The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c20.s6.16

v1.c20.s6.16

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.