The Adityas are the sons of Aditi, whose name means unbound or boundless, and their concern is not weather or war but order. Varuna, the greatest of them in the Rigveda, is the guardian of rta, the truth or right ordering of things, and the god who sees what is done in secret; his bonds hold the guilty, and some of the most personal hymns in the collection are attempts to have them loosened. Mitra is the contract itself, the word that serves as a name for alliance and friendship in both Indian and Iranian tradition. Aryaman governs the arrangements that hold a society together, hospitality, marriage and the obligations of kin. Bhaga is the apportioner, the share received. Daksha is skill or capacity, and Amsha is another word for a portion.
Read together they are a department of state rather than a family: sovereignty, sworn agreement, custom, allotment. They are called kings, they are said to be without deceit, and they are asked for freedom from guilt and from the bonds that guilt incurs, which gives their hymns a moral register that the hymns to Indra do not have. Georges Dumezil built much of his comparative account of Indo-European sovereignty on the pairing of Varuna and Mitra, and that reading remains influential and contested in about equal measure.