Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Open Questions

By what route did Vidhatri, a name with almost no independent textual life, become Vidhata, the personified fate of later popular usage?

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Open Question

Vidhatri has no myth, no iconography and no cult, and outside the formulaic pairing with Dhatri he barely occurs in Sanskrit. Yet the disposer becomes an ordinary way of naming destiny in later devotional and vernacular speech. Nothing in the surviving Sanskrit sources sets out how the one became the other.

What would resolve this A philological trace of the Dhatri and Vidhatri pairing through Puranic, epic and regional devotional literature, showing where the formula stops naming an act of divine arrangement and starts naming an agent who fixes a person's lot.
OpenSanskrit philology, and the study of regional devotional and vernacular literaturesArthur Anthony Macdonell, Vedic Mythology
Cross-Tradition Connections

Question On

Vidhatri, Deities
Source Vedic MythologyArthur Anthony Macdonell
Sources
Vedic Mythology
Arthur Anthony Macdonell, Karl J. Trubner, Strassburg, 1897View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.