Aditi

Most Vedic gods are named for what they do. Aditi is named for what is not there. The word is built from the negative prefix and diti, a binding or a bond, so the name means unbound, unlimited, free of restraint, and it is used as an ordinary abstract noun in the hymns as well as a divine name. Freedom and the goddess who is freedom are not clearly separable in the language, and translators have to decide sentence by sentence which one a verse is asking for.

That gives her an unusually practical role for so abstract a figure. Vedic religion took guilt seriously as something that ties a person, and the bonds of Varuna are a real image of a real anxiety. Aditi is who you ask when you want them off. Hymns request aditi from sin, from disease, from the consequences of an oath badly kept, and the request is the same word as the goddess. She is also asked for wide space, uru loka, the room to move that a small or hemmed-in life does not have.

The famous verse that identifies her with sky, air, mother, father and son, with all the gods and all people born and unborn, is not pantheism arriving early. It belongs to a Vedic habit of pushing a name outward until it covers everything within its range, and the range of boundlessness is everything by definition. In later literature she is more domesticated, the wife of the sage Kashyapa and the mother of the gods, set against her sister Diti, whose name is the bond her own name denies and whose sons are the Daityas, the gods' opponents.

One short passage in the tenth book of the Rigveda has done more to unsettle later readers than anything else said about Aditi. In a hymn on the generations of the gods, Daksha is born from Aditi and Aditi is born from Daksha. The text states the reciprocity as a fact and moves on. It is not an error of transmission, and commentators from the early ritualists onward have offered readings of it rather than corrections: that the two names stand for capacity and boundlessness, which imply one another; that the sequence describes a cycle rather than a line; that the hymn is deliberately describing an origin that cannot be told in order.

The same hymn holds the second difficulty. Aditi bears eight sons. She brings seven of them to the gods and casts the eighth away. That eighth is Martanda, whose name means the dead egg or the dead bird, and he is brought back to be born and to die, which in some readings makes him the ancestor of mortals and in others makes him the sun. The Adityas of the classical lists are not eight and not seven but twelve, so this passage sits inside a tradition that had not yet settled how many there were.

What the atlas takes from both is that Aditi belongs to the oldest and least tidy layer of the material. Her later career, as the wife of Kashyapa and the mother of the gods in the Puranas, is a much more orderly arrangement, and it is a later one. Neither displaces the other, and the pages here keep both.