The Vasus

Vasu is an ordinary adjective before it is a divine name. It means good, or bright, or excellent, and as a noun it means goods, wealth, the things worth having. In the Rigveda the Vasus are a group rather than a set of individuals, generally named under Indra, and it is often impossible to tell whether a given verse means a class of gods or is simply calling some other gods good ones. They are one of the standard triads of the older material, invoked with the Adityas and the Rudras, and in that formula they occupy the position of the beneficent.

The number eight and the membership are later, and the membership never quite steadied. The lists that survive give something like earth, water, fire, wind, the fixed pole star, the moon, light and dawn, wearing names that are transparent to those meanings, and they differ in which of them are included and in what order. That variation is not damage. It is what happens when a tradition inherits a class with a fixed size and an unfixed roll, and successive compilers fill the eight slots from a template of the natural world, each choosing a slightly different eight.

What the Vasus are gods of, on any of the lists, is the furniture of the habitable world: the elements and the abodes, the things that make a place somewhere one can live. That reading fits the name. A group called the good ones, filled with earth and water and fire and the light, is a way of saying that the world is provisioned, which is a different religious claim from the ones the Adityas and the Rudras carry, and the triad works because the three are doing three different jobs.

The Mahabharata gives the eight the only narrative they have, and it uses them to solve a problem of its own. The Vasus offend a sage by taking his cow, and they are cursed to be born as human beings. They arrange with the river goddess Ganga that she will bear them and release them from the human condition immediately, and seven of them are duly born and put into the water at once. The eighth, whose share of the offence was the largest, has to stay. He grows up as a man, and he is Bhishma, the grandfather of the epic, who will renounce a kingdom and a marriage and hold a promise for a lifetime and die on a bed of arrows.

The story is doing work in both directions. It gives a class of Vedic gods a career they never had in the hymns, and it gives the epic's most morally weighted minor character a reason to be the way he is: a divine being serving a sentence, whose extraordinary self denial is a condition rather than an achievement. Readers who find Bhishma unaccountable are usually reading him without this.

It also fixes the Vasus in a way the ritual literature never managed. After the Mahabharata, the eight are the ones from the story, and the disagreements between the older lists become a technicality that only the lists themselves preserve. The jyotisha tradition, giving them the mansion Dhanishta, inherits the epic version, so a system built on the Vedic sky reads the class through a narrative that the Vedic material would not have recognised.