Ratriरात्रि

Ratri is the Night, and her hymn — Rigveda 10.127, eight verses — is one of the most quietly beautiful things in the collection.

It begins: rātrī vy akhyad āyatī purutrā devy akṣabhiḥ — Night, coming on, has looked about in many directions with her eyes, and has put on all her glories. The eyes are the stars.

What follows is a description of evening in a village. She fills the wide space, the heights and the depths; she pushes back her sister the Dawn, and darkness comes. The people go home. The birds go to their nests and the cattle to their stalls. And then the hymn asks her for something:

Keep off the she-wolf and the wolf; keep off the thief; be easy for us to cross — sutarā bhava — and, in the last verse, take away the darkness as one takes away a debt.

That is the whole of it, and its tone is the point. In a great many religions the night is a horror. Here she is a goddess who is asked politely for a safe passage, on the understanding that she will be paid off at daybreak. There is no terror in it and no evil in her.

And unlike almost every other deity in this Vedic tranche, she did not disappear. Her hymn is recited today, at every full reading of the Durga Saptashati.

Night as a benign presence. The Vedic treatment of Ratri is worth setting against what is usual. She is devī, a goddess; she is called sunṛtā, gracious and truthful; she is susaṃdṛś, lovely to look at; and the danger the hymn names is not her but what moves in her — the wolf, the thief. She is asked to keep those off, which makes her a protectress rather than a threat.

The Atharvaveda's Ratri hymns (19.47–50) develop the protective aspect further, asking her to guard the sleeper through the watches and naming the terrors she keeps at bay.

The pair with Ushas. Dawn and Night are sisters, and are addressed together as Ushasanakta or Naktoshasa — a dual deity with its own small set of hymns. The Rigveda describes them as taking their turns without conflict: one goes and the other comes, of one mind, tireless, wearing different colours. Two goddesses who alternate an office without rivalry is a rarer image in world religion than it should be, and the hymns clearly take pleasure in it.

The debt. The closing verse asks Night to take the darkness away ṛṇaṃ na, as a debt is taken away, and the image assumes a transaction that will be settled. It is the Vedic moral idiom — obligation, binding, release — applied to the passage of a night.

Ratri in the Shakta tradition. This is where she survives, and it happened in two stages.

First, the Durga Saptashati — the Devi Mahatmya — opens with Yoganidra, the sleep of Vishnu, personified as the Goddess. Vishnu sleeps on Shesha in the cosmic ocean; the asuras Madhu and Kaitabha arise; Brahma praises the goddess of sleep and asks her to leave Vishnu, so that he may wake and fight. That hymn of Brahma's, within the text, is itself known as a Ratri Sukta, and identifies the Goddess as Mahamaya, Yoganidra and Ratri.

Second, the ritual apparatus around the Saptashati recitation attaches the Vedic Ratri Sukta — RV 10.127 — as one of its angas, alongside the Devi Sukta (RV 10.125), the Devi Kavacha, the Argala Stotra and the Kilaka. So a reader performing a full Saptashati path recites both the Rigvedic hymn to the Night and the Puranic hymn to the Goddess-as-sleep.

Kalaratri. The seventh of the Navadurga, worshipped on the seventh night of Navaratri — dark, terrible and protective. She is a very different figure from the Vedic Ratri, and the continuity is of name and of the idea that night is a power, not of character.

No image in the Vedic material, and the hymn's descriptions are entirely of the sky.

Eyes. Her single memorable attribute: she comes akṣabhiḥ, with eyes, looking about in many directions. The stars are the eyes, and the image is of being observed rather than of being hidden — the exact opposite of what darkness usually means.

Glories put on. Viśvā adhi śriyo'dhita — she has put on all her splendours, as a woman puts on ornaments. The same simile the Ushas hymns use of the dawn, applied to the other end of the day.

Filling the space. She is described as filling the wide expanse, the high places and the low, and as coming near so that the darkness is palpable — ā nas tamas.

In later Shakta art. Where a night goddess is depicted it is Kalaratri, seventh of the Navadurga: dark as night, dishevelled hair, riding a donkey, with a scimitar and an iron hook, three eyes, and flames from her nostrils — an image of a quite different order, and one produced by a much later tradition. Yoganidra, the goddess as Vishnu's sleep, is shown emerging from the sleeping Vishnu in Devi Mahatmya manuscript painting and in Pahari sets.

Aniconic. Her practical form in worship is the recitation itself, at night.

Ratri of RV 10.127. The Vedic night; the protectress.

Ushasanakta / Naktoshasa. The dual goddess, Dawn-and-Night, addressed as one.

Ratri in the Atharvaveda. The guardian of the sleeper, invoked against night terrors.

Ratri as Yoganidra and Mahamaya. The Devi Mahatmya's identification: the Goddess as the sleep that holds Vishnu, who must be asked to release him. This is the theologically weightiest form — sleep as a cosmic power that even Vishnu is subject to — and it is the doorway by which Ratri entered Shaktism.

Kalaratri. Seventh of the Navadurga, worshipped on the seventh night of Navaratri. Related by name and by function, unrelated in character.

Maharatri, Moharatri, Kalaratri, Darunaratri. In Shakta reckoning, the great nights — associated in the Devi Mahatmya's scheme with the three principal episodes and with the Goddess's forms.

Shivaratri and Navaratri. The two great Hindu observances named for nights rather than days. Neither is Ratri's festival, but both belong to the same intuition: that the night is when the significant thing happens.

