The name Varuṇa literally means The All-Enveloping Sky. His home star is Śatabhiṣaj — "Hundreds of Healers" — whose symbol is an empty or dark circle. The circle is the image of the sky. Specifically, Varuṇa is the god of the half of the sky that hides ("envelopes") the Sun. When the Sun falls below the western horizon, it enters this enveloping half. The empty-circle symbol also represents the dark sun. Varuṇa is structurally the night-sky deity — the cosmic-vector through which the Sun moves into hiding and through which the night reveals what daylight obscures.1
Since his domain begins where the Sun sets, Varuṇa is connected to sunset and the west. Among the eight deities who guard the cardinal directions (the dik-pāla), Varuṇa is in charge of the west.
DiCara delivers an important religious-language correction here. The Rg Veda declares Varuṇa is the chief of the Asura. This does not make him a "demon," it merely indicates that he is a force of darkness. Sura connotes "light" (thus the Sun is called Sura) and Asura connotes "darkness." Since Varuṇa takes the Sun into darkness, naturally he is an Asura.1
This corrects a category-error that runs through popular treatments of Vedic literature: Asura translated as "demon" with Sura translated as "god" produces a Manichean light-vs-darkness moral-dualism that the Vedic apparatus doesn't actually have. The Vedic distinction is structural (light/dark) not moral (good/evil). Varuṇa is dark — and one of Aditi's sons, an Aditya, the night-sky-deity. Darkness is not opposed-to-goodness; it's the structural-complement to light within a single cosmological-architecture.
The enveloping-dark-sky is also dakṣināyaṇa — the lower half of the universal sphere. The lower half is the underworld. So Varuṇa has dominion over the underworld in addition to the night-sky. He is to the underworld what Indra is to the heavens.1
In Vedic cosmology, a cosmic ocean exists in the lower half of the universal sphere. Varuṇa's underworld-dominion gives him dominion over water — he becomes famous as the god of waters. In Bhagavad Gītā 10.29, Krishna says: varuṇo yādasām aham — "Among water-dwellers I am Varuṇa." Varuṇa is the foremost of all beings dwelling in water.1
More precisely, Varuṇa is the husband of the waters; his wife Vāruṇī (also called Āpas) is the actual water-goddess. The Padma Purāṇa (Bhūmi.119) says that when gods and anti-gods churned the ocean of milk, by Varuṇa's efforts four goddesses appeared from the ocean: Sulakṣmī, Vāruṇī, Kāmodā, Śreṣṭhā. Vāruṇī married Varuṇa and became Āpas, the goddess of water. The Purva Ashadha chapter develops Āpas fully.1
As god of the night sky, Varuṇa watches what daylight obscures. The stars provide the light by which he sees. The stars are his eyes. Śatabhiṣaj contains more stars ("hundreds") than any other nakshatra. Through these stars Varuṇa watches the hidden affairs of humans and arrests the duplicitous and deceitful in his divine noose. Footnote 37: the noose is another significance of Śatabhiṣaj's empty-circle symbol.1
Śatabhiṣaj is a star of justice and fair treatment — punishing whomever deserves punishment, without consideration of their status. It is therefore a source of revolutionary movements and liberal forces in human society. Varuṇa is the all-seeing-judge whose judgment doesn't depend on social-position. His underworld-domain is where souls eventually go to be judged.
Atharva Veda, Taitterīya Saṃhitā, and Taitterīya Brāhmaṇa all say: "The god of medicine himself cannot cure someone who falls ill when the Moon is in this nakshatra." Varuṇa, as god of the underworld, has great control over the affairs of death; as god of waters, he has great control over the power to give life. In Rg Veda he is treated as the god of immortality — he holds the power of life and death. His is the star of healers and cures.1
Operational chart-reading consequence: illness with roots in Śatabhiṣaj is very difficult to cure; cures applied under the influence of Śatabhiṣaj are highly effective. The deity governs both ends of the healing-vector.
DiCara provides one of the more striking cosmological-historical claims in the book. Varuṇa's carrier (vāhana) is the fearsome sea-monster called a Makara — the creature we call "Capricorn." This, of course, is due to his lordship over the deep seas. But the symbolism suggests something deeper: that very ancient Indians evaluated solstices and equinoxes, and may well have employed a twelvefold zodiac based on them.1
The claim: the oldest hymns of Rg Veda most probably took formal shape about five thousand years ago when the Winter Solstice occurred with the heliacal rising of Śatabhiṣaj. By definition, the Winter Solstice is the beginning of Capricorn (Makara, Varuṇa's vehicle). This suggests the symbol for Capricorn may derive from Varuṇa — the god whose star held the Winter Solstice when the symbolism became decided.1
The cardinal-point pattern five-thousand years ago:
The pattern is symmetric and theologically-meaningful: the Mitra-Varuṇa polarity-pair sits at the Spring-Autumn axis, while the Indian-zodiac-Capricorn symbol may carry millennia-old Vedic deity-iconography.
