Varuna

Varuna is one of the great gods of the Rigveda, associated first with the all-encompassing sky and then increasingly with the waters, and above all he is the guardian of rta, the cosmic and moral order, the deep principle by which the seasons turn, the rivers run to the sea, and truth and right conduct hold. In the Vedic hymns Varuna is a majestic and somewhat awesome figure, a sovereign who sees all: he is said to know the flight of birds in the sky, the path of ships on the sea and the secret thoughts of men, and to bind wrongdoers with his nooses while releasing those who confess and atone. This ethical dimension makes him unusual among the early gods, less a power of nature than a divine upholder of the truthful order of things, before whom human beings feel guilt and to whom they appeal for forgiveness.

Varuna's standing declined sharply in the transition from Vedic to classical Hinduism, without the dramatic humbling narratives attached to Indra; he simply recedes into a narrower, still-honoured role as one of the eight guardian deities of the directions, presiding over the west, and as lord of the ocean and its creatures. He appears in later Puranic myth chiefly in supporting roles, among them the great churning of the cosmic ocean, the Samudra Manthan, undertaken jointly by gods and demons to win the nectar of immortality, a myth set in Varuna's own watery domain even though he is not the story's central actor, illustrating how thoroughly the sovereign moral authority he once held in the Rigveda had, by the time of the Puranas, given way to Vishnu, Shiva and the great Goddess as the primary focus of devotion.

Over the long history of Indian religion Varuna's standing changed markedly. In the oldest layer he is among the highest gods, often paired with Mitra as the twin sovereigns who watch over oaths and order; but as the tradition developed, his cosmic sovereignty faded, and he settled into the more specialised role of the god of the waters, of the ocean, the rivers and the rain.

In classical Hinduism he is chiefly the lokapala or guardian of the western direction, lord of the seas, riding the sea-monster makara and carrying his noose, a dignified but no longer supreme deity. This decline of a once-great sky-god into a departmental god of water is one of the clearest examples in the record of how the relative importance of deities shifts over time.

Scholars have also long compared Varuna, as guardian of a cosmic-moral order and binder of the guilty, with sovereign and order-keeping gods in the wider Indo-European world, making him a figure of particular interest for the comparative study of religion. In his oldest form Varuna preserves something that later Hinduism developed in other terms: the sense of a moral order woven into the structure of the cosmos itself.