Savitrसवितृ

Savitr is the god who sets things in motion.

His name is a straightforward agent noun: savitṛ, from the root sū, to impel, to stir, to set going, to generate. He is the impeller, and the hymns use him as the answer to a question the Rigveda takes seriously — what starts anything?

The most important thing to understand about him is that he is not Surya. Surya is the sun: a visible disc that crosses the sky and can be pointed at. Savitr is the impelling power of which sunrise is the most conspicuous instance. Yaska, in the Nirukta, draws the line by time: Savitr is the sun before it has risen, Surya the sun once it is up. The hymns bear that out — Savitr's hour is the interval, the dark before dawn and the dark after dusk, when the change is happening and nothing has yet appeared.

Eleven hymns are addressed to him, and one of them — RV 1.35 — is among the most admired in the collection: a hymn to Savitr coming up through the darkness on a golden chariot, laying mortals and immortals to rest, watching over the worlds.

He is also, and this is why most people encounter him without knowing it, the deity of Rigveda 3.62.10 — the verse known as the Savitri and, from its metre, as the Gayatri. Every recitation of the Gayatri mantra is a request addressed to Savitr.

An abstraction with a job. Savitr belongs to a small class of Vedic deities whose name is a function rather than an object: Savitr the impeller, Dhatr the establisher, Tvashtr the fashioner, Vishvakarman the all-maker, Prajapati the lord of creatures. These are the Rigveda thinking about causation, and they cluster in the later books, where the collection is most philosophical.

Savitr is the oldest and best developed of them. Unlike Dhatr, who never becomes more than a name, Savitr has hymns, an iconography of sorts, a myth, and a verse.

Savitr and Surya: not a duplication. The relationship is genuinely close and the hymns sometimes blur it, but the distinction is real and was maintained by the ritualists. Where a rite needs the visible sun — an offering thrown toward the disc, a circumambulation following its course — Surya is named. Where a rite needs the beginning of something — the start of study, the start of a journey, the start of the day — Savitr is named. The Vedic verb prasū, to set in motion or authorise, is his, and the prasava, the impulsion, is what he gives.

Golden throughout. He is hiraṇyahasta (golden-handed), hiraṇyapāṇi (golden-palmed), hiraṇyajihva (golden-tongued), with golden eyes, golden arms and a golden car. The gold is not ornament; it is the colour of the light at the moment he acts.

The raised arms. His most distinctive gesture, repeated across the hymns: ūrdhvaṃ bāhū, he raises his arms, and everything obeys. The image is of the first rays coming up over the horizon before the disc appears — which is precisely the interval he governs — and it doubles as the gesture of a person giving an order.

The Savitri verse. RV 3.62.10, in the gayatri metre, composed by Vishvamitra, addressed to Savitr. In the Rigveda it is one savitrī verse among several and is not singled out. Its elevation is the work of the later ritual literature, which made it the verse of the upanayana and of the thrice-daily sandhyavandana. See the Gayatri page for that history and for the goddess who personifies the verse.

The fading. Savitr's function is absorbed into Surya, his name survives as one of the twelve Adityas and as one of the twelve names in the Surya Namaskara, and his verse leaves him behind entirely — most people who recite the Gayatri daily could not say whose name is in it.

Savitr has no image in Indian art and was never given one. The hymns supply a description that is unusually consistent and unusually abstract.

The golden hands. His defining attribute, and the subject of the one story attached to him (see Legends). Hiraṇyahasta is his standing epithet.

The raised arms. Ūrdhvaṃ bāhū — he stretches his arms upward, and by that gesture the world is impelled. The hymns say he raises his arms and men lie down to rest, or rise to work, according to the hour.

The golden chariot. Drawn by dun, white or ruddy horses; it climbs through darkness. RV 1.35 describes him ascending the dark space, kṛṣṇā rajāṃsi, the black regions, with the chariot's yoke and pole and axle all specified.

Broad-handed, wide-pathed. Pṛthupāṇi, urūcakṣas — of broad palms and wide gaze.

The two watchers. In several hymns Savitr sends everything to rest at evening and impels it at dawn, and he is described as observing what is upright and what is crooked among men — a moral function borrowed from the Adityas rather than his own.

In later art. Where Savitr appears, it is as one of twelve identical Aditya figures around a Sun temple's sanctum, indistinguishable from his brothers. He has no separate iconography and never acquired one.

Savitr the Rigvedic deity. The impeller; eleven hymns.

Savitr as an Aditya. Counted among the twelve in the Puranic lists, and one of the twelve names of the sun recited in Surya Namaskara — oṃ savitre namaḥ.

Surya. The deity into whom his function was absorbed. The two are already interchangeable in some later Vedic passages and are effectively one by the classical period. See the Surya page.

The Savitri verse and the goddess Gayatri. The verse is his; the goddess is the verse personified. That the goddess of Savitr's verse is not Savitr's consort but a deity in her own right, married in the Puranas to Brahma, is one of the odder developments in the tradition and is treated on her page.

Not Savitri of the Mahabharata. Savitri, the princess who follows Yama to recover her husband Satyavan and argues him out of the death, is a Puranic and epic heroine and the subject of the Vata Savitri vow kept by married women. She is named after the verse and has nothing to do with the deity. The confusion is extremely common and worth stating twice.

Not Savitri of Pushkar. Brahma's first wife, whose curse in the Pushkar story explains why Brahma has almost no temples, is a third figure again. See the Gayatri and Brahma pages.

Prasavitr / Prasava. The technical form — the impulsion or authorisation Savitr grants — which survives in the ritual vocabulary long after the deity has faded, as the permission with which a rite is begun.

Savitr has almost no narrative, but the one story attached to him is among the most interesting in comparative mythology.