Although Varuṇa is an Asura, he is one of the children of Aditi — and therefore represents a form of the Sun: the dark sun, the midnight sun, a dark and empty circle. This explains why most of Aditi's children own their own nakshatras. Rg and Yajur Veda name eight Adityas; the eighth (Mārtanda/Vivasvāna) was rejected by his mother but later redeemed.1 Varuṇa is the 1st Aditya in DiCara's enumeration.
DiCara assembles Varuṇa from the Shatabhishaj primary chapter (lines 2358-2467) with cross-chapter at Purva Ashadha (lines 2010-2049) for the Āpas-Vāruṇī wife-relationship and at Anurādhā (lines 1755-1767) for the Mitra-Varuṇa polarity, Bhagavad Gītā 10.29 (water-dwellers) at line 2396, the Atharva/Taittirīya/Taitterīya medical-astrology claim at line 2410, the 5000-year archaeoastronomy at lines 2420-2432, and the 8-Aditya enumeration at lines 2440-2462.1
The 5000-year archaeoastronomy claim is interpretively-significant but the precise dating depends on which Rg Vedic stratum is identified as "oldest" and how precisely the heliacal-rising calculation can be performed. Mainstream Vedic-textual scholarship generally accepts that the oldest Rg Vedic material is ancient but may not endorse the specific 5000-year-ago dating.
The Asura-as-darkness-not-demon correction is structurally important but runs against the dominant popular framing. Readers operating with the standard "Asura = demon" reading will need to recalibrate to follow DiCara's apparatus.
Pai treats Varuṇa in the Shatabhishaj chapter at archetypal-symbolic depth (Varuna Dark-Sun, 100-people-milk remedy, B.V. Raman + Goethe). Pai develops the dark-sun-and-healing character without DiCara's archaeoastronomy claim or the Mitra-Varuṇa polarity-framework.
DiCara's framing makes Varuṇa structurally the night-sky-judge with explicit cosmological-historical and polarity-pairing implications. The convergence: both lineages agree Śatabhiṣaj is the healing-and-justice star with deep mysteries. Where they split: Pai's per-chapter framing supports diagnostic chart-reading; DiCara's polarity-and-archaeoastronomy framing supports cosmological-and-historical reading.
Varuṇa's character as the all-seeing-judge-of-hidden-affairs has structural parallels in any framework that recognizes a watcher-mechanism operating on what's-not-publicly-visible.
behavioral-mechanics: Surveillance as Behavioral Deterrent — Modern behavioral-mechanics recognizes that the perception-of-being-watched alters behavior even when no actual watcher is present. Varuṇa-as-watcher-with-eyes-that-are-the-stars is the cosmological-version of the same insight: the cosmic-watcher's presence is structurally what produces moral-behavior in situations where social-watchers aren't present. The parallel produces: contemplative-cosmology and behavioral-mechanics independently arrive at the recognition that watcher-presence (whether real, perceived, or cosmological) is structurally what produces self-regulation, and apparatus-for-internalizing-the-watcher is what produces sustained-moral-behavior.
psychology: Shadow as What Daylight Obscures — Jungian shadow-work treats the shadow as what conscious-daylight cannot see — what only becomes visible in the night-of-the-soul or in dream-imagery. Varuṇa-as-night-sky-god-watching-what-daylight-obscures is the deity-mythological compression of the same insight: the dark-realm has its own legitimate-watcher whose perception sees what light-realm cannot. The parallel produces: contemplative-tradition and depth-psychology independently recognize that darkness has its own seeing-vector, and the apparatus is incomplete without explicit recognition of night-sight as legitimate-knowledge-source rather than just absence-of-day-sight.
history: Archaeoastronomy as Dating Vector — Archaeologists use astronomical-alignments (Stonehenge's solstice-orientation, Mayan calendar precision) as dating-vectors that can place ancient sites within specific multi-century windows. DiCara's 5000-year claim about Rg Vedic hymns based on Winter-Solstice-at-Śatabhiṣaj is the same methodology applied to Vedic-textual-dating. The parallel produces: contemplative-tradition and historical-archaeology independently arrive at the recognition that celestial-alignments are stable-enough-temporally to function as dating-vectors, and the same methodology operates in both fields.
The Sharpest Implication
If the Asura-as-darkness-not-demon correction is right, then a substantial part of the popular Vedic-mythology framing (which routinely treats Asuras as evil-demonic-beings opposing the good-Sura-gods) is operating with an imported Manichean dualism that the actual Vedic apparatus rejects. The implication is uncomfortable for readers comfortable with the good-vs-evil framing: the Vedic apparatus actually operates on a light-and-darkness complementarity within a single cosmological-architecture, with darkness having legitimate deity-representatives (Varuṇa is Aditi's son, the chief Asura, AND the foremost watcher-of-justice). Treating darkness-as-evil is a Western-religious import that distorts the actual structure.
Generative Questions