Father Sky and Mother Earth

It was a festival day, and the poet had a hymn to make.

The fire was lit and the offerings were ready. Other poets on other days sang to Indra, who had a dragon to kill, or to Agni, who was burning there in front of them. This poet looked past the fire. He looked up, and then he looked down at his own feet.

"I praise Heaven and Earth," he began. "The two great ones, the wise ones. The gods are their children."

That was the first thing to say about them, and the strangest. Every god the people prayed to had come from somewhere. They had come from these two. The sky was the Father, and the ground was the Mother.

"I think of the Father's kind mind," the poet sang, "and of the Mother's great power. These two parents made the world of living things, and they keep all creatures safe."

He tried to say what they looked like. They were two great bowls, he said, one above and one below, and the bright Sun travelled between them on his fixed path. Another poet called them a bull and a spotted cow. A third said they dripped with honey and butter and milk, and that they stood apart from each other because the god Varuna had ordered it so.

Then came the wonder of it.

"They do not move," sang the poet. "They have no feet. And yet they hold up all these children of theirs who have feet and who walk."

Day and Night rolled on over them like a cart, and lay in their lap like twin sisters. Nothing happened anywhere that did not happen between those two.

One poet, whose hymn is the longest of them, started his song with a question.

"Which of these two is the elder, and which came later? How were they born? You wise ones, who knows it?"

Nobody at the fire answered him. The hymn does not answer either. It was an honest thing to ask. A child knows that his father and mother are older than he is, but he was not there to see which of them came first.

Other poets had their guesses. One said that the cleverest of all the gods must have made these two, measured them out and set them firm on pillars that never wear away. But that only moved the question. If the sky and the earth are the parents of the gods, how could a god have built them? The Rigveda leaves both sayings standing side by side.

The poet with the question did not wait to settle it. He had something more pressing to ask for.

"Protect us, Heaven and Earth, from fearful danger."

He said it again at the end of the next verse, and again at the end of the one after. He said it seven times, like a child tugging at a sleeve.

"As a son is safe in the lap of his parents, keep us safe. If we have done any wrong to the gods, or to a friend, or to the head of our house, let this hymn make it right. Protect us, Heaven and Earth, from fearful danger."

Then he finished, and he sounded sure of himself.

"I have said this truth aloud for everyone to hear. Father and Mother, stay near us. Keep us from blame and from trouble. Let us find food in plenty."

That was all he asked. He did not ask them to fight for him or to come down to the feast. They were already there, one over his head and one under his feet, as they had been on every day of his life.

Another poet put the whole matter into one line of a different hymn, and people have remembered it.

"O Heaven our Father, Earth our guileless Mother, bless us."

The priests who came after the poets liked to explain things. They saw that the sky was far above the earth, and they asked whether it had always been so. In one of their books, the Aitareya Brahmana, there is an answer a few lines long.

Once, it says, these two worlds were together.

Then they went apart.

The text does not say why. It gives no quarrel and no fault on either side. It only says what happened next, and what happened was bad for everyone.

No rain fell. No warmth came down. The five peoples of the earth fell out with one another and could not agree on anything. With the sky gone its own way and the earth gone hers, nothing passed between them, and everything that lived in the middle suffered for it.

The gods saw this, and they did what families do.

"Come back together," they said, and they brought the two worlds face to face.

The sky and the earth agreed. They did more than meet. They married, and the Brahmana calls it the wedding of the gods.

A marriage needs gifts going both ways, and the text is careful to list them.

The earth sends up smoke to the sky from her fires. The sky sends down rain to the earth.

The earth gave the sky a place for worship, and she set it in the moon. That is the dark patch you can see on the moon's face, the Brahmana says, and it is why people hold their sacrifices in the waxing half of the month, hoping to win that place.

The sky gave the earth salt. That is why a herdsman looking for good pasture asks first whether there is salty ground there, since his cattle will thrive on it.

So the two worlds turned toward each other again, and the rain and the heat came back.