Prithviपृथ्वी

Prithvi — pṛthivī, the broad one, from a root meaning to spread out — is the earth.

In the Rigveda she is almost never alone. She is one half of Dyāvāpṛthivī, Heaven-and-Earth, a dual deity treated as a single word and addressed in about six hymns as the universal parents: the two bowls, the two worlds (rodasī), the father and the mother of everything, held apart by Indra or Varuna or Vishnu so that there is room for anything to live. One hymn — RV 5.84, three verses — is addressed to her by herself, and it praises her for bearing the weight of the mountains and for supporting what is heavy.

Her great hymn is not in the Rigveda at all. It is Atharvaveda 12.1, the Bhumi Sukta or Prithivi Sukta: sixty-three verses, the longest sustained treatment of the earth in Vedic literature and by common consent one of the finest. Its most quoted line is mātā bhūmiḥ putro ahaṃ pṛthivyāḥ — the earth is my mother, and I am the son of the earth — and it is cited in Indian environmental argument constantly, in parliament, in courtrooms and on posters.

After the Vedic period she does something almost no other deity in this tranche manages: she survives, under a new name. As Bhudevi or Bhumi she becomes a consort of Vishnu, is lifted from the ocean by the boar Varaha, stands beside Venkateswara at Tirumala, gives birth to Sita from a furrow and takes her back at the end, and receives a rite — Bhumi Puja — performed before nearly every building in India.

Dyaus, and a great Indo-European curiosity. Her partner Dyaus Pitṛ, Sky Father, is linguistically the most securely reconstructed deity in the entire Indo-European family: Dyēus Ph₂tḗr gives Vedic Dyauṣ Pitā, Greek Zeùs patḗr, Latin Iūpiter, Illyrian Dei-pátrous, and Germanic *Tīwaz (Norse Týr, whose name is the same word). He is the head of the pantheon in Greece and in Rome.

In India he is almost nothing. Dyaus has no hymn of his own in the Rigveda, no cult, no story worth the name, and appears chiefly in the dual with Prithvi. The reconstructed chief god of the Indo-Europeans arrived in India and was displaced — by Indra, and then by Varuna — before the hymns we have were composed.

That inversion is one of the most instructive facts in comparative Indo-European religion, and Prithvi's page is where it belongs, because she is what he is attached to.

The pair, and the separation. Heaven and Earth are described as having once been together and as having been pushed apart — by Indra, by Varuna, by Vishnu's stride, by the Angirases, depending on the hymn. The space between them is where everything lives. This is a widely distributed cosmogonic image and the Vedic version is among the oldest recorded.

The Atharvaveda's earth. AV 12.1 is a different order of composition from the Rigvedic material: long, detailed, and interested in the earth as a place people actually live on. It names her rocks, dust, sand, fields and forests; her villages and assemblies; her smells; the plants that grow on her and the tribes and languages she carries. It asks her to bear the ploughing, and it asks pardon for it. It also contains a request — that what is dug from her be replenished, and that the digging not go too deep — which is why it is so heavily cited now.

The transition to Bhudevi. Where most Vedic deities lost their office to a successor, Prithvi kept hers by changing employer. The mechanism was the Varaha myth: the earth, sunk under the cosmic waters, is raised by Vishnu in boar form on his tusk. That story makes her Vishnu's — rescued, and then consort — and it is attested from the Gupta period onward, with the Udayagiri panel of about 401 CE as its earliest monumental statement. From there she becomes Bhudevi, one of Vishnu's two wives, standing opposite Sridevi (Lakshmi) in temple after temple.

The element. Independently of all this, pṛthivī is one of the pancha mahabhuta, the five gross elements, in Samkhya and in every later Indian physics.

In the Vedic material, none. The earth is described but not pictured: broad, firm, unaged, patient, bearing weight, full of smells.

As Bhudevi, an established type. She is shown as a calm, richly dressed goddess, standing or seated, often with a lotus and sometimes with a pomegranate or a vessel of grain, in the posture of composure rather than of power. Her distinguishing feature is her placement:

• On Varaha's tusk or arm. The commonest and most powerful image in Indian art of this goddess: the colossal boar with a small female figure held on his tusk, elbow or shoulder. At Udayagiri she is a slight figure clinging to the boar's tusk while the waters and the assembled gods look on; at Khajuraho, Eran and Badami the composition recurs.
• Beside Vishnu, opposite Sridevi. In Vaishnava temples of the south, Vishnu stands between two consorts: Sridevi (Lakshmi) on his right, Bhudevi on his left. At Tirumala the two flank Venkateswara; at Srirangam and across the Sri Vaishnava temples the arrangement is standard, and the theology of the two — prosperity and patience, grace and forbearance — is developed at length in Sri Vaishnava commentary.
• Rising from the ground. In Ramayana narrative art, at the moment the earth opens to receive Sita.

