Apasआपः

Apas — āpaḥ, feminine, and always plural — are the Waters.

Not a river, not an ocean, not a god of water: the waters themselves, addressed in the plural as a company of goddesses. Four hymns of the Rigveda are theirs, and they are invoked in dozens more.

What the hymns call them is consistent and simple. They are mothers (mātaraḥ); they are young (yahvīḥ); they are purifiers (pāvakāḥ); they carry away what is foul and what has been done wrong; they are kindly (mayobhuvaḥ) and they hold within them both amrita, the deathless, and bheṣaja, the substance that makes well.

And of every deity described anywhere in this encyclopedia, they are the one whose worship has never been interrupted. RV 10.9 begins āpo hi ṣṭhā mayobhuvaḥ — O Waters, you are indeed kindly — and that verse is recited in the achamana, the sipping of water that opens almost every Hindu rite; in the marjana, the sprinkling; in the daily bath; at consecrations; at purificatory rites; and at temple abhisheka. It is among the most frequently spoken Sanskrit verses in the world.

No temple was ever built to them, and none was needed. Their shrine is any water at all.

Feminine and plural, from the beginning. Sanskrit has no singular for this deity: āpaḥ is a plural noun and the goddesses are grammatically many. That is not a detail — it shapes everything. The Waters are never a person, never have a biography, and are addressed as a collective of mothers, which is the register the hymns keep to throughout.

Cosmogonically prior. In several of the Rigveda's creation passages the waters are already there. RV 10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta, describes an initial state as salilaṃ sarvam, all water, undistinguished; RV 10.121 has the waters bearing the golden germ, Hiranyagarbha; and the Brahmanas repeatedly begin an account with the waters and a desire arising in them. In Indian cosmogony water is generally not created — it is what creation happens in.

Varuna's element, and Apam Napat's. Varuna dwells in them, and their moral character — the removal of anṛta, falsehood, and of the fault a person has incurred — is borrowed from him. Apam Napat, the child of the waters, is a fire that lives inside them and has his own page.

Medicine and immortality. RV 1.23.19–20 states the claim that has echoed longest: apsu antar amṛtam apsu bheṣajam — in the waters is the deathless; in the waters is the healing substance — and asks that the waters make the body strong so that one may see the sun for a long time. The line is the ancestor of the Indian association of water with both purity and health, and of the entire tirtha system.

Purity, and what kind. The Vedic waters remove two things that later thought separates: dirt and fault. The hymns ask them to carry off what is foul, and in the same breath to carry off false speech, the wrong done to a friend, and the curse. That the same act washes both is the foundation of Hindu ritual purity, and it is stated in the oldest layer without any sense that two different operations are being described.

The rivers, later. The specific river goddesses — Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Narmada, Godavari, Sindhu, Kaveri — grow out of this stratum and eventually eclipse it. The verse recited at every Hindu bath names those seven and asks them to be present in this water: gaṅge ca yamune caiva godāvari sarasvati / narmade sindhu kāveri jale'smin sannidhiṃ kuru. That verse is post-Vedic; the idea that any water can be made to hold all sacred water is pure Apas.

None, and none possible. The Waters are plural, formless and grammatically feminine, and no Indian tradition has attempted to depict them as a group.

What stands in for iconography is a set of vessels and gestures which are among the most familiar objects in Hindu practice:

The kalasha. A pot of water with mango leaves and a coconut, established at the start of almost every rite. The pot is the deity's seat and, in the ritual's own terms, contains all waters.

The achamana. Water sipped three times from the right palm, with prescribed formulae, before any observance. Performed hundreds of millions of times a day.

The panchapatra and uddharini. The small vessel and spoon on every household shrine.

The arghya. Water offered from cupped hands toward the sun at the sandhya, and toward a guest at the door.

The river itself. The ghat, the step, and the act of standing in the water at waist height with hands joined. This is the Waters' shrine and there are thousands of miles of it.

In later personification. Where water is given a body in Indian art it is a river goddess — Ganga on her makara, Yamuna on her tortoise, flanking a temple doorway — or Varuna with the makara and the noose. Both are descendants; neither is Apas.

Apas, the Waters. The Vedic plural goddesses.

Apah as a Vasu. One of the eight Vasus is Āpa — the waters as a member of that company. See the Vishvedevas page for the distinction between the Vasus and the all-gods.

The river goddesses. Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati and the rest. Each has her own cult, her own mythology and, in the case of Ganga and Yamuna, her own page here. They are the Waters made particular.

Varuna. Lord of the waters in the classical scheme, and the deity to whom water rites are addressed when a deity is required.

Apam Napat. The fire in the water; his own page.

Tirtha. The most consequential later form of the idea: a tīrtha is a crossing place, a ford, and the word for a place of pilgrimage in every Indian language derives from the act of getting across water. That the general Indian word for a holy place means "a place where you can cross a river" is the deepest mark the Waters left on the religion.

Prithvi's counterpart in the elements. As ap, water is one of the five mahabhuta, associated with taste, with the Svadhisthana chakra, and with the crescent in yantra geometry.

Not Varuni, and not Ap the ocean. Varuni is a distinct goddess, and samudra, the ocean, is a place rather than this deity.

The Waters have very little narrative of their own — they are the medium in which other stories happen — but they are present at the beginning of nearly every important one.

Before anything. The Nasadiya Sukta (RV 10.129) describes a state before being and non-being in which there was salilaṃ sarvam, water everywhere, undistinguished, and something covered by emptiness that came to be by the power of heat. Water is what is there before the question of existence is settled.

Hiranyagarbha. RV 10.121: the waters, at the beginning, bore the golden germ and brought forth Agni; the hymn's refrain asks kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema — to which god shall we offer? See the Brahma page, which owns Prajapati.

