The Secret Of The Veda Aurobindo - HolyBooks.com

498 Hymns of the Atris
— as indeed throughout the hymns the unity in difference of all
the gods makes it difficult for the mind not accustomed to the
subtleties of psychological truth to find in the Vedic divinities
anything but a confused mass of common or interchangeable
attributes. But the distinctions are there and have as great a
force and importance as in the Greek and Egyptian symbolism.
Each god contains in himself all the others, but remains still
himself in his peculiar function.
This nature of the difference between the Four explains their
varying prominence in the Veda. Varuna is easily the first and
most considerable of them all, for realisation of infinite existence
is the basis of the Vedic perfection: the wideness and purity
of the divine being once attained, all the rest comes inevitably
contained in it as possession and power and attribute. Mitra
is seldom hymned except in union with Varuna or else as a
name and form of the other gods, — oftenest of the cosmic
worker Agni, — when arriving in their action to the harmony
and the light they reveal in themselves the divine Friend. To the
twin-power Mitra-Varuna the greater number of the hymns to
the luminous Kings are addressed, a certain number to Varuna
separately or to Varuna-Indra, one to Mitra, two or three to
Bhaga, none at all to Aryaman. For the infinite wideness and
purity being founded, the luminous harmony of the workings
of the gods by the correlated laws of the different planes of our
being from the spiritual to the material has to be realised in that
continent and on that foundation; and this is the combination
Mitra-Varuna. The power of Aryaman is hardly viewed as an
independent principle, — just as force in the world is only a
manifestation, movement or dynamic value of existence, is only
a working out, a liberation of consciousness, of knowledge, of
the inherent Truth of things into stuff of energy and form of
effect, or is only the effective term of the self-discovering and
self-seizing movement by which Being and Consciousness realise
themselves as Bliss. Therefore Aryaman is invoked always
in conjunction with Aditi or Varuna or Mitra or in the great
realising Triad or in the realised quaternary or in the general
invocation of the All-Gods and the Adityas.