Summary
Aditi is, in the Rigveda, the mother of the Ādityas, the group of gods headed by Varuṇa with Mitra beside him. Her name in Sanskrit means "free of bonds", "without limit". Macdonell says her chief quality is that she delivers from the bonds of suffering and of guilt, and that in myth she is younger than some of her sons, since Mitra is older than any goddess born in India.
Her story is in hymn 10.72, a hymn on the births of the gods. Brahmaṇaspati made them as a smith does, by blowing and smelting, and in the first age of the gods being came out of non-being. From the outstretched power came the earth, and from the earth the quarters. Dakṣa was born of Aditi, and Aditi of Dakṣa, and after her were born the gods who do not die. The gods stood in the waters holding one another, dust rose from their feet as from the feet of dancers, and they brought out the sun that lay hidden in the sea. Then the hymn says: Aditi had eight sons born from her body; with seven she went to the gods, and the eighth, Mārtāṇḍa, she cast away. Then she brought him back to be born and to die again and again.
Hymn 1.89 widens her name until it holds everything: Aditi is the sky, Aditi the mid-air, Aditi mother, father and son, Aditi all the gods and the five peoples, what has been born and what will be born. In hymn 1.24 the singer asks: who will give us back to great Aditi, so that I may see my father and my mother? He answers: Agni. Then he asks Varuṇa to loosen the bonds above, below and between, "so that we may be sinless before Aditi".
The idea her story turns on is that the mother of the guardians of order is the one who has no bond. Varuṇa ties the offender with his cord and unties him, Mitra guards the covenant between people, and their mother's name is freedom from the bond. To return to her is to be released: the cord is loosened and a person goes back to father and mother without guilt. The riddle of the hymn, that Aditi bore Dakṣa and Dakṣa bore Aditi, makes boundless motherhood and skilled power give birth to each other. Dakṣa in Sanskrit is ability and skill, and he is one of her sons, the Ādityas.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Indian essay reads अदिति, Aditi, from ʿadā, yaʿdū, to go beyond a limit: Aditi is ʿadat, "she went beyond", the one who passed every bound. The ʿayn at the head of the name drops as throat sounds do, leaving its vowel; d is d; and the final t is the t of the feminine verb ʿadat. In Lane, ʿadāhu is "he went beyond it, exceeded it", and ʿadā ṭawrahu, "he passed beyond his proper limit". The essay itself gives the Sanskrit analysis as well: the initial a- is a negative and what follows is limit and bond, so she is "the unbounded". Arabic and Sanskrit say the same thing, the one who goes beyond every limit, and that is what the hymn makes her: sky, mid-air, mother, father and son, all that has been born and will be born.
Linguistic Root
Aditi and ʿadā
| Form | What it names |
|---|---|
| अदिति aditi | not tied, free; freedom and safety; boundlessness; the mother goddess |
| āditya | "son of Aditi", plural the Ādityas |
| diti | a goddess named three times in the Rigveda, formed as Aditi's opposite |
| mārtāṇḍa | "sprung from a lifeless egg", Aditi's eighth son |
Monier-Williams places the name under the verb "to bind, tie", with the negative prefix, so that it means "not tied, free", then freedom and safety, boundlessness and inexhaustible abundance, then the goddess. Macdonell renders it "Liberation, Freedom (lit. un-binding)". In Lane, ʿadāhu is "he went beyond it, exceeded it", ʿadā ṭawrahu, "he passed beyond his proper limit", and taʿaddā al-ḥaqq, "he went beyond what was right". The Arabic root is passing a limit, the Sanskrit word is denying a bond, and the two meet in the one whom nothing bounds.
The sounds: ʿayn drops at the head of the word, the steadiest of the Juthoor laws, by which ʿayn drops in about nine places out of ten. D is d. The vowel and t after it are where the readings part: in Sanskrit they belong to the word for "bond" itself, and in the essay's reading they are the vowel of the verb and the feminine t.
Other readings in the essay
The Indian essay gives two more readings. The first is Ādam plus dītī, "the first human mother", which splits the name in two and lets the m fall. The second is abadī, "the everlasting", which fits the sense but needs a b the name shows no trace of. The essay also cites Hebrew עַד ʿad, perpetuity, "for ever". Brown, Driver and Briggs explain it as advancing time and derive it from עָדָה, "to pass on, advance", which they compare with Arabic ʿadā, to pass by. So Hebrew is a witness from another branch to the same root: what passes beyond a limit in space becomes, in time, a duration without end.
Key Mythic Narratives
Mārtāṇḍa and the elephant
The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa explains the hymn of the eight sons. Aditi had eight sons, but those called the gods, the sons of Aditi, are seven, because the eighth, Mārtāṇḍa, she bore unformed, a lump of flesh as broad as it was high. His brothers said: what was born after us must not be lost; let us shape it. They shaped him as a man is shaped, and what they cut off and threw down became the elephant. The one they shaped was Vivasvat, the Āditya, the sun, and from him come these creatures. The son who was cast away is the sun, and in this account the ancestor of people.
The Ādityas
Hymn 2.27 names six Ādityas: Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, Varuṇa, Dakṣa and Aṃśa, and describes them as pure as streams of water, without guile or falsehood, many-eyed, seeing good and evil near and far. Macdonell thinks the seventh was Sūrya and the eighth Mārtāṇḍa. In the Brāhmaṇas their number became twelve, after the months of the year, each representing the sun in one month.
The face of Aditi
Hymn 1.113 calls Uṣas, the dawn, "mother of gods, the face of Aditi", and at its close asks for what Mitra, Varuṇa, Aditi, the Indus, earth and heaven give.
Symbolic Reading
The Indian essay makes Aditi "the cosmic mother" and the cosmic absolute, and compares her with the first mothers of the Near East: Asherah, mother of the gods in Canaan; Tiamat, the first mother in Babylon; and Nut, the sky, mother of the gods in Egypt.
The hymns themselves give a picture every household knows: the singer asks to be given back to Aditi so that he may see his father and mother, and asks for his bond to be loosened so that he may be sinless before her. The boundless mother is the home one returns to after wrongdoing, and her sons the Ādityas are the ones who see the wrong, bind its doer and then release him.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Asherah on the Ugarit tablets is mother of a group of gods named after her, "the seventy sons of Athirat", and Aditi is mother of a group named after her, the seven or eight Ādityas. Both protect their children: Athirat fears for hers when she sees Baal and Anat approaching, and Aditi takes her seven to the gods and brings back the eighth. Her son Mitra is Iranian Mithra, guardian of the covenant in the Avesta.
In hymn 10.72 the gods she bore stand in the waters and bring out the sun hidden in the sea, as in the primordial waters. In Egypt Nut gives birth to the sun every morning; in India Aditi casts away her son the sun and then brings him "to spring to life and die again". In Babylon the mother of the gods, Tiamat, fights some of her children, while Aditi carries hers to the gods.