The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c14.31

v1.c14.31

In other passages the relation of parentage³ is prominent, and this idea has the most varied forms. What is prior in time is the parent of the subsequent phenomenon: thus the Dawn is born of night, though she is also her greater sister, and yet generates the sun, and again the sacrifices of the Fathers are said to produce the Dawns, since they take place before the appearance of dawn. Spatial relations are similarly enough to explain paternity: the quiver is the father of the arrows, the steeds of the sun are the daughters of the car: the parent *par excellence* is Dyaus, and earth also is the mother of the many things she bears. Sky and earth too are universal parents: the sky fertilizes the earth, and again both produce life in the world, the one by the gift of rain, the other through providing food. But the parenthood of sky and earth leads to one of the contrasts in which the Vedic poet delights: the gods, as we have seen, constantly are represented by the seers as measuring out the sky and the earth, and thus the paradox arises that they produce their own parents, and it can be said of Indra that from his own body he produced his father and his mother. Agni, again, is the child of the waters, which contain the fire of lightning, and the rain cloud is the mother of the lightning and of the waters. In another application the chief of a group is its father, Vāyu of the storm gods, Rudra of the Rudras or Maruts, Sarasvatī of rivers, Soma of plants. Or again the quality in which a deity is pre-eminent is made to be his father: the gods are sons of immortality as well as of skill, Agni is son of strength or force, Indra son of truth, and also of might (*çavas*), whence his mother bears the name Çavasī, mighty. Pūṣan is son of setting free, Mitra and Varuṇa sons of great might. It is possible¹ that the goddess Aditi is no more than an example of a figure born of a misunderstanding of this usage, and it is certain that in the later religion, from the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa at least, the wife of Indra, Çacī, is merely a misunderstanding of the epithet *çacīpati*, ‘lord of strength’, applied to that god.