequently the retributive violence of Varuna and pray to him to deliver them from sin and its wages, death. “Repel the Destruction away from us,” they cry, “loose from us even the sin that we have done;” or, always with the same sense of a chain and a bondage, “Cleave away sin from me like a cord.”
The crude conception of sin as a result of natural wickedness found no place in the thought of these deep thinkers and subtle psychologists. What they perceived was a great insistent force of Ignorance; either a non-perception of right and truth in the mind or a non-seizing of it in the will, or an inability of the life-instincts and desires to follow after it, or the sheer inefficiency of the physical being to rise to the greatness of the divine law. Vasishtha cries to mighty Varuna in a passionate litany, “It is from poverty of the will that we have gone contrary to thee, O pure and puissant One; be gracious to us, have grace. Thirst found thy adorer though he stood in the middle of the waters; be gracious, O puissant Lord, have grace. Whatever this be, O Varuna, that we human beings act, a treason against the Divine Birth, wheresoever by the Ignorance we have put away thy laws, smite us not for that sin, O God” (VII.89.3-5).
Ignorance, this matrix of sin, has in its substantial effect the appearance of a triple cord of limited mind, inefficient life, obscure physical animality, the three ropes with which the Rishi Shunahshepa in the parable was bound as a victim to the sacrificial post. The whole result is a struggling or inert poverty of being; it is the meagreness of a mortal undelight and the insufficiency of a being that collapses at every moment towards death. When Varuna the Mighty comes and sunders this threefold restraint, we are freed towards riches and immortality. Uplifted, the real man arises to his true kingship in the undivided being. The upper cord flies upward releasing the wings of the Soul into superconscient heights; the middle cord parts both ways and all ways, the constrained life breaking out into a happy breadth of existence; the lower cord collapses downward taking with it the alloy of our physical being to disappear and be dissolved in the stuff of the Inconscient. This liberation is the purport of the parable of Shunahshepa and his two great hymns to Varuna.
As ignorance or falsehood in the being – the Veda prefers usually the less abstract phrase – is the cause of wrong and suffering, so Knowledge or Truth is the agent which purifies and liberates. It is because of the eye with which he sees,– the luminous symbolic Sun,– that Varuna is the purifier. And unless he governs the will and teaches the judgment while the divine Thought is being learned, we cannot ascend on to the ship of the gods to be borne by it over the life-ocean beyond all this stumbling and evil. Dwelling in us as the thinker with knowledge Varuna cleaves away the sin that we have committed; he abolishes by his royal power our debts of the Ignorance. Or, using a different image, the Veda tells us that this King has in his service a thousand physicians; it is by their healing of our mental and moral infirmities that we get a secure foundation in Varuna’s wide and deep right-mindedness.13
The Kingship of great Varuna is an unbounded empire over all being. He is a mighty world-ruler, an emperor, samrāṭ. His epithets and descriptions are those which a mind at once religious and philosophic could apply with little or no change to the supreme and universal Godhead. He is the vastness and the multiplicity; among his usual epithets are vast Varuna, abundant Varuna, Varuna of whom wideness is the habitation, Varuna of many births.14 But his puissant being is not only a universal wideness; it is a universal force and might. The Veda says of him in words that both have
an outward and an inward significance: “Thy force and might and passion neither these Birds in their travelling can attain, nor these Waters ranging sleeplessly, nor they who hedge in the hugeness of the wind” (1.24.6). It is a force of universal existence which is active around and in all that lives. Behind this vast universality of force and being there watches and acts a vast universality of knowledge. The epithet of kinghood is constantly coupled with the epithet of seerhood, not otiosely but in the strong, pregnant antique style. Varuna has a manifold energy,– the hero’s, and wide expression,– the thinker’s; he comes to us as a godhead of the glory of force and in the same movement we find in him a soul of wide vision.
The full significance of this constant coupling of epithets appears in the double character of his sovereignty; he is svarāṭ and samrāṭ, self-ruler and emperor. They are the two faces of Aryan kingship. In man they are a royalty of thought and action and the plenitude of wisdom and will; the King-Sage, the Hero-Thinker. In the Godhead, in Varuna “almighty, omniscient, thousand-visioned, whose form is the Truth”, they lift us up to supreme and universal principles; we see revealed a divine and eternal majesty, the plenitude of consciousness and the plenitude of Force, Wisdom omnipotent, Power omniscient, Law justified, Truth fulfilled.