Held back by Vritra. The Rigveda's central myth is a story about water being withheld. The serpent Vritra encloses the waters in the mountain, and Indra kills him with the vajra, and the waters go free — the hymns say they went forward like lowing cows to their calves. The Waters are the prize of the most-told story in the collection, and their release is what makes Indra the greatest god in it.

Apam Napat within them. The fire that lives in the water, golden, shining without fuel, whom the waters nourish. His hymn (RV 2.35) is the most concentrated Waters material in the Rigveda.

The waters carry away the wrong. RV 10.9 and 1.23 ask the waters to carry off what is false, what has been sworn falsely, what one has done to a friend. The image is of fault as something physically removable, borne downstream. It is the same idiom as the Adityas' noose and untying, in a different medium.

And the flood. Manu, warned by the fish, rides out the deluge — the story that opens the Dashavatara. The waters there are destructive and are still not evil; they are what remains when everything else has gone, and what the boat floats on.

Continuously, universally, and several times a day. Of every deity in this encyclopedia, the Waters have the strongest claim to unbroken worship, and the reason is that their rite is washing.

Achamana. Water sipped three times before any observance, with the names of the deity. The opening act of essentially every Hindu rite.

Snana. The bath, and the verses said during it. The seven-river verse — gaṅge ca yamune caiva... — asks the great rivers to be present in this water, which is the whole theology of Apas in one line: all waters are the Waters.

Marjana. Sprinkling with darbha grass; āpo hi ṣṭhā is the verse used, and it is Rigveda 10.9.

Abhisheka. The pouring of water over an image, which is the central act of temple worship across India, and over a person at a coronation or an initiation.

Punyahavachana. The purificatory rite that opens weddings, house-warmings and samskaras, conducted over a kalasha.

Tarpana. Water offered to the gods, the sages and the ancestors, poured from the hands — daily in some traditions, and at Pitru Paksha by very large numbers.

Arghya at the sandhya. Water thrown toward the sun at the junctures.

Tirtha snana. Bathing at a river or tank at a festival: Kumbh Mela, Chhath, Makar Sankranti, Ganga Dussehra, Kartik Purnima and the great bathing days, which move tens of millions of people to the water.

A necessary note. The tradition's own vocabulary calls water pāvaka, purifying, and bheṣaja. DharmSetu records this as religious practice and makes no claim about health. Many Indian rivers and tanks are severely polluted; bathing in them carries real risk, and the ritual literature's language about purity is not a statement about water quality.

The Waters have no temple and need none, but they have more sacred sites than any deity in India.

The tirthas. Every tīrtha in India is theirs by etymology and by function: a crossing place at water. Varanasi, Prayagraj, Haridwar, Nashik, Ujjain (the four Kumbh sites); Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath; Rameswaram, Kanyakumari, Dwarka, Puri; Pushkar's lake; Kurukshetra's tanks; the Godavari at Nashik and the Kaveri at Srirangam and Talakaveri.

The temple tank. Nearly every substantial South Indian temple has one — the pushkarini, teppakulam or kulam — and it is a functioning part of the temple, not an ornament. Madurai's Potramarai Kulam, Kapaleeshwarar's tank in Chennai and Thanjavur's are among the best known.

Ghats. The stepped riverfronts of Varanasi, Haridwar, Ujjain, Maheshwar and hundreds of towns; and the baolis and stepwells of Gujarat and Rajasthan — Rani ki Vav at Patan, Chand Baori at Abhaneri — which are water architecture of the highest order.

Wells and springs. The nāga shrines at springs, the kunds of the Himalaya, Muktinath's hundred and eight spouts, and the sacred groves whose function is to protect a water source.

Chhath ghats. Where the offering is made standing in the water at sunset and sunrise.

See the Ganga, Yamuna and Varuna pages for the particular deities who took over this ground.

The deity that never lapsed. Ushas disappeared. Mitra became a word. Parjanya became a cloud. The Waters have been worshipped, in the same words, without interruption, for as long as there has been anyone in India to worship anything — because their rite is washing, and washing did not stop. RV 10.9 is spoken more often today than it was three thousand years ago, simply because there are more people.

Purity as a physical operation. The Vedic waters carry away dirt and fault in the same act, and the tradition has never fully separated the two. This is the origin of one of Hinduism's most characteristic features and one of its most contested: a conception of purity that is at once hygienic, ritual and moral, in which what is wrong can be washed off. It has produced the tirtha system, the daily bath as a religious act, and the finest water architecture in the world. It has also produced the machinery of ritual pollution and the treatment of whole communities as sources of it — a use of the same idea that Indian reform movements, the Constitution and a very long argument inside the tradition have been contesting for more than a century. Both consequences come from the same root, and an honest page says so.

All water is the water. The bathing verse asks the seven rivers to be present in this bucket. That move — the universal made locally available by invitation — is one of the most useful things Hinduism does, and it is why the tradition travels: a river in a bathroom in another country is still the Ganga if the verse is said. The same logic underlies prana pratishtha, the invitation of a deity into an image, and the mental puja performed with no materials at all.

Water before existence. That the Rigveda's most philosophical hymn describes the beginning as undistinguished water, and that Indian cosmogony generally does not bother to create it, gives water a peculiar status: it is not one of the things that were made. Whatever the physics of it, the intuition is old and widely shared, and it is why the Waters can be mothers of everything without having a mother themselves.

And a caution the tradition needs. The rivers this deity is made of are, in the twenty-first century, among the most polluted in the world. A religion that calls water pāvaka and then poisons it has a problem its own texts are unusually well equipped to name — the Atharvaveda's earth hymn already asks that what is taken be replenished. Recording the reverence without recording the state of the rivers would be a description of the past.