Mitra

Sanskrit mitra means an alliance, a compact, and by extension the person you have one with. It is an ordinary noun in constant use, and the god carries the same name without modification. That is unusual even inside the Vedic pantheon, where names are often transparent but rarely this transparent, and it settles what kind of power he is. Mitra is not a god who happens to be interested in agreements. He is the agreement, addressed.

The single hymn of the Rigveda given to Mitra alone is short, and almost everything else said about him is said in the dual, Mitra-Varuna, the two named as one unit. The pairing is not decoration. Between them they hold rta, the true ordering of things, and the division of labour drawn by later readers is that Varuna is the terrible side, the one whose cords hold a guilty man, and Mitra the side that is present in the transaction itself, the one who gathers people and makes them keep to what they said. A Vedic verse credits him with settling people in their places and making them speak with one voice.

He is a god of sovereignty rather than nature, and that puts him in the group that gives the Adityas their character. They are called kings, they are said to be free of deceit, and they are asked for release from guilt. Nothing in the hymns to Indra sounds like that. It is why the Adityas keep a distinctly moral tone across a body of poetry that is otherwise about rain, cattle, victory and soma.

Mitra has a cousin, and the relationship is one of the securest results of comparative Indo-Iranian philology. Avestan Mithra is the same name from the same root with the same core meaning, the covenant. The two traditions then went different ways with him: in India Mitra stays paired with Varuna and gradually recedes, so that by the classical period he has almost no independent cult, while in Iran Mithra grows enormously, acquires a great hymn of his own in the Avesta and a place in the calendar, and is later the starting point, at some distance and through disputed channels, for the Roman Mithras of the bull-slaying reliefs. The atlas carries the Iranian and Roman figures as separate entries, which is the right treatment: shared descent is not identity, and the Roman cult in particular is a Roman creation whose debt to Iran is still argued over.

Inside India the pairing itself became a theoretical object. Georges Dumezil built a large part of his comparative account of Indo-European sovereignty on Mitra and Varuna as two complementary faces of rule, the contractual and the magical, the priestly and the terrible. The reading is influential and it is contested in roughly equal measure, and it is worth knowing that it is a modern framework applied to the hymns rather than a scheme the hymns state.

What the Rigveda itself asserts is narrower and firmer. The two are invoked together, they uphold rta, they see what is done, and the offender is released by their favour and not otherwise.