Varuna, the Vedic symbol of this grandiose conception, is described finely as a vast thinker and guardian of the Truth. In him, it is said, all wisdoms are lodged and gathered up into their nodus; he is the divine Seer who nurtures the seer-knowings of man as if heaven were increasing its form. We find here the key to the symbol of the luminous cows. For it is said of him that, upholder of the worlds, he knows the hidden names of these shining ones and the thoughts of the seers go beyond like cows to the pastures desiring the wide-visioned. It is said of him too that he guards for the Maruts, greatened in knowledge, the thoughts of men like the cows of a herd.
That is the side of thought; there are parallel descriptions for the side of action. Great Varuna is the continent and nodus of the world’s uplifted puissances no less than of its arising thoughts. The unconquered workings that fall not from the Truth are established in him as upon a mountain. Because he thus knows the things that are transcendent, he is able to cast his majestic eye of sovereignty upon our existence and see there “the things that are done and those that remain to be done” (1.25.11). The things that remain to be done – and also to be known. The wisdom of Varuna shapes in us the divine word which, inspired, intuitive, opens the doors to new knowledge. “We desire him,” cries the Rishi, “as the finder of the Path because he unveils the thought by the heart; let new truth be born.” For this King is no whirler of a brute and stupid wheel; his are not the unfruitful cycles of a meaningless Law. There is a Path; there is a constant progress; there is a goal.
Varuna is the leader on this path. “Perfect in will,” cries Shunahshepa, “let the Son of Infinity make us by the good path and carry our life forward. Varuna puts on his golden robe of light and his scouts are all around” (1.25.12,13). These detect the ambushed foes of the Light, the piercers of our hearts – who would prevent, it is to be supposed, the unveiling of the Truth-thought by the heart. For this journey which we saw as a march of the waters, we see also as a journey of the sun with the all-wise and all-powerful King for its Guide. In the vast, where there is no foundation, Varuna has built a high pyramid of the fuel of sacrifice for the fire that must be the blazing material of a divine Sun. “Its rays are directed downward, their foundation is above; let their perceptions of knowledge be established in us within. King Varuna has made a wide path for the Sun to follow; where there is no footing he has made places for him to set his feet. He shall make manifest too those who pierce the heart” (1.24.7,8). His purity is a great devourer of the hurters of the soul.
The Path is a constant making and building of new truth, new powers, higher realisations, new worlds. All heights to which we can climb from the basis of our physical existence are described in symbolic figure as mountain summits upon the earth and Varuna of the vision holds them all in himself. World after world is reached as level and ever higher level of a great mountain; the voyager in the forward march of Varuna is said to lay his grasp on all things that are born in all the statuses. But his final goal must be the highest triple world of the Deva. “Three delightful Dawns increase according to the law of his workings. He of the all-seeing wisdom dwells in three white-shining earths; three are the higher worlds of Varuna whence he rules over the harmonies of seven and seven. He is the builder of the original seat, ‘That Truth’ of Varuna; and he is the guardian and the mover” (VIII.41.9,10).
In sum then, Varuna is the ethereal, oceanic, infinite King of wide being, wide knowledge and wide might, a manifestation of the one God’s active omniscience and omnipotence, a mighty guardian of the Truth, punisher and healer, Lord of the noose and Releaser from the cords, who leads thought and action towards the vast light and power of a remote and high-uplifted Truth. Varuna is the King of all kingdoms and of all divine and mortal beings; earth and heaven and every world are only his provinces.
Mitra
If the purity, infinity, strong royalty of Varuna are the grand framework and majestic substance of the divine being, Mitra is its beauty and perfection. To be infinite, pure, a king over oneself and a master-soul must be the nature of the divine man because so he shares in the nature of God. But the Vedic ideal is not satisfied simply with a large, unfulfilled plan of the divine image. There must be noble and rich contents in this vast continent; the many-roomed tenement of our being contained in Varuna has to be ordered by Mitra in the right harmony of its utility and its equipment.
