Aja Ekapada

There are gods in the Rigveda who are thinly attested, and then there is Aja Ekapada. He has no hymn. He is not described. He performs no act, holds no attribute, receives no epithet, and is not addressed on his own anywhere in the collection. What he has is a handful of appearances in enumerations of gods, and in almost every one of them he stands next to Ahi Budhnya, so that each of the two is known mainly through the company of the other.

The classification usually given to him, an atmospheric deity, is not drawn from anything said about him. It is drawn from where he is placed in the lists, which is among the gods of the middle region, and from the assumption that a name paired with a serpent of the deep belongs to the same department. That is an inference from arrangement, and it is a reasonable one, but it should be recognised for what it is. Nothing in the text puts him in the sky rather than anywhere else.

What is genuinely visible is the mechanism that preserved him. Vedic enumeration is formulaic. Once a name enters a list it travels with the list, and the list is recited long after anybody remembers what the name was for. Aja Ekapada is what a formula looks like when its content has gone: a slot that continued to be filled correctly for three thousand years by people who could no longer say what they were filling it with. The lunar mansion scheme, which makes him the presiding deity of Purva Bhadrapada, is the same mechanism working one system later.

The name is the only evidence there is, and it will not settle. Aja is a common Sanskrit word for a goat. It is also, read as a-ja, the negation of born, so the unborn. Ekapada is one-footed, or having one foot, or standing on one support. Every combination of those has been proposed. The one-footed goat has been read as a lightning image, the single shaft coming down, with the goat brought in from its role as a sacrificial animal. The one-footed unborn has been read as an abstract or primordial figure, the support on which something rests, which fits a later Sanskrit habit of talking about a single foot as a quarter or a basis.

None of these can be tested, because there is no passage to test them against. This is the point at which the atlas has to be careful about a word. The identification is not debated, in the sense the atlas uses that word: debate means camps exist, holding positions that can be read and weighed against each other. Here there are proposals, offered tentatively, mostly in the nineteenth century, that nobody has since defended at length because there is nothing to defend them with. The status is unknown, and the entry says so, with an open question naming what would actually move it.

The later material does not help, and it is worth saying why. Aja Ekapada turns up in Shaiva contexts as an epithet, which could be a real survival of an old association or could be the tradition doing exactly what a modern reader does when handed an empty name, which is fill it with whatever is nearest.