I should admit something from the outset: when I read “cosmic order,” I do not really understand what it means. It is one of those academic translations that give the impression of explaining everything while explaining nothing. So I found my own way toward the ṛta — and that is where Varuṇa became, for me, one of the most interesting gods in the Rig Veda.
Varuṇa: what the name says
In Sanskrit, varuṇa means “that which surrounds.” He is the Ocean. He is the Sky. He is the inseparable companion of Mitra — “the friend,” the lord of love and friendship. Together, Mitra and Varuṇa form a pair the Rig Veda summons ceaselessly: one does not go without the other. It is no coincidence that these two deities are common to Vedic India and Zoroastrian Iran — they belong to a spiritual bedrock older than either of the traditions that inherited them.
What the hymns say specifically about Varuṇa is that he is “the conscious force of Truth.” Not a judge. Not a lawgiver. A force. Conscious. Of Truth.
That formulation deserves a pause.
The ṛta: not morality, not law — Reality
The ṛta is usually translated as “cosmic order,” “universal order,” sometimes “divine law.” These translations are not wrong — they are insufficient. They reduce something ontological to something normative. As if the ṛta were a cosmic code of conduct, a kind of Constitution of the Universe.
That is not how I read it.
Here is what I take from my own experiences — and from reading the hymns through them: our senses give us access to only a portion of reality. Our eyes cannot see infrared, ultraviolet, atoms. Our ears cannot hear infrasound or ultrasound. What we call “the world” is in fact a very thin slice of the real — the slice our biological instruments can register. The rest — the greater part — escapes us entirely.
The Rig Veda has a word for this partial perception we mistake for totality: māyā. Not “illusion” in the sense of non-existent — māyā is real enough at its own level — but limited vision, incomplete perception. Reality itself, in its fullness, is Brahman. And it is precisely that Reality which the ṛta points toward.
Mitra and Varuṇa “increase Truth through Truth” — that is how the hymns describe them. They are not enforcing a rule. They carry, amplify, manifest something that exists independently of them.
Sat-cit-ānanda: when a definition becomes an experience
There is a formula in the Rig Veda that defines Brahman — the ultimate Reality, that which the ṛta points toward without ever containing it entirely: sat-cit-ānanda. Being. Consciousness. Bliss.
This formula cannot be explained with ordinary words. Not because it is obscure — it is, on the contrary, absolutely precise — but because it describes an experience that words can only circle around. Those who drank soma — and the hymns say it without ambiguity: “We have drunk the soma. We have become immortal. We have entered into the Light, we have found the gods there” — those people understood sat-cit-ānanda not as a definition but as a lived state.
The ṛta is the structure of that state. It is what is always there, whether we perceive it or not. Varuṇa is its guardian — not in the sense of a policeman, but in the sense of one who maintains its presence, who ensures that Truth/Reality remains accessible.
The hymn of fault — and its real meaning
There is a hymn to Varuṇa in the Rig Veda that has often been read as a hymn of guilt, almost Judeo-Christian in its tone: “O Divine Varuṇa, as the people do not follow your rules, each day we violate them. Do not make us the object of death.”
I read this hymn differently. What the sacrifiant drifts from when he “violates Varuṇa’s rules” is not a moral code — it is Truth/Reality itself. To move away from the ṛta is to sink deeper into māyā, to lose contact with what actually is. The Vedic “fault” is not a sin — it is a blindness. And the compassion Varuṇa grants is not forgiveness — it is a return to clarity.
“So that you may show us compassion, we keep our thought united as a chariot-driver does with his Horses.”
This image moves me deeply. The thought that scatters is consciousness losing contact with the ṛta. Gathering it back is recovering access to Reality.
Varuṇa, Mitra, and what precedes them both
What seems fundamental to me in the Mitra-Varuṇa pair is that both are in service of something that exceeds them. Mitra carries love and friendship — the warmth of connection. Varuṇa carries Truth/Reality — the rigour of the real. Both are aspects of Brahman, as all the gods of the Rig Veda are. Neither is an end in itself. They are pathways.
The fact that they are common to India and Iran says something important: these intuitions are not the product of a particular culture. They belong to a period when humanity’s spiritual bedrock was still shared — before traditions separated, before names diverged, before rituals took different forms.
Varuṇa and the ṛta: not order imposed from outside, but Reality perceived from within. What soma made it possible to reach. What spiritual practice seeks, in all its forms, to recover.
Soma, the path of access to the Reality that Varuṇa guards → Soma: Plant, Drink, God — What the Hymns of the 9th Mandala Really Say
Uṣas, who each morning reopens access to this Light/Reality → Uṣas, the Dawn: the Most Beautiful Poetry in the Veda
The civilisation that lived according to the ṛta — without palaces, without dominant ego → Mohenjo-daro: a Million Bricks and Not a Single Palace
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