For the godhead is a plenitude as well as an infinity; Varuna is an ocean no less than an ethereal heaven. Pure and subtle as the ether, his strong substance is yet no serene void or easy vague of inactive peace, but rather we have seen in it a surging march of thought and action; he has been described to us as a nodus in which all wisdom is upgathered and a hill upon which the original, unfallen workings of the gods are supported. King Varuna is one who sleeps not, but is awake and mighty forever, eternally an effective force and worker for the Truth and the Right. Still he acts as the guardian of the Truth rather than constitutes it, or constitutes rather through the action of other godheads who avail themselves of his wideness and surging force. He keeps, drives even the shining herds, but does not assemble them in the pastures, an upholder of our powers and remover of obstacles and enemies much more than a builder of our parts.
Who then gathers knowledge into this nodus or links divine action in this sustainer of works? Mitra is the harmoniser, Mitra the builder, Mitra the constituent Light, Mitra the god who effects the right unity of which Varuna is the substance and the infinitely self-enlarging periphery. These two Kings are complementary to each other in their nature and their divine works. In them we find and by them we gain harmony in largeness: we see in the Godhead and increase in ourselves purity without defect basing love faultless in wisdom. Therefore these two are a great duo of the self-fulfilling godhead and the Vedic word calls them together to a vaster and vaster sacrifice to which they arrive as the inseparable builders of an increasing Truth. Madhuchchhandas gives us the keynote of their united divinity. “Mitra I call, the pure in judgment, and Varuna, devourer of the foe. By Truth, Mitra and Varuna, Truth-increasers who get to the touch of Truth, you attain to a vast working of the will. Seers, dwellers in the wideness, born with many births they uphold the judgment at its works” (1.2.7-9).
The name Mitra comes from a root which meant originally to contain with compression and so to embrace and has given us the ordinary Sanskrit word for friend, mitra, as well as the archaic Vedic word for bliss, mayas. Upon the current sense of the word mitra, the Friend, the Vedic poets continually rely for their covert key to the psychological function of this apparent sungod. When the other deities and especially the brilliant Agni are spoken of as helpful friends to the human sacrificer, they are said to be Mitra, or to be like Mitra, or to become Mitra,– as we should now say, the divine Will-force, or whatever other power and personality of the godhead, reveals itself eventually as the divine Love. Therefore we must suppose that to these symbolists Mitra was essentially the Lord of Love, a divine friend, a kindly helper of men and immortals. The Veda speaks of him as the most beloved of the gods.
The Vedic seers looked at Love from above, from its source and root and saw it and received it in their humanity as an outflowing of the divine Delight. The Taittiriya Upanishad expounding this spiritual and cosmic bliss of the godhead, Vedantic Ananda, Vedic Mayas, says of it, “Love is its head.” But the word it chooses for Love, priyam, means properly the delightfulness of the objects of the soul’s inner pleasure and satisfaction. The Vedic singers used the same psychology. They couple mayas and prayas,– mayas, the principle of inner felicity independent of all objects, prayas, its outflowing as the delight and pleasure of the soul in objects and beings. The Vedic happiness is this divine felicity which brings with it the boon of a pure possession and sinless pleasure in all things founded upon the unfailing touch of the Truth and Right in the freedom of a large universality.
Mitra is the most beloved of the gods because he brings within our reach this divine enjoyment and leads us to this perfect happiness. Varuna makes directly for strength; we discover a force and a will vast in purity; Aryaman the Aspirer is secured in the amplitude of his might by Varuna’s infinity; he does his large works and effects his great movement by the power of Varuna’s universality. Mitra makes directly for bliss,– Bhaga the Enjoyer is established in a blameless possession and divine enjoyment by the all-reconciling harmony of Mitra, by his purifying light of right discernment, his firmly-basing law. Therefore it is said of Mitra that all perfected souls adhere or are firmly fixed “to the bliss of this Beloved in whom there is no hurt”, for in him there is no sin or wound or falling. All mortal delight has its mortal danger; but the immortal light and law secures the soul of man in a fearless joy. That mortal, says Vishwamitra (III. 59.2), who learns by Mitra’s law, the law of this Son of Infinity, is possessed of prayas, the soul’s satisfaction in its objects; such a soul cannot be slain, nor overcome, nor can any evil take possession of it from near or from afar. For Mitra fashions in gods and men impulsions whose action spontaneously fulfils all the soul’s seekings.
