Mitraमित्र

Mitra (मित्र) presides over the kept word. His name means both friend and compact, and in the Vedic scheme he is the god of agreements, alliances and the honest bond between persons, the power that makes society possible before any law enforces it. A hymn says of him that he sustains earth and heaven and that he brings men together; the tradition assigns him the light of day, the open realm in which dealings are seen and honoured, as his sphere.

Mitra and Varuṇa

Mitra is rarely alone. The Ṛgveda addresses him constantly in the dual compound Mitrāvaruṇā, pairing him with Varuṇa, the sovereign of cosmic order; only one complete hymn of the collection invokes Mitra by himself. The pairing is a piece of moral analysis conducted in theology: Varuṇa stands for order enforced, binding transgressors with his nooses, while Mitra stands for order freely entered, the contract and the friendship. Both are Ādityas, sons of Aditi, and together they oversee ṛta, the truth of things, from the two sides of consent and command.

The Iranian cousin

Mitra is an Indo-Iranian inheritance. His Avestan counterpart Mithra, likewise a god of covenant and light, rose to far greater prominence in Iran, and, transformed beyond recognition, gave his name to the Mithraic mysteries of the Roman world. In India the trajectory ran the other way: Mitra faded as a cult figure after the Vedic period, absorbed into the roster of the twelve Ādityas as a solar name. His durable monument is linguistic. In Sanskrit and its daughter languages, mitra simply means friend, so that the god's essence passed whole into the common speech, invoked every time friendship is named.