The golden hand. In the Brahmanas — the Shatapatha and Kaushitaki give versions — Savitr's hands were cut off at a sacrifice. In one account the gods were performing a rite and Savitr, as the officiant who gives the impulsion, took the offering and his hands were severed; the gods gave him hands of gold in their place. The epithet hiraṇyahasta, which in the Rigveda simply describes the colour of the light, is thus given a story to explain it.

The comparative case. Georges Dumézil set this beside two other Indo-European figures who lose a limb in the service of the sovereign function: the Norse Týr, who puts his hand in the wolf Fenrir's mouth as a pledge and loses it when the pledge is broken, and the Irish Nuada, king of the Túatha Dé Danann, who loses an arm in battle, is disqualified from kingship because a king must be unblemished, and is given an arm of silver. The pattern — a sovereign or juridical deity who is maimed, and whose maiming is repaired with precious metal — recurs too precisely across three branches to be coincidence, and the Savitr material is the Indian member of the set.

The reading is Dumézil's and is contested in its details, as all of his tripartite arguments are. The correspondence itself is not seriously disputed.

He grants immortality. Savitr is credited in several hymns with giving the gods their deathlessness, and with granting immortality to the Rbhus — the three craftsmen who earned divinity. The impeller is, appropriately, the one who authorises a change of status.

Vishvamitra's verse. The Savitri verse was seen by Vishvamitra, a king who became a brahmarshi by austerity. That the tradition's most sacred verse was received by a man not born to the office is a fact it preserves and repeats; the Gayatri page pursues it.

And the daily thing. Savitr's real story is not a narrative at all. Twice a day, every day, for something over two and a half thousand years, people have stood facing the horizon at the moment before the change, thrown water toward it, and asked this deity to set their thinking in motion. That is a longer continuous record than any myth.

The Gayatri is his. Tat savitur vareṇyam — that excellent glory of Savitr — is the opening of the verse, and every recitation of the Gayatri names him. In sheer numbers this makes Savitr among the most-invoked deities on earth and among the least recognised.

Sandhyavandana. The thrice-daily junctural worship is Savitr's rite in substance: performed at the intervals he governs, with water offered toward the horizon (arghya), and the japa of his verse at its centre.

Upanayana. The Savitri verse is imparted at the thread ceremony, and the technical term for that imparting — sāvitrī-upadeśa — carries his name. The initiate is said to be "born of the Savitri".

Surya Namaskara. Oṃ savitre namaḥ is one of the twelve names recited, one per round.

Prasava in ritual. Vedic rites are begun with a formula asking Savitr's impulsion — devasya tvā savituḥ prasave, "at the impulsion of god Savitr" — which opens a great many srauta and domestic procedures. It is one of the commonest phrases in the entire ritual literature and functions as a ritual starting handle.

No temple, no festival, no image, no vow of his own. Everything above is performed under other headings.

A note on what the verse asks. The Savitri verse petitions for one thing only: that the faculty of understanding be impelled. It asks for no wealth, no protection and no outcome. DharmSetu records the practice as the tradition prescribes it and makes no claim about results.

None of his own, and none is to be expected: Savitr was absorbed into Surya before the temple period, and Surya's temples are where his name is carved.

Sun temples. Konark (Odisha), Modhera (Gujarat), Martand (Kashmir) and the Deo and Dakshinaarka temples of Bihar carry twelve Aditya figures, one of whom is Savitr. He is not distinguishable from the others without an inscription.

Suryanar Koil (Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu) — the Navagraha kshetra where Surya presides.

Pushkar (Ajmer district, Rajasthan) — the Savitri temple on the hill is dedicated to Brahma's wife Savitri, not to this deity. The Gayatri temple faces it from the opposite hill. Both are covered on the Gayatri page, and neither is Savitr's.

Every place sandhya is performed. Which is the honest answer. Savitr's shrine is a riverbank, a tank, a rooftop or a doorway facing east, occupied for a few minutes before sunrise by one person with water in their hands.

Vedic recitation schools, where RV 1.35 and the rest of his hymns are chanted.

A god of beginnings, and of nothing else. Savitr does not create, sustain, destroy, protect or judge. He starts. The Vedic mind found the moment of initiation interesting enough to deify on its own — not the sun, but the first stirring; not the day, but the impulsion that produces it — and built the language of ritual authorisation on it. Devasya tvā savituḥ prasave, "at the impulsion of god Savitr", opens rite after rite, and the sentence means: something has to move first, and this is that.

The distinction the tradition keeps losing. Savitr and Surya are not the same, and the difference — between the visible thing and the power of which it is an instance — is a genuinely philosophical distinction made in a hymn collection usually described as pre-philosophical. It is the same move that later separates brahman from any of its manifestations. The tradition subsequently collapsed the distinction and made Savitr a name of the sun, which is a real loss, and one worth restoring whenever the Gayatri is explained.

The most-said name nobody knows. The Gayatri is recited by an enormous number of people daily. Its subject is Savitr. He is named in its second word. Very few of those reciting it could identify him, and many would say the mantra is addressed to the sun or to a goddess. That gap between use and recognition is characteristic of what happened to the Vedic pantheon: the words were preserved with extraordinary fidelity while the referents were forgotten.

Maimed sovereignty. The golden hand puts Savitr in company with Týr and Nuada, and the pattern those three make — the deity of authorisation who is damaged in the exercise of it and repaired with metal — is one of the more suggestive things comparative mythology has found. Whatever one makes of Dumézil's larger scheme, the correspondence is there in the texts.

Impulsion, not command. The verb is pracodayāt, may he impel — a causative, and a gentle one. Savitr does not order the mind to think; he sets it going. For a deity of authority that is an unusually light touch, and it has shaped the register of the most-repeated prayer in Hinduism.