That happy freedom of all-possession comes to us out of this godhead’s universality and his reconciling luminous embrace of things: Mitra’s is the principle of harmony by which the manifold workings of the Truth agree together in a perfectly wedded union. The root of the name means both to embrace and to contain and hold and, again, to build or form in the sense of linking together the parts or materials of a whole. Adorable Mitra is born in us as a blissful ordainer of things and a king full of might. Mitra holds up heaven and earth and looks sleeplessly upon the worlds and the peoples, and his vigilant and perfect ordinances create in us a happy
rightness of mind and feeling,– sumati, a state of grace, we might almost say,– which becomes for us an unhurt abiding-place. “Free from all undelightfulness,” says the Vedic verse, “rejoicing with rapture in the goddess of the Word, bowing the knee in the wideness of earth, may we attain to our abiding-place in the law of working of Mitra, son of Infinity, and dwell in his grace” (III.59.3). It is when Agni becomes Mitra, when the divine Will realises the divine Love that, in the Vedic image, the Lord and his Spouse agree in their mansion.
The well-accorded happiness of the Truth is Mitra’s law of working; for it is upon Truth and divine Knowledge that this harmony and perfect temperament are founded; they are formed, secured and guarded by the Maya of Mitra and Varuna. That well-known word comes from the same root as Mitra. Maya is the comprehending, measuring, forming Knowledge which whether divine or undivine, secure in the undivided being of Aditi or labouring in the divided being of Diti, builds up the whole scene, environment, confines and defines the whole condition, law and working of our existence. Maya is the active, originative, determinative view which creates for each being according to his own consciousness his own world. But Mitra is a Lord of the Light, a Son of Infinity and a Guardian of the Truth and his Maya part of an infinite, supreme and faultless creative wisdom. He builds, he joins together in an illuminated harmony all the numerous planes, all the successive steps, all the graded seats of our being. Whatsoever Aryaman aspires to on his path, has to be effected by the ‘holdings’ or laws of Mitra or by his foundations, statuses, placings, mitrasya dharmabhiḥ, mitrasya dhāmabhiḥ. For dharma, the law is that which holds things together and to which we hold; dhāma, the status is the placing of the law in a founded harmony which creates for us our plane of living and the character of our consciousness, action and thought.
Mitra, like the other sons of Aditi, is a master of Knowledge. He possesses a light which is full of a varied inspiration, or, to keep closer to the Vedic term, a richly diversified hearing of the knowledge. In the wideness of existence which he enjoys in common with Varuna, he acquires possession of heaven by the
greatness of the being of the Truth and enlarges his conquering mastery over the earth by these inspirations or hearings of its Knowledge. All the five Aryan peoples labour therefore and travel for this bright and beautiful Mitra who comes into them with his luminous force and bears in his wideness all the Gods. He is the great and blissful one who sets and leads creatures born into the world upon their path. The distinction is drawn in one verse that Varuna is the masterful traveller to the soul’s supreme seat, Mitra makes men advance in that march. “Even now,” says the Rishi, “may I attain the movement to the goal and journey on Mitra’s path.”
Since Mitra cannot fulfil his harmony except in the wideness and purity of Varuna, he is constantly invoked in company with that great godhead. Theirs are the supreme statuses or planes of the soul; it is the bliss of Mitra and Varuna that has to increase in us. By their law that vast plane of our consciousness shines out upon us and heaven and earth are the two paths of their journey. For Aditi of the Truth, their mother, has borne them omniscient and great for almightiness; and it is luminous Aditi, the undivided being, whom they, wakeful from day to day, cleave to, she who holds for us our habitations in that world of light and they attain to its luminous forcefulness. They are the two Sons perfect in their birth from of old who support the law of our action; children are they of a vast luminous power, offspring of the divine discerning thought and perfect in will. They are the guardians of Truth, possessed of its law in the supreme ether. Swar is their golden home and birth-place.
