Who Aditi is
Aditi has no hymn of her own in the Rigveda, and yet she is named in it about eighty times. She comes in with her sons. When a poet calls on Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman, he very often calls on their mother in the same breath.
Her name means "unbound". Diti is a tie, and a-diti is what has no tie on it. So the first thing the poets ask of her is freedom. A man who has done wrong feels himself roped, and he asks Aditi and her sons to loosen the rope. One hymn begs to be released "like a thief who has been bound". Another speaker, in great danger, asks which god will give him back to great Aditi, so that he may see his father and mother again.
She is also simply a mother. The hymns call her the mother of kings and the mother of strong sons. They ask her to guard the herd by day and by night, to keep children alive, to give a wide and safe shelter. One poet compares her to a well-oared ship that never leaks, on which people can cross to safety.
Then there are verses where she grows until nothing is left outside her. The most famous one says that she is the sky and the air between, the mother, the father and the son, all the gods and all the peoples, everything that has been born and everything still to be born.
One strange hymn about the beginning of things says that Daksha was born from Aditi and Aditi from Daksha. The same hymn says she bore eight sons, went up to the gods with seven, and put the eighth aside. The poets do not explain either riddle.
Scholars have long argued about what she was at first. Some read her as the open sky, some as the earth, some as the idea of freedom given a mother's face. The hymns themselves do not choose.
Aditi is the sky and Aditi is the air. Aditi is mother, father and son. Aditi is all that has been born and all that will be.