There is in the Vedic pantheon a god whose name is perhaps the most beautiful of all, and certainly one of the most necessary for our era: Aryaman. His name means intimate friend, companion, and it designates at once the deity and the human quality it embodies: that particular form of friendship that extends beyond the circle of those close to one in order to welcome the stranger, that treats the one who comes from afar with the same warmth and the same respect as the one who belongs to the household. Aryaman is one of the great Adityas, the sons of Aditi, the infinite mother, and this lineage already says something about the nature of what he represents: hospitality toward the stranger is an expression of the maternal infinite of Aditi, a way of recognising in the other, whoever they may be, the same common source from which all beings emerge.
In the hymns, Aryaman is always mentioned alongside Mitra and Varuna, the two other great guardians of ṛta. This triad is fundamental in Vedic cosmology. Varuna is the consciousness that sees everything, that knows Truth in its totality. Mitra is friendship, the contract, the word given and kept between those who know each other. And Aryaman is the bond that extends beyond mutual acquaintance, that creates a relationship where there was none, that transforms the stranger into a guest and the guest into a brother. These three gods together cover the entire spectrum of human relationships in their sacred dimension: the right vision of reality, faithfulness toward those one knows, and openness toward those one does not yet know.
Hospitality in Vedic civilisation was not an optional virtue, an extra kindness that well-disposed people could choose to practise. It was a sacred obligation, rooted in the very vision of the world that ṛta defined. To refuse hospitality to a traveller was to violate ṛta, to act against the fundamental Truth of the world, in which all beings share the same source and deserve the same consideration. The Atharva Veda and other texts that followed the Rig Veda would make this an explicit rule: the guest, atithi, literally the one who arrives without a fixed date, the one who arrives at any moment, must be received as a god. This formulation is significant: the stranger who knocks at your door is Aryaman in person. He is a manifestation of the divine that asks you to recognise in him what soma and the sacrifice have taught you to recognise everywhere: Brahman in human form.
This vision of the stranger as a manifestation of the divine is not unique to Vedism. One finds it in Homer’s Odyssey, where Zeus is the protector of hosts and suppliants. One finds it in the Abrahamic tradition, where Abraham receives three strangers who reveal themselves to be angels, and in the New Testament, where the welcoming of the stranger is equated with the welcoming of Christ himself. This is not a coincidence. It is the same fundamental intuition, discovered independently by different traditions that had all understood something essential about the nature of the other: that he is not truly a stranger, that the perception of strangeness is a construction of the ego that cannot see beyond its own familiar sphere, and that to see beyond this construction is to see reality.
In the concrete practice of Vedic civilisation, hospitality took precise and generous forms. The traveller who arrived at a house or in a village was entitled to food, shelter and protection for the night. This obligation was not limited to certain categories of persons: it extended to all, regardless of their origin, their status, their belonging. The public granaries that we mentioned in the article on the civilisation of the 7 Rivers were also, in this spirit, resources for travellers and strangers passing through. Abundance was not kept for those who had produced it. It was shared with those who needed it, including those who came from elsewhere.
It is worth mentioning here the role of Aryaman in Vedic marriage rituals. In the nuptial hymns of the tenth mandala, Aryaman is invoked as the protector of the union, the one who presides over the creation of new bonds between individuals and families who were not yet linked. Marriage is a radical form of hospitality: one welcomes into one’s family someone who came from another family, one creates a bond where there was none, one transforms the stranger into a spouse and the in-laws into family. Aryaman presides over this transformation because he is the specialist in the creation of bonds where none yet exist, in the extension of the circle of friendship and recognition beyond its habitual boundaries.
What all of this says about Vedic civilisation as a whole is consistent with everything we have seen in other articles. A civilisation in which the regular practice of soma dissolved the boundaries of the ego, in which the experience of Brahman revealed the fundamental unity of all beings, in which ṛta defined Truth as something that transcends the categories of self and other: such a civilisation could not treat the stranger as a threat. The stranger is a threat to the ego. He is not a threat to a consciousness that has experienced unity. For such a consciousness, the stranger is simply someone whose familiarity is yet to be discovered.
And now let us look at the world of walls in which we live. The walls between nations are multiplying at a speed that would have seemed unimaginable a few decades ago. Borders are closing, migration is being criminalised, refugees are dying at sea or in deserts, policies of exclusion are winning elections in countries that claim to uphold humanist values. This is not only a political question. It is a spiritual question. It is the manifestation at the scale of nations of what the individual ego always does when it is not worked upon: it builds walls, it defines perimeters of security, it distinguishes between those who are on its side and those who are not, it treats difference as a threat and strangeness as a danger.
Aryaman is the Vedic response to this movement. It is not a political response, not a programme, not an ideology. It is a spiritual reality: the stranger is sacred because he is a manifestation of Brahman. To welcome him is to recognise this manifestation. To turn him away is to deny Brahman in one of its forms. This is not a moral rule imposed from outside. It is the logical and necessary consequence of a vision of the world in which everything is one, in which the boundary between self and other is a construction of the ego and not a fundamental reality, in which ṛta, the Truth, does not recognise the boundaries that human beings build to protect themselves from what they do not understand.
The civilisation of the 7 Rivers had no defensive walls around its cities. Archaeology has confirmed this: unlike Troy, Ur or Babylon, the great cities of the Indus-Sarasvati were not fortified. This was not because they lacked the technical means to build defensive walls. It was because they had no need of them. A civilisation in which the stranger is sacred has no need of walls. It needs Aryaman. And Aryaman was there, invoked in the hymns, honoured in the rituals, present in every act of hospitality as a cosmic force that maintains the bonds between beings and prevents the world from fragmenting into islands of hostile ego.
Le Rig Veda 
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