The Child of the Waters

A poet sat beside a small fire and worked at a song.

He wanted it well made, and he wanted it to come from the heart, because the one it was meant for was hard to please and hard to see.

"I am sending my words out to win a prize," he said to the flames. "May the Child of the Waters take pleasure in them. Will he not understand a song, the one who made everything that is?"

Then he began to sing what he knew of the god.

"The rivers run together," he sang. "Some meet here, and others join them further on, and all of them fill one great store. In the middle of them he lies. The bright Waters stand all around the bright Child of the Waters."

The poet could see it as he sang. Far down, where no flame should be able to live, something was shining.

"The Waters are young women who are never sullen. They wait on him and make him beautiful, and he is young as they are. He needs no wood. He shines in the water with clear rays, and his clothing is melted butter."

The fire in front of the poet needed feeding every few minutes. The one in the deep did not.

"Three goddesses bring him his food," the poet sang. "He lies in the Waters and drinks their milk like a baby, and they kiss him. They are mothers for the first time, and he is their child."

The song grew larger.

"He lives far away, in strongholds no hand built, where no lie and no ill will can reach him. The horse was born there. The sunlight is his. All the other worlds are only branches of him, and the plants are born from him with all that they bear."

Then the poet looked up, away from the river, to where the clouds stood.

"The Child of the Waters has risen. He has put on the lightning and climbed into the lap of the curling cloud. The young ones, golden, carry his glory and move around him."

"He is golden," sang the poet. "Golden in body, golden to look at, golden in colour. He comes from a golden home. Those who give gold are giving him his food."

So the same god was under the river and in the cloud. He was a child and also a bull, the son of the Waters and also the one who gave them their young.

At the end the poet turned back to the fire on the ground.

"This is his fair name and his lovely face, and they grow in secret," he sang quietly. "But here the young women kindle him, and here his food is golden butter."

He laid on a few chips of wood and poured a little butter, and the flame rose.

"I make his back shine. I feed him and I praise him. The Child of the Waters has come in here, as if into the body of another."

The last line of the hymn does not name the Child of the Waters at all. It says simply: Agni. Whoever the shining one in the water was, the poet found him again in his own fire.

The Child of the Waters had a moment of his own in the great Soma sacrifice, and the priests' handbooks describe it.

Soma had to be pressed with water, and the water had to be brought with honour. Some of it was drawn the evening before and kept overnight. More was drawn fresh in the morning. When the time came, the priest called the Adhvaryu went down to the water and poured an offering into it. The offering was for the Child of the Waters.

"Go to the water, priests," says the hymn that was chanted then. "Worship the Child of the Waters with your gifts. He shines in the floods with no fuel. He will give you a wave made holy."

The Adhvaryu came back with the jars. The chanting priest, the Hotri, was waiting for him with a question.

"Adhvaryu, have you found the Waters?"

"They have indeed bowed to us," the Adhvaryu answered.

The Brahmana explains the question. The Waters are the sacrifice, so the Hotri is really asking whether the sacrifice has been found. Then the Hotri stood up, as a man stands when someone greater than himself comes in. He walked behind the jars, still chanting. "The mothers go along their paths," he sang.

Once, the Aitareya Brahmana says, the two kinds of water quarrelled.

"We shall carry the sacrifice first," said the water of the evening.

"No, we shall," said the water of the morning.

The sage Bhrigu saw that the Waters were at odds. He settled it with a single verse, and the verse came from the hymn to the Child of the Waters: some come together, and others join them. The two waters were poured into one cup, and they have carried the sacrifice together ever since.

Last of all the jars were set down on the sacred grass, and the hymn asked the Waters to sit there together with their Child.