Vedic era
Vedic · The golden god who shines in the depths of the water with no wood to burn
Apam Napat
Apam Napat means the child of the Waters. He is a god who lives in water and shines there like a flame. One whole hymn of the Rigveda is his (2.35), two verses of a hymn to the Waters call on him (10.30), and his name comes up about thirty times in all.
in look and in colour, and born from a golden home
Who Apam Napat is
Apam Napat means the child of the Waters. He is a god who lives in water and shines there like a flame. One whole hymn of the Rigveda is his (2.35), two verses of a hymn to the Waters call on him (10.30), and his name comes up about thirty times in all.
The hymn describes him closely. He is young, and the Waters are young women who stand around him, adorn him and feed him. He drinks their milk like a baby. He is golden in every way, and he comes from a golden birthplace. He burns with no wood, and his clothing is melted butter. He lives far off, in strongholds that no hand built, where lies and ill will cannot reach. Then the hymn lifts him out of the river into the sky. He puts on the lightning and climbs into the lap of the cloud. It also calls him the maker of all things, and says the other worlds are only his branches.
Who is he? The hymn itself answers in its last verse, which is spoken to Agni. Elsewhere the Rigveda calls Agni the child of the Waters outright (3.9, 10.8), and tells how fire once hid in the water. Yet other verses name Agni and Apam Napat side by side as two. The poets were content to leave it so.
His usual company is a set of dim, ancient powers: the Serpent of the Deep, the One-Footed Goat, Trita and the sun god Savitar. He also guards the honey-sweet wave of the Waters that is Indra's drink (7.47).
Scholars have read him in different ways. Macdonell took him for lightning, the fire hidden in the rain cloud. Oldenberg thought he was first a water spirit who was later joined to Agni. Those are their readings. The hymn gives the picture and does not explain it.
Golden in body, golden to look upon, golden in colour is the Child of the Waters.
From the Vedas to the Puranas
What became of Apam Napat
Apam Napat did not grow into a god of the Puranas. He was already half merged with Agni in the Rigveda, and in later India his name lives on as a title of fire and in one moment of the Soma sacrifice, when an offering is made to him in the water.
That moment is described in the Brahmanas. The hymn that calls on him (Rigveda 10.30) became the Aponaptriya, the chant for fetching the Soma water. The Aitareya Brahmana (2.19) tells how it was first seen by Kavasha, a man the sages drove into the desert to die of thirst, and how the river Sarasvati ran all around him when he sang it. The Kaushitaki Brahmana (12.1 to 12.3) tells the same in its own way, and adds that the hymn drove the Rakshasas from the fords. Both order the priest to pour an offering for the Child of the Waters before the water is drawn.
The picture of fire inside water passed into the stories of Agni. The Rigveda, the Taittiriya Samhita, the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Mahabharata all tell how Agni hid in the waters and was brought out again, and the epic explains hot springs by it. Devalok tells that story under Agni, as The Fire That Hid in the Water.
Outside India the name survived whole. The Avesta of ancient Iran honours Apam Napat as a tall, shining lord with swift horses who lives beneath the waters. In its hymn to the kingly Glory (Yasht 19), the fire god and a three-mouthed dragon fight over that Glory until it escapes into the sea, and there the Child of the Waters seizes it and keeps it safe in the deep. He is honoured in Zoroastrian prayers to this day. Scholars take the shared name as a sign that this god is older than the parting of the Indian and Iranian peoples.