The Adityas

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.

The Rigveda does not know how many Adityas there are. One hymn names six. Another says that Aditi has seven sons, and a further passage has her bring seven forward and cast the eighth away, so that Martanda, the dead egg, is then brought back as the ancestor of mortals or identified with the sun. The variation is not a textual problem to be corrected. It belongs to a body of poetry that was not attempting a fixed pantheon in the first place.

The number twelve is later. It appears in the Brahmanas and is standard by the time of the epics and the Puranas, where the twelve Adityas are matched to the twelve months so that a different Aditya presides over each, and the class becomes explicitly solar. Later lists include Vishnu among them, usually last and often as Vamana, which is how a god who is marginal in the Rigveda acquires a Vedic pedigree, and they include Surya, who in the Rigveda is a separate deity and not a member of the class at all.

Two things happened at once in that development. A group defined by sovereignty and law became a group defined by the sun and the calendar, and a fluid count became a fixed one. The atlas holds the class as a class for exactly that reason: the membership is a moving thing across the literature, and pinning it to any single list would misrepresent the sources it is drawn from.