Who Savitr is
Savitr is the god who sets things going. His name comes from a Sanskrit root that means to rouse or to set in motion, and the poets of the Rigveda play on it constantly. Savitr rouses. Savitr sends. Savitr sets free. Eleven whole hymns are his, and his name comes up about a hundred and seventy times.
Nearly everything about him is golden. He has golden eyes, golden hands and a golden tongue, and these three are said of no other god. His arms are golden, and he lifts them and spreads them wide, so that the poets compare other gods to him when they raise their arms. He drives a golden chariot with a golden pole, drawn by two bay horses with white feet.
He is close to the sun and yet is not simply the sun. The hymns have another name, Surya, for the bright disc in the sky, and in one of them Savitr tells Surya to come. He is nearer to the force behind the sunrise and the sunset. In the morning he wakes all two-footed and four-footed creatures. In the evening he puts them to rest. One hymn watches him do it: he raises his hands, the weaver rolls up her cloth, the traveller unyokes his horses, and every bird goes to its nest.
His law is steady. The waters and the wind obey it, and the hymns say that not even Indra, Varuna, Mitra or Rudra goes against it. He gave the gods their immortality, and he gives to people "life following life". He takes away bad dreams. A funeral hymn asks him to set the dead down where the good have gone.
He has one verse above all. In the last hymn of the third book, among verses to other gods, a poet of Vishvamitra's family asks for Savitr's brightness and for his own mind to be stirred. That verse is the Savitri, better known as the Gayatri.
May we take hold of the lovely brightness of the god Savitr, and may he set our thoughts moving.