Aryamanअर्यमन्

Aryaman (अर्यमन्) is one of the sovereign Ādityas of the Ṛgveda, regularly named in a triad with Mitra and Varuna. Where Varuna guards the cosmic order and Mitra the compact between persons, Aryaman presides over the customs that bind a society of households together: hospitality, the obligations between kinsmen and allies, the give and take of civility. His name is built on the word ārya in its old sense of a full member of the community, and he personifies what that membership required.

God of the marriage bond

Aryaman's most durable association is with marriage — the supreme act by which two households are joined. He is invoked in the Ṛgveda's wedding hymn, and the marriage liturgy kept his name for centuries; brides and grooms called on Aryaman as witness and guarantor of the new bond. He is also connected with paths and hospitable roads, and later tradition gave the association a celestial form: the Milky Way was called the path of Aryaman, the great road across the night sky.

Later tradition

In classical Hinduism Aryaman survives chiefly in two places: in the standard list of the twelve Ādityas, and as chief of the pitṛs, the ancestral fathers — the Bhagavad Gita has Krishna declare that among the ancestors he is Aryaman. The god of the social bond thus ended as the lord of the community's oldest members, the honoured dead.