The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s6: § 6. Aditi and Diti

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s6

Language: English

§ 6. Aditi and Diti

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The place of Aditi in the Vedic pantheon is very remarkable, if, as is on the whole most probable, she is to be regarded as an abstract deity. She has, indeed, no entire hymn in the Rigveda, but she is mentioned not less than eighty times, and in the great majority of these with her sons, the Ādityas. Of her personality little is said beyond the fact that she is intact, extended, bright, and luminous, a supporter of creatures, an epithet enjoyed by Mitra and Varuṇa, and belonging to all men. She is invoked at morning, noon, and evening. While the Ādityas are normally her sons, she is once said to be their sister, and to be the daughter of the Vasus.⁶ She appears in the Yajurveda⁷ once as the wife of Viṣṇu: in the post-Vedic mythology she is especially the daughter of Dakṣa and the mother of Vivasvant, and of Viṣṇu, but also of all the gods.

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⁶ RV. viii. 101. 15; cf. AV. vi. 4. 1.

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⁷ TS. vii. 5. 4; VS. xxix. 60.

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Aditi is constantly invoked to release from sin: in this respect she stands in the closest connexion with Varuṇa, who fetters the sinners. Varuṇa, Agni, Savitṛ, and other gods are besought to release from sin before her. But in some cases the goddess cannot be distinguished from the primitive sense of the name, which denotes unbinding, or freedom from bonds. The Ādityas are besought to place the offering in sinlessness and freedom from bonds,¹ and a worshipper seeks to be given back to great Aditi to seek his father and mother again.² Aditi thus is asked to release her worshippers like bound thieves.

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¹ RV. vii. 51. 1.

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² RV. i. 24. 1; cf. i. 185. 3.

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Aditi, however, appears in other connexions than the freeing from sin. Not only the Ādityas, but all the gods are said to be born from her : as the sky she supplies them with honied milk. But the Taittirīya Saṁhitā ³ and other texts expressly assert her identity with the earth, and by the time of the Naighaṇṭuka this is so much the accepted version that the word is placed as a synonym for earth. But she often in the Rigveda ⁴ is clearly differentiated from both. Again she is identified pantheistically with sky, air, mother, father, son, the five tribes, what has been or shall be.⁵ Dakṣa, who is her son, is also her father,⁶ and she appears as celebrating Savitṛ and producing a hymn for Indra.

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³ Apparently also in RV. i. 72. 9; AV. xiii. 1. 38.

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⁴ x. 63. 10.

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⁵ RV. i. 89. 10.

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⁶ RV. x. 72. 4, 5.

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More important is the fact that Aditi is sometimes at least conceived as theriomorphic, a fact which is clearly shown by the fact that in the ritual ⁷ a cow is addressed by her name. It is also to be seen, however, in the Rigveda itself : where not only is she occasionally spoken of as a cow,⁸ but Soma is compared to her milk, and milk must be meant in the daughter of Aditi, who yields to Soma as he flows to the vat.

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⁷ Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* i. 325.

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⁸ i. 153. 3; viii. 101. 15; x. 11. 1; ix. 96. 15; 69. 3.

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Though rarely, Aditi is credited with the usual powers of the gods, and is prayed to for wealth and other boons : the special gift of light which she bestows may be due to her connexion with the Ādityas.

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The explanations of Aditi differ widely, according as she is treated as an abstract or a concrete deity. Pischel ⁹ holds that she is the earth, but this is not borne out by anything save the view of the later Vedic texts, and does not suit at all the picture of the goddess presented in the Rigveda. Hillebrandt,¹⁰ in fairly close agreement with one view of Roth's,¹¹ that she is the eternal principle underlying the celestial light, urges that she is essentially connected with light and the highest heaven, and explains her as the light of day in its imperishable aspect, a view which agrees in substance with that of Colinet ¹² that she is the light of the sky, thus in essence a sort of feminine form of Dyaus. This in some measure agrees with the theory of Bergaigne ¹³ that the goddess is a development from the phrase Dyaus Aditi, supplying the gods with milk as the boundless sky, but in his view stress is laid on the imperishable nature of the light, not on the boundless space of the sky. Max Müller ¹⁴ takes the view that the boundless sky as the expression of visible infinity is the phenomenon meant. Wallis¹ and Oldenberg,² on the other hand, acquiesce in the view that Aditi denotes simply freedom from bondage. Oldenberg, however, lays stress also on the fact that Aditi is regarded as a cow, and that the gods appear as cow-born and suggest that there may have been a tradition according to which the celestial gods are the offspring of a celestial cow,³ or cow fetish. It is difficult to understand exactly how he considers this concept related to that of Aditi, and in point of fact it is very doubtful whether the stress laid upon the idea of the cow is to be justified by the appearance of the cow in the mythology. It seems rather that the cow is not a primitive conception, but a secondary view.