Nirrti. Sometimes confused with her, and quite distinct: Nirrti is dissolution and misfortune, and is worshipped so that she departs. Ratri is worshipped so that she is kind. See the Nirrti page.

Yoganidra and the waking of Vishnu. The Devi Mahatmya's first charita, and Ratri's one substantial narrative.

At the end of a cosmic age Vishnu lies asleep on Shesha in the waters. From the wax of his ears arise the asuras Madhu and Kaitabha, who move to kill Brahma, seated on the lotus from Vishnu's navel. Brahma cannot wake Vishnu, because the sleep on him is not ordinary sleep — it is the Goddess, Yoganidra, who has entered his eyes.

So Brahma praises her, not him. He addresses her as svāhā, svadhā, the syllable, the night of the destruction of the world, the great night and the night of delusion; he calls her the cause of everything and the power by which the universe is bound; and he asks her to withdraw from Vishnu's eyes so that Vishnu may wake and fight.

She does. Vishnu wakes, fights Madhu and Kaitabha for five thousand years, and kills them by a stratagem she supplies.

The theological content is unusually direct. The supreme Vishnu is asleep and cannot wake himself; the Goddess is what is holding him; and Brahma's recourse is to petition her. The Devi Mahatmya opens with this deliberately, before any battle, because it establishes the entire text's claim in a single episode.

The village at evening. The Rigvedic hymn's own "narrative", such as it is: the people go home, the birds go to their nests, the cattle come in, and someone on the road asks for a safe crossing. It is a domestic scene and it is the whole content of the hymn, which is why it has lasted.

And the wolf. The one danger named. Vṛkam — the wolf — and vṛkī, the she-wolf, and the thief. The hymn is spoken by somebody who is outside after dark.

In the Durga Saptashati. Her living use, and a substantial one. The full Saptashati path — performed at Navaratri in households and temples across northern, eastern and western India — is framed by angas, and the Ratri Sukta is among them, recited alongside the Devi Sukta.

Within the text itself, the Brahma-stuti to Yoganidra in the first chapter is likewise called a Ratri Sukta and is recited as part of the whole.

Navaratri. Nine nights, and the seventh belongs to Kalaratri in the Navadurga scheme.

Ratri jagarana. The night vigil — staying awake and reciting or singing through the night — is a major form of Hindu observance: at Maha Shivratri, at Navaratri, at jagratas for the goddess across the Hindi belt, and at Kalaratri observances. The vigil is not addressed to Ratri, but it is a religion of the night that she is the earliest expression of.

In the Atharvaveda's usage. The night-protection verses were employed against nightmare and against the terrors of the dark; the ratri-sukta of the Atharvaveda has a domestic, apotropaic function.

In Vedic recitation. RV 10.127 is chanted in the pathashala tradition and is a common choice for demonstration, being short and much liked.

No temple, no image, no festival of her own.

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

None dedicated to Ratri.

Where she is present:

Every Devi temple at Navaratri, where the Saptashati is recited with its angas — which is a very large number of buildings for nine nights of the year, twice a year.

Kalaratri shrines within Navadurga circuits. The Navadurga temples of Varanasi include a Kalaratri temple at Kalika Gali, visited on the seventh day of Navaratri.

Shakti Peethas and Devi temples generally, where the Yoganidra episode is part of the recited text.

Vedic recitation schools, where the tenth mandala is chanted.

As with the rest of this tranche, her presence is in a text that is read aloud rather than in a building. What is unusual about Ratri is that the text is still read aloud by very large numbers of people, which is more than can be said for Ushas, Mitra or the Maruts.

A night that is not the enemy. This is the page's first and best point. An enormous amount of religious literature treats darkness as the domain of evil and the dawn as its defeat. The Rigveda's night hymn does nothing of the kind. She is a goddess who arrives adorned, who sends everyone safely home, who is asked to keep the wolf off, and who will be repaid at morning. The only negative thing in the hymn is a request that she be easy to get across — which is what one says about a river, not about an enemy.

Watched, not hidden. The stars are her eyes. Night in this hymn is the time when one is most observed, not least — which inverts the usual moral geography of darkness and fits the Vedic world, where the Adityas do not blink and nothing done in secret is private.

Two sisters, no rivalry. Ushas and Ratri hold the same office in turn and the hymns are explicit that they do not quarrel. Given how much of the world's mythology is organised around the conflict of light and dark, a tradition that made them sisters taking turns is doing something distinctive, and it is worth noticing that Indian religion never developed a serious dualism of that kind.

The Vedic goddess who made the crossing. Ushas is gone. Vac was absorbed. Aditi became a genealogy. Ratri is recited at Navaratri, in her own Rigvedic words, by people performing a Puranic Shakta liturgy — because the Shakta tradition went back to the oldest layer and took what it could use. Ratri and Vac are the two Vedic goddesses it took, and they are the two who are still spoken.

Sleep as a power. The Devi Mahatmya's use of her is the most ambitious thing done with this deity. Making sleep the Goddess, and making Vishnu's inability to wake himself the proof that she is greater, is a theological argument of real force — and it is placed first in the text, before the demons and the battles, because everything the Saptashati goes on to claim depends on it.

And a religion that meets at night. Shivratri, Navaratri, the jagarana, the kalaratri, the ratri japa of Tantric practice: an unusual share of Hindu observance happens after dark, deliberately. Ratri is where that begins.