Diti

Aditi means unbound, and it is built from a negative prefix and diti, a binding. Diti is that binding with the prefix taken off. The relationship between the two names is not a family resemblance; it is a grammatical operation, and it is the first thing anyone notices about her.

What follows from it is a real question about which came first. One reading takes Diti as an old goddess in her own right, the bond that Aditi releases, so that the pair are a genuine opposition inherited from an early stratum. The other takes her as a back formation: the abstract noun was extracted from the divine name to give the negation something to negate, and the goddess was assembled around it afterwards. The evidence favours the second more than the first, because Diti is almost invisible in the Rigveda. She is named a handful of times, usually in the same breath as Aditi and usually in a formula, and she has no hymn, no epithet and no story anywhere in the collection. A figure that old with that little attached to her is unusual.

Her career begins later, and it begins because the genealogists needed her. Once the Puranas organise the population of the cosmos into a single descent from the sage Kashyapa, two co-wives are required to produce two opposed families of powerful beings, and the two names already stand in opposition. Aditi bears the devas. Diti bears the Daityas, whose name is simply her own with a patronymic suffix. Whatever she was in the oldest material, in the literature that most readers meet she is the other mother, and the whole of the deva and asura rivalry runs through the difference between the two households.

The Puranic story most often told about Diti is a story about grief and about a vow. Her sons by Kashyapa have been killed by Indra, and she undertakes an observance so as to conceive a son who will kill him in turn, on the condition that she keeps the vow perfectly for a fixed term. Indra, who cannot break the observance from outside, attends on her, waits for a lapse, and when she sleeps at an hour the vow forbids he enters her womb and cuts the embryo with his thunderbolt. The pieces cry out. He cuts them again, and the fragments become the Maruts, the storm gods who then ride with him.

The story does several things at once, and none of them are flattering to anybody. It gives the Maruts an origin that binds them to the god they accompany. It puts Indra in the position of committing an act against a pregnant woman which the text does not present as heroic. And it lets a mother of the losing side produce, out of an act of revenge that fails, a set of gods who join the winning one. That is characteristic of how the tradition handles the deva and asura conflict: the two families are not good and evil but kin, and the traffic between them goes both ways.

It also gives Diti the only thing resembling a personality she has. Elsewhere she is a position in a genealogy. Here she is a bereaved parent whose attempt at redress is defeated by a technicality in her own vow, and whose defeat produces something the tradition then celebrates. The Daityas keep her name, the Maruts keep her body, and she keeps neither of them.