Devalok ← All gods
Also calledNightNishaVibhavariUrmyaNakta

At a glance

TraditionVedic
FormThe starlit night herself

a goddess wearing all her glories, not the plain dark

EyesThe stars

with which she looks out on every place

Who Ratri is

Ratri is the Night. The Rigveda has exactly one hymn for her, eight verses near the end of the tenth book, and it is still recited today.

She is the daughter of the Sky, as Dawn is, and the two are sisters. The poets like to name them together, Dawn-and-Night, in a single word. They walk the same road in turn. Each makes room for the other, and neither keeps the sky.

The surprising thing about the Vedic Night is that she is not dark. The poet who sings to her sees a goddess arriving in all her finery, looking out over the world with many eyes. Readers have always taken the eyes to be the stars. She fills the valleys and the heights. And it is she, he says, who drives the darkness away with her light. The black, frightening dark is something separate from her, and she holds it off.

We have come home to you, Night, as birds come home to their nest in the tree.

Under her the whole world goes to rest. The villagers go in. Whatever walks and whatever flies settles down, even the hawks. Then comes the plain request that sits at the centre of the hymn. Keep the she-wolf and the wolf away. Keep the thief away. Be easy for us to cross. The poet speaks of the Night as of a river with a far bank, and the far bank is morning. At the end he hands her his hymn as a herdsman drives in his cows.

Elsewhere in the Rigveda she appears beside her sister. In the hymns to Dawn she is the dark one who gives up her house to the bright one. A poet in the fifth book even uses her as a messenger, and asks Night to carry his song to a king far away in the mountains.

The Atharvaveda has four more hymns to her. They are a householder's prayers, said for protection. They count the watchers who look down from her, by elevens, from ninety-nine to eleven, and they ask her to hand the sleepers safely on to the Dawn.

She is a small goddess beside Indra or Agni. But every creature in the Veda comes home to her once a day.

From the Vedas to the Puranas

What became of Ratri

Ratri never received a great temple cult under her own name, but she did not fade as her sister Dawn did. She was drawn into the worship of the great Goddess. Her Vedic hymn is recited to this day as the Ratri Sukta, often alongside the Devi Mahatmya, and the Puranas turn the Night into a dark goddess with work of her own to do.

The first steps are in the Vedic books themselves. The Atharvaveda gives her four protective hymns and calls her "mother". An appendix of extra verses was attached to her Rigveda hymn. Another Vedic story, told on Yama's page, says that the gods made the night so that his grieving sister could forget.

In the Mahabharata the Night shows her fearful side. On the night when Ashvatthama falls on the sleeping camp, the warriors see Kalaratri, the Death-Night, standing before them: a dark woman with a noose in her hand, leading away the dead.

The Puranas give her a story. In the Matsya Purana and the Skanda Purana, Brahma calls Ratri, who was born from his own body, and sends her into the unborn Parvati to make the child dark. Years later, when Parvati asks for a golden colour, the darkness steps out of her as a goddess, three-eyed, with a bell in her hand. Brahma gives her a lion and sends her to the Vindhya mountains to fight demons. The texts call her Kaushiki and Ekanamsha, and the Skanda Purana says she will be known as Chamunda.

The Devi Mahatmya, in the Markandeya Purana, takes the last step. When Brahma praises the great Goddess who holds Vishnu asleep, he calls her the Night of the world's ending, the Great Night and the Night of delusion. That hymn is known as the Tantric Ratri Sukta, and it stands in the recitation beside the Vedic one.

Today the name Kalaratri is given to the form of Durga honoured on the seventh day of Navaratri. The gentle, starlit Night of the Rigveda and the fierce Night of the Goddess are far apart in mood. The tradition keeps both, and uses the old hymn for each.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

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