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The Sixth Name in the Rigvedic List

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The Sixth Name in the Rigvedic List

One Rigvedic hymn opens by naming the Adityas in a run: Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuna, Daksha, Amsha. It is the closest thing the collection has to a membership list, and it is the reason the Adityas are conventionally said to be six in the Rigveda even though other passages give seven or eight. Amsha is the last name in it and by a wide margin the least developed.

His name is amsa, a share or a part, essentially a synonym of bhaga. Two gods of the allotted portion inside one small group looks like duplication to a modern reader, and it may simply be that the poets liked the pairing and used both words because both were available. It may also preserve a distinction the tradition later lost. Nothing in the surviving hymns settles it, because outside the group invocations Amsha barely appears at all. He has no myth, no attribute, no cult and no epithet of his own.

That is not a defect in the record. The Adityas are a class of sovereignty gods whose individual profiles were always uneven, and a name that is little more than a name is evidence about how the class worked: what mattered was the group, its collective character as kings, guardians of order and releasers from guilt, and the number of members was never the point. The atlas holds Amsha for the same reason the tradition did, as a name in the list, and does not manufacture a personality for him.

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