Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 6 (Indian and Iranian).djvu/87

Rh The name Aditi means "Unbinding" or "Boundlessness," and the name Āditya as applied to a group of bright gods denotes them, beyond doubt, as the sons of Aditi. Hence she has been regarded as a personification of the sky or of the visible infinite, the expanse beyond the earth, the clouds and the sky, or the eternal celestial light which sustains the Ādityas. Or, if stress be laid not on her connexion with the light, but on the view that she is a cow, she can be referred to earth, as the mother of all. In these senses she would be concrete in origin. On the other hand, she has also been derived from the epithet Aditi, the "boundless," as applied to the sky, or yet more abstractly from the epithet "sons of Aditi," in the sense of "sons of boundlessness," referring to the Ādityas. As Indra is called "son of strength," and later "Strength" (Śacī) is personified as his wife (perhaps not in the Ṛgveda itself), so Aditi may have been developed in pre-Ṛgvedic times from such a phrase, which would account for her frequent appearance, even though a more concrete origin seems probable for such a deity. On the other hand, from her is deduced as her opposite Diti, who occurs twice or thrice in the Ṛgveda, though in an indeterminate sense.

Another goddess of indefinite character is Sūryā. She cannot be other than the daughter of the Sun, for both she and that deity appear in the same relation to the Aśvins. They are Sūryā's two husbands whom she chose; she or the maiden ascended their car. They possess Sūryā as their own, and she accompanies them on their car, whose three wheels perhaps correspond to its three occupants. Through their connexion with Sūryā they are invoked to conduct the bride home on their car, and it is said that when Savitṛ gave Sūryā to her husband, Soma was wooer, while the Aśvins were the groomsmen. The gods are also said to have given Pūṣan to Sūryā, who bears elsewhere the name Aśvinī. The sun as a female is a remarkable idea, and therefore Sūryā has often been taken as the dawn, but the name presents difficulties, since it does not contain any patronymic element; and, moreover, the conception contained in