Aniconic. Her most common form in actual worship is a pot of earth or a marked patch of ground at a Bhumi Puja, and the earth itself touched with the hand.

The gesture. Touching the ground and then one's forehead, on rising or before an undertaking, is her rite performed by more people than any temple observance. The Buddhist bhūmisparśa mudrā — the Buddha touching the earth to call her as witness against Mara — is the same gesture used for the same purpose in a different tradition.

Prithvi / Prithivi. The Vedic earth; the broad one.

Dyavaprithivi. The dual deity, Heaven-and-Earth, addressed as one. The Sanskrit dual makes this a single grammatical entity, and translations that split it lose the point.

Bhumi / Bhudevi. Her Puranic and living form: consort of Vishnu, raised by Varaha, mother of Narakasura and — in the Ramayana — of Sita.

Bhu. As one of the three vyahrtis — bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ — recited before the Gayatri and at the start of countless rites. Bhūḥ is the earth, and it is spoken hundreds of millions of times a day.

Prithvi the element. One of the five mahabhuta; the prithvi tattva of Samkhya, Ayurveda and Tantra; associated with the Muladhara chakra, with the sense of smell, and with the square in yantra geometry.

Vasudha, Vasundhara, Dharani, Kshiti, Medini, Urvi, Ira. Her many synonyms, several of which are common personal names. Vasundhara has an independent Buddhist cult in Nepal and Tibet as a goddess of abundance.

Sita's mother. Bhūmijā, born of the earth — the name is a statement of parentage, and the Ramayana closes by returning her.

Not Lakshmi. Sridevi and Bhudevi are distinct and stand on opposite sides of Vishnu. Sri Vaishnavism keeps them apart deliberately: one is prosperity and the other is forbearance, and the theology depends on the difference.

Held apart. The oldest: Heaven and Earth were together, and were separated so that there could be a world between them. The separator is variously named. It is a cosmogony of making room.

Varaha lifts her. The earth sinks under the waters — in most tellings because the asura Hiranyaksha has dragged her down. Vishnu takes the form of a boar, dives, finds her, and brings her up on his tusk. The story is told on the Varaha and Dashavatara pages; what belongs here is that the earth in it is a person who is drowning and is rescued, and that the tradition's central image of ecological catastrophe and recovery is exactly that.

Bhumi's son. By Varaha she bears Narakasura, who becomes a tyrant and is killed by Krishna. When he dies, Bhumi asks that his death be remembered as a day of light rather than of mourning — which is the origin, in one strand of the tradition, of Naraka Chaturdashi at Diwali. A mother asking that her son's killing be celebrated is a strange request, and the Puranas let it stand.

Sita, from the furrow and back. Janaka, ploughing a field for a sacrifice at Mithila, turns up a child in the furrow and names her Sita — the furrow. At the end of the Ramayana, having been asked once too often to prove herself, she calls on her mother, and the earth opens and takes her back. It is the most consequential appearance the earth makes in Indian literature, and the reader is meant to notice that the earth's answer to an unjust demand is to remove the person from the people making it.

Angaraka. In the Skanda Purana account a drop of Shiva's sweat falls on the earth and Mangala is born of it — which is why the planet Mars is called Bhauma, son of Bhumi, and why his page names two parents.

The pardon. Not a legend but a verse, and the one most people know: samudra-vasane devi parvata-stana-maṇḍale / viṣṇu-patni namas tubhyaṃ pāda-sparśaṃ kṣamasva me — goddess robed in the ocean, whose breasts are the mountains, wife of Vishnu, salutations to you; forgive me the touch of my feet. It is recited on waking, before the first step of the day.

The verse on waking. Pāda-sparśaṃ kṣamasva me — forgive me for stepping on you — recited by many Hindus before rising from bed, with the ground touched and the hand brought to the forehead. It is one of the most widely performed daily observances in India and it is addressed to this goddess.

