The Twelve Ādityasआदित्य

The Ādityas (आदित्य) are the sons of Aditi, the boundless — the sovereign gods of the Vedic pantheon, guardians of ṛta, the cosmic and moral order. In the Ṛgveda they are a small and shifting group, six, seven or eight in number, with Varuna and Mitra at their head: bright, sinless kings who see all deeds, punish falsehood and loosen the bonds of sin. They are gods of oversight rather than of storm or fire — the celestial magistracy of the early religion.

From eight to twelve

As the tradition developed, the group expanded and regularised. The Brāhmaṇas already speak of twelve Ādityas, and the classical texts fix the canonical list: Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, Bhaga, Dhātṛ, Aṃśa, Vivasvān, Savitṛ, Tvaṣṭṛ, Pūṣan, Indra and Viṣṇu. The roster is a composite — old sovereign gods, solar figures, the artisan Tvashtar, the king of the gods, and Vishnu, in the Veda a minor strider, here the youngest of the twelve and destined to outgrow them all. As Upendra, the younger Indra, Vishnu's place among the Ādityas gave the later Vaishnava tradition a Vedic pedigree for his supremacy, and it is as the Āditya-born dwarf Vamana that he humbles the demon king Bali.

The twelve suns of the year

In the Purāṇic scheme the twelve became calendrical: one Āditya presides over each month, and the twelve together are the sun in its yearly round — Āditya having become, in ordinary usage, simply a name of the sun. Texts describe them circling in rotation, each accompanied by its own sages, gandharvas and serpents. At the dissolution of the age, tradition says, all twelve will blaze at once and burn the worlds. The old college of moral sovereigns thus ended as the solar year personified — though the earlier sense survives wherever the sun is worshipped as witness of all deeds, the unblinking eye of the old Ādityas.