VARUṆA replaced the earlier god Dyaus as the sky god in the Vedic pantheon, but early in his mythological career he became the god of the night sky; the myriad stars were his eyes and, still later, his spies. The importance of such a sky god seems to belong to the pastoral history of the nomadic Aryans. The Bogazköy inscription of the fourteenth century BCE mentions a Mitanni god, Uru-van-nas-sil, Varuṇa's prototype. Ouranos, Varuṇa's Greek parallel, was also a sky god.

With his thousand eyes, Varuṇa watched over human conduct, judging good and evil deeds and punishing evildoers. Varuṇa is the only god in the Vedic pantheon with such strong ethical bearings. The word used in the Vedas to refer to his eyes, spaśa, derived originally from the verbal root spac ("see"), later came to...