Vedic era
Vedic · The Waters, a company of goddesses who are mothers, healers and washers-away of wrong
Apas
Apas means the Waters. The word is plural, and the Rigveda never makes one goddess out of it. The Waters are many, and they are always addressed together, as mothers or as young women. They have no faces, weapons or family history.
Apas means the Waters. The word is plural, and the Rigveda never makes one goddess out of it. The Waters are many, and they are always addressed together, as mothers or as young women. They have no faces, weapons or family history. They are simply water, wherever it is found, treated as holy and as alive.
Four hymns of the Rigveda are theirs (7.47, 7.49, 10.9 and 10.30), and verses to them are scattered through many more. The poets count their kinds. Some Waters come from heaven, some are dug from the earth, and some run free by themselves, and all of them hurry to the sea. Indra dug their channels with his thunderbolt after he freed them from the dragon. The sun draws them up with his rays. King Varuna walks in their midst and looks down on the truth and the lies of men.
They are called the most motherly of beings. One hymn asks them for their sap as children ask loving mothers. They are healers: the god Soma tells a singer that every medicine lives in the Waters. And they clean more than the body. The singer asks them to carry away whatever wrong he has done, whatever lie he has told and whatever false oath he has sworn.
They hold fire as well. Agni entered the Waters, and a golden god called the Child of the Waters shines in their depths without fuel. They also hold a wave sweeter than honey, which was the first drink of Indra.
Beside the Waters as a group, the Rigveda praises rivers by name. A whole hymn goes to the Sindhu, the Indus (10.75), and names the Ganga and Yamuna in passing. In another the rivers Vipash and Shutudri answer a singer who begs them to let his people cross.
You Waters are kind. Give us strength, and give us your sweetest sap, as mothers do who love their children.
From the Vedas to the Puranas
What became of Apas
The Waters did not become a single later goddess. The Vedic company of nameless mothers gave way to rivers with names, faces and stories of their own, above all Ganga, while water itself went on being used and addressed in worship much as the Rigveda addressed it.
The Brahmanas keep the Waters at the centre of the ritual. Water for the Soma is fetched with a whole hymn (Rigveda 10.30), and the Aitareya Brahmana (2.19 to 2.20) and the Kaushitaki Brahmana (12.1 to 12.3) say plainly that the Waters are the sacrifice. The Shatapatha Brahmana uses water wherever something has to be made good, calling it a means of putting things right.
In the Mahabharata the rivers act as persons. The Vipasha breaks the cords of the grieving sage Vasishtha and puts him ashore, and the Shatadru flees from him in a hundred streams (Adi Parva 179). The Sarasvati rises inside a dry well to lift out the sage Trita (Shalya Parva 36). In the epics and Puranas, Varuna, who only walked among the Waters in the Rigveda, becomes lord of the sea, and Ganga comes down from heaven through the hair of Shiva. Philosophy keeps the old word in another way. Ap, water, is counted as one of the five great elements of which the world is made.
The hymns never went out of use. The first verses of Rigveda 10.9 are recited in the daily sandhya prayer while water is sprinkled over the body, a step known as marjana. At Varanasi lamps are offered to the Ganga every evening at Dashashwamedh Ghat. Twelve rivers each have a Pushkaram festival once in twelve years, a custom that comes from medieval astrology and is not in the early texts, and in the calendar of the stars the Waters are the deity of the asterism Purva Ashadha.