Bhumi Puja. Performed before the ground is broken for a building: a puja at the site, the earth propitiated and asked permission, and in many versions a kalasha and offerings placed in the foundation. It is performed for houses, for factories, for bridges and for state infrastructure projects, and is one of the rare Hindu rites that has been adopted essentially universally across Indian public life regardless of the participants' own practice.

Ploughing rites. Halakarshana and the first-furrow observances of the agricultural calendar; Akshaya Tritiya and regional sowing festivals; and the Aadi and Pongal cycles in the south, where the earth and the field receive worship directly.

Bhudevi in temple worship. As Vishnu's consort she receives full temple puja at Tirumala, Srirangam, Kanchipuram and across the Sri Vaishnava tradition, with her own shrines, her own tirumanjanam and her own festival days.

Panchabhuta and yoga. As the prithvi tattva she is invoked in Tantric nyasa, in bhuta shuddhi, and in the meditation on the Muladhara.

Bhu, in every rite. Bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ, the three utterances, precede the Gayatri and open innumerable observances.

In modern usage. The Bhumi Sukta is quoted in Indian environmental campaigning, in judicial observations and in policy documents. This is a genuine contemporary afterlife; whether the citation always reflects the hymn's own concerns is another matter, and the hymn is longer and more agricultural than the excerpts suggest.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes.

As Bhudevi she is in thousands of temples, which makes her the great exception in this Vedic tranche.

Tirumala Venkateswara Temple (Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh) — Bhudevi and Sridevi flank the deity, and Bhudevi has her own observances.

Srirangam, Kanchipuram Varadaraja, Melukote, Guruvayur and the Sri Vaishnava divya desams — the two-consort arrangement is standard.

Bhudevi temples in her own right are uncommon but exist; the Bhoodevi shrines attached to Varaha temples are the usual form.

Varaha temples. Srimushnam (Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu), Simhachalam (Visakhapatnam district), Muktinath and the Varaha shrines of the Vaishnava circuits, where the boar is shown holding her.

Udayagiri Caves (Vidisha district, Madhya Pradesh) — the Varaha panel of about 401 CE, the earliest monumental image of this goddess in India, and one of the great works of Gupta sculpture.

Sita temples and Mithila. Sitamarhi (Bihar) and Janakpur (Nepal), where the furrow story is localised, and Punaura Dham, identified as the birthplace.

Eran, Khajuraho, Badami and Ellora carry major Varaha-and-Bhudevi panels.

Every building site in India, at the Bhumi Puja — which is, in volume, where she is actually worshipped.

The goddess who changed employer and survived. Ushas vanished. Mitra dwindled to a word. The Maruts stopped being mentioned. Prithvi is worshipped today, daily, by tens of millions, and the reason is that she was attached to Vishnu at the right moment by the Varaha myth. This is the clearest evidence in the tranche that a Vedic deity's disappearance was contingent on institutional accident, not on any decline in relevance. The earth did not become less important. She acquired a husband with temples.

And the sky did not. Dyaus, her partner, is the reconstructed head of the Indo-European pantheon and is a nonentity in India. The pair make the point together: the same cosmogonic couple, one absorbed and one abandoned.

Apology as a religious act. The single most characteristic thing about Prithvi worship is that it consists largely of asking pardon. Forgive me for stepping on you. Forgive me for ploughing you. Forgive me for digging. The Atharvaveda hymn asks that what is taken be replenished and that the digging not go too deep; the morning verse apologises for the weight of a foot. A religion that requires a daily apology to the ground is doing something specific, and it is not the same thing as reverence.

The environmental citation, honestly. Mātā bhūmiḥ putro ahaṃ pṛthivyāḥ is quoted constantly in Indian ecological argument, and it deserves to be. Two cautions belong with it. The Bhumi Sukta is an agricultural hymn by people who ploughed, quarried and cleared, and it asks the earth to bear that; it is not a hymn against use. And the existence of a beautiful ancient text is not by itself evidence about how any society has actually treated its land. The hymn is a resource for the argument, not a conclusion to it.

The earth's answer to injustice. The Ramayana's ending is the tradition's most severe use of this goddess. Sita, asked once too often to prove her innocence, does not argue; she asks her mother to take her, and the ground opens. The earth's response to a community that will not stop demanding proof is to remove the person from it. That is the sharpest thing the tradition has ever said with Prithvi, and it is worth remembering against the gentler readings of her.