Mitra and Varuna have an unwounded vision and are better knowers of the Path than our sight; for in the Knowledge they are seers of Swar. They take by the passion of their discerning thought the concealing falsehood away from the Truth to which the path has to lead. They proclaim the vast Truth of which they are possessed. It is because they possess it and with it the perfection of the will which is its effect, that they are seated in us for empire and uphold our action as the masters of might. By Truth they come to the Truth, nourishing in their lordship of things our thoughts, and in their purified judgment they open the eye of consciousness to all wisdom by the perception in men. Thus all-seeing and all-knowing they by the law, by the Maya of the mighty Lord, guard our actions, even as they govern the whole world in the power of the Truth. That Maya is established in the heavens, it ranges there as a Sun of light; it is their rich and wonderful weapon. They are far-hearers, masters of true being, true themselves and increasers of truth in each human creature. They nourish the shining herds and loose forth the abundance of heaven; they make heaven to rain down by the Maya of the Mighty Lord. And that celestial rain is the wealth of the spiritual felicity which the seers desire; it is the immortality.17
Aryaman
Aryaman, third of the four great solar godheads, is the least prominent of them all in the invocations of the seers. No separate hymn is addressed to him and, if his name occurs not unfrequently, it is in scattered verses; there is no strong body of Riks from which we can construct firmly our idea of his functions or recompose his physiognomy. Most often he is simply invoked by his bare name along with Mitra and Varuna or in the larger group of the sons of Aditi, almost always in adjunction to other kindred deities. Still there are half a dozen or more half-Riks from which his one chief and characteristic action emerges accompanied by the usual epithets of the Lords of the Truth, epithets expressive of Knowledge, Joy, Infinity and Power.
In the later tradition the name of Aryaman is placed at the head of the Fathers to whom as their appropriate offering is given the symbolic food, the píṇḍa of the Puranic funeral and memorial rites. In the Puranic traditions the Fathers are of two classes, divine and human, the latter being the ancestors, the Manes. But it is in connection with the Fathers as the souls who have attained to heaven, to immortality that we must think of Aryaman. Krishna in the Gita, enumerating the chief powers or manifestations of the eternal Godhead in things and beings, speaks of himself as Ushanas among the seers, Bhrigu among the Rishis, Vyasa among the sages, Vishnu among the children of Aditi, Aryaman among the Fathers. Now in the Veda the Fathers are the ancient illumined ones who discovered the Knowledge, created and followed the Path, reached the Truth, conquered Immortality; and in the few Riks in which Aryaman’s separate personality emerges, it is as the God of the Path that he is hymned.
His name Aryaman, kin etymologically to the words arya, ārya, ari, by which are distinguished the men or peoples who follow the Vedic culture and the Gods who assist them in their battles and their aspirations, is similarly indicative. The Aryan is the traveller on the Path, the aspirant to immortality by divine sacrifice, one of the shining children of Light, a worshipper of the Masters of the Truth, a fighter in the battle against the powers of darkness who obstruct the human journey. Aryaman is the godhead in whose divine power this Aryahood is rooted; he is this Force of sacrifice, aspiration, battle, journey towards perfection and light and celestial bliss by which the path is created, travelled, pursued beyond all resistance and obscuration to its luminous and happy goal.
In consequence, the action of Aryaman takes up the attributes of Mitra and Varuna as leaders of the Path. This Force fulfils the happy impulsions of that Light and Harmony and the movement of infinite knowledge and power of that pure Vastness. Like Mitra and Varuna he makes men travel on the path; he is full of the perfect happiness of Mitra; he is complete in the will and the works of sacrifice; he and Varuna distinguish the path for mortals. He is like Varuna a godhead manifold in his births; like him he oppresses the wrath of the hurter of men. It is by the great path of Aryaman that we shall cross beyond the souls of a false or evil thought who obstruct our path. Aditi, mother of the Kings, and Aryaman carry us by paths of a happy travelling beyond all inimical powers. The man who seeks the straightness of Mitra’s and Varuna’s workings and by the force of the word and the affirmation embraces their law with all his being, is guarded in his progress by Aryaman.