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⁹ *Ved. Stud.* ii. 86.

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¹⁰ *Ved. Myth.* iii. 408 ff. Cf. RV. i. 115. 5.

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¹¹ *ZDMG.* vi. 68 ff.

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¹² *Trans. 9th Or. Congress*, i. 396–410; *Muséon*, xii. 81–90.

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¹³ SBE. xxxii. 241.

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¹⁴ *Rel. Véd.* iii. 88–98.

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¹ *Cosmology*, pp. 45 ff. Cf. von Schroeder, *Arische Religion*, ii. 400.

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² *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 202 ff.; SBE. xlvi. 329. Geldner (*Zur Kosmogonie des RV.*, p. 5) holds that Aditi is ‘undividedness’, ‘completeness’.

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³ RV. vi. 50. 10; vii. 35. 14. In Greece we have a cow-headed figure in Arcadia (BCH. 1899, p. 635) and Here’s epithet Boōpis (Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 76–80).

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An interesting suggestion of the origin of Aditi is due to Macdonell,⁴ and on the whole it has more to say for it than any other explanation of the deity. The Ādityas are here and there called sons of Aditi, and he suggests that, just as Çavasī is found in the Rigveda itself as the name of Indra’s mother, arising from the phrase ‘son of strength (*çavas*)’, applied to Indra as the most strong one, so Aditi was conjured up from a phrase meaning sons of freedom or rather perhaps guiltlessness. The personification would then by a most natural and simple process be invested with the leading characteristics of her sons, as the mother of the Ādityas she would be brought into conjunction with heaven and earth, the universal parents, while she would retain her special connexion with the idea of freedom. In that case Āditya would be a term produced and applied to Mitra, Varuṇa, and the other gods after Aditi had been created, and the original gods, who were called sons of freedom or guiltlessness, would probably be Mitra and Varuṇa, and perhaps some others. It must be assumed that these others had already been formed into a close group before the separation of the Indo-Iranian stems as the connexion of the group of Ādityas with the Ameša Spentas is obviously probable if it cannot be proved, but there is no objection to this view to be raised on the ground of the theory of Aditi here accepted, since it is clear in any case that the name Āditya is an invention of India.

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⁴ *Ved. Myth.*, p. 122. Bloomfield’s suggestion (*The Symbolic Gods*, p. 45) that Āditya means ‘from of old’ is opposed to the usage of the language, and in *Rel. of India*, p. 131, it is not pressed.

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Compared with Aditi the goddess Diti is merely a name. She occurs thrice in the Rigveda,⁵ twice with Aditi, who with Diti is said to be seen by Mitra and Varuṇa from their car. Agni is also begged to grant Diti, and preserve from Aditi. Finally Diti is said to give what is desirable. In the later Saṁhitās⁶ she appears as a colourless deity beside Aditi, except that in the Atharvaveda¹ we find already mentioned the Daityas as her sons : in the post-Vedic mythology the gods and the Daityas are the sons of Aditi and Diti respectively, the common father being Dakṣa Prajāpati. It is obvious that, even assuming that the second of these passages is not to be explained as having no connexion with deities at all, and as merely referring to giving and not-giving, regarded perhaps as powers, just as Arāti in the Atharvaveda is deified, the existence of Diti is merely derived from Aditi, and that it is idle to give any real meaning to such a personality.²

Linked texts (4)

Ṛgvedasaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Atharvavedasaṃhitā — Atharvan & Aṅgiras, Sanskrit
Vājasaneyisaṃhitā — Sanskrit
Taittirīyasaṃhitā — Sanskrit