But the Rik most distinctive of the function of Aryaman is that which describes him as “Aryaman of the unbroken path, of the many chariots, who dwells as the sevenfold offerer of sacrifice in births of diverse forms” (X.64.5). He is the deity of the human journey who carries it forward in its irresistible progress which the attacks of the enemy cannot overcome or successfully interrupt so long as this divine Force is our leader. The journey is effected through a manifold movement of our evolution, the many chariots of Aryaman. It is the journey of the human sacrifice which has a sevenfold energy of its action because there is a sevenfold principle in our being which has to be fulfilled in its integral perfection; Aryaman is the master of the sacrificial action who offers this sevenfold working to the godheads of the Divine Birth. Aryaman within us develops our various forms of birth in the ascending planes of our existence by which the Fathers climbed, travellers on his path, and by which it must be the aspiration of the Aryan soul to climb to the highest summit of Immortality.
Thus Aryaman sums up in himself the whole aspiration and movement of man in a continual self-enlargement and self-transcendence to his divine perfection. By his continuous movement on the unbroken path Mitra and Varuna and the sons of Aditi fulfil themselves in the human birth.
Bhaga
The goal of the path is the divine beatitude, the illimitable joy of the Truth, of the infinity of our being. Bhaga is the godhead who brings this joy and supreme felicity into the human consciousness; he is the divine enjoyer in man. All being has this divine enjoyment of existence for its aim and end, whether it seeks for it with knowledge or with ignorance, with the divine strength or the weakness of our yet undeveloped powers. “On Bhaga the strong calls for his increasing, on Bhaga he who has not the strength; then he moves towards the Delight” (VII. 38.6). “Let us call in the Dawn on Bhaga strong and victorious, the son of Aditi who is the wide-upholder, on whom the afflicted and the fighter and the king meditate and they say to the Enjoyer,
“Give us the
enjoyment” (VII.41.2). “Let it be the divine Enjoyer who possesses the enjoyment and by him let us be its possessors; to thee every man calls, O Bhaga; do thou become, O Enjoyer, the leader of our journey” (VII.41.5). An increasing and victorious felicity of the soul rejoicing in the growth of its divine possessions which gives us strength to journey on and overcome till we reach the goal of our perfection in an infinite beatitude, this is the sign of the birth of Bhaga in man and this his divine function.
All enjoyment comes indeed from Bhaga Savitri, the mortal as well as the divine; “creating a wide and vast force he brings forth for men their mortal enjoyment”. But the Vedic ideal is the inclusion of all life and all joy, divine and human, the wideness and plenty of earth and the vastness and abundance of heaven, the treasures of the mental, vital, physical existence uplifted, purified, perfected in the form of the infinite and divine Truth. It is this all-including felicity which is the gift of Bhaga. The Enjoyer is to be called on by men because he has many riches and ordains perfectly all delights,– the thrice-seven delights upheld by him in the being of his mother Aditi. It is by creating in us “the wide and vast force”, it is when the Divine as Bhaga, Pushan, Aditi, the infinite, the undivided puts on the radiances of the infinite consciousness like a robe and distributes without division all desirable boons that divine felicity comes to us in its fullness. Then he gives to the human being full enjoyment of that greatest delight. Therefore Vasishtha cries to him (VII.41.3), “O Bhaga, our leader, Bhaga who hast the wealth of the Truth, giving unto us, raise up and increase, O Bhaga, this thought in us,” – the Truth-thought by which the felicity is attained.
Bhaga is Savitri the Creator, he who brings forth from the Unmanifest Divine the truth of a divine universe, dispelling from us the evil dream of this lower consciousness in which we falter amidst a confused tangle of truth and falsehood, strength and weakness, joy and suffering. An infinite being delivered out of imprisoning limits, an infinite knowledge and strength receiving in thought and working out in will a divine Truth, an infinite beatitude possessing and enjoying all without division, fault or sin, this is the creation of Bhaga Savitri, this that greatest Delight. “This creation of the divine Creator goddess Aditi speaketh forth to us, this the all-kings Varuna and Mitra and Aryaman with one mind and heart.” The four Kings find themselves fulfilled with their infinite Mother by the delightful perfection in man of Bhaga the Enjoyer, the youngest and greatest of them all. Thus is the divine creation of the fourfold Savitri founded on Varuna, combined and guided by Mitra, achieved by Aryaman, enjoyed in Bhaga: Aditi the infinite Mother realises herself in the human being by the birth and